Niantic, misunderstanding of user needs. Or everything new is well forgotten old.
Today, there are combat beacons, and they disappointed me as much as the drones. In fact, a combat beacon is not a beacon, it is a fracker with a battle for the portal. An expensive fracker with a mini-game in which we are again forced to meet and interact with the enemy. Is this a necessary item for an ordinary agent? It is unlikely. There are a lot of level 7 or more farms around. And many simply have no desire to see "godless apostates from the opposite faction."
I can bought a beacon, used it and that's it, it's not there. Battle for the portal you say? Can you calm down the flying cheaters? Or those players who have modified game clients that allow you to take out 4 aegis shields in 1 second? No. Let's be honest, a useless thing for an ordinary player that has absolutely no effect on victory.
And if there are few players in the city? The community is shrinking, and in many cities where before 20 players played every day, you can hardly see 1-2 players now. Who needs a beacon like that in a city where you can hardly find agents for the first Saturday?
Drone? And there is no drone, there is a remote viewing of the portal with the ability to hack it once an hour, without the ability to get a key. A useless thing that I looked at only once and have not used it since.
Dear players, what is the use of these two items? Do they fit organically into the concept of the game? And instead of making a workable client that really looks like an agent scanner, let's add a bunch of disposable useless items?
P.S. Yes, I was entirely for the idea of drones, such irreplaceable helpers in the game. Not for remote viewing with a 1 hour hack. And I was for real beacons, not just another fracker with a portal battle. But alas, everything new from nia is old songs in a new way.
What will happen next? Remote viewing in which you can see dancing green or blue pikachu around the portals of your faction? Or a paid regular shield that launches a faction symbol over the portal? Or an ultrastrike that will **** fireworks on impact ???
Comments
Battle beacons aren't a mini-anomaly, as many are calling them. They're a volatile in a cluster battle. A single portal out of hundreds.
Drone? And there is no drone, there is a remote viewing of the portal with the ability to hack it once an hour, without the ability to get a key. A useless thing that I looked at only once and have not used it since.
The sole useful part of the Drone is ensuring that Sojourner is maintained. It would have been good to remove the "recharge to sojourner" at the same time, but not everyone could deploy their done all the time. A drone that is capable of more, would be encouraging spoofers because "you can do it too".
But regardless, the biggest reason why Niantic's goal of reinvigorating the game is failing, is because all of these ideas are focused on individuals, not bringing players back to the community.
Battle beacons "sound" like a community event, until you realize that all it does is cluster a handful of people around one portal. RES and ENL don't want to stand next to each other. That's not how the communities work. The Tesselation's best parts were the monthly events where people went out and played the game.
While right now there is a pandemic, we're beyond the "stuck at home" stage for most people, and it's time to encourage people to play the game again. "Drone Events", more drone features etc, are counter productive, because they allow people to sit at home and play.
Real features like Uniques display would actually get people playing again. Providing UI support for mission banners and easing mission play with UI tweaks. Provide us with a Subscription, that mythical tease that's been out there for more than a year, so we can support the game, and then get on with providing us with good things in the game that don't cost far more than they're worth.
Ingress doesn't need a bunch of new 'modes' of play. It's already got a myriad of them, if only they weren't so painful to do.
I would love to remote travel portals again... without a drone.
"Watering the garden while the house is on fire".
✌️
Yeah this new idea seems dumb, and I'm a new player, I can count on one hand gow many enl players i would do this with and dont see the point in paying for those less than 3 players.
As for bringing people back, it should also be about bringing new players in. One of the biggest issues I found when starting and see a lot of people who try it say, is that if they are in an area the wrong colour, they get no chance to field or link due to fields that they have no chance to take down, and the portals are opposite faction so same issue no chance to actually play the game, and when they do start getting up portals, those opposing factions will come along, smasg it and throw high level.stuff in to stop them getting the portals. The portal one i dont think there's much help to be done (unless there's a scaling thing similar to gyms in pogo but I know id move annoyed if a kevel one agent took out an l8 4 aegis sheild portal haha) but the linking and fuelding thing under fields could be a way to fix it, dont provide mu for it and dont let anyone over level 4 be allowed to do it, but allow low level starters to get the ap needed to be able to play
As for returning players that kne is hard to judge, the biggest issue I can see in my area is the dominant faction has it all their way, they have pwople with seemingly endless money and time to just drive round taking out our portlad and fields while getting big ones of them, have boats and canoes and the like to constantly get to portals we can't make it too and things line that, how do you convince people to come back or keep playi g when the other teams lives seem dedicated to playing?
The other issue is how toxic some people can be, me persobally ive bwen accused of stalkig a player, when all.i did was try to keep portals alive whe this player came to my area and send a few jokey funny messages, for that player to then get her boyfriend back playing to keep attackign my stuff and wait for me at portals ( the hypocrisy seems to be lost on them). This player has apparently got multiple people banned for these accusatuons btw, and the boyfriend has attacked an agent irl before, yet nothing is ever done to these 2, and reading online ive seen very similar stories to these amd other toxic level player bases. How can niantic go about sorting those out to convince people who stopped playing because of the toxicity of players line these?
Oh and spoofing of course, that's always going to be one of the biggest issues of all time
The issue with high level players forcing new players out of the game is a tricky one. I am a high level player, and yes if an upstart on the other team comes along I want to crush them out of the game. Why? It makes game sense.
I think the only real way to combat this is for their own faction to explain and protect them till they are at least level 8.
Boats/planes/access issues, I find these are generally fairly balanced. (With a few that only either faction can access). Approach old players on your team for help. They likely know who has access to boats etc.
Players with seemingly endless time on their hands? Always an issue, it's school holidays here at the moment and the other team has a number of teachers on break. I'm working whilst stuff gets blown up all day.
Have to laugh at the stalking issue. I think I may have had that raised with me recently when in fact I was up a long dead end road and the only way out was past the other agent. I stopped, wound my window down and said hello politely. Then drove off in the direction they had come from, (ie opposite to the way they were heading).
Having been followed a number of times with another car just about touching my rear bumper I know this is not fun and avoid it wherever possible. A polite hello, then go cause mayhem elsewhere.
I do ge the need to atop upstarts (i have inadvertently done it myself as I've been feilding over an area of a new player without intentionally meaning to .... at firsy) but this is still supposed to be a game, it should offer ways to encourage new players to play, as i said, not to high kevel, juat level 4 as thats when you can realistically start hitting higher level portals enough. The odea of older players protecting would work if there were some in the area or the comms was useful (it really isn't as theres been many reports of multi accounting to get access to other teams comms)
The boats planes one id argue only works if both team shave, as far as im aware in my area, only 1 person in my owns a canoe, so he can go on cal. Waters, but islands that are only accessible but boats, thats where its unfair, I dont think that they should be removed or anything, but maybe noantic can set an increased decay that increases week on week for portals? So that maybe after 5 weeks up it will drop no matter what? I dont know, from what I've read people hate portals like these as its unfair advantages to those with the means (money)to reach them.
Yeah, thats what I said, I was having a laugh and left when the player left my area, but they took it to heart and have decided to try amd bully me out the game, only problem is i find it funny to just go wind them up and hit their home portals lol. But that eas just one example of how toxic the community can be and niantic dont seem interested in fixing (in fact, they seem to favor these kinds of people, the person doing the accusing has done this several times and got people banned for nothing more than banter)
Well, I agree the games nicer when less toxic.
However, one could argue toxicity breeds competition.
A lot of older players lament the loss of guardian hunting. They say it removed the competition.
To me it was just trolly cheating since we all knew scrapers were being used to locate them.
I would argue for Guardian to be returned IF scraping and spoofing was eliminated.
But alas...
I do like the idea of increased field anchor decay rate over time as long as it's fielded. A deployed portal with no field should not suffer this.
I think the drone use went complete over your head, and your comments about it is what is really useless. You don't understand it, just don't use it. It's clearly not for you.
I know players who recycle ito ens, VR stuffs, etc. Why? Because it's useless for them, since they play alone in their cities. Also players who didn't bought keylockers, because feel like it is useless too, since they don't do team work and just wander around throwing links. And of course, a LOT of players don't do glyph hacking, just the simple, because they also think it is stupid or just hard.
So, as much as Niantic is doing a **** job overall, I defend the drone existence. It's not for you (you probably live in a big city with a lot of portals and some in range from your home, right?), so just chill out about it, there's a lot of people using and enjoying it, mainly new players who don't have prejudice about it. The exist to ensure a player is able to do at least one hack a day without leaving their home and slowly get some gear.
The only shame on it for me is the lack of badges for unique drone hacks so far.
I think we will see more pogo-style type of events and items in ingress later. Battle beacons is someting similar to pogo raids where u need raid passes to play. BUt i hope we get global challenges back soon so we can get back old players who havent signed in a long time. I mean besides badge hunting there isnt much to do outside the virtual fs@home.... we have drones how about they make a challenge on those and its safe to do from home.
One of the biggest issues I found when starting and see a lot of people who try it say, is that if they are in an area the wrong colour, they get no chance to field or link due to fields that they have no chance to take down, and the portals are opposite faction so same issue no chance to actually play the game, and when they do start getting up portals,
How many grey portals have you experienced? In terms of new players, the 'grind to 8' is largely a case of fast tracking grey portals, getting to 8 then being no different from everyone else. Heavy fielding by other players is largely irrelevant in that respect except for speed.
As for returning players that kne is hard to judge, the biggest issue I can see in my area is the dominant faction has it all their way, they have pwople with seemingly endless money and time to just drive round taking out our portlad and fields while getting big ones of them, have boats and canoes and the like to constantly get to portals we can't make it too and things line that, how do you convince people to come back or keep playi g when the other teams lives seem dedicated to playing?
Most players didn't quit because the other team is 'better'. They quit because the game changed or got boring or they simply didn't want to continue the back and forth. But the largest group quit because the UI changed and they didn't like it. The classic interface was a smooth slim thing, that felt more like an undergraduate IT student's project. Everything designed for super fast gameplay, with little thought to the fancy graphics that hold the "normies". People loved the weak graphic capabilities in exchange for lightning fast play, the ability to play in the damn sunlight and the fact that 'animation lag' wasn't a thing (except linking).
Until those are rectified, the game really isn't going to recover the older players.
As much as I don’t want to see Ingress turn into PoGo, the fact of the matter is that ingress does need to start evolving to stay relevant.
What do I mean? Well, while the game was somewhat balanced in the early days, the player base is different now. Like, straight up there is less people playing. The game needs to change, at least a little, to make it at least somewhat appealing for newer players, especially more rural ones or in areas with few agents.
I don’t know what those changes are, but keeping it strictly old school and OG just isn’t going to work forever, sorry...
The trouble lies elsewhere. We have no connection with nia. And there is a game on the principle of "Eat what we gave you", with a broken chat, with phantom links, and lousy optimization. They don't want to know what the community wants. They don't want to collaborate with potential clients, that's the trouble. Maybe at least once recently there was a survey of what we want from the game? Maybe there was at least some result? No, no, and many more times no.
All that we have over the past few years is style updates - we have moved the button half a pixel higher, removed two old errors and added a dozen new ones. Well, plus a not entirely successful attempt to monetize the game using apexes and a fracker with a minigame, as well as introducing a portal hack into the game via remote viewing.
I also doubt very much that Brian or anyone else will read this and give a concrete, well-founded answer
and we will finally have a normal community manager who will actively develop the game and connections with the players.
well, disconnect from niantic is a huge issue. we are after 2 huge banwaves that affected many people. one affected many people who were inactive for a long time. many friends who held me items and did not play for a long time gottermination email. one who appealed it just got answer, we did not find your account, try opening new appeal. and that is end of process. why should players care about game with this level of customer care ?
i think covid accelerated things, but lets be honest with ourselves. standalone missiondays were dead long beforre covid, despite community wanting them. and no real replacement was provided for it.
To be fair to Niantic, we have as much connection now, as we did in say 2014. @RedSoloCup spoiled us.
Hmmmm... Community Managers are not game developers, event planners, and also don't get to tell people how to build the game.
That's the job of the current Producer and former Product Managers that Ingress has had over the years. And they are not Community Managers.
Do you even know how any product is developed? First, the demand is studied, a survey of potential consumers is carried out about what exactly they would like to see in the final version of the product.
On the contrary, in ingress, no one studies the needs of the target audience. Nia just do what they want, and because of this, the community has decreased so much that in many cities there is not a single player left at all.
And how does Nia want to connect with potential customers if she doesn't even have a community manager? Even Brian does not reply to topics on the forum. And often the impression is that the company does not care about our opinion.
Let me give you a few examples.
1. Instead of quickly fixing the chat, a lot of improvements were made to the scanning of portals, a new type of frackers with a mini-game was developed ... "I can't dare call this thing a beacon."
2. Incomplete motivation of factions together with unfinished scanner. Enlightenment no longer has shapers, but Jarvis is still yelling about them in the scanner, and training also goes with the mention of shapers. The resistance no longer has reason to fear the shapers, but ADA still refers to them as a threat. Maybe someone did a survey about how the agents themselves would like to see future enlightenment and resistance? What interaction between factions is preferable to them? Do not turn the game into a kind of Pokemon go, where people from all teams gather under one portal to play a mini-game ... but really do what the players need.
3. Many players ask to explain why portal scanning is useful and how it will affect the ingress gameplay - but from the company there is zero reaction.
By the way, can you ask Brian to come into this thread and comment on what people are writing here,
and in general communicate with people on the forum more often.?
I think the only point of contention here is whether Niantic considers player feedback via a Community Manager or not. Community Managers themselves do not have any say on what gets developed, when, or how. They can only give their own view (based on their own experience or feedback from the players) of what the community might want/need and hope it would be considered. They are not the drivers or decision makers of the product. At most, they can maybe slightly influence the direction product development takes.
And quite frankly, Brian does what he wants to do. Asking me to ask him to respond here will get the same attention as you asking him personally. He's not a Community Manager, thus is not obligated to respond to the public at all.
You shouldn't play the role of a "lawyer for nia". You do it badly because you carelessly read what is written for you on the forum.
It's not about whether there is a community manager, but about the fact that there is no connection between the Nia and the users at all. As an example, tomorrow they can introduce dancing pikachu around portals, or a flying Harry Potter in the sky, without asking the players if they want it or not. Or make a modification of the gameplay by adding 3 factions like in Pokemon ... But do we need this? Do they know what product is needed in order for us to put at least 4 stars in the playmarket ??? Does anyone consult with us? Earlier, at least Andrew was, through him it was possible to solve many issues. Now there is nobody.
Ingress has became what newcomers from Pokemon have been saying since the portal submission became online again: a tool to create and edit pokestop that you're forced to waste your time to get the minimum levels to became able to do it. The community is dying and their solutions is bring as much people who have zero interest in it, to mess the portal Network, cheat to get the desired lvs as fast as possible and speed up the time of the dead of ingress.
I have repeatedly heard from other agents that there is no point in developing above level 8. There is no difference in gameplay between levels 8 and 12, with the exception of certain parameters. Many people get bored with playing after 9-10 levels. Even new players cannot understand why they need to swing further? If before there was a battle, skirmishes in chats, and much more that was supported by both the plot and the faith of the longest in innovations, now almost all local newcomers leave the game after taking the 10-11 level. BECAUSE THERE IS JUST NOTHING TO DO HERE. Enemies in many cities have disappeared, there are only old maniacs who sleep with a scanner under their pillow.
A decrease in the community and, as a consequence, a decrease in the number of game actions, reduces interest in the game even among the oldest players.
+ waves of players who left the game due to certain actions of the NIA:
1. Change of the convenient interface from the redacted to the inconvenient interface of the prime = -% of players
2. Introduction of cross-faction events where we had to cooperate with the enemy even more = -% of players, verified comrades should explain to you
3. Loss of factional ideals in the form of shapers and fighting against them = -% of players ...
Why is that?
It's not even a shame, but the fact that no one will even hear us, ordinary players.
I'm Only going off of what my area and what I've read says, new players want to link and fiekd but cant (in my area there was loads of greys, but only because i created thrn in pogo, if I hadn't there would be a grand total of 4 portals in an hours walking distance if me)
As for people quitting, again, can only go by what has happened in my area, and it is the enl (in this case) have peoplw with endless time, money, boats etc. **** down the older res players will to play as they just couldnt compete on even terms. And thats ognoring how toxic the game was at one piont, with peoples personal details being put up on comms, false stalking/harassment claims (that niantic backed), with that one still being an issue from one player.
Its probably different where you are, but im telling you what Its like here and giving a semi outsider perspective if what could help
We so need a community manager, when Krug left it seems things slowed down the line between him and niantic back to players and considering all the issues lately with scanner, innocent ban reports, spoofers etc im suprised they still havent replaced Krug with a new community manager, its obvious Brian cant be a producer at fulltime fulfill the roll of a CM at the same time.
im probably wrong, but didn't krug do this voluntarily? So the issue is niantic won't want to hire/pay someone to.do community manager, and I doubt many at niantic would be willing to do extra work for no money
No Krug was a fully hired Community Manager, that was his job not something he did on his spare time. Vanguards and Trusted reportes on the other hand are voluntarily helpers.
The goal is not to provide something "useful", the goal is to provide something that lets you have fun. People similarly spend a lot of equipment on anomalies and have fun. In the anomaly case, we give medals as a reward. We thought about doing something similar for battle beacons, but since a battle beacon is a mini-anomaly we cant provide something as impactful as a single medal per so we thought we would give you gear. We may add a medal to the number of these completed, but we wanted to test out the concept first.
EDIT: we've also thought about changing the reward from increased hack output to a single one time reward. If we did single time reward, it would end up being less than what you would make from hacking which is why we went with the hack approach: to let players potentially get a lot more. IMO it feels worse to have to then hack to get back gear, but as I say below, we'll see how players respond (also, lmk what you think!)
Battle beacons are a single-portal anomaly. Now, you might say that you cant have an anomaly with a single portal, but you can throw a few of these on neighboring portals as well and then you would have an actual mini-anomaly. We designed battle-beacons as a minimal proof of concept for mini-anomalies where we didnt want to go too overboard with features before seeing whether / how they resonated with the community. Other features that we thought we could add in the future if Battle Beacons work out: Battle Beacon Bomb: deploy a battle beacon and have it deploy to the portal and others within a certain distance (they would share timers, reward levels, etc), Real time battle metrics: be able to see out of the battle beaconed portals who has flipped the most / done the most damage / etc, and possibly other win conditions too. The thing is that we didnt want to invest in any of those other features if Battle Beacons itself wasnt well received.
(This is my own belief here, not necessarily NIAs:) As far as reinvigorating the game goes, I've personally sat down and talked to many recursed + lvl16 agents and they all say that they want community, but when asked about what causes them personally to play less or more it comes down to the fact that the gameplay has stagnated for years: theres nothing to do. I believe that we, the Ingress team, need to give players more ways to have fun. When those already passionate players are out there having fun, others will see that and want to join. Especially if those ways involve others. This is why Battle Beacons is something we've been investing in: anomalies have consistently been one of the most fun parts of Ingress, so we're trying to make it easier for players to do themselves.
As far as features that you've mentioned....keep your eye out :)
As far as covid goes, we're trying to enable people who can go outside to be able to play, but we also want to be sensitive to those that cannot.
As far as quick interactions / animation lag, we absolutely should do better on it but compared to revitalizing the game, is of secondary importance.
As far as a community manager, we know about this and IIRC Brian is looking for someone to fill this role, so hopefully things improve.
Hope Niantic listen on agents feedback when lots of agents dont like new Battle Beacon. I hope Niantic remove it soon. @NianticBrian
(This is my own belief here, not necessarily NIAs:) As far as reinvigorating the game goes, I've personally sat down and talked to many recursed + lvl16 agents and they all say that they want community, but when asked about what causes them personally to play less or more it comes down to the fact that the gameplay has stagnated for years: theres nothing to do. I believe that we, the Ingress team, need to give players more ways to have fun. When those already passionate players are out there having fun, others will see that and want to join. Especially if those ways involve others. This is why Battle Beacons is something we've been investing in: anomalies have consistently been one of the most fun parts of Ingress, so we're trying to make it easier for players to do themselves.
This was part of my point though. There are tons of ways to play already, but most of them require a) using a less than enjoyable interface, and b) usually some level of external checking or tracking.
Examples:
And regarding Anomalies... the actual format of Anomalies is largely irrelevant. For some of the more competitive players, the different formats held different things some good and some bad, but the big draw card for Anomalies was not fighting the same people you see every day, but meeting, and re-meeting up with people from all over the country or world who actively travel to the anomalies.
Pandemic aside, no-one is going to fly from Chicago to New York for battle beacons. They'll fly there because someone else is coming from Savannah, and someone else from Denver, and someone else from Dusseldorf is coming in. The mechanics of the 4 hour block of the anomaly was always the least important part of why people travelled. Events, not just anomalies but also mission days and even Hexathlons, are more about meeting up with people. The pre-parties, and the after parties are why Anomalies are so popular. Some people come for the 'faction pride' or need to win, for whatever largely pointless gain (or to prevent whatever punishment for losing), but the vast majority of people come to events for the other people who also come to the events. Most fly in on the Friday and out on the Sunday, but the in between is filled with catching up with a 4 hour block put aside for crushing the other team.
If you talk to old players who've actually come back from a long break in past years, the reason has usually been an anomaly within reach, and friends from the game reaching out to them to come back and meet up with everyone they knew. They might retire again after a while, but its the large scale event that's brought them back and reinvigorated them. Boredom and frustration with the UI and gameplay makes people put it down, but the community makes people pick it back up again, as far as I've seen.
And as a point of note, the Events were being mishandled and delayed, long before Prime came out. We haven't had a 4-series year, since 2014, and every year seems to be fewer and fewer.
Yes and this was also a decision long ago before covid 19 happend that large scale events like before probably will not happen again. Everyone felt it was very strange that it was supposed to be only 1 anomaly this year worldwide ? so i understand how many feel game lacks events etc outside the normal gameplay hunting for personal badges.
As far as "ways to play the game" I've generally bucketed the types of gameplay into three buckets: 1. competitive, 2. exploratory, and 3. social. Also, that list is ordered by the amount of engagement in each category. So, Battle Beacons are both competitive and social (note: competitive without social is flipping portals / linking / fielding). Unique portals is exploratory. Missions are exploratory and/or social. As you can see we want to engage the most people which is why we've been trying to focus on the competitive aspect.
That being said, we literally just brainstormed/pitched ideas for a hackathon which included unique portals and a questing system. That isnt to say that either of those will actually happen, just that we're always evaluating what the right time / way to execute on these ideas are.