I Miss This Era of Ingress
Redfox1701
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in General
Anomalies with 1000+ people. Multiple weekends per series. Shards happening at the same time. Ingress Report to tell you what was actually happening. (This photo was taken by a photographer friend of mine who wanted to, "see what this whole Ingress thing was about")
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These were great times.
The current state of the game _and community_ just doesn't compare to the glory days. Comparing now to back then (Milwaukee Persepolis) makes a person very aware of the general feeling of things being on the decline.
Half this people migrated to Pokemon.
I missed this one, but I was there for Via Noir and loved it! Things are not the same today.
The good old days.... I started at Recursion Brussels. 😊
A 3 year code freeze, then a disliked replacement client will do that to a game.
Yeah Prime has pretty much killed our community. Chats have the same 6 players talking to themselves where there were once 50+ randomly joining in the chatter locally. Every player that has dropped off said the same things about ingress Prime. Most said they would pay 5-20$ monthly if they could keep redacted. Oh well. Niantic hasn't really displayed a history of listening to its player base so why should they start now? I too miss the good old days when this was a viable social experiment full of vibrant individuals.
I miss those days. When the game was fun, and good natured. I suppose it can get there again, but it will take a lot of work, and some recruitment effort from the Factions and Niantic.
The code freeze and portal network freeze really hurt. We were seeing numbers drop significantly long before Prime.
I have some really strong feelings about the way the introduction of Prime was mishandled, how the app still isn't great, and how it's affected the depth and breadth of our player base. But I won't go into that here, because I largely be rehashing what others have said before, and now it's all we've got.*
So, given that the shrinking player base is a near universal experience, and given that we all miss the glory days of massive anomalies, why don't we discuss some things we've been doing that may or may not have been successful to try and reinvigorate our player bases so that we can learn from each other. For example:
*the one exception I'll make is PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE Niantic, make it evident for us to see when new players sign up in comms again. Without that ability, we have to study comms pretty intently to see who the new players are to invite them in. And that's not an easy task.
The game is still fun. People on both factions needs a lot of reminding that it is indeed just a game. The whole animosity thing surprised me when I ran in to when I first started as the very first players I met when I started were ENL. Hell the first player bought me a beer and showed me the long press attack when I was level 6/8.
If Niantic could do a major pokego ad campaign ( Herald Square train station in NYC last August) could you you do even 15% of the pub and ad budget to get ingress aware again? I don't think people are aware that it exists.
Otherwise we are stuck in 1.0 Doctor Who when BBC was not giving anything close to the budget that would have been appropriate.
https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/5684/umbra-dresden-2019#latest
Great 'sitrep' showing the fun still there!
Suggested a few things that can make Ingress at its best again both for the company and users, even potential agents. This was discussed at IUENG Discussion group in TG, but I just got kicked yesterday for "inciting fights and waking up an admin from her sleep with reports".
I forgot, as a lowly agent who loves the game and likes to discuss things in a healthy and respectful manner, I don't need sleep and i am apparently there to troll. Lol...
If you able to get in, that is the thing I hope to achieve or to see.
I'll update if I can get it back, or if this discussion is still ongoing.
Stay strong, agents! We will get that same wide eyed excitement back! :)
OTOH, there were over 600 participants at Umbra Sacramento. That may perhaps not live up your 1000+ person "glory days," but it's actually a really big number by the standard of most hobby (or even many professional) activities. And do we have evidence that Anomaly attendance is actually declining (versus having declined and then stabilized)? We only recently started getting information that would allow a random agent on the ground to know what the numbers are like, but I've been to every series since EXO5 and I have not noticed any obvious decline. If anything, it looks to me like there are more events, and more engagement, now than around that time (which was right after a long drought in investment). There are certainly challenges, but on average it seems to me like things are looking up (relative to what they were like when I started).
I'm not arguing that conditions today are like they apparently were when Ingress was new (and had no competition), but I'm not persuaded that conditions are bad, and it's not obvious that they are getting worse. I would also note that the same case can be made in spades for PoGo. For the first year or so of that game, there was a grand, all-night market in Long Beach, CA that was full of players from dusk to dawn. Now, that whole area is a ghost town (and the stops that were constantly lured are rarely lit). The decline in PoGo seems at least as severe as the decline in Ingress, and yet that game rolls on...that's just how it is when you're no longer the shiny new object. Ingress isn't likely to become as popular as it was in its heyday, but there's no reason it can't continue to be a successful game on its own scale.
Ohhhhh SaraB!
And, yep, there I am....
Milwaukee....I forget which anomaly series. It's been so long.
Not sure about other sites, but Antwerp and Dresde both had 1000+ attendance.
The photo that started this thread is, for me, still the most iconic anomaly photo there is. Two leaders, staring each other down [1], in front of the assembled troops, before the battle that is to come.
I miss that Ingress's never-ending war over the portals seemed to take a pause in the hours right before the anomaly. We picked up swag, sought out old friends, and made new friends. We wandered over as an amorphous blob of blue or green to the cross-faction photo, where we looked out over the agents that we would be playing with and against later that day. You could see the costumes and feel the energy.
Now, we seem to have given in to a prisoner's dilemma-esque scenario, where the rational, strategic thing to do before the anomaly is to "prepare" the playbox. We have the cross-faction photo afterwards, when everyone (who bothers to show up) is tired and hungry and in need of a shower. It doesn't help that there is no rest for the weary during the anomaly. The four cluster battles of old, where "hurry up and wait" meant more waiting and less hurrying, have become nine periods of ALL the things, where "hurry up and wait" means "hurry up, you're late."
[1] I believe they were actually having a friendly conversation.
I'm in the vicinity of both those photos. They were fun times for sure.