Niantic!!! Does anyone hear us?

GreenVamGreenVam ✭✭✭✭✭
edited April 2021 in General


How much is written on this forum. People share their needs, problems, ideas, hopes, and instructive life stories. Many people write about what they would like to see or would not like to see in the game.

Some of us even offered help to our beloved company.

Some people have pointed out bugs in the game.


And what comes out at the end? And in response, silence.


People are having trouble renewing their subscriptions. And silence in response.

Someone describes bugs in the game. And silence in response. Here's a concrete example. How many programmers does a company need to change some words?

Look at the quality of the Russian translation in the game. Developers !!!!! Have you ever tested what you have done yourself ?????? !!! 

So I personally do not understand why the text is translated in places, and why you did not bring this matter to the end. And I, as a Russian-speaking agent, do not understand some of the words from your translation. What is СОПР.? There is no such word in Russian. 


Further, there are people who, together with the community, offered to make competent translations in all languages. There are trusted agents with the required qualifications. But the company ignores their help.


Agents have repeatedly asked to include the plot in the scanner. Each medal and each new item can be beaten in a storyline! But no, for unknown reasons, something new appears again (for example, today's medal), which has nothing to do with the plot at all. And sometimes even completely contradicting the storyline. For example, a topic that drew the attention of many agents, it was discussed in many chats, but alas, we did not see a response from a company representative. Read it to the end there are not many posts and a lot of interesting things are written in the middle of the topic.

https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/13662/the-plot-let-everyone-speak-about-it#latest

Oh yes, Exogenous Creatures are long gone from our world, but in training and in glyphs, they still pose a danger. Why? Why doesn't the tutorial in the game fit the story?


What about cheaters? I remember once the players of our team left a request to deal with a dishonest player. It was about 3 years or more ago ... And we wrote many times. The result is zero. A person cheated like with the old scanner and continues with a new one. And this situation is not only for our regional team.


People have been asking for a media capsule for how many years? What result? Some who ask for more keylockers, and what in return? Silence.


And there are a lot of such cases, examples. But it is especially offensive for those who started having problems with the subscription. These people decided to support the company, and in response ... and in response, all the same silence.


You know, I even doubt that at least some of the company's representatives will read this topic, and that there will be at least some sane, and most importantly effective answer to it. 

Post edited by GreenVam on

Comments

  • PkmnTrainerJPkmnTrainerJ ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited April 2021

    For now, there’s nobody appointed to specifically hear what the users have to say and act on that feedback. Niantic did advertise a position - https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/13665/ingress-community-specialist-role#latest

    This recently closed off so in a few weeks time there will be someone whose role will involve taking on all the feedback, issues and such and feeding it back to the teams so they can resolve, acting as a voice for the community.

    There’s also the XM Ambassadors who will view this and feed anything back to Niantic but there’s not always going to be something they can do. Perhaps a Media Capsule isn’t worth it for the amount of time put in, versus how used it would be, for example.

  • kiloecholimakiloecholima ✭✭✭✭✭

    These guys just held a global event, zeroed out the stats right after the event ended, and offered no explanation to all of the people asking what happened. I'm flabbergasted by that level of neglect.

  • MoogModularMoogModular ✭✭✭✭✭

    The stat was an unique counter for the event. It seems that maybe this stat will be used whenever a special event happens.

  • GreenVamGreenVam ✭✭✭✭✭

    I wonder how to draw the attention of the forum administration to this topic?

  • ZeroHecksGivenZeroHecksGiven ✭✭✭✭✭

    No clue, silence seems to be your likely response...

  • GreenVamGreenVam ✭✭✭✭✭

    The main question is not only in translation, the question is in your attitude to the game. Updates in the style of "we fixed a few old bugs and added a few new ones" this is not what we need. We are waiting for the old ingress that was at the very beginning. A game with a strong storyline and opposition potential. The game that forces you to dress up and go to distant lands in -30 degrees frost to help your faction in the global struggle. In the meantime, the Ingress in many countries resembles an extinct volcano, from which in some places a thin plume of smoke sometimes comes.

  • GreenVamGreenVam ✭✭✭✭✭

    And please tell me, shouldn't a company of your level test the application before submitting it to the playmarket? Why are there always so many glitches after the release of the next version?

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    Yes - however...

    Ingress was fresh then, and, one of the first augmented reality games. That generated interest in and of itself. It resulted in a lot of people rapidly hopping onto something that was a completely different play style to what had come before.

    The decline came after, and, in my opinion, is mostly due to natural turnover, and, a game company that took too long to address core problem issues with the game. The main killer was Prime. The client was teased to the community, expectations built, then dashed.

    That lost a lot of players. The other one was the decline in Anomaly events. Even pre-COVID, these had declined in number. (And let's be honest, had become a bit predictable). Then we had the end of G+ (which also broke a lot of community tools).

    Prime is now playable and not half bad.

    However most of the original leaders have moved on, a lot of the community tools are gone or unusable to some extent with the maintainers gone and nobody willing or able to look at the code without starting from scratch again. Pokemon also dealt a blow with people moving to it/spending less time on Ingress and the damage to the portal network Pokemon dealt.

  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭

    Niantic - comm is still badly broken even in latest release its not working proper when is the comm actually gonna be fixed and working as normal ?

  • GorillaSapiensGorillaSapiens ✭✭✭✭✭

    @NianticBrian would it be easier / less work for Niantic to simply publish the localization files and allow people to comment / suggest changes? I also expect doing so would also expedite community translations of languages you do not currently support.

  • InvestigateXMInvestigateXM ✭✭✭✭✭

    I have asked him about it once, and the answer (at the time) was that, while there does exist a tool for translators to work together on translations, it'll not be made public (same with the raw strings btw), as there will always be some unreleased features that need translating, of which the strings get fed into the tool long before its getting released.

  • @SSSputnik

    The decline came after, and, in my opinion, is mostly due to natural turnover, and, a game company that took too long to address core problem issues with the game. The main killer was Prime. The client was teased to the community, expectations built, then dashed.

    A long period of no development and an intermittent and mishandled events schedule, set up people to be dissatisfied, and then I agree, Prime's original release was the hammer that drove the nail in.

    Prime is now playable and not half bad.

    Agreed, and with additional features, I'd not want to go back.

    However most of the original leaders have moved on, a lot of the community tools are gone or unusable to some extent with the maintainers gone and nobody willing or able to look at the code without starting from scratch again.

    This is the bit that gets me though.

    a) Many of the tools we used are still right there, and there are still other actively developed new tools. We have less sure, but that's a factor of the number of players.

    b) When the game started, we didn't have those tools. We organized ourselves using G+ or Facebook, and Hangouts. The current player base doesn't seem to have the motivated organizers, but that's not a problem Niantic can fix. Those who want to recover their communities need to be those motivated organizers.

    I know for some people it seemed like a random blip in the patch notes, but the recent changes to provide "Agent joined the Enlightened" etc in the client, are a big thing for communities. Now that you can see new players again, it's up to the player base to welcome those new people in and get them hooked, just like we did in 'the old days'. Hell, aside from this week, I'm helping new RES players get addicted by removing all their fields so they can get more and more AP 😁

    Niantic can only give us the platform. It's up to the players to build the communities again. Just like we did before.

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    Yeah the new (again) COMM notifcations are great.

  • ToxoplasmollyToxoplasmolly ✭✭✭✭✭

    @Perringaiden:

    Niantic can only give us the platform. It's up to the players to build the communities again. Just like we did before.

    Niantic can give us "events." Anomalies. Dark XM. The Tessellation. Anything where the goal cannot be achieved by individuals acting alone, without coordination.

    Niantic can also change the rules. On a day-to-day basis, a 24/7 battle for control of checkpoints with no end/win condition in sight becomes tiresome — especially when the rules and mechanics haven't changed in years, if ever. At some point, the creative avenues are exhausted, and it all becomes a rote exercise. Interest fades, until what sustains the "community" is less anything to do with Ingress and more social bonds (or anti-bonds, as the case may be) that will persist long after Ingress fades away.

    There's no need for community if there's nothing for the community to rally around.

  • GorillaSapiensGorillaSapiens ✭✭✭✭✭

    this is a solvable problem; tag strings with #released or #development (or whatever or however), then "grep -v" or equivalent.

    honestly, this is the sort of programming problem you could hand to an intern, it's not rocket science.

  • edited April 2021

    Events don't create the community though. Yes, they can do things that give us reasons for community. The game itself is a reason for community, though this latest event is actively undermining that (if it were permanent).

    I've been playing for 8 years, and if not for Covid, I'd be playing as strongly as ever. Community is strong when the community does things together, and that requires organizers. You're right, without a reason, communities fade away, but the 'reason' was always the desire to have fun and beat the competition.

    All these people focused on AP as if that were the goal, are foregoing community activity for personal aims. That's fine for individuals, but the game suffers when no-one aims for team goals, and those goals are still as valid as they were before.

  • I agree Niantic's handled the situation badly over the years, but you're acting like new "new players" are somehow different from old "new players".

    They're not. People come into the game with largely the same motivations and ideas. The difference is that there used to be a lot of active communities who picked these people up and brought them into the team, showed them how much fun things were as a group, and didn't just leave them hanging to play solo.

    The community meets we have now, Ingress is barely talked about :( It's even getting close to a forbidden subject. A lot of attendees are fully retired and or, bored with the subject.

    If the community doesn't add new blood constantly, of course it's going to run down. There's not as many Founders playing as people think, but players (at any era of Ingress) who weren't introduced to the team generally didn't last long. I remember having tracking back in 2015 that said of the names we saw in comm each month (we had the messages back then) about 1 in 10 actually hung around, but 90% of those that did, did so because they started participating in the team game instead of just playing solo.

    This is the fundamental reason why Ingress is preferred over 'better produced and resourced' games like Pokemon Go. If the goal was to compete on solo gameplay, Ingress will never win. Changing the game towards AP grinds and solo play doesn't work. Because we don't have a dozen generations of Mon's to collect. We don't have a constant 'falling behind' mechanism to keep players coming back.

    Ingress' strength has always been emergent gameplay both with technical challenges (like HCF fielding) and strategic teamwork. Ditching that would require a complete reimagining of the game, into something no-one recognizes, and something that wouldn't compare with PoGo, or WU or Catan.

    Driving Ingress out of the niche that it's in, to make it a pale imitation of pay to win games, is not a recipe for success. If we want Ingress to recover, it's going to be through Agent's work to rebuild their communities. Not through mechanics changes. These fields weren't a problem in the past, because of the community.

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    I didn't say they were any different, it's always been hard to turn COMM msg requests into active community members.

    Agree - I am trying to reach out to the other faction to get them involved, takes two teams to make the game.

  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭

    The game needs to grow, sadly it does not so much, where i play hardly many new starts to play... i wonder why.. last someone new tried went to lvl 5 and then vanished.. we tried say hello etc in comm but seems we didnt get through.. i guess got bored once reached lvl 5 and uninstalled.. shame :( the google play rating doesnt help either, still a low 3.4 last time i checked....

  • Agree - I am trying to reach out to the other faction to get them involved, takes two teams to make the game.

    This is definitely one of the steps after sorting out the basics of own faction. The best gameplay environment for new players is one where both teams are friendly enough to not take the game as a war, and understand that both sides are necessary. Two thriving friendly communities makes the game better for everyone.

  • GreenVamGreenVam ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited May 2021

    And you did not notice that Brian just wrote to us once, and that with the standard promises that each politician generates from the TV screen. that's all. then everything is as usual. quiet and peaceful. I can bet that a community manager who will monitor this forum for several days every week and communicate with us, and so, he will not be hired until the end of the year. and maybe even longer.

  • GreenVamGreenVam ✭✭✭✭✭

    Here's an example of how a company loves its customers. clear, understandable, and all players like it. and we have only promises.



  • ZeroHecksGivenZeroHecksGiven ✭✭✭✭✭

    I don’t even need promises. It’s crazy how well some companies work with their community and how some still treat its community like we’re the customers and the relationship ends there.

Sign In or Register to comment.