Adding smaller bundles (Nano Packs) to the Store
NianticBrian
Niantic › admin
in General
Later today, I'm adding the following new, smaller bundles of 10-25 items to the Store to test whether smaller quantities of items is a useful option:
- Nano Pack (XMP): XMP x25 at your level (up to L6), 1200 CMU.
- Nano Pack (Ultra Strike): Ultra Strike x10 at your level (up to L6), 1200 CMU.
- Nano Pack (Resonator): Resonator x20 at your level (up to L6), 1200 CMU.
This is starting with a staggered release where Nano Packs will only be visible to agents Level 1-6. We'll look at feedback and usage before rolling it out more widely.
In an upcoming update, we're also planning to show agents Nano Packs in the Attack and Deploy carousels to help agents quickly access featured Store items, starting with new recruits or agents Level 1-6.
Thank you,
Brian
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I feel like placing the purchasable items in the carousels is going to cause a lot of very nasty comments about face-front monetization in future Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter comments. Because that's usually where people attack you all.
I think placing them in the store and leaving them there is the better option. I still think there can be a quick pop up notification when people log into Ingress to notify users of the store options, but the carousel placement is a no-bueno. Especially with the buggy carousel jumping from item to item.
Brian.
I know I've been a horrible troll to you.
But all troll trolling aside, please **leave the cash shop inside the damn cash shop**.
Out of my 50+ irl friends, nearly all of them quit Harry Potter Wizards unite over aggressive in-app purchases like this. We don't want to see more than one link to that damned store anywhere in the app and WB managed to have over 15 of them littering every menu.
Agents should be encouraged to upgrade a portal or seek out other agents to strengthen their local community to obtain gear. Doing this will only continue to discourage upgrading and building farms.
While I'm not at all fan of the bursters or ultra strikes being added to the shop, I still think up to R8s should be available. I'm sure plenty of people will disagree, but the effective "balance of power" of a single R8 is minimal, but it helps people in rural or under populated areas more than you'd imagine.
You'd make more money just selling portal nominations or access to wayfarer (or access to review xx amounts of "waypoints") than selling Level 6 gear I would think.
Also @NianticBrian, given that any deployed portal requires a variety of resonators by level, will the nano packs vary the resonators at all? Like a Level 6 Agent can only deploy 2 R6s, 2 R5s, and 4 R4s, so selling them 20 R6s, where at level 4 they were getting 20 R4s, might not be a great plan.
I'd like to help new players and low-level players ramp up more easily, and continue playing Ingress beyond L6. Making these Nano Packs available and accessible to players Levels 1-6 may help — I want to see how it affects retention and engagement over time. We'll build, measure, learn, repeat to keep working to improve the game.
We hear your feature requests on subscriptions, cosmetics, and consumables, but those take more time to build and release. While these are being worked on, there are other things we can do in parallel or in the meantime to work towards our goals to make Ingress more sustainable.
@Perringaiden I'd prefer a L6 agent deployed 2 L6 Resos on 10 different portals versus buying a one-off pack to max deploy on a smaller number of portals, but a variety pack is something we discussed.
@Cyclebiff I don't think you've been a troll, or if you have, I didn't take anything said personally. I much rather prefer hearing passionate constructive criticism than no feedback at all. I'm here, listening and engaging, and as I try and chart a course forward, there'll be decisions I make that players may dislike or disagree with. It's a balance, and I'm working to regain trust with the community by being present (online and offline, going to anomalies and First Saturdays). I hope it's clear that I'm making these decisions with good intentions, and because I'm trying to make the game better long-term.
A deployer pack we saw during Umbra would probably work as something for everyone. I don't know if it was that or the one passcode where the XM was rainbow for Pride that also was a neat mix of resos. It's not so much L6 but getting all 8 on the board to enable linking and fields
The purchasable items should stay in the shop. And only here. I don't want to see them cluttering carousel. And the max level should stay L6 to encourage people meeting and farming high-level gear together. Don't think of getting beyond L6.
@NianticBrian
I'd like to help new players and low-level players ramp up more easily, and continue playing Ingress beyond L6. Making these Nano Packs available and accessible to players Levels 1-6 may help — I want to see how it affects retention and engagement over time. We'll build, measure, learn, repeat to keep working to improve the game.
While I commend the goal of onboarding new players, I see a potential issue here.
Onboarding players by selling them on stuff isn't what used to drive retention. Teams reaching out and incorporating them into the group, giving them help directly, and then bringing them to farms, is what got retention. This seems like a plan designed to get people used to buying gear, before adding higher gear to the store by public demand.
I rather see you guys sell character badges instead of gear.
"In an upcoming update, we're also planning to show agents Nano Packs in the Attack and Deploy carousels"
Please don't add packs to the carousels.
Already now it is hard to get a good overview of all items we have in the inventory (compared to the list view we had in Redacted). Adding more stuff will make it worse.
New agents might have different views, but if this would end up in any form in carousels of veteran agents it will be yet another move in the wrong direction.
Veterans / grinders would most likely want an even simpler UI with less animations, less clutter etc. and not more stuff crammed into the menus.
I think you'd better develop some new gameplay features to gain more players instead of trying to suck everything from what's left of the playerbase after bad start of Prime and closure of Redacted.
Better than 20 R8:
2x R8, 2x R7, 4x R6, 4xR5, 4xR4
In other words, max deploy of two portals.
In another game I play the number one UI complaint is how easy it is to unintentionally buy things.
Purchases should be ONLY in the store.
@NianticBrian I don't think the problem for new players is the missing items. in bigger cities its relativly easy to level up and you can hack resos on the go (for example more than 50% of L.A. portals are grey so capturing a bunch of portals will give you enough AP). in rural areas its more like the lack of portals that stops new players from playing .For example i know a agent that leveled himself up to L7 in mexico with only 1 portal in his city until some agents from CA submitted a bunch of new portals in his town. And the other problem is the lack of community. With gplus going away, there is a platform missing for new people to find other people in there area and organise with each other. No other social media platform could absorb the vacuum that gplus left. The community forum is not completely fitting to what the community wanted. so i doubt, that those nano bundles will keep players playing. in the end the thing that keeps players in the game is the community and the playing together.
I think adding to the carousel is a terrible idea to be honest. It makes the game appear more premium than freemium and will attract a lot of negative feedback.
If you are fiddling with the carousel though, can you fix it so it doesn't reset to US1 when I use up all my XMP8 please? I'm pretty sure I can't be alone in saying I want to use the next highest burster and not an entirely different weapon. 😊
Definitely, keep the store in the store, not in the carousel. Less clutter there is good, keeping it simple.
No objections to the small / nano packs being available, though I find it interesting that people are finding it hard to level up. Hard to level up was what Ingress was in the beginning, I believe it took me about 3 months to get to level 8. Now, I could do it in an afternoon (I'm in a slightly above average sized city). As @Claudija says , it's catching players in to a community that is kinda missing now. We get a lot of lone wolves who are probably the ones having the trouble levelling , and they don't know where to go for community help. We try to engage with comms but it's an uphill battle when there is no easy "in app" way of connecting with local communities.
@Perringaiden this hypothetical scenario is reaching. I'm not saying these Nano Packs are going to get us to 100% new player retention, but it certainly won't drive many players to lives of crime. Players who choose to buy Ingress items on eBay or from unauthorized item sellers will be banned, like the 22K accounts in a recent wave: https://nianticlabs.com/blog/cheatingupdate-081419/
I hope Niantic continues to catch both spoofers and gear sellers and their bots, but we've always been told that buyer's will only have their items removed.
Also, I'm not sure if you saw this one but back in Reddit there was a good thread on ideas of what to sell, when the community didn't like the idea of selling high level gear: https://www.reddit.com/r/IngressPrimeFeedback/comments/9utchs/megathread_inapp_purchase_replacements/
Anomaly packs excluded, the only items that should be in the store are things you can't hack.
@Claudija @RoadRunn3r having worked on the Google+ launch before joining Niantic to work on the original Ingress launch, yes, finding ways to fill these gaps are top of mind. And there are some considerable gaps now that G+, Communities, and the Community Directory are gone. I'd eventually like to help new players answer those questions of, "Hey, I'm new here, is there anyone playing near me?" and "How do I move?" But right now, I also need more data on possible sustainable paths forward for Ingress.
It's like that Reddit megathread of things people actually want and are willing to pay for never happened...
If you genuinely can't keep the game profitable without shoving monetisation into every possible UI element, just turn the servers off. Ingress has already gone from the gold standard of mobile gaming in the Google era to being indistinguishable from everything else in the Play/App store, no reason to degrade its legacy further.
We know you miss the glory days of the game just as much as we do, but if there's nothing you can do to help restore that then sometimes euthanasia is the best option.
Nano packs sound like an interesting idea - it will be good to see how they work out at helping with player retention. As several others have noted, please leave them in the store. The carousels already cause some usability issues with selecting the item you want and having links to the store seems likely to add to those issues/make it worse when things are mis clicked.
when PoGo came out and postcards were added, I immediately thought something similar could be added to Ingress. Instead of sending direct to another player tho, they could be sent from one portal to another via links similar to shard traveling. This would make link direction more meaningful too - the postcard could only be sent across an outgoing link, possibly only when the link is created. The postcard items could be akin to media or include items. It encourages collaboration - the postcard would be available next hack, regardless of faction.
I‘d happily buy a bundle of postcards to send out, even if only a single item could be attached.
The problem is, if you keep experimenting with unsound ideas for monetization, it's not going to matter because there won't be any players left. Not one of my communities is anywhere near the activity level of a few years ago, and some are completely silent. There are a lot of reasons for this but mostly it's been a thousand paper cuts - mishandled or no communication, inability to keep the game clean, constant event issues, etc. Putting in app purchases in the carousel is just one more cut to a player base that wants desperately to play a game that 1) works consistently, 2) isn't overrun by spoofing and multiaccounting, and 3) shows some - ANY - sign of listening to players about what they want.
Hey@NianticBrian I am totally cool with a store link being on the carousels as long as there is an option to toggle them off and never have to see them.
Having the items for sale in the carousel is a bad idea for the same reasons that pop up ads are bad.
Someone mentioned media lockers in another thread. Please sell us those. Make beacon lockers. Make fracker lockers. We want to give y’all money but we aren’t going to spend it on lvl 6 resos and common shields.
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maybe they(Niantic) didnt feel how much hate and dislike happened the time they initially sell hackable items in the store? numbness. repeat action.
the reddit thread got lists of what the players would likely pay for other than things than can be obtained through hacking.
I was expecting something similar to Pogo's 100pokecoins for a very minimal price on a daily basis and have it for CMU instead.
The community has plethora of clewer people suggesting interesting ideas for unobtrusive monetization; instead, you make anomalies paid-only and now are trying to put some purchasable sh..stuff into carousels, overusing that "make more sustainable" phrase as a mantra / excuse for these bad decisions. Facepalm. You say you're listening, but I don't see that.