Ingress is dying.
Ingress is dying, If earlier in the capital of my state 50 or more people played at the same time, now it's good if there are 1-5 active agents per day ...
The chat rooms on the game were almost all silent. Even the most active players lost interest in the game.
During the existence of Prime, we were promised that "the popular bike will become even better" but in the end something incomprehensible came out ...
This picture in my opinion reflects the whole essence of Prime.
We wanted a battlefield with active combat operations, an abundance of multi-moves in terms of gaining an advantage over the enemy. A kind of cyberpunk stealth action in the real world ...
And we got a collection of useless junk in the form of changing cursor arrows or broken game chat. Or the same combat beacons allow you to fight for one portal for no reason ... And many other things that destroy the integrity of the game concept.
- Apex
- Battle beacons
- Drones
- Portal scanning
- Kinetic capsules
Sorry, but I do not know of a single agent in my country who would regularly use a drone or buy beacons or apexes. These are not the innovations that most players expected.
And yes, having a normal staff of productive programmers, all these innovations could be added in one update, and not stretched over several years, passing off as great achievements.
I really love ingress. Previously, it looked like a great chess club where there were always a lot of people, life was always seething. And now the game is more like a half-abandoned closet full of unnecessary or rarely used things.
What do you think needs to be done in order for the game to become popular at least as an old scanner in its best years?
Comments
Well, it should improve whenever players who didn't quit rise their 1 star score in Play Store. If you use 1 score is to never play again anymore, not to keep playing. The ratings had been dropping since Prime was released because of rage quit and now that is threatening Ingress future. No matter how good are the improvements the staff make, if the playerbase continues bashing Niantic employees like that, it will shut doon earlier than expected because the algorithm from the play store won't recommend newcomers to install the game.
The plan: 1) release subscription, let the darn money flow; 2) polish the app and fix long-standing issues, thus cut those reasons for people to throw 1* in play market; 3) make a push for 4* overall rating and let new people in; 4) increase gameplay depth! currently all those new features are kinda superficial: you try them once and forget about them because they aren't needed in core gameplay. 5) profit!
I've been pretty vocal about this game all over the forums. I'm relatively new with 3'ish years under my belt, so wasn't really around during the glory days of Ingress. I've heard the stories and seen it on YouTube and it's what partially attracted me to the game.
In my opinion, a lot has changed in 8 years. Not just with the player base, but mobile gaming in general, gaming in general. Things evolve and I honestly feel like NIA hasn't done enough to evolve. 8 years of triangles is one thing. But we're 8 years in and the only thing we hear from anyone at Niantic is release notes, "event" announcements and a couple of forum posts here and there each week, none of which really answer anything or give us any hope that something is going to change. More non-answers and vagueness.
Gaming 8 years ago you could get away with just releasing the game and some patches. These days, devs are communicating with their people. They're active, they're hyping their own game, they're giving sneak peaks, they have easter eggs, they have fun with the game. And not even just game devs, but other app developers as well. This veil of secrecy is doing more harm than good and y'all still haven't figured that out. I get you need to keep some stuff "secret," especially with the rampant cheating that abounds. But lets talk about possible features, lets flesh them out a bit before you spend valuable development time on something. Maybe even have some fun with it. You've got three ideas, hold it to a vote. Preface it with a, these aren't promises the other items will ever make it to the game or some other sort of warning. edit: But working with us instead of having this us/them relationship would benefit everyone.
I dunno, I would love to keep playing this game, but between the rampant cheating, feeling like a worker (scanning) and a seemingly unchanged game, my patience is wearing down. It's time to evolve Niantic. A subscription plan isn't going to save your hide. Banking on agents who are still obsessed with your game to keep the lights on will only work for so long, but not evolving/changing the game for them might be even worse.
Good luck!
PS thoughts on new "features"
Just to flip the script a little bit, Niantic's purpose for those items is most likely to generate some revenue on things that wouldn't require long-term developer costs or resources. Apex's would have been relatively simple to implement, Battle Beacons, a little more complex, but housed in its own thing and allows Niantic to produce some "quick-wins" and gain some money. I've spent money on them, I would like to do more, but I'm stuck trying to get this portal scanning **** done every damn day.
Portal scanning, we all know its useless for Ingress, but Niantic have stated that it gives them value, so it's obviously important for them. That's cool, but why don't they listen to the hundreds of feedback topics and make the process better?
The #1 thing Niantic need to do is simply communication. This is brought up in so many threads and we all ever see is silence. ofer2 chimes in every now and then, and that's awesome to get some insight on things. But we aren't looking for promises or announcements, just participation and acknowledgement! The people on the forums would be the most die-hard passionate fans, the ones that have the most influence in their local communities, the ones that do the most for Ingress. The average player doesn't care about the forums, let alone knows of their existence. Niantic simply need to be seen and present, rather than silent and omnipresent.
Back to the original question, it's very difficult. Ultimately, it's up to the person that plays whether they want to commit time to play or not. I love Ingress and would love to play more, but at the moment I'm slaving away on scans and not playing the game, others simply don't have the time due to real world commitments, etc. However, the one thing that everybody loves the most is the large-scale anomaly-style events, obviously it's a challenging world we live in right now, but there's no reason why some events can be done in-scanner (that aren't just "capture X portals" or "make X links" or whatever). The challenges are always about global competitions, but on a local scale they mean nothing, bring it down and make locals work together or something, change up the challenges, make them multi-tiered with some real stakes. See how interesting the game can be.
It doesn't actually have to happen, just open up some dialogue with the community. Communication is key, and silence keys community. The sooner Niantic learn that, the better.
Alternative plan: terminate the game and create a new one with same basic mechanism (links between wayspot), hope old players join without crying and hate, hope new players like it.
I have been playing a little over two years. I am still learning the game.
Took me until l15 to fully understand glyph hacking.
The biggest problem is people can't be terribly active right now.
Q4 2019 after the bugs got straightened out was the best the game ever played. Even prior, with the every 45 minutes you'd either get punted or frozen out it was intense action in my box, and it has been probably from the beginning.
Game mechanics and tech side still has a good deal of work that needs to happen. Yet until the virus goes away things will not reach full potential because there are not enough players to make semi permanent fields go away.
I’ve heard that ingress is dying for the past two years...
Can we just start off by saying, there’s good in everything and bad in everything.
Death of redacted and birth of prime: “Ingress is dying!”
Tessellation: “Only one anomaly, Ingress is dead.”
Hexathlons outnumber Anomalies: “NIA don’t care, Ingress is dead, PoGo is the cash cow.”
Seriously, I joined right at the **** of Ingress... or so they said back then.
Guess what the devs, are old school... won’t release stuff and due to NDA’s can’t really blab about it either (same with Vanguards).
Things that are still going strong... (or any positives in the past story arc)
Ingress First Saturday (virtual)... may not like it but guess what, there’s your community, still playing.
Drones/Recharge hack (Covid-19 update)... may not have liked either but guess what, it works, yes I lost my streak but honestly I don’t mind. One thing I’d add is a drone badge.
Virtual NL-1331... great form that brutal day. One hack/recharge and you earned a global badge for it.
GORUCK/Ingress... yeah some of us are still rucking out there...
EOS events... yeah was nerfed a badge but the reason why, some are locked down some aren’t. Got a huge feeling a makeup badge is coming.
Tessellation events... Perpetua happened, Lexicon didn’t, neither did the anomaly... already been stated, a mulligan will come about.
Apex/Battle Beacons... great for an AP machine... add a dash of recursion for extra gear!
Kinetic Caps/Quantum Cap replication... remember when a Qcap was able to reproduce VRMH, VRHS, VRLA, SBanks, ADA, Jarvis? 8km on a fitness ap, yeah that’s not bad, but can we get a second cap that does rare gear too?
Portal Animation... some loved it, some became sea sick from it, guess what instead of a dot on a map, now a picture shows up.
This all becomes a who you play with and around, makes or breaks a play style... Some agents have keys to 7 portals it seems and only fields there... 24/7. Some microfield, some do big ops, some like xfac, some do GORUCK, some log in once or twice a month to play... it’s about game style.
The one and only one thing you can say that even remotely says, “Ingress is dead,” is SARS-CoV-2. That’s pretty much it. With the disease COVID-19 being what it is, any government being how they are, and how you wanna play... are all at odds.
Give it a few months, you’ll kick back a beer (if it’s legal), and the think... wow can’t believe I was a Ingress is dead agent.
Agreed. Once the virus is dealt with and everyone gets back out on the road, things will be back to can we get the freeze/punt to stop. That is what we'd like to have.
Oh completely agree with you there. Ingress isn’t dead, it’s that freeze/punt to stop/2 lap penalty for running over an air line...
Ingress will come back with a “resurgence” or “resonance” that one couldn’t imagine.
The essence of Ingress died sometime ago. Like 2-3 years ago. It will never again be what it was in its heyday. The cause(s) are debatable, but it’s my belief that it was already on the decline before Prime.
one problem is, ingress isnt growing many players really due to the low rating on google store last i checked is 3.1 ... how do we get many old players and new back in this game? for that we need fun events like global challenges etc back.
Ingress was declining well before Prime. Pokemon came out and many quit to play that exclusively. Then Prime came out and it become a mass exodus. When you have less than 5 players in a large city you have to admit the game is dead. The early years were fun. Then the spoofers and scrapers ruined it for many. Now they have to entice us with double deploy l8 resos just to keep us interested. Ingress needs a drastic change if it's going to grow again.
I tend to agree about the state of the game. You're lucky to see 5 active agents in a state, let alone a city.
Group chat servers have more public channels to talk in than they do active users. I've been playing for roughly three years and there are a ton of "old guard" who own the admin ownership to their local communities chats but sit in armchairs telling others how to act/play without actively playing the game.
New players who are gamers almost exclusively use Discord while more obscure programs are being used by local communities. It's really time to let Slack die, we're in a gaming world, not the business world. Slack was good for the task when the game first went out but it really is the equivalent of trying to use Teamspeak or Ventrilo now. They're obsolete.
Prime had a really bad release and Niantic rightly suffered for it. They still aren't optimizing their client for low spec devices so you won't see people coming back if they're required to get a flagship tier phone just to play one game. Just give us a basic, 2D, low graphics mode that emphasizes speed and battery efficiency. Let me turn off all this 3D garbage that's sucking my battery's will to live.
Moreover, Niantic has tried to make this game more about global challenges than PvP. At the core of it, that's killing the game as well.
The only influx of new players I have seen are people from the pokemon go community who wanted the ability to submit and edit portals, with the hope that they get hooked on Ingress. That's no longer a valid entry point as pokemon go now has submissions directly. Only the truly dedicated who want to edit locations that are out of position for being pokemon stops make the climb to level 12 for location edits.
From what I've seen locally, the only reason players will show up anymore is for local anomalies. They consider themselves "OG" agents that don't have to contribute locally anymore, but should be held in high regard. Anyone new to the game is unable to reach this status, making the possibility of coordinated gameplay a constantly retreating set of goalposts. To be fair, this is what happens in many matured organizations/groups. The only way to really shake this up is to bring in new blood and shake up gameplay. It would be nice to see some sort of community building from faction leads which factors in activity of agents for making sure points of contact are kept up to date.
Did you forget about the pandemic? World wide more than 15k are still dying of it, daily. Please, limit your outside time. Not spreading this plague is far more important than getting your freaking portals and throwing links.
I don't think the pandemic changed anything, just hastened things. There are many issues but cheaters are at the top of the list and they just go away with it continuosly.
What hurts the most, watching how someting you love dies or watching something you love grow up to become something you hate and desire to see destroyed?
Here is the problem, ingress was already dire pre-october 2019
AR gaming just isn't as captive as it once was,
Microsoft tried and failed with mine craft,
Niantic currently has 4 titles published in playstore,
Does anyone remember delta-t?
I'm sure you can all name atleast one other....
Very easy to understand. Now agents dont need to do nothing to get medals. Only buy from shop and agents get it and dont need play Ingress Prime. More spoofing agents now when Pokémon Go trains find Ingress Prime and play. Now lots of agents stop play when Niantic do nothing to stop spoofing.
Ingress was never about the client. That's the premise that people keep making, but it's not the case. The classic Ingress client had lots of bugs, simplistic graphics that looked inferior for the era of it's release, missed a lot of features, and wasn't really in a 1.0 complete state until 2015.
Ingress was always about the community. People played the game because of the community. People did the relatively repetitive activity loops, because they were helping friends. Or even better, doing it with friends. People worked hard to gain level 8 so they could participate in the group activities, like fielding a city, or destroying an opposition farm. Or both.
Niantic supported the community with events. Lots and lots of events. In 2014, Helios spanned 6(?) weekends, multiple continents, and tens of thousands of players. All through 2013, 2014 and the first half of 2015, there were hundreds of events around the world. People travelled from all over to come together, meet old friends and new ones, hang out with people they'd only ever talked to in chat. Maybe see an Ingress actor in the flesh. But mainly, they were organized meetings of the community.
Events reinvigorated players, and reinvigorated communities. People got excited again and didn't feel as bored with their daily loops and routine. Old players were rousted out of retirement, and new players grasped what everyone else was always so excited about and got excited too. Events every 3 months kept the hardcore players from burning out and roped new players in harder.
In 2015, when Niantic spun off from Google, it was understandable that they missed a Q3 anomaly, and they went on with a great dual weekend anomaly in Q4. Obsidian, Aegis Nova, Via Lux, Via Noir through 2016.
But then there was a 6 month break. We thought it was just a 'preparation for something big' when they announced Navarro for May, and 13 Magnus Reawakens in Q3. Exo 5 followed in Q4, but then there was another 6 month break. After that, events got scattered and inconsistent, then they got smaller and more constrained. 24 sites became 3 sites, and eventually in 2020, they planned Requiem, which consisted of a single Anomaly in Munich in June.
More than anything else, the demise of Ingress started with inconsistent anomalies and smaller less dispersed sites.
Prime didn't **** the game alone. Prime blasted the happy cocoon people used to comfort themselves that the events would pick up again. That the game was not shrinking. It pushed everyone out of their comfortable familiarity and failed to provide a new happy place for people to wait for the next events. Prime didn't **** the community alone. It just provided the "two" in the one-two punch that failing event support had started.
Right now it's difficult to restart those events and have thousands of people reinvigorated. And travel long distances is going to be hard and expensive and hesitant for a long time.
Hopefully, Niantic will understand this and abandon the nonsense of a "Single event most of the world can't attend" and go back to what made Ingress great. Multiple sites around the world, so no-one has to travel too far, multiple weekends in those regions so that people can work around schedules. And a general accessibility and consistency to the part of the game that's been lacking for the five years we've been watching the community slide.
I think you make a point I’ve made elsewhere very clear. Niantic needs to evolve to keep this game alive. Using covid as a crutch isn’t going to work forever, a subscription is just a monetary bandaid and events with medals you buy isn’t going to hold people over for very long either....
Time to change and try something different. Try to find a tough balance of not making your OG elitists cry and entertaining new agents long enough to set the hook.
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So i reinstalled the game to come back after 3 years, but, sorry, i just do not understand the client. how should a new player ?
Bye Ingress.
Great post!
This veil of secrecy is doing more harm than good and y'all still haven't figured that out
My favorite part, its time to change Niantic Team!
A new player isn't hung up on the past and willing to adapt
That's Prime. Niantic had the dilemma to shut down Ingress with the redacted scanner or continue the game through Prime. RoboVM was no longer supported.
A global shards event might be good.
Agree free buy medals all the time is not going to hold people.
Some ppl are organising a couchnomoly. This appears to have better ideas than other recent ideas I have seen here.
Niantic really need to listen and feedback more and just appear to be incapable of changing in this regard.
Maybe hand over more to the player base via Vanguards? Let's face it, players always had a huge input to the success of anomalies.
I've always said that taking orga opportunities away from the community is a dumb decision. Let's face it, Niantic (and @NianticBrian ), you NEED the community help to organize more events, be it anomalies (1 city ano Requiem is a joke btw, need 9-24 cities) or more local Mission Days, and get people back. Why you rejecting this help?
Agree ^
I started in mid 2016, people have been telling me this game was dying, and not like it "used to be", since litterally day one.
I've got a pretty good feeling that this is mostly about frame of reference and expectation.
Covid is probably what is hitting Ingress hardest currently. Not Prime. That and those pointless 1 star "Redacted is gone" reviews that keep Ingress's play store score low likely keeping new people away.
You're really stuck in the past if Prime still gets you worked up.
Global shards right now would be horrible. Once things are generally back open, might be fun, as long as it's not cross-faction again.
Am I the only who think that shards should appear more frequently, not just like once each 2-3 years?
I only remember 2 shard games outside the anomalies since my start.
They don't need to be global, maybe only inside the scorecells, making points there and not leaving.