Hypothesis: Ingress is a great game, but only at relatively narrow range of scale

HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

Time travel back with me a little bit to pre-Machina Ingress

Imagine that you are the only player within 100 miles. Ingress would not be very interesting for you because there's rarely going to be any competition. There have always been a few people in this situation and over the last couple of years a lot more have found themselves without opposition. Ingress really isn't a very good game in those circumstances.

Now, imagine the opposite extreme and every single person on the planet plays Ingress. That wouldn't be a very fun game either because everything would be a highly-contested area with no ability to ever build up high level portals or control an area. Ingress isn't a very good game at this extreme either.

Somewhere between those two extremes there's a sweet spot for Ingress where there's enough competition to make the game interesting but not enough for the playfield to become perpetual chaos. I don't know how to quantify that sweet spot but it's obvious to me that it exists and that getting too far outside of it makes the game less interesting.

Machina has been introduced to help players out in areas that have very little competition, and it does help some but it's not a replacement. Machina can't throw an annoying field over you, and it won't care if you throw one over it. It's never going to (deliberately) throw a strategic blocking link, it's not going to smash up your farm, and it's never going to rent a 15-passenger van and roll hundreds of P8s through a city. It's an interesting chaos agent but it's not active opposition.

Competing as a team against another team is what makes Ingress great, IMO. Unfortunately it is likely to be its downfall as well since it needs to retain a minimum player base but there's also a cap on how big the game can get and still be fun. That makes me sad, but unless the game radically adapts it will be the eventual outcome.

Comments

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    P.S. Pogo does have similar issues but only as it applies to a small part of the game. Before I quit I'd played in areas that had constant gym churn... if you held a gym in midtown Manhattan or downtown San Francisco for more than 10-20 minutes during the day it was a miracle. I also know people who have held a gym for years because nobody else plays in that area. It doesn't hurt the game as much because holding gyms isn't the primary goal of the game.

    (Yeah, yeah, I know a lot of that insane gym competition is from spoofbots.)

Sign In or Register to comment.