People who protest against changes in the game. I'm interested in your opinion.
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?
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Definitely not with built-in spoofer, like you suggested in other discussion. Drones are fine as they are now, and can be improved in many ways, but not with keys, links and attacks.
I'm all for new features and innovation.
But in my opinion,Ingress needs to stay true to it's identity.
2 teams fighting over control in the real world.
Anything that alters that (more teams. Remote actions. ..) takes away from Ingress' identity.
It's these people:
Drones should never be able to alter the play area = meaning no **** or linking capture etc... Hacking is fine enough.
I'm not against innovation. However, as @XQlusioN so eloquently said, Ingress needs to stay true to its identity.
The things that I love most about Ingress are exploration and competing for control of the playing field. Ingress is very different from PoGo and HPWU in one really important way-- the other two games are almost entirely about achieving personal goals. You collect more things, you rack up more stats, you check things off on a personal checklist. Ingress is the only game where I can look at the map at the end of the day and say, "I accomplished that." It's the only one with elements of strategy, large-scale cooperation and collaboration, creativity. The other games have no analog to a BAF, no large memorial linkstars, no field art. There's no reason to climb mountains in the other games, to seek out obscure ghost towns and places with no cell service. Ingress is the only one of the games with a strong incentive to explore new places.
I'll admit that I've never been a fan of the storyline hoop-jumping tasks that are only tenuously related to gameplay, and I'd be happy if they got innovated out of town on a rail. I feel like they're some other game glued onto the side of Ingress rather than a part of the game itself.
I like the drone as an exploration tool, and I don't really mind it as a tool for keeping sojourner alive or for low-volume farming. I would hate it if it could be used to alter the playfield or for strategic resource gathering.
In general, I'm in favor of innovations that build on the things that make Ingress special, things that improve the game mechanics, things that add interesting strategic elements, things that reduce toil so that you can spend more time doing fun things. Glyph hacking and frackers were both awesome innovations because they cut down on the time spent doing boring, mechanical stuff to get gear so that you could spend more of that time using gear. Similarly, capsules reduced toil.
I'm not so interested in things that would dumb down the game or turn it into PoGo with bursters.
Shards were a wonderful innovation that everyone loved. Please bring them back.
shard jumping with drone would be a fun event maybe ?
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.
People just want a ultra repetitive, capture, link, field for eternity. It is boring. Need drastic change.
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.
What where shards exactly?
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.
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.
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:
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.
No it's not.
Ingress hasn't actually had any major innovations since 2015, except the Drone. Prime wasn't an innovation it was an incomplete UI rewrite.