What does the Ingress Community want, and what are your suggestions on how to achieve it?
in General
Assuming that you have the ear of Brian/Thia/Hanke/some other important Ingress/Niantic person and you can tell them directly what the community (not an individual) wants in/from Ingress, what do you ask them for?
How do you suggest they achieve this?
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@GreenVam is that you? Have you taken over @PkmnTrainerJ account?!?!
Haha, nah. Just wanted to try and gather some views. Maybe worded it a bit “out of character” for me.
My best guess is that the consensus would be a clear investment in growing and improving Ingress, more attention to the needs and wants of players, a better response to cheating, better transparency, and a record of meeting or exceeding its commitments.
(To paraphrase, the community wants a pony!)
I was being silly.
But since I commented, I’ll share my thoughts, lol
Id agree with what @Hosette posted. But with how small the Ingress teams seems to be, I have to imagine the days of maintaining/building a game for its players is mostly gone. Seems like it’s more or less a testing ground for new Niantic features, in hopes that agents will continue to build their database for future endeavors. Seems like the bare minimum is being done with features that actually appeal to players these days. Lots of talk about keeping agents engaged and enticing new people to this game, but it seems like a majority of the efforts I’ve seen have been with anomalies. The task system would be a huge win for new and old agents alike, yet, we’re almost at a year since it was first introduced and the team has more or less been silent about it.
The next series of anomalies does appear to have a little more global participation, so maybe there is a shred of hope. Who knows. This team has been given idea after idea on ways to gain goodwill and engagement, but also ways to generate money, which would in turn, ideally, allow for more devs to work on the game. Yet, we get machina and no global events. Yippie..
Literal interaction.
Someone whose job it is to reply to posts with actual answers, or at a minimum explain why the answer can't be given. Would it be tedious, totally. Would it slow the ridiculousness over time, definitely.
There are a lot of decent ideas being ignored here, and a ton of horrible game-destroying ones being repeatedly amplified, because no-one with 'authority' can give the same answer as everyone's already given them, and have them actually stop repeating it.
Oh and spoofing. Stop all of them.
Oh my lordy, if I sat down with with Brian/Masa, it would quite detailed.
1) implement mandatory wayspot scanning/overclock when a spoofer may be detected.
This may even mean, requiring players who are transiting through an airport, to scan a wayspot/overclock.
Heuristics only can do so much, and you have the tech to stop spoofing.
2) Remove VR item crafting from Rare Kinetic Capsules. These should be recipes in VR Kinetic Capsules
3) I'm an old gamer, however, discussions with potential new players to Ingress expect a task system.
4) Related to #3, a way better onboarding tutorial is required, and is quite common to use a task system for this purpose.
5) More events and challenges
6) Actively advertise Ingress, Ingress is currently on par with app store ratings as other games, but does not actively advertise, instead we are inundated with advertisements from another game.
7) Time to temporarily halt adding new features once a task system is implemented, and fix the myriad of bugs that have about as a result of jumping onto new feature to new feature too quickly.
8). Relayed to #7, most of the new features added since the start of the covid-19 pandemic, are not fully utilized and thus not allowing Ingress to grow.
9). Please ensure the while Ingress team gets regular holidays, ie, ensure they leave their PCs at home, their mobiles disconnected from development teams. It is essential for everyone to have decent holisays/vacations without stressing about work.
I may think of other things, however this was what was on my mind.
1. You have a bad idea of the Internet in underdeveloped countries. When in the city center the signal can drop to one line. Scanning in such conditions is useless, especially in the dark. It’s 20.00 in the evening and it’s already dark as night.
2. Yes? What to do with cheaters who use bots for farming? They have an unlimited number of modifiers. There are people whose inventory is constantly filled with level 8 weapons and pink shields.
3 and 4. We need an interesting system and not a stupid set of repetitive activities, such as installing 25 resonators or destroying 5 shields. And everything must be justified by the plot, for which each task is done.
5. I agree, the world needs to become more interactive. Events and tasks should appear on the map like in other games from the company.
6. In order to advertise something, you need to develop a game promotion strategy, and as I see it, this ingress option is not very interesting for new players.
7 and 8. I agree.
9. In general, more people should work for ingress. Then this game would become a full-fledged AAA product.
@Grogyan So I'm out on a mountain somewhere... I won't say where because opsec. It's dark. I'm on a satellite connection, and I'm carefully limiting my data usage because satphone data is billed by the megabyte (not gigabyte). I'm getting ready to throw the base link across the ocean for the field and all of a sudden I get a message telling me that I have to scan a portal and upload the data because Niantic has flagged my actions as suspicious. Uploading big steaming piles of data over a satellite connection is expensive and slow, and it's not going to be useful data because the only light on the mountain comes from a sliver of a moon, a whole lot of stars, and a small headlamp.
One portal scan is 80-200MB... I'm supposed to pay hundreds of dollars to scan a portal so that maybe I can throw a field?! But I probably can't because I'm going to run out of prepaid data first, anything I upload will be garbage, and Niantic won't have any other scans to compare it against because I'm the first person to go there in the last two years.
To add something to my earlier message, one of the things that I would like from Niantic is better game designers... and this isn't specific to Ingress. I want gameplay that is interesting enough that I don't need special events and daily/weekly task lists to keep me coming back. I still play PoGo but it's out of habit more than anything else... much of the time I open the game, do the daily spin, capture, and task, maybe take over the couch gym to get coins but maybe not, and then I'm done for the day. Sometimes I'll play the rare critter lottery, sometimes not. Peridot is adorable and sometimes beautiful but there's not a whole lot to do but repeat the hatching cycle over and over with variations on appearance and a checklist of appearance combinations that you can get shiny badges for... plus the monetization is waaaayyy off the mark. I just fired up Pikmin Bloom for the first time in months and closed it after 30 seconds. HPWU was the same in that the game got boring and repetitive quickly and only an endless stream of regular and special tasks kept it slightly interesting.
(Yes, that paragraph was fairly harsh... I'll admit it.)
Ingress is the only game where I'm motivated by the actions that I can take to control the playfield rather than just checking things off and playing the lottery for a special items. It's been just short of ten years since I started playing and I still find it interesting enough to play every day, but that's only because I live in a major metropolitan area with active competition. If I was in a town by myself I probably would have been bored and quit by now.
What I want from Ingress is for it to remain (and in some areas go back to being) a uniquely compelling game where competition naturally provides the incentive to play.
Haven't we already played this game here & other places before? It doesn't matter what we want. Niantic is gonna Niantic and ignore their userbase. Just look at the forums here. Setup for this game, yet almost no one from their company actually bothers to interact with their users.
Yeah, we do have a system in place called CAL (which I don't know about its effectiveness). @Grogyan why are you so sure about scanning used for verification? They are two different databases. It can't even be used for portal location verification because we have various types of POIs. A portal is a point (latitude, longitude) of data. What the scanning does is gathering other elements. The area of the POI, height, and the surrounding area that isn't even the POI.
They pushed the verification process backed onto the scanning process which takes forever. It even takes forever for my Pixel 6a to process it with 6 GB RAM. CAL seems to be the better compromise than anything about scanning.
u are right sadly niantic has their own opsec agenda and we arent allowed to peek in what Brian is talking on their weekly meetings but it would be interesting to hear them eh xd
@GreenVam @Hosette @moobassy
Complain if you want, fact is that the data packets during a portal scan are approximately the same as Hacking a portal.
Relying on CAL, does not work either as I have personally talked with players from both factions who have undertaken OpSec ops and have been unable to do them because of how CAL works.
What will work is a simple portal scan.
Low light at these tactical portals, I recommend bringing a torch with you unless there is good moonlight.
Have had good success with moonlight portal scans myself.
@moobassy
@Grogyan How did you assess the data utilization of hacking vs scanning? Can you share your data with me?
This doesn't make a lot of sense because hacking only requires a small amount of data to be sent, while scanning necessarily sends back a lot more information. The data that I found elsewhere suggested that portal scans were in the range of 30-40MB each.
It's also not clear to me why you think uploading a scan of a portal is a failsafe against spoofing. How exactly do you think that would work?
Scanning would also scr3w agents who have phones that are unable to scan.
[citation needed]
Packets are just the data sent back and forth to the server, come on. I have not seen any connection between location of an POI to the scan of a portal. The scan feature is opt in. I just did scans yesterday and it was up to 100 mb for each one. You can even check what has been scanned in the separate Wayfarer app and there's no lat and long points set to the POI.
Something I posted a while back and is still unanswered.
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My propositions for the community are simple:
2. And 3. Are necessities.
There should be one Ingress ad for every ten pokego ones.
I remember the summer when the train station near work was crawling with pokego ads. As an Ingress player that is not the target audience for pocket monsters, this is awful.
There are even less players now than before the machina was introduced. And I didn't think it could get any quieter. Niantic really should be advertising Ingress. I see advertisements for their other games. But there's very few players out there doing anything anymore. The few left throw fields and there's nobody to take them down. It's very boring. But we've been saying this for a few years now. So I don't suspect we'll see anything change. Ingress is only still being used to grow their other games. Once everyone stops scanning and reviewing there's nothing left for Niantic.
Agree ihave never see ads for ingress only other niantic games on license but not their own ip they full own why? They must do some hardwork its not going to happen otherwise if they dont do anything and yea this Community feels abandoned long ago sadly.
A game like this needs more global events and weekly monthly task system like in their other games
Speaking as one of the oldest players, the dialogue has always been about this.
However, I would like to see the Ingress team more actively disseminate various Ingress information as they did up until 2016.
In the past, the Ingress team used to send out an Ingress Report about once every two weeks, moderated by Ione Butler, who played the role of Susanna Moyer.
The impact this had on the early Ingress community was significant, and it inspired the community to conduct operations and events that would be featured in the Ingress Report.
The Ingress team is very small now, and I know that there are many difficulties.
However, I hope that the Ingress Report will be revived so that the community can flourish again.
Definitely agree, but even just basic interaction with the community they helped create would go so far. The fact that basically no one from the team has any interaction with their provided forums says a lot. I've more or less stopped playing completely (I will jump on randomly when I'm travelling for work and in new cities) and if I saw Brian and other folks interacting in the forums, it would help keep me interested in this game. In my opinion, the lack of interaction makes me think he's got more important things to do that may not have anything to do with this game at all. He doesn't need to be answering every last question, but jumping in and being part of the conversation, maybe dropping some sneak peeks at future updates or even entertaining some of our ideas... All that would help build some confidence in this game and the team behind it.
But, instead, a team too busy or cool to acknowledge we exist except on twitter or to agents who do nothing but **** and play the try hard game.
I only really play on the double ap Tuesday. I only care about getting ap now and finishing the connector badge. There's nothing left in the game without players. So I'm just sitting back waiting it out. Eventually somebody will pick up the game. I keep waiting to hear about this game being retired. When a company has to assure the people they are not shutting down it usually means it's being shut down. I've been in corporate America long enough to see the signs.
Brian is busy in the weekly meetings he shouldnt come here for interact with us even if he could atleast once every 6 months i dont even recall last time he replied in the general section even, for that they should hire someone like Krug a bridge between the community and niantic, sadly we dont have that anymore since thia has gone silent also probably her role changed more internal stuff things we dont see exactly what she does.... and yeah she travels to anomalies also but other then that not much from what u can tell
He seems to have time for twitter, so I disagree. It's almost like this team thinks we'll just keep waiting around forever or that it's on us to build the player base, lol. I'm saying he should be here to keep his job, lol. Maybe Brian and his team think they can rest on their laurels, but a game that has been in almost constant decline for years now would say otherwise. I felt bad for Brian when he was asking for people to rate this game 5 stars and to invite their friends to play and that they needed money to survive, but then year after year, I see the absolute bare minimum effort by the Ingress team. We will continue to be beta testers for other games and the workforce needed to build up their database of wayspots and 3d scans....
Sad when ofer2 (who noticed agents begging for info and at least told us what he could) was swept up in the niantic purge.
He was more active on the forums than Brian!
Twitter is his personal and he can do what he wants there i sure dont go there to interact or read what he even post there but its clear he avoids post on their own community for a reason and thats just sad and like u said zero effort.
I miss ofer2
Seems we summoned @NianticBrian
(just kidding, he will look at Bug Reports and then head off again)
@PkmnTrainerJ Someone should report his absence on the forums as a bug. (-:
Haha, would have to be someone other than me. I’ve only had a response about FitRep on there and nothing else.
He has the time to reply and post on twitter. He surely has time to come to the forums for the game he manages to post, or reply or even show agents that he cares...