Prime in-app support chat is very, very bad

I’m trying to log a serious issue with portal nominations on iOS via the in-app Report-a-Problem chat, as it’s there and seems like The Right Way to do things. It is not going well.


The situation: Ingress Prime currently rotates pictures submitted from my iPhone 11 Pro by 90degrees for no apparent reason during Portal Nomination. They’re not rotated like this anywhere else that I use them.


1) The dialogues you go through as you try to find the right ‘question’ (clue: they’re not ‘questions’, they’re ‘reports’) are annoying, frustrating, and never seem to cover actually suitable options.


2) When you finally get to the ‘I need to talk to a person’ stage, it sometimes asks for your agent name, and sometimes just asks for the same thing you began your chat with. So half the time you’re caught out by answering the wrong way and all the time you’re forced to repeat yourself. Also, it’s *in-game chat*, why not quietly send a packet of info including the OS and Prime versions and user IGN&email at the time a chat begins? Quietly capture the same if/when a player tests on other devices as part of the process. It’d be much more reliable for everyone and much easier for both the users and Niantic’s helldesk operators.


3) in this particular case the first ‘reply’, which interrupted my active game play, was just some boilerplate text about granting permissions to the camera and photos. This is patronising and frustrating because it was evident from my description of the problem that I must’ve already granted those permissions to get to the bug I had described. So this boilerplate was pointless and a waste of everyone’s time. I said as much in my reply.


4) I’ve just got another reply instructing me on the necessity of and methods for how to get a strong and stable connection in order to play Ingress. As far as I can tell this is just deliberate trolling now. It’s both utterly irrelevant to the stated problem, and again, self-evidently my situation means I must have good connectivity or I wouldn’t be uploading images and engaging in support chat, or, y’know, PLAYING. And worse, it keeps this pointless and infuriating chat going when I have other problems that I want to report. Seeing as the humans at Niantic’s helldesk evidently aren’t going to convey this one to someone actually competent at reading and in a position to actually investigate and fix the real issue I might as well get on to the next bug and try my luck finding someone helpful with that one.


5) Every time Niantic reply on this in-game chat it forcibly interrupts gameplay. Which is annoying as hell.


6) to reiterate, it’s not possible to use this in-game chat to report and discuss more than one issue at a time.


So this is my idea of support hell.


Niantic have a badly configured chatbot menu system, staff who don’t care to read and understand extremely clear, concise reports, also the way the chat hooks into the game is superficially attractive but practically destructive of the game play experience and taken together all this harms the relationship between the players and Niantic.


Seriously Nia, sort this out. I actually do give you money to play this game, cos I like it and I want it to do well and have a future, etc.. The least you could do is make it so I can have a vaguely productive dialogue with you when I come to you with genuine problems and potentially useful suggestions.


Trolling your paying customers loses your paying customers.

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