Another Vanguard farewell - and thank you

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Comments

  • InvestigateXMInvestigateXM ✭✭✭✭✭

    Maybe the text survived in the drafts? The board seems to save a draft every few seconds.

    Regardless, thank you for taking the time to read and respond. And just in general, thank you for being in regular communication about the intel map. It is very much appreciated.

  • RostwoldRostwold ✭✭✭✭✭

    I'd like to second that, @ofer2 really does stand out as someone who makes and effort to clearly communicate with players and resolve issues.

  • PhantomR1982PhantomR1982 ✭✭✭
    edited February 2020

    Maybe @ofer2 should step into @RedSoloCup 's recently vacated shoes not that I have had the pleasure of communicating with either of these 2 people as I'm relatively new still but from what I have read these two individuals used to stand up for the community,now there's a local founder in my area who upon getting wind of new players goes out of there way to help people learn the world of Ingress,i made a joke about staying in the shadows early on via comms and that no one will possibly see me play in the real world...but this was a great challenge that the user couldn't pass up...challenge completed & the User Found Me...we chatted for a while and even their perspective echoes what @pinesinger & @MM207A and many others are saying.

    Farewell Departing Vanguard's

  • Thanks for the extra insight @ofer2

    And thanks for all the hard work from the departing Vanguards 😍

  • RostwoldRostwold ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited February 2020

    I might be reading between the lines a bit, but @ofer2's long, informative and honest post on the previous page might be hinting at very positive news for the community.

    I think a lot of us have looked at Niantic's apparent lack of any desire to recruit new Ingress players and reluctance to take on any of the vast range of ideas for monetisation we've posted here as a sign that they are happy for the game to go into terminal decline. If the reason for letting player numbers slide is actually that server costs are out of control and recruiting new players would be bad for the bottom line, but that's being fixed, then there's a light at the end of the tunnel that the players didn't know about until now.

    We might also have been interpreting slow progress on client improvements and dealing with long standing bugs as a lack of commitment to the game, when what's actually going on is a lot of programmer time is being invested into the game, but it's on some thing we can't see; server load reduction. For example this neatly explain why scrolling through comms isn't getting fixed quickly.

  • joecainjoecain ✭✭✭✭✭

    Retirement has its benefits. #retiredagents #lifeafteringress #watchingressdie

  • Thank you very much for communicating with us, @ofer2! A lot of people have been frustrated with the state of the game these days, but just learning some reasons for what’s happening behind the scenes goes a long way toward easing that frustration (for me, anyway).

  • ```I just spent an hour writing out a long response which somehow got deleted by this board`

    Thank you for dogfooding.

  • EvilSuperHerosEvilSuperHeros ✭✭✭✭✭

    This forum software is annoying, it DOESN'T DELETE drafts EVER! lol Even an errant space it holds on to.



  • TinderbiscuitTinderbiscuit ✭✭✭
    edited February 2020

    _-

  • Thanks so much for all the hard work you guys put in.

    The problems you handle are unlike the problems a lot of companies have to solve. If you make console games, you only build for a handful of platforms with fixed hardware and OS constraints. I imagine you guys build and test for a significant number of hardware and software variants. The network backend for your game must also be something a bit special and again quite different from what most PC and console games require to run. Couple with that the organically harvested and ever-changing real world data and you have a very dynamic system with a lot of variables. (Oh and for a long time all of this had to work with two game clients Prime and Redacted).

    So many variables. It's a wonder there aren't more bugs, tbh. You're doing a great job. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next.

    Don't be afraid to make changes. Not telling us what's happening is the smartest move. You can't raise expectations and you can't invoke that sense of gamer entitlement that unfortunately seems to be so prevalent these days. Good luck!

    (From a fellow game dev. :)

  • @ofer2

    I'm glad to read that people within Niantic understand the need for new gameplay. Let's hope they consider ideas like Redfection and Boss Fights. These would really help reinvigorate gameplay especially in Areas where not many players are left... Also look at eg HPWU with it's daily tasks for ideas how to encourage daily play.

    About the Anomalies: I understand the reasoning, and while I don't agree that limiting it to only 1 anomaly was necessary, let's see how the Hexathlons turn out.

    Really good to read someone from Niantic understanding and sharing. I feared that was lost with Andrew leaving. Thanks!

  • HydracyanHydracyan ✭✭✭✭✭
  • Thank you for sharing this level of insight. I know it's "just" your perspective among many, but it gives a lot of transparency into what's going on in the background, driving the decisions Niantic has made.

    Some of us might not agree with those decisions (I've heard a bunch of comments along the lines that "I'd rather be an unpaid volunteer if the alternative was not to have an anomaly in our community again...") but hearing the motivation/intent behind them is reassuring. It's not that Niantic doesn't want events, it's that they want to figure out how to take on the 'burden' of organizing those events at lower mental/time/prep cost to the players. That's admirable.

    In any case, thank you for the transparency. It helps.

  • @ofer2 Thanks for taking the time to write all of that out. I guess I would say that while you have offered some insight into the Niantic perspective, I am not sure that really covers all the issues that have affected the morale of the player base. I hope that Niantic can turn things around but I confess, based on prior performance, I am not optimistic.

  • I want to fight some nasty big Shapers and N'zeer, popping out of a portal ^=^

  • MrCathulhuMrCathulhu ✭✭✭
    edited February 2020

    Thank you for the reply, it's very insightful and good to hear something (ANYTHING) from inside of the dev teams.

    I realize it is a bit of a catch 22 to some degree needing to monetize the game more in order to keep the servers up, but I strongly recommend focusing on getting the game to a stable state before adding anything to to it or trying to find new ways of monetizing it. Nobody wants to put money into something that doesn't work so much of the time. From the way Prime can't handle even 2G reception, to frequent crashes, connection issues, recently huge issues with ghost fields and links, still some bizarre UI designs (why, in a game played via cell phone data, do you load EVERY alternative photo for a portal when viewing it!? And chat still makes extremely poor use of the screen.), amongst others... it's just not even really at the same point Redacted was when it comes to features and stability and therefore playabiltiy and fun.

    Certainly new mechanics and ways to create more fun gameplay are great, when carefully thought out, but unfortunately Niantic has a long track record of not carefully thinking things out, in fact I'd say community trust is at an all time low because last year Niantic repeatedly made decisions that clearly where not even remotely thought out. If there were good reasons behind them, they certainly weren't shared with the community or were shared very, very poorly.

    Also, two major reasons for me personally and I know for others that has lead to old player inactivity, (in addition to naturally losing interest over time or burning out) are the rampant cheating and toxic players and how often little is done about them (especially people who **** and **** other players, even with video proof often little to nothing is done) and (this is kind of out of Niantic's control though) when in an area only one faction is actually able to compete (either they drove off anyone trying to oppose them, like in Utah, or the other faction can't get their stuff together, won't work together, and took years too long to deal with horrifically toxic players like what happened to the resistance in my local area).

    Third reason, and possibly by far the biggest, is how bad Prime has been for many people. Even though it has improved overall, it's really burning out a lot of people with all of the issues.

    I really wish you luck in it because I had a lot of fun with Ingress and I love my local community, but you Niantic still has so very, very much to do to win back even half the trust that's been lost.


    tl;dr Stable, reliable, and more streamlined (less of a data hog, actually works properly when you go into rural areas) game is needed before people will truly start considering spending more money on the game.

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    I actually find Prime pretty good now. No crashes.

    Main annoyances:

    Loading all those pics.

    Scrolling in comms only to have it reset back to end again.

    Lag on recharge/cube usage.

  • Ktulu789Ktulu789 ✭✭✭
    edited February 2020

    @Offer2

    "Server cost went through the roof". Then why not remove all this comm nonsense of images and icons that really are unuseful? Really. I don't need pictures for every portal (an unrecognizable 10x10 pixel image that I can't see in daylight and wont bother to try to **** at night because it's really A. Too small, B. Badly cropped <portal images are never square>). Sure, it looks good for one second the first time you open Prime and see all that shinyness... But after all we all rely on simple portal names. And, thanks God, you removed the images ghosts on the map! I always wondered if devs played the game once (thanks for clarifying that), because when you are on a dense portal zone, those ghosts were the worst and no dev needs feedback to remove that. Took you all a long while as if none of you ever played your app.

    Live Map view: It's kiiiiiiind of nice to see the attacks and deploys happen in real time... but as it was before (refresh after every action, deploy, fire, etc) was better, cheaper on data plan and surely impacted less on BATTERY LIFE. That could really save you a lot on server resources too. I don't think many people would miss the live map... At least, I wont and I really appreciate using GBs from my data plan for things like Netflix, Spotify and Youtube.

    Shiny graphics don't get players involved. That's what I get from new players that begin and leave. I been helping new players since always (I played since 2014) and new player engagement is at its lowest ever since Prime. At the beginning (when Redacted went the way of the dodo) it looked like the problem was PoGo/Prime feature parity: everyone wanted to LvlUp to send Portals from the game that was able to do so... and then they left. Easy: just learn to make multilayers. But now PoGo has that feature available and still, new players stop playing after lvl 6 or 7 so it's worst, as I said, new player engagement is at its lowest since Prime.

    What I think is the problem with player engagement: I Recursed and my problem was this: I can't see the map when linking. I used to be able to know all the portals and the keys in my mind. It felt like I detected XM. Like being able to "see the links in real life". No, I'm not on drugs xD

    But now, the maps keeps rotating by itself in every action, the zoom is pretty bad, portal pictures are badly cropped, portals are dots on the zoom out, and on the link screen, links are almost invisible, fields are too dim. The shadows on the sides of the map really get in the way, even worst when there are hacks going on and the sides get even darker. When you are on the link screen you CAN'T SEE THE MAP. My phone is 16:9 and I don't want to think what 4 or 5 hacks leave of the screen to actually play on a newer device with 20:9 aspect ratio. The link screen is locked to my position, so I can't look at the map (why load 500m radius if I can only see 200m? Here you can save server load too: load less map when the zoom is showing less) I can't even take a nice screenshot of my work, for Jarvis sake!

    A thing on shiny graphics: the nice fields on top never appear in real life as no one sets the zoom all the way in. I only saw them once: on the Anime! xD

    All of this makes linking a simple on-the-spot multilayer with no planning, almost a boring task that is not enjoyable nor engaging. And that was what engaged me to the game, that feeling of being an "agent" on a "mission", connected and "feeling" the portals and links, knowing the portal resos and amount of keys on the fly, knowing where was everything out in the real world and never felt lost, never felt disoriented, playing was simply lightning fast, I never felt like just someone playing a little game. And let me remark "A LITTLE GAME".

    I feel that your slogan "Ingress is not a game" died with Redacted and I couldn't pinpoint why until recently. Was it the bugs? Was it the new mechanics? No, it is that portals don't seem real or tangible anymore. I can't relate to those pixels in this new interface. No amount of Dynamic lighting can fix that, the map is dim, I don't feel "walking that map, getting the XM", I don't see the "portals in real life" (portal screen with the tiny 10x10 pixel image doesn't help, keys with landscape pics when they are mostly taken vertically doesn't help either, and too many clicks to actually see the pics). Portals are almost needles on a dim grid (Buenos Aires is a tidy grid of streets, mostly), fields look almost as dim as the buildings.

    I don't think you need to change the game mechanics to make it less repeatitive, any game is repeatitive when you reach a hicg enough level, be it FPS or RPG or even turn based strategy. Old people still play Monopoly and that thing haven't changed since it's invention. Let alone Scrabble..

    Post edited by Ktulu789 on
  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited February 2020

    Great post @ofer2 @NianticBrian

    One thing I will say, players LIKE being involved in organizing events. (Often seen people fight to be PoC like a bunch of seagulls chasing a chip).

    However, more of the load being carried by Niantic would be appreciated, especially when dealing with permits/local authorities.

    I think ask local players for assistance with this is fine, (put Niantic in contact with relevant local authorities or whatever).

    Unfortunately in today's society, in many countries, getting permission for large public events is like pulling teeth, it's a wonder anyone bothers. Opinions also vary widely on events. Example, if a local authority decides to organize something, it sails though, or something that the majority of the public are into. (Various runs, or cycle rides etc). Mention games fighting aliens etc and you can be shown the door pretty fast. It's delicate. Insurance and safety compliance costs, as well as permit fees can be a killer.

    After parties, not normally an issue except for financial burden. (ie deposits for venues, guarantee income amounts and so on).

    Pre selling party tickets etc get's around this to a degree, however then you don't know how much money you have till you have sold the tickets, bit chicken and eggy.

    Involving players in events is a good way to engender touchy feely love for Niantic. I think it does need to be done better. Wholly running the events yourself, has plusses and minuses.

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