Niantic - you're doing it wrong. Here's how to do it right

So, you've had to refund that anomaly money. All that bad feeling, literal law breaking, and you ended up with nothing except egg on your face, and a lot of angry players.

I'm not here to tell you what you already know, though.

What you need has 3 requirements.

1) Regular income. Decent levels.

2) Makes the players love you for taking their money

3) Doesnt overbalance the game or make it pay to win

Your answer is locker rental.

XMP lockers, resonator lockers, mod lockers, cube lockers. $1 per month for the first locker, $1 for 2 more, $1 for each 3 more to a maximum of what, 18 lockers? That'd get you $7 a month from MANY players. We already know lockers dont overbalance the game, and players would LOVE it.


If you want to make a fair profit from ingress, without resorting to bait and switch cons like you did for Umbra, this is how. It fulfils all of your needs in the product.


And unless your devs are a bit rubbish, you could have this released in a couple of weeks.

Comments

  • Considering the difficulties with the prime rollout, I'd say their dev's are a bit rubbish.

  • Media and more key lockers, yes.


    Anything else would be broken in drawn out fights of equal numbers

  • bait and switch cons like you did for Umbra

    I must have missed the "bait and switch con." You were given the chance to participate in a costly event, for a fee. You were free to do that, or not. There were some technical problems - and Prime is not currently well-adapted to Anomaly play - but that's neither a "con" nor a "bait and switch."

    I'm not sure what folks who post these sorts of comments think they're accomplishing. Offering concrete critiques of things that could be improved is one thing, but baseless accusations are quite another. I don't see how accusing Niantic of conning people is going to contribute to improving Ingress.

  • Anomaly events had always been free to participate.

    This round of anomaly events was advertised / announced quite sometime back, people started making and paying for travel, accommodation etc.

    Weeks before the event due date, NIA suddenly announced it was going to be pay to participate.

    That's the bait & switch angle people are referring too. Those that were already financially committed to going, now had to pay.

  • ArtilectZedArtilectZed ✭✭✭✭✭

    Definition of bait and switch. 1 : a sales tactic in which a customer is attracted by the advertisement of a low-priced item but is then encouraged to buy a higher-priced one.

    Months out, the assumption was made that getting credit for the anomaly was going to be free, as they always had in the past, this was the bait, since Niantic hadn't hinted at a cost going in to it, untill...

    A few weeks before the event, after plane tickets were purchased, reservations made at hotels, and local player based organizations had done all of the ground work, Niantic pulled the switch where you had to pay $13+fees/etc to get credit for the anomaly.

    All the problems that happened at the anomaly sites were good cover for Niantic to get out of another ticketing based lawsuit by offering refunds to everyone.

  • Paying for anomalies sounds like a great way to reduce the number of people who participate in the biggest attractions of the game... and thus reduce the amount of people present in advertising images taken from that a anomaly.

    But I dont think monthly payments for a locker would be a good idea either. Here's why:

    1: current key lockers are obtained via a one-time purchase price.

    There are still people upset about the sixth locker that some players have, so lockees are not without contention. Renting space seems in contradiction to the philosophy of the key locker purchase. Also, the key locker holds only one kind of item, to minimize game play modification.

    2: we must consider how this could affect the "alt account" situation. Currently, certain players violate terms of service by creating additional accounts. One claim is that these alternates are used to store, or transport gear.

    Imagine for a moment that you are a poor ingress player, and some enemy agent happens to be able to visit a farm, and blow up a lot of the portals you build. Are you more likely to pay seven dollars a month to store more gear, or get a burner phone, create another account, and store items there? Possibly also use second account to help blow up portals, deploy mods. And eventually even upgrade resonators?

    To the poor, monthly payments might not be possible, and what a more wealthy player could do might feel unfair, leading to "justified cheating" we've already got plenty of claims that alternate accounts exist, and it seems like telling the difference between helping a noob, and running an alt is difficult.

  • I feel the same as you now a backpack would have a quantifiable value. Some people would make them and use that cost as an excuse.


    I still prefer some new premium items. Like for 5 dollars and a key to a portal you can block a portal from being remotely recharged. Because of regular BAFs and bgan portals niantic would make tons of money in my region and the game would become more dynamic and interesting.

  • We do need more mechanisms to combat gigantic fields, but this ain't it chief. Literally worse than the OP

  • You make a list of three things that they need to accomplish with monetization and then your suggestion immediately violates two of them.

  • This round of anomaly events was advertised / announced quite sometime back, people started making and paying for travel, accommodation etc.

    Weeks before the event due date, NIA suddenly announced it was going to be pay to participate.

    That's the bait & switch angle people are referring too. Those that were already financially committed to going, now had to pay.

    That's not a bait and switch: they announced when the event would be held, not what the price would be. You may have made guessed that it would be FTP based on past events, but that was not AFAIK actually claimed; this is your own issue. You can be unhappy about the change, but calling it a "con" or a "bait and switch" just makes your concerns less credible.

    I also find it rather remarkable that one would be fine with spending hundreds of dollars on travel and hotel to attend the Anomaly, but then be put off by the $15 fee. In fact, the claim is so remarkable that it is hard for one to believe that it is made in good faith. Those making them would do well to dispense with such arguments, because (like the inflammatory "con" and "bait and switch" accusations) they lack credibility.

    If you aren't happy about the event pricing, fine. But if you want anyone else to take your concerns seriously, I would suggest dropping these sorts of rhetorical techniques. They're not working for you.

  • I would argue that a lot of agents work on tight budgets for these events, and throwing an additional fee into their tightly planned event, several weeks after they made their plans, is enough to cause issues in morale at the very least. This could have all been avoided if they had made an announcement when dates were released - something as simple as "this anomaly will have free and paid tiers for participation, final prices to be released soon".

    As a member of the org team for a couple of anomaly sites, there are many hurdles we have to work against to get people to attend. Anomaly travel isn't cheap, and any way to help cut costs increases the chances of getting agents on the ground. Niantic adding hurdles in the last half makes the job harder for all of their unpaid volunteer staff trying to help make the events successful.

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