People who protest against changes in the game. I'm interested in your opinion.

GreenVamGreenVam ✭✭✭✭✭

Repeatedly I hear exclamations that the game does not need innovations. "This will destroy the balance!" or "Niantic want to make bloody Pokemon from the game!" and much more. Many agents oppose the introduction of drones, others do not like the fact that exogenous creatures may appear in the game, others are against the third fraction, or they do not like the whole prime at all ... Explain to me your position, why are you so against innovations in the game? In what form would you like to see ingress in the future?

Comments

  • Shards were a wonderful innovation that everyone loved. Please bring them back.

  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭

    shard jumping with drone would be a fun event maybe ?

  • Torron54Torron54 ✭✭✭
    edited June 2020

    New features or functions are fun but the novelty passes by soon. A good innovation should be sth that makes the game more complicated, tho not more difficult, rather than easier.

    As you can see many players are more interested in the methods to enlarge the drone’s flight range limit (like using keys) or the routes that enables them to fly the furthest . This drone thing complicated the game. People view the intel map differently and even some are writing new IITC plugins. Some suggest anti-drone mods. Some suggest drones jumping through links. All these stuff shows how an innovation can bring more complexity into the unchanged frame: portals, links, and fields.

    The debates, however, are often on drone ideas that make the game easier, like key hacking or capturing. That is reducing the things you need to do for same goals in this game and decreasing the minimum neurons required to play this game.

  • BreenzyBreenzy ✭✭✭✭

    People just want a ultra repetitive, capture, link, field for eternity. It is boring. Need drastic change.

  • DSktrDSktr ✭✭✭✭

    From one side,game needs innovations,or it will become boring.

    From the other side:

    1) I don't like drones because that "drone ready" dot pissing me off,i'd like to turn drones in settings off,just like scanning or dynamic compass. I have enough portals to claim gear,and yes i understand that somebody doesn't have portals not only in sight. And if this drone will have xmp's,even as a paid feature... That WILL ruin balance,yes. IMO this game is about fields not about ruining "just to have fun and troll". If drone will have linking option...even worse,the same as key obtaining. Only gear and maybe remote charging w/o key(but this charging can make significant issues too).

    2) Also i don't like itoen- mod,and nerf of shields. Now defending a Portal is nonsence and creating some fields was all time much harder than go and bang bang. Okay,i can go and recap with the same ease,but keys are not unlimited,and so on.

    3) Also i don't like Prime a bit,redacted was not so hungry to phone resources,not so buggy,and without STORE in inventory,it fitted holo design of android 4**,and i prefer that style not material from 5+ android,the same with prime. More laconic or i don't know how to tell:) But i enjoy this game spirit,not the client-application. Oh,and sounds were as a part of atmosphere...not the screaming Roland or ADA telling something i even don't want to know :)

    4) About new portal battles and exogens - i can't tell nothing because have no idea how it will be realised. About 3rd faction - unfortunately,we will never have it. Ingress has two sides,PoGo has 3,WU has 4.

  • Personally, I think the innovations help to keep the game interesting. The various ways you can play also make it interesting but it would get boring if things didn't evolve. For 3-4 years, I've been hearing that Ingress is going to be ruined by innovations. It simply hasn't happened IMHO. The drone idea is really cool but we're still evaluating the ways we can use it. It's perplexing how many people are worried about the drone. I wish I could put mine in a Quantum capsule and replicate it so I could deploy an army of drones.

  • Drones have a lot of potential.

  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭

    well yeah as long as they wont get too OP features.... i want drone battle arenas :D

  • Sorry for the weird question. I started playing later than some of us.

  • HydracyanHydracyan ✭✭✭✭✭

    Shards are floating ornaments over a portal, used during anomalies and global events, that change the portal based on the links it have. The objective is to move the shards arround the world creating a patch of links to a designated goal portal.

  • The need of teamwork, to be onsite on really strange places on very odd times, creating fields, links, missions or capture a portal really really remote, are what defining this game. Take away the need to be ONSITE will change the core idea of this game ( please do not make the drone able to alter the playfield or hack keys). I think the problem, for many, is the lack of opponents, making the game extremely static and let's just say it.. boring. we all like to fire bursters to capture portals linking them together and making fields.. it's the purpose of the game :-)

    yes I know some people like the game board to be static, making huge fields and keeping those fields as it is the only measure that goes across the team (ENL/RES) and according to the lore, the only thing that matters. That's okay as long there is an active "balanced" playerbase, but again, that is not the scenario in all region's

    The game have stats for all of the playerbase. you can go alone and play this game for for a looong time and hoard up personal stats, but at some point the lack of opponents will make the game very hard to play as the decay rate will be a factor to deal with. I believe the gameboard have to change frequently in order for this game to be fun for most players. Make it hard to remote maintain fields covering huge areas, make the "price" for a portal to hold link's/fields very expensive, forcing the team that want this field up, use a lot of powercubes. I think it would be natural, that a portal loses a lot of energy when it hold's link's/fields.

  • edited June 2020

    Like others have said, I am not against "innovation".

    I am against destroying game balance for the sake of change. Not all changes are good, and Ingress runs a delicate balance between different elements dominating the environment.

    For example:

    • Increasing decay - With the game losing players more and more, individuals who want to maintain an area are choosing between using all portals and having an onerous recharge schedule, or omitting portals and fielding over them, leaving greys everyhere.
    • Decreasing decay - In other areas, where players are lacking opponents, but want AP, reducing decay makes them wait longer for portals to naturally decay and disappear.
    • Add a third faction - A third faction will not increase gameplay. It will split the already low playerbase into smaller groups that are less likely to complete a P8. In other games where three factions exist, one faction is always far smaller, and generally destroyed by the other two combined, before they duke it out. DAOC is a perfect example of this, and Team Instinct another (though PoGo really doesn't care about teams).
    • Add an AI 'team' - I'm all for this and posted about the 'Redfection' concept because it would provide a useful addition for regions with few players, while being largely unnoticed in heavy play regions.
    • Increase inventory - I'm again a big supporter of more inventory. 1000 or 2000 extra slots preferably. Alternatively, remove all AXAs, and reduce the shield values back to their pre-sticky values (CS 10%, RS 20%, VRS 40%). Shield values and inventory are directly in opposition, because the people who need large inventories (aside from those who can't manage their keys) are destroyers, who fill up in one location, travel, and then destroy in another. The more they can hold, the less the "travel" percentage of that equation is reduced. Since travel is essentially dead-time, more inventory increases the farming and playing portions.
    • Increase defense - Ingress is a game built on dynamism. The more static an environment, the less interest there is. Unassailable fortifications make for "Recharge only" players who lose interest for the most part.
    • Decrease defense - I support reverting to the previous defensive model, but not further. 10/20/40 was a good balance of defense and viable offense. Removing shields all together, or the original shielding values of 4/8/16 would be too far gone and make shields pointless.

    Regarding drones, they're largely a 'meh' for me. I have plenty of access to decent gear, but I can see that it would be nice for those who don't, to be able to get a bit extra from time to time. It's a great tool for casual players, without being even slightly unbalancing, and therefore I was quite happy to see the feature as a sign that Niantic is moving forward. If you could hack keys, or go further than visible jumps, it would have been a different matter.

    But then there's the 'oddball' ideas.

    Most often, these ideas are badly thought out and are simply to address a given Agent's personal pain point, while not considering the grander scheme of the game. Ingress has had a long history of failing to address the Law of Unintended Consequences. A perfect example was early in the game when Joe Philley advised a group to code-party a VRLA code. They got 3 or 4 times the value of the passcode, but then leaked the process. In true form, another group got 50+ people together and code-partied another VRLA code. From then the process was set and meant a single code could yield upwards of 100 VRLA, far more than intended.

    Another example of LoUC with VRLA was the 1% growth rate in Capsules. Without a specific limiter on the rarity, capsules were filled up with VRLA from those code parties, and the volume exploded exponentially, since after a while, everyone had 96 VRLA in a capsule. Same happened with Aegis, and to a bigger extent, because spoofers and bot farmers would make capsule accounts that did nothing but grow AXA for sale. Other players also made backpack accounts to grow AXA and suddenly every single portal had 4 AXA on it wherever this was being done.

    This is why balance matters, and why people are more likely to **** down oddball ideas. Because they aren't well thought out and haven't had all the consequences looked at or discussed. Since the idea is posted "fully formed" people tend not to enjoy criticism in what they feel is "after the fact". When in reality, the concept hasn't been through a proper evaluation and that's precisely what these threads are giving it.

    Ingress at it's core is a very gracefully built concept. If you want to think about it, look at the resonator deploy counts and what's required to hit each level of portal at the 5-8 range. The tipping points from 5-6 and 6-7 are very carefully chosen.

    We just don't want crazy, partially formed ideas to destroy that balance.

  • Ingress hasn't actually had any major innovations since 2015, except the Drone. Prime wasn't an innovation it was an incomplete UI rewrite.

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