I wonder if anyone thought about sending polls through scanner. You got a whole notification and news system, you can now easily reach every single agent for a survey (when appropiate).
A survey through scanner would bypass any faction based information barrier. It would only reach active players. It would allow to create real activity heat maps.
I doubt that you will answer me, but I will write. The point is not whether our community has a manager or not. Even with Krug there was a withering of the main aspect of the game. It's about the very approach to the game. In the old scanner, in its best years, there was what was called confrontation. It was a battle on an intellectual level, a battle for the specific ideals of a faction, a battle for the fate of humanity. And the battle was structured and the battle was great. If you began to develop exactly the basis of the game, the battle between the two factions, it would help to make the game interesting and save both new and old players. But alas, now we see the following.
1. scanner errors that are not fixed for half a year or more.
2. Lack of development of the basis of the game.
3. elimination of differences and ideology of factions (even in the plot).
The core of the game, namely battle and strategic planning on the battlefield, is what attracts many people. And these are the people who are willing to pay. But alas, the battle between the two factions was spoiled for a long time by joint events, and disregard for the development of the game.
Bold statement on the VG being useless, as you have no knowledge of what was even discussed, what input we may have given, and if it was taken onboard or not.
Agree with Viona here. Just because we don't have a CM does not mean Vanguards are not being listened to.
As players, we have limited visibility on this, same as when we did have a CM.
Personally, I'd go the way some app devs have gone, where you get a bucket of points to distribute to dev tasks. (New feature X, bug fix Y etc).
Once an issue is resolved, you get the points back to add to another item.
Niantic can then address the list. "Nope not going to do that, too expensive". "Not possible" "In our opinion this would unbalance the game, so no." "Working on this now" "Good idea, in pipeline" etc.
Regarding the "help new agents": I miss the redacted "Agent X captured their first portal." That allowed us to welcome new players. Since my local group is on telegram, chat appears dead - which can be discouraging to players that think no one is around. And if we don't know they are there (because the notifications are gone), we don't know they are alone and thinking chat is dead.
PoGo doesn't have a chat, so players can't make assumptions if an area is dead or alive just from chat. It's great to have a chat in ingress (since it's both more collaborative and competitive) but the current form seems to not really meet any needs other than cross faction banter. The scrolling bug frustrates many, new player notifications are missing, and no one does secure ops in faction chat. The only thing I've seen faction chat effectively used for in 3 years is telling people to go to out of game chat channels. Which is fine because Ingress shouldn't compete with Discord, Telegram, and Slack, but maybe there can be a more efficient way of notifying experienced players that there is a new person rather than seeing a new name on a resonator when recharging.
After the covid madness ends, Ingress has a chance to bounce back to its former glory as people are starved for travelling, visiting and exploring almost any place on earth besides the home town, and meeting new and old friends again. This is exactly where Ingress used to excel, and it's possible to happen again since the world has been "paused" for such a long time. When the GCM is hired, I hope he or she will work with the communities around the globe to get anomalies (several, not just one) and MDs, and other types of live events running again.
The notification is there actually, but it's bundled into the activity tab, not the faction tab like it was under Redacted. If you have an area which is semi active, it might easily be missed. It would be better to put it into the faction comm.
Did the vanguards support battle beacons? look how that turned out, almost nobody is using that except as **** ap, i have yet to see one deployed in my cell...
Would play it even if it was text based with paper maps. "at the park gazebo and i link to the mural."
These redacted was better folk are just weird ..... don't they know about the power of the + .... insta power cube so good.
Why i am just keeping up my sojo at the moment ? ....my kid lost some of his eyesight in August and the air just feels thicker and heavier to move through. 2020 has been awful for a lot of folks.
Playing Catan because it's easier than sorting out my inventory and easier to deal with a player with more time and money than i do.
I need something that is not hard.
Ingress is not hard rules wise .... but yes it is hard in the mind ...... there's that ever present tension.... i know what i want to do in ingress but i am constrained by real world limitations.
.... i don't want to stop that dreaming about possibilities i could do in ingress .... yet maybe i need a permission structure to play ingress within limits life is restricting play.
....a list of daily tasks?
...easy or hard daily quests?
Love ingress to bits but she's a lot of work to play at a high level over years.
Until more info is allowed/shared, I'm standing by my assertion that the vanguard program is broken/ineffective, given the poor decisions and unwanted/unused feature releases in recent history.
Oddly, locally, we lost MOST of our active agents after Prime became the only client for Ingress.
Must be a cowinky-d-i-n-k tho, right? I'm sure no other communities have experienced the same thing.
Guardian badger got me to travel and see new things. Pushed me to go out and go somewhere, vs doing something else or just playing locally. Would of been nice to see it re-worked into a larger cumulative thing though. Overall days held for multiple portals, not just one. Would of pushed more traveling, more fun, more game play.
edited apparently "d-i-n-k" is censored (this censor list is sad, never seen one this silly before, including at schools).
I can. @Azhreia has been extremely helpful the past few weeks in dealing with an ongoing spoofer problem in my cell. I've shared reports with her and the accounts are banned within hours. We also got numerous links and remote portals fully restored with mods and every resonator and all other portals the spoofer deployed on neutralized. It's too bad Niantic doesn't pay Vangaurds because I'd be asking they to start giving them raises.
The Vanguard program is broken. How can a team of players help the community when they have to sign an NDA and no communication takes place? When no decisions are made?
I do not blame the situation to technical issues. I blame the situation to the lack of community management (except Andrew, he was exceptional!) and communication. Of course it is easy to rant and I cannot offer a solution. This can only be done by Niantic's management.
I only joined ingress a year and a half ago so most of my experience with the game has been during this extended flu season. With no first hand experience of what ingress "used to be like" I can't see the writing on the wall like some of you folks seem to.
In regard to the 5 features op brought up:
APex and kinetic capsules bring ingress more in line with the rest of niantic's platform; ultimately a good thing for ingress to mesh well with the greater infrastructure.
Apex may be useless for seasoned agents but serves as a way help new agents progress while providing passive income to the ingress team.
Kinetic capsules helped to rebalance the value of mods without affecting gameplay. Finally, something to do with all these link amps! So long as is doesn't mutate into a poke-incubator situation, it's a solid addition to the game.
Battle beacons could be really fun at irl events but we haven't had a chance to see them shine yet due to the global situation. It's a mini-game with a flashy scoreboard, sounds like the perfect thing for light-hearted xfac meetups. That said, they have some major tuning issues. Being able to flip a portal 5 times is incredibly abusable and makes the game effectively pay-to-win. If the "battle" were to only begin once an agent of both factions interacted with the portal (via resonator or burster) it would eliminate the possibility of solo agents spending $5 to flip a field 5 times.
Drones have a lot of potential. As a solution to the lockdown, the mk 1 couldn't have come at a better time. It was sojourner life-support and didn't need to be anything more. What comes next is what's important. Niantic has mentioned their intentions to further develop the drone system several times, only to be met with pushback from the forums.... so it's stayed bare-bones. With time we've gotten to see that the ability to hack one (1) portal per hour isn't inflating gear availability like some feared; hopefully agents are warming up to the potential and we can begin to see more drone gameplay features.
Finally, we have scans. I'm happy to spend time gathering data for niantic if it means ingress stays viable; especially if you give out two shiny badges and AP for my time. It's a niantic-wide feature so I don't think it's fair to read too deeply into how it's meant to affect ingress in the long term. Realistically, we're doing this so poke-players can have their pikachu's hide behind things and I'm fine with that. If you don't want to scan, no one's forcing you to. In the context of this badge drought though, I can absolutely see how two new badges for niantic temp work could rub agents the wrong way.
It's been a really rough year for ingress, the gameplay can't pivot to stay-at-home success like pogo; and If the community didn't actively push back against nearly every proposed change (drones, portal network tweaks, eos protocol) maybe we would have actually gotten to see more of it.
TL:DR
So much of this community is the old guard complaining about the good 'ol days, which is understandable - the days were good. But so many talking points I see are about community. Being brought into the fold as a new agent, gr*nding up to 8 in order to participate in ops, helping friends, etc. I'm entirely in agreement that that's what makes this game great. It's what makes any mmo great, but Isn't that part of the game reliant on you, the senior agents in the community?
During my first ifs (Dec 2019) I got to meet my local community. At the event, the community was alive. So many agents eager to show me the ropes and bring me in. But since then our group has been completely silent. Run by a hierarchy of agents who haven't logged in in 8 months. I mean no shade or malice towards anyone, I want to see the community return to how y'all talk about it. But from my perspective, you're your own worst enemy, not niantic.
With time we've gotten to see that the ability to hack one (1) portal per hour isn't inflating gear availability like some feared; hopefully agents are warming up to the potential and we can begin to see more drone gameplay features.
The problem with this idea, is that the motto of Ingress is "It's time to move" and "Adventures on foot". Drones, and playing remotely, have a minor place, and have been useful to some during the COVID era, but as an element of a location specific competitive game, they're close to sanctioned cheating.
Comments
I wonder if anyone thought about sending polls through scanner. You got a whole notification and news system, you can now easily reach every single agent for a survey (when appropiate).
A survey through scanner would bypass any faction based information barrier. It would only reach active players. It would allow to create real activity heat maps.
So many posibilities, so few ideas...
I doubt that you will answer me, but I will write. The point is not whether our community has a manager or not. Even with Krug there was a withering of the main aspect of the game. It's about the very approach to the game. In the old scanner, in its best years, there was what was called confrontation. It was a battle on an intellectual level, a battle for the specific ideals of a faction, a battle for the fate of humanity. And the battle was structured and the battle was great. If you began to develop exactly the basis of the game, the battle between the two factions, it would help to make the game interesting and save both new and old players. But alas, now we see the following.
1. scanner errors that are not fixed for half a year or more.
2. Lack of development of the basis of the game.
3. elimination of differences and ideology of factions (even in the plot).
The core of the game, namely battle and strategic planning on the battlefield, is what attracts many people. And these are the people who are willing to pay. But alas, the battle between the two factions was spoiled for a long time by joint events, and disregard for the development of the game.
Bold statement on the VG being useless, as you have no knowledge of what was even discussed, what input we may have given, and if it was taken onboard or not.
Agree with Viona here. Just because we don't have a CM does not mean Vanguards are not being listened to.
As players, we have limited visibility on this, same as when we did have a CM.
Personally, I'd go the way some app devs have gone, where you get a bucket of points to distribute to dev tasks. (New feature X, bug fix Y etc).
Once an issue is resolved, you get the points back to add to another item.
Niantic can then address the list. "Nope not going to do that, too expensive". "Not possible" "In our opinion this would unbalance the game, so no." "Working on this now" "Good idea, in pipeline" etc.
All lots spoofing agents killing Ingress Prime and take to long time for Niantic and vanguard to restor portals,liks and fields.
Extreme lots more spoofing agents now when new agents join Ingress Prime.
Regarding the "help new agents": I miss the redacted "Agent X captured their first portal." That allowed us to welcome new players. Since my local group is on telegram, chat appears dead - which can be discouraging to players that think no one is around. And if we don't know they are there (because the notifications are gone), we don't know they are alone and thinking chat is dead.
PoGo doesn't have a chat, so players can't make assumptions if an area is dead or alive just from chat. It's great to have a chat in ingress (since it's both more collaborative and competitive) but the current form seems to not really meet any needs other than cross faction banter. The scrolling bug frustrates many, new player notifications are missing, and no one does secure ops in faction chat. The only thing I've seen faction chat effectively used for in 3 years is telling people to go to out of game chat channels. Which is fine because Ingress shouldn't compete with Discord, Telegram, and Slack, but maybe there can be a more efficient way of notifying experienced players that there is a new person rather than seeing a new name on a resonator when recharging.
After the covid madness ends, Ingress has a chance to bounce back to its former glory as people are starved for travelling, visiting and exploring almost any place on earth besides the home town, and meeting new and old friends again. This is exactly where Ingress used to excel, and it's possible to happen again since the world has been "paused" for such a long time. When the GCM is hired, I hope he or she will work with the communities around the globe to get anomalies (several, not just one) and MDs, and other types of live events running again.
The notification is there actually, but it's bundled into the activity tab, not the faction tab like it was under Redacted. If you have an area which is semi active, it might easily be missed. It would be better to put it into the faction comm.
Prove me wrong.
Pull back the curtain and provide more transparency as to what the vanguards actually do and what they're involved in.
Communicate.
Did the vanguards support battle beacons? look how that turned out, almost nobody is using that except as **** ap, i have yet to see one deployed in my cell...
I would love to. But we cannot and will not break the NDA we signed and agreed to.
It is not an agreement that can be conveniently put aside on a whim to assuage the curiosity and demands of other players.
@mortuus , same goes for your question.
@joecain You can refresh your understanding of what the VG program is here :
and take note of the following section:
I love ingress it is the best game in the world.
Would play it even if it was text based with paper maps. "at the park gazebo and i link to the mural."
These redacted was better folk are just weird ..... don't they know about the power of the + .... insta power cube so good.
Why i am just keeping up my sojo at the moment ? ....my kid lost some of his eyesight in August and the air just feels thicker and heavier to move through. 2020 has been awful for a lot of folks.
Playing Catan because it's easier than sorting out my inventory and easier to deal with a player with more time and money than i do.
I need something that is not hard.
Ingress is not hard rules wise .... but yes it is hard in the mind ...... there's that ever present tension.... i know what i want to do in ingress but i am constrained by real world limitations.
.... i don't want to stop that dreaming about possibilities i could do in ingress .... yet maybe i need a permission structure to play ingress within limits life is restricting play.
....a list of daily tasks?
...easy or hard daily quests?
Love ingress to bits but she's a lot of work to play at a high level over years.
Until more info is allowed/shared, I'm standing by my assertion that the vanguard program is broken/ineffective, given the poor decisions and unwanted/unused feature releases in recent history.
"I don't know that it does and they won't tell me so it must be bad". Great argument there.
You didn't call the program ineffective, you called the participants useless.
You're presenting baseless speculations and your personal opinion about new developments as if they were facts.
Communication in general is good. But style matters.
"The proof is in the pudding" - joecain
You spelled "my own unsubstantiated opinion" wrong.
Also, I get the feeling you're trying to goad us into revealing something to "prove you wrong". So I'll leave you to your opinion, and carry on.
Not sure why you're expecting to see them deployed as their intended gameplay right now when the whole world is still on covid lockdown.
Oddly, locally, we lost MOST of our active agents after Prime became the only client for Ingress.
Must be a cowinky-d-i-n-k tho, right? I'm sure no other communities have experienced the same thing.
Guardian badger got me to travel and see new things. Pushed me to go out and go somewhere, vs doing something else or just playing locally. Would of been nice to see it re-worked into a larger cumulative thing though. Overall days held for multiple portals, not just one. Would of pushed more traveling, more fun, more game play.
my point,, its not fitting in the current covid situation, why was time wasted on them ? would have been better design new drone verisons instead.
Unfortunately, my 20% project on a human-sized Quantum Capsule, codename: Project Brundle, is on hold.
Hi, Brian. What is a human-sized Quantum capsule? 😮 Do you mean any new feature that is currently at an early stage of development? Thanks.
I think it means he can't duplicate himself after being in a Quantum capsule long enough.
I can. @Azhreia has been extremely helpful the past few weeks in dealing with an ongoing spoofer problem in my cell. I've shared reports with her and the accounts are banned within hours. We also got numerous links and remote portals fully restored with mods and every resonator and all other portals the spoofer deployed on neutralized. It's too bad Niantic doesn't pay Vangaurds because I'd be asking they to start giving them raises.
May I point out this goodbye post from Claudij: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/10812/goodbye-of-a-vanguard/p1
The Vanguard program is broken. How can a team of players help the community when they have to sign an NDA and no communication takes place? When no decisions are made?
I do not blame the situation to technical issues. I blame the situation to the lack of community management (except Andrew, he was exceptional!) and communication. Of course it is easy to rant and I cannot offer a solution. This can only be done by Niantic's management.
Oh🤣🤣🤦 Brian the joker😁😎
has been extremely helpful the past few weeks in dealing with an ongoing spoofer problem in my cell
Every time it's strange for me why a vanguard should do this, not support
I only joined ingress a year and a half ago so most of my experience with the game has been during this extended flu season. With no first hand experience of what ingress "used to be like" I can't see the writing on the wall like some of you folks seem to.
In regard to the 5 features op brought up:
APex and kinetic capsules bring ingress more in line with the rest of niantic's platform; ultimately a good thing for ingress to mesh well with the greater infrastructure.
Apex may be useless for seasoned agents but serves as a way help new agents progress while providing passive income to the ingress team.
Kinetic capsules helped to rebalance the value of mods without affecting gameplay. Finally, something to do with all these link amps! So long as is doesn't mutate into a poke-incubator situation, it's a solid addition to the game.
Battle beacons could be really fun at irl events but we haven't had a chance to see them shine yet due to the global situation. It's a mini-game with a flashy scoreboard, sounds like the perfect thing for light-hearted xfac meetups. That said, they have some major tuning issues. Being able to flip a portal 5 times is incredibly abusable and makes the game effectively pay-to-win. If the "battle" were to only begin once an agent of both factions interacted with the portal (via resonator or burster) it would eliminate the possibility of solo agents spending $5 to flip a field 5 times.
Drones have a lot of potential. As a solution to the lockdown, the mk 1 couldn't have come at a better time. It was sojourner life-support and didn't need to be anything more. What comes next is what's important. Niantic has mentioned their intentions to further develop the drone system several times, only to be met with pushback from the forums.... so it's stayed bare-bones. With time we've gotten to see that the ability to hack one (1) portal per hour isn't inflating gear availability like some feared; hopefully agents are warming up to the potential and we can begin to see more drone gameplay features.
Finally, we have scans. I'm happy to spend time gathering data for niantic if it means ingress stays viable; especially if you give out two shiny badges and AP for my time. It's a niantic-wide feature so I don't think it's fair to read too deeply into how it's meant to affect ingress in the long term. Realistically, we're doing this so poke-players can have their pikachu's hide behind things and I'm fine with that. If you don't want to scan, no one's forcing you to. In the context of this badge drought though, I can absolutely see how two new badges for niantic temp work could rub agents the wrong way.
It's been a really rough year for ingress, the gameplay can't pivot to stay-at-home success like pogo; and If the community didn't actively push back against nearly every proposed change (drones, portal network tweaks, eos protocol) maybe we would have actually gotten to see more of it.
TL:DR
So much of this community is the old guard complaining about the good 'ol days, which is understandable - the days were good. But so many talking points I see are about community. Being brought into the fold as a new agent, gr*nding up to 8 in order to participate in ops, helping friends, etc. I'm entirely in agreement that that's what makes this game great. It's what makes any mmo great, but Isn't that part of the game reliant on you, the senior agents in the community?
During my first ifs (Dec 2019) I got to meet my local community. At the event, the community was alive. So many agents eager to show me the ropes and bring me in. But since then our group has been completely silent. Run by a hierarchy of agents who haven't logged in in 8 months. I mean no shade or malice towards anyone, I want to see the community return to how y'all talk about it. But from my perspective, you're your own worst enemy, not niantic.
With time we've gotten to see that the ability to hack one (1) portal per hour isn't inflating gear availability like some feared; hopefully agents are warming up to the potential and we can begin to see more drone gameplay features.
The problem with this idea, is that the motto of Ingress is "It's time to move" and "Adventures on foot". Drones, and playing remotely, have a minor place, and have been useful to some during the COVID era, but as an element of a location specific competitive game, they're close to sanctioned cheating.