I get that folks had to throw in a few bucks to participate at the anomaly, but I think you guys are being straight up rude to a company that has provided you with 7 years of free entertainment. The Ingress community can be so ungrateful to Niantic, that at times, it makes me wonder why they don’t just shut the entire project down.
In the beginning it was a Google project that provided us with the free one.
When the idea of Pokemon Go came up, Niantic had made himself independent, and let us pay with data...
If you had sold your data from Ingress to Pokémon Go to a reasonable extent, Ingress would make a profit, and had continued to make money selling data to Pokemon and Wizzards United...
Each group of companies that shifts goods among themselves must pay invoices accordingly. And there is no telling whether Niantic has done this...
I don’t think you and I are understanding each other. Aside from the cost of this anomaly, the game has always been free. I think you are being rude to Niantic. You act like they own you something. They do not. (Anomaly excluded)
For me, I know that there is a lot of competition and with at least three Niantic games, all having the same or similar customers. Each is vying with one another for that customers attention and activity to showcase their success and value to Niantic. There will be times this causes problems for players.Until Niantic come up with a schedule that works for each game, this will continue. Our only way to stop it is to stop playing completely on those days.
However, the game is not free. It gives the impression of being free but in fact we give a lot. The data of movement, OPR portals data, both for those already online and then the data of what has changed through reviews is worth a lot...
As a Pokemon player, I must strongly disagree with the statement that "same engine works fine with much more players on community days in Pokémon Go"!
In my experience community days are around 50% bugged and 15% unplayable, with no noticeable improvement over time. Today's one for example was very low on spawns, with some parts of the world reporting almost no boost at all.
The game is free. Allowing Niantic to track your movements, submitting portals, and choosing to do OPR is not payment. I submit portals because I prefer a higher portal density. This benefits me. It benefits Niantic as well, but I don’t care about that, and I don’t feel like they owe me anything for it. I’ve never done OPR, nor have I ever cared to. Everyone here makes it sound like a job, and I don’t want another job. If you feel like Niantic owes you something for it, then don’t do it. So they’re having server problems. That sucks. I have no idea what it takes to maintain a server, but I’m sure they do, and I’m pretty sure they’re working on it. Be grateful for the years of free entertainment you have received, and stop submitting and approving portals, because you obviously perceive yourself as getting the short end of the stick.
not sure, what is your experience in the field, but!
it's not about money in the first place. before switching to "prime only" the gameplay was quicker and much less demanding from hardware and your cellular connection. even during large anomalies (say - moscow in 2016), where total number of agents on the ground was more than 2000, and at the same time there were two other anomalies in same region -- there was NO time, when it could be unplayable. laggin - maybe. "cirquit overload"? - maybe. but not client blacking out and being absolutely unresponsive.
the "prime" scanner is out for some 18 month. instead of making new scanner (in new framework) look as possibly same from UI perspective - some dubious design changes were made. which, frankly, made some people angry. but aside from that - it seems that during these 18 months almost no work on that "prime" scanner was done - except in a couple of last month. it was not even an RC quality - and during last year it was always felt like "late alpha, early beta". it was slow, battery hungry and overall buggy. now it's slightly less buggy. maaybe an RC, but definately not a "production" quality, compared with old "redacted".
now, on top of that - regular problems at "community" events. on "old" scanner everything worked. not perfect, but positively bearable. let's say - 3.5 on a 5 point scale. with new and shiny "prime" it's much less prime - i'd say between 1.5 (during heavy battles) and 2.2 (overall). maybe slightly better, if you are on new and really powerful phone. and problems, that clearly show, that something in the infrastructure is overloaded and did not scale properly.
what i'm trying to say - the game has become much less playable. not just somewhat less playable (subject to personal priority and taste), but quite a lot less playable. more shiny and blingy, yes. now add to that a sweet extra - requirement of "must pay for community events". extremely badly timed. basically - changing rules on the fly. and do not forget, that "a few bucks" for you or for me may be negligable, but for some ppl it may consistute 10% or more of their _monthly_ salary. no, not my case, but i feel pity for my playmates from certain regions of asia and america.
But in this case some people paid. There was a class action lawsuit against Niantic when this happened at the PoGo fest and they settled for $1.5 million in non-game costs.
You make a good point. I can see why you’re very disappointed. I have no problems with Prime. Thus far I have assumed Prime is effortless for me because I’ve played it near exclusively since it’s launch. When it gives me any trouble I just restart it, but I’m not playing in an anomaly, and I am playing on a new device.
I'd argue this may not entirely be the fault of Niantic, but in fact the cell phone carrier providers. Bring a group of people close together in a confined area, all of whom are using a large amount of data, and most cellular infrastructure will end up dropping packets here in the United States which may not be a problem when streaming video thanks to buffering or loading websites thanks to caching, but can be a killer for Ingress which is extremely data sensitive and a love service that depends on real time feedback. Add to this the fact it has to keep track of each individual agent's actions in a short period of time in a small condensed area you do of course run into the issue of Niantic's servers not being able to keep up, but the lack of optimization is only further exacerbated by dropped packets from cellular providers.
I wonder if anyone was running some network analytics while there? The information could be useful to Niantic to better optimize both the user client as well as things server side to inprove data transfer speed.
Carrier issues are easy to test, just try a different game. For example, Ingress was unplayable for me due to the Anomaly for about an hour yesterday, but Pokemon was fine so I switched over to that for a bit. If it was a carrier issue, both would have been affected.
Completly disagree. I was not at an anomaly site, some 700km away. Suddenly the app stopped working, no gameplay possible for about an hour. And I had perfect network connection - as pogo proved.
Pretty much the same experience; in my case the nearest anomaly site was about 800 km away. I had been doing a mission banner with no issues (being the first time I used Prime for a mission banner, I was actually pleasantly surprised how well things worked), until the scanner suddenly started to lag massively, with any scanner operations taking dozens of seconds at best to complete, with complete failures/error messages happening too. Oh well, it was a time for a coffee break anyway.
All other network connectivity continued to work just fine.
We saw the same issue at First Saturday in September and at the Field Tests and during both these events only Prime had the network problems while Redacted worked fine. This suggests that it is not a problem of the network provider. It is also not a problem of the core back-end systems that do the logic. It only seems to be a problem of the shim back-end layer that is currently in place as a middle-man between the Prime client and the old back-end.
I never experienced the same issue myself during the event, so I cannot answer that. Like I said, this can still fall back on the servers, I just dont think the servers are the only thing to blame.
Like I said to @LemoMcLemonFace , this is not just carrier issues, it is also server, both issues worsen each other and to be looked into respectively by Niantic. Using PoGo as a test is not appropriate either, its like comparing apples to oranges.
The first real useful and insightful response I have gotten so far unlike everyone else just parroting one another and venting their frustations without truly reading my post, thank you. My opinion of carrier I'd still argue given this additional information you have shared. Redacted left a much lighter data use footprint than Prime ever has, carriers can easily keep up with the packets Redacted sent, while Prime not as easily as I see higher data use just on initial boot of Prime compared to Redacted (2mb-2.2mb Prime vs .3mb Redacted), and Prime has a horrible time picking back up where it left off when packets are lost (easily tested via switching phone to airplane mode and off, or roaming between cellular and wifi connection).
As I said, I only speculate cellular contributing to the issue given the way Prime is designed vs Redacted. I retract my statement regarding server issues, as the middle man system you discuss makes more sense as being a point of additional failure/overload. Your insight on this matter is appreciated.
I just wish someone who was at one of the events did some network analysis where I was only a remote agent, as I'd believe this would still be useful data for Niantic to have to improve things client side to make data transmission to the server side less heavy.
I was not at the dresden anomaly but some 500km away. But game did not work at least on the first hour or so. Lags, random strange error messages, app hangs. It went better during the next hours but even then there were lags and app hangs. I needed to restart the scanner at least 7 times.
So yes, if I would had paid for a ticket I'd be mad at niantic. And even without having paid for anything it leaves a bad anomaly event and the question if this happens during the next events again.
Very well put 👍️ I agree! Ingress is a great game! But is the current scanner doing the game justice? Hundreds of community posts says it does not. Yet. Sure this may sound like ungratefulness but in my ears it is expressing desperation that the essence of the game is too hard to reach for the players.
The scanner is dark hard to see small everything is purple ... where did purple come from, the game is about blue and green! Not purple. Why is it dark? People have problems with the colors, contrasts and visibility. And why on earth is my closest portal flashing its picture for me the whole time, it was fun the first 3 times now it is just annoying. I think for many Ingressplayers the scanner is just the tool to play the great game Ingress -the scanner is not the game. Ingress is the game. A tool should be easy to use, easy to see all vital information, fast, secure and customizable. I can't see who does what and says what nor my AP or field MU size in comm while playing any longer. I can hardly see xm -why hide the gaming information that makes the game? I hope for a scanner that does the game justice so it is fun to play again!
Omg sorry for tagging you/anyone in this. I must have touched the quote button. I can’t get the quote to leave my comment box. It’s been sitting there for days. Restarting doesn’t work. This has got to be the worst site built for discussion.
Comments
For the last 1.25h, I have to revise my statement. There it ran almost like Ano with Redacted.
Why not like that, from the beginning?
For the first 1.75h the first statement remains current.
Game is freezing in Brooklyn. This could be a very long afternoon.
This doesn't sound good, and is a sign that the servers can't handle the local load.
Statement from Dresden Germany
I get that folks had to throw in a few bucks to participate at the anomaly, but I think you guys are being straight up rude to a company that has provided you with 7 years of free entertainment. The Ingress community can be so ungrateful to Niantic, that at times, it makes me wonder why they don’t just shut the entire project down.
I'd like to talk him out of it.
In the beginning it was a Google project that provided us with the free one.
When the idea of Pokemon Go came up, Niantic had made himself independent, and let us pay with data...
If you had sold your data from Ingress to Pokémon Go to a reasonable extent, Ingress would make a profit, and had continued to make money selling data to Pokemon and Wizzards United...
Each group of companies that shifts goods among themselves must pay invoices accordingly. And there is no telling whether Niantic has done this...
I don’t think you and I are understanding each other. Aside from the cost of this anomaly, the game has always been free. I think you are being rude to Niantic. You act like they own you something. They do not. (Anomaly excluded)
I think we talk from different think's, I do not talk about the cost for Anomalie and the Ticket costs.
I talk about the stability from the Server's, and this are blame for Niantic... over half time of the Anomalie the server doesn't work.
And don't start a discussion that Prime us new and they must test it, because they have test it several times.
The same engine works fine with much more players on community days in Pokémon Go ...
For me, I know that there is a lot of competition and with at least three Niantic games, all having the same or similar customers. Each is vying with one another for that customers attention and activity to showcase their success and value to Niantic. There will be times this causes problems for players.Until Niantic come up with a schedule that works for each game, this will continue. Our only way to stop it is to stop playing completely on those days.
However, the game is not free. It gives the impression of being free but in fact we give a lot. The data of movement, OPR portals data, both for those already online and then the data of what has changed through reviews is worth a lot...
Dresden had connection problems i asume ?
Nah man ..Blame it on the weatherman.
As a Pokemon player, I must strongly disagree with the statement that "same engine works fine with much more players on community days in Pokémon Go"!
In my experience community days are around 50% bugged and 15% unplayable, with no noticeable improvement over time. Today's one for example was very low on spawns, with some parts of the world reporting almost no boost at all.
The game is free. Allowing Niantic to track your movements, submitting portals, and choosing to do OPR is not payment. I submit portals because I prefer a higher portal density. This benefits me. It benefits Niantic as well, but I don’t care about that, and I don’t feel like they owe me anything for it. I’ve never done OPR, nor have I ever cared to. Everyone here makes it sound like a job, and I don’t want another job. If you feel like Niantic owes you something for it, then don’t do it. So they’re having server problems. That sucks. I have no idea what it takes to maintain a server, but I’m sure they do, and I’m pretty sure they’re working on it. Be grateful for the years of free entertainment you have received, and stop submitting and approving portals, because you obviously perceive yourself as getting the short end of the stick.
not sure, what is your experience in the field, but!
it's not about money in the first place. before switching to "prime only" the gameplay was quicker and much less demanding from hardware and your cellular connection. even during large anomalies (say - moscow in 2016), where total number of agents on the ground was more than 2000, and at the same time there were two other anomalies in same region -- there was NO time, when it could be unplayable. laggin - maybe. "cirquit overload"? - maybe. but not client blacking out and being absolutely unresponsive.
the "prime" scanner is out for some 18 month. instead of making new scanner (in new framework) look as possibly same from UI perspective - some dubious design changes were made. which, frankly, made some people angry. but aside from that - it seems that during these 18 months almost no work on that "prime" scanner was done - except in a couple of last month. it was not even an RC quality - and during last year it was always felt like "late alpha, early beta". it was slow, battery hungry and overall buggy. now it's slightly less buggy. maaybe an RC, but definately not a "production" quality, compared with old "redacted".
now, on top of that - regular problems at "community" events. on "old" scanner everything worked. not perfect, but positively bearable. let's say - 3.5 on a 5 point scale. with new and shiny "prime" it's much less prime - i'd say between 1.5 (during heavy battles) and 2.2 (overall). maybe slightly better, if you are on new and really powerful phone. and problems, that clearly show, that something in the infrastructure is overloaded and did not scale properly.
what i'm trying to say - the game has become much less playable. not just somewhat less playable (subject to personal priority and taste), but quite a lot less playable. more shiny and blingy, yes. now add to that a sweet extra - requirement of "must pay for community events". extremely badly timed. basically - changing rules on the fly. and do not forget, that "a few bucks" for you or for me may be negligable, but for some ppl it may consistute 10% or more of their _monthly_ salary. no, not my case, but i feel pity for my playmates from certain regions of asia and america.
"It's a free game" and "It's in open beta / early access" are the two biggest excuses game devs resort to when it comes to poor gameplay experience.
This is why some games never leave open beta many years after launch and start of monetization.
But in this case some people paid. There was a class action lawsuit against Niantic when this happened at the PoGo fest and they settled for $1.5 million in non-game costs.
You make a good point. I can see why you’re very disappointed. I have no problems with Prime. Thus far I have assumed Prime is effortless for me because I’ve played it near exclusively since it’s launch. When it gives me any trouble I just restart it, but I’m not playing in an anomaly, and I am playing on a new device.
I'd argue this may not entirely be the fault of Niantic, but in fact the cell phone carrier providers. Bring a group of people close together in a confined area, all of whom are using a large amount of data, and most cellular infrastructure will end up dropping packets here in the United States which may not be a problem when streaming video thanks to buffering or loading websites thanks to caching, but can be a killer for Ingress which is extremely data sensitive and a love service that depends on real time feedback. Add to this the fact it has to keep track of each individual agent's actions in a short period of time in a small condensed area you do of course run into the issue of Niantic's servers not being able to keep up, but the lack of optimization is only further exacerbated by dropped packets from cellular providers.
I wonder if anyone was running some network analytics while there? The information could be useful to Niantic to better optimize both the user client as well as things server side to inprove data transfer speed.
Carrier issues are easy to test, just try a different game. For example, Ingress was unplayable for me due to the Anomaly for about an hour yesterday, but Pokemon was fine so I switched over to that for a bit. If it was a carrier issue, both would have been affected.
Why was it also dying for people not attending, or even in the same country as one of the sites then.
Completly disagree. I was not at an anomaly site, some 700km away. Suddenly the app stopped working, no gameplay possible for about an hour. And I had perfect network connection - as pogo proved.
No carrier excuses whem the game didnt work on global scale. It was the same problem that happened a week ago for first saturday.
The game never stopped working for me apart from normal anomaly lag during the rr
Pretty much the same experience; in my case the nearest anomaly site was about 800 km away. I had been doing a mission banner with no issues (being the first time I used Prime for a mission banner, I was actually pleasantly surprised how well things worked), until the scanner suddenly started to lag massively, with any scanner operations taking dozens of seconds at best to complete, with complete failures/error messages happening too. Oh well, it was a time for a coffee break anyway.
All other network connectivity continued to work just fine.
We saw the same issue at First Saturday in September and at the Field Tests and during both these events only Prime had the network problems while Redacted worked fine. This suggests that it is not a problem of the network provider. It is also not a problem of the core back-end systems that do the logic. It only seems to be a problem of the shim back-end layer that is currently in place as a middle-man between the Prime client and the old back-end.
I never experienced the same issue myself during the event, so I cannot answer that. Like I said, this can still fall back on the servers, I just dont think the servers are the only thing to blame.
Like I said to @LemoMcLemonFace , this is not just carrier issues, it is also server, both issues worsen each other and to be looked into respectively by Niantic. Using PoGo as a test is not appropriate either, its like comparing apples to oranges.
Like I said to @LemoMcLemonFace and @rz231 , it is both likely carrier and server, please re-read my post.
The first real useful and insightful response I have gotten so far unlike everyone else just parroting one another and venting their frustations without truly reading my post, thank you. My opinion of carrier I'd still argue given this additional information you have shared. Redacted left a much lighter data use footprint than Prime ever has, carriers can easily keep up with the packets Redacted sent, while Prime not as easily as I see higher data use just on initial boot of Prime compared to Redacted (2mb-2.2mb Prime vs .3mb Redacted), and Prime has a horrible time picking back up where it left off when packets are lost (easily tested via switching phone to airplane mode and off, or roaming between cellular and wifi connection).
As I said, I only speculate cellular contributing to the issue given the way Prime is designed vs Redacted. I retract my statement regarding server issues, as the middle man system you discuss makes more sense as being a point of additional failure/overload. Your insight on this matter is appreciated.
I just wish someone who was at one of the events did some network analysis where I was only a remote agent, as I'd believe this would still be useful data for Niantic to have to improve things client side to make data transmission to the server side less heavy.
I'm in Brazil and feel lag during hacks over 1 minute each. I was doing a banner so it was a real pain in the sun.
I was not at the dresden anomaly but some 500km away. But game did not work at least on the first hour or so. Lags, random strange error messages, app hangs. It went better during the next hours but even then there were lags and app hangs. I needed to restart the scanner at least 7 times.
So yes, if I would had paid for a ticket I'd be mad at niantic. And even without having paid for anything it leaves a bad anomaly event and the question if this happens during the next events again.
Very well put 👍️ I agree! Ingress is a great game! But is the current scanner doing the game justice? Hundreds of community posts says it does not. Yet. Sure this may sound like ungratefulness but in my ears it is expressing desperation that the essence of the game is too hard to reach for the players.
The scanner is dark hard to see small everything is purple ... where did purple come from, the game is about blue and green! Not purple. Why is it dark? People have problems with the colors, contrasts and visibility. And why on earth is my closest portal flashing its picture for me the whole time, it was fun the first 3 times now it is just annoying. I think for many Ingressplayers the scanner is just the tool to play the great game Ingress -the scanner is not the game. Ingress is the game. A tool should be easy to use, easy to see all vital information, fast, secure and customizable. I can't see who does what and says what nor my AP or field MU size in comm while playing any longer. I can hardly see xm -why hide the gaming information that makes the game? I hope for a scanner that does the game justice so it is fun to play again!
Omg sorry for tagging you/anyone in this. I must have touched the quote button. I can’t get the quote to leave my comment box. It’s been sitting there for days. Restarting doesn’t work. This has got to be the worst site built for discussion.