Nia have said that this change is only temporary. If so, fine. However, Niantic have a history of changing their mind, and the players saying DON'T MAKE THIS PERMANENT are being perfectly reasonable in the circumstances.
This change is like turning Chess into Checkers. I think it would make the game less interesting.
Niantic have other games that suit other play styles. Some of us want a game where teamwork matters, and success is earned. That is what keeps people coming back to Ingress.
I would say a huge incentive for people to spoof/cheat is not being able to play regularly in their home area. In a way, this removes that frustration which should reduce spoofing. I think making this a permanent solution fits but only if Niantic can make link distances limited to microfielding under existing fields. AP gains from the change are good, yes. Using it to throw long blocks or build high MU fields? Not so much.
You can throw more inner baselines from hard anchors to hard anchors under your own fields. You had to wait for them to go down without this.
If you have better control of the area you can compound it. This lets people (of either faction) micro field under dense areas that are completely negated now.
I couldn't agree more. To experiment with new stuff/adding game changers once in a while isn't bad at all, certainly not if it is handled in a limited time event like this one 👌
If 'the others "can field under fields and ruin everything...." you can also co-ordinate blocklinks, fields, microfields under fields, just to prevent that...
Definitely more fun to level up with a friend. Upgrade each other's resonators and help each other farm keys for fields in a well-orchestrated symphony of AP gain.
Still, fast levels aren't everything.
I agree microfielding is the fastest way to level up... its so fast the smurf most local to me hit L11 still claims to not understand how the game works and hasn't engaged its faction's communities despite being reminded to do so.
Part of learning to appreciate Ingress is the coordination in making BAFs, or going out of your way to take it down.
Enabling linking and fielding inside fields will just be great for the newbies (and the fatigued ones) that B&W they can't play under a BAF.
@NianticBrian , yes absolutely please do NOT make this event a permanent "fix" to Ingress.
Niantic already has games for folks that can't imagine themselves leaving town to go somewhere new.
I agree 💯. If this can be used as an advantage by the "other" to circumvent your fields... Think of how this can be used as an advantage to bolster your fields.
A lot of semi permanent fields have slightly easier anchors within them. The concern I keep seeing is that they'll take those... Hollow your field and use your spine to throw to them.
What I can't understand is why this isn't a golden opportunity to throw inner rails from those same inner anchors that you can never touch cause your field is up.
Thanks for making important changes to break the routine playing ingress. it will be fun!
In future, please consider intermediate options between how you can play before and after the event. I personally like the idea of permanently being able to create fields under fields with conditions (for example, only by creating small links).
Do not be afraid of important changes, just have to think well and test in an event.
Hope ingress get more new users being able to reach high levels.
Problem being, Ingress has been instructed by Niantic to be self-sustaining. Keep pushing out new players, we won't have Ingress anymore. The directive handed to the dev/business team is "if this game can't compete with pokemon go, we're shutting it down".
They can keep operating under the incorrect sunk cost fallacy of "retired" players coming back but that's not going to earn new players for us unfortunately.
"Making it more interesting does NOT equal making it super easy" <--excellent statement
Good experiment for a week I suppose. My hunch is our average 1-3M mu win will increase as we can layer under the already substantial fields built in my cell....but you never know....
I understand the concerns of those that can't play under fields -but- my perception is that most of the players that complain about this have no issue driving around the city or region for hours upon hours to catch poke and capture gyms.....taking down fields and playing ingress just isn't their priority (understanding this isn't the 100% complete entirety of the players effected by being covered....just 95% of them).
If this thread is a representative slice of the ingress world I'd have to say that dinosaurs like myself and the OG's I play with (who prefer to play to win rather than chase vanity AP) are in some kind of minority. If this is the direction of the game just tear the band-aid off and get rid of the mu scoreboard for cells. I'd guess that a vast majority of the types that play the 5 hour game would quickly become indifferent to their area control strategies, start derp linking for vanity AP themselves and -maybe- occasionally tune in for builds that might effect the world score.
If this needs to be a 'thing' in the future to keep players in the game/keep game alive (the instant/easy gratification, everyone needs a trophy, everyone is a winner age is strong here apparently) how about only 1km or less links are allowed under fields or something along those lines(??)
Chess to Candyland seems apt.
FWIW we should experiment with ability to do crosslinks for a week as I and many others have plenty of souvenir keys many thousands miles away that I'd love to blow through🤡
That rant/rage part is the thing i don't like. It's always the same story 'give us something new -> NO we don't want that change and we don't want these new things (drones for example)' & 'give us events with badges -> NO how dare you to put on an event during a pandemic' & 'we want now badges/medals -> we don't need another hacking badge, just retire sojourner'
I can understand some of the reasoning , but if we keep acting like that ... how will Nia ever be able to do something that doesn't end in ranting just because of personal reasons.
And the ability to link under fields gives them more room for that pesting. After all, you can link inside a field from a bed to somewhere in the center of triangles like this, and such can come at any moment of the operation:
And those who start cheating because of their own laziness - they will continue to do so. This is not their game, and such players are generally not needed.
In addition, I'm more than sure that these "lazy" players won't pay for anything in Ingress.
Such "innovations" will not attract new players. And even if they do, people who are too lazy to get up from their couch and go to the neighboring area, certainly will not monitize the game. Why do they need it, because everything is easy to pass?
Seems ridiculous to mess with game mechanics. Seeing that the coding is now capable, why not include shards as a part of the overall game? Such a cool feature that is hardly used.
Why not try a new scoring method like a curve... based on the number of people playing per cell per faction?
There are many more things to make this game more interesting.... this is not something I consider keeping my attention
Niantic has the capability to allow Mini events that could be held in each individual cell. They choose not to implement. Point being is that there is much that can be done to keep our interests, but it feels like they have already given up without trying. I certainly don't mind this feature for an event. The problem is that it's more than likely going to stick permanently
I like the idea of having this permanent if the fields created under a field counts as zero mu gained. It will allow people to play the game in a way that isn't necessarily destroying the scoring aspect of the game. The strategy of covering an entire area so that nobody can link or field just stops people from playing. This would allow the large fielders to still be effective for the score and the micro fielding grinders to still be able to gain ap. Let's face it, if nothing changes then the player base will continue to fade away and the game will shut down sooner than later.
Their response being upset about having to drive around all weekend to defend their streak is very telling.
"I don't want to spend time playing the actual game and competing hard, instead I want to control how others spend their time playing the game so they quit!"
This is the core mentality that's killing competition and the game as a whole.
It is an opportunity to make field art under massive and permanent fields. As an example, **** the spine and the make **** C ... U And then microfield under the opposing agents last field and see how long it takes for them to put it back. But with all the multi accounts and cheating that occurs in this game there is no intetest in being this damn petty in this "game". Most people just quit playing ingress.
Why play a game when the rules are ingored by agents and by niantic. Changing the rules temporarily will not help Ingress be a fun game.
As someone that lives under a BAF, let me tell you: BAFS are horrible. Worse when it is your own color.
I cannot link. I cannot field. This means I cannot score any AP for links or fields; I can make no badge progress for link count, field count, or MU's covered. I cannot get scoreboard presence or yearly contribution badge. And until this new badge for weekly progress on hacking, there was no way I wasn't going to be badge blocked.
Even now? Given how low my link and field count is (I had a helpful faction member that helped me out with MU's, while I just stood there and took the keys from a container), it's a LOT of "too little too late".
The real problem is that high-end play consists of blocking low-end play.
So what's the problem with this new event?
Here's something to try next time, that I think will work much better: "Links/Fields" created under an existing field count for your agent stats, badge progress, and AP earned, but will not actually change the board. So if you field under the enemy color, you have a triangle, but the inside is still the enemy color.
Now, mark that as a "suppressed" field. Take down the outer field, and the next bigger field becomes unsuppressed -- if you took out a bigger enemy field, suddenly now your triangle is the controlling one and becomes active.
Now the game can be played while under a field, and you won't alter the board. People still have an incentive to make BAFS -- control territory -- but others can still play and are not locked out.
Blue has some massive BAF's, anchored in gated communities or satellite-data only places. Worse, before Blue got portals in the gated communities, green used to have their own BAF's anchored in satellite-data only places. When people would spend $10k per year on data access, they were (and still are) less willing to open up for casual players, so casual players drop out / stop playing.
When I started playing, my area was full of green links and portals. So I took blue so I had something to attack. I've been blue BAF'd probably 80% of the time.
you apparently don't have spoofers in your area then - that's hardly the incentive when the highest levels of spoofing are where there are a lot of players, a lot of activity, and a lot of turn-over of almost all portals. The spoofing you hear about, where hard anchors are taken down, isn't nearly as frequent as what you don't hear about unless you're local. And in a lot of cases, the fields that are dropped aren't covering areas where there are any actual players, but they ARE getting a lot of mu for the cell they are in.
>my perception is that most of the players that complain about this have no issue driving around the city or region for hours upon hours to catch poke and capture gyms.....taking down fields and playing ingress just isn't their priority (understanding this isn't the 100% complete entirety of the players effected by being covered....just 95% of them).< we've got one of those here. The agent cant' be bothered to drive 20 minutes out of the way to drop the fields, but that agent can sure whine about the fields to everyone that'll listen. That agent has even told others in their own faction, in cities a couple of hours away from where that agent even plays not to put up fields there. That agent is a pokemon go player who started playing ingress just to submit new portals so that there would be new stops - and who moves portals around so that they can control where gyms are place.
>Their response being upset about having to drive around all weekend to defend their streak is very telling.< when was the last time you did a week long op and spent several hundred hours on gas doing it? Did you not notice the event's a week, not just a weekend?
>Here's something to try next time, that I think will work much better: "Links/Fields" created under an existing field count for your agent stats, badge progress, and AP earned, but will not actually change the board. So if you field under the enemy color, you have a triangle, but the inside is still the enemy color.< That's actually a good idea for THIS event - that way, if the other faction wishes to field, they can but all they'll be doing is increasing the score of the faction they are fielding under. That'll solve the issue with score being adversely affected by this nonsense.
But let's not do this again. Ingress - for all that the pogo players want to change it, and apparently some at Niantic want to change it - has always been a war between both factions for control of the XM - and that's done by fielding over the areas where the XM generates. That's the core of the story line, and the core of the game, and what makes it a competition. Let's not lose that. The factions aren't supposed to work together, they're not supposed to help each other win (called win trading, right?) Let's not create a rule that basically sanctions that.
Yes, Ingress needs to pay for itself, and a lot of us have made a large number of suggestions over the years - starting with a lot more swag in the store - we'd like physical things back. But only a small fraction of what we've suggested has even been listened to, yet alone implemented, which is odd because we've said we'd buy those things. Maybe if Niantic started actually taking our suggestions seriously most of the time there'd be more players and be more money coming in to the game.
Maybe, as a suggestion, Niantic could run ads for Ingress INSIDE other games (not inside pogo) that would appeal to players that want to compete, like, well, all the other games out there do.
Comments
Nia have said that this change is only temporary. If so, fine. However, Niantic have a history of changing their mind, and the players saying DON'T MAKE THIS PERMANENT are being perfectly reasonable in the circumstances.
This change is like turning Chess into Checkers. I think it would make the game less interesting.
Niantic have other games that suit other play styles. Some of us want a game where teamwork matters, and success is earned. That is what keeps people coming back to Ingress.
I would say a huge incentive for people to spoof/cheat is not being able to play regularly in their home area. In a way, this removes that frustration which should reduce spoofing. I think making this a permanent solution fits but only if Niantic can make link distances limited to microfielding under existing fields. AP gains from the change are good, yes. Using it to throw long blocks or build high MU fields? Not so much.
You can throw more inner baselines from hard anchors to hard anchors under your own fields. You had to wait for them to go down without this.
If you have better control of the area you can compound it. This lets people (of either faction) micro field under dense areas that are completely negated now.
I couldn't agree more. To experiment with new stuff/adding game changers once in a while isn't bad at all, certainly not if it is handled in a limited time event like this one 👌
If 'the others "can field under fields and ruin everything...." you can also co-ordinate blocklinks, fields, microfields under fields, just to prevent that...
Definitely more fun to level up with a friend. Upgrade each other's resonators and help each other farm keys for fields in a well-orchestrated symphony of AP gain.
Still, fast levels aren't everything.
I agree microfielding is the fastest way to level up... its so fast the smurf most local to me hit L11 still claims to not understand how the game works and hasn't engaged its faction's communities despite being reminded to do so.
Part of learning to appreciate Ingress is the coordination in making BAFs, or going out of your way to take it down.
Enabling linking and fielding inside fields will just be great for the newbies (and the fatigued ones) that B&W they can't play under a BAF.
@NianticBrian , yes absolutely please do NOT make this event a permanent "fix" to Ingress.
Niantic already has games for folks that can't imagine themselves leaving town to go somewhere new.
I agree 💯. If this can be used as an advantage by the "other" to circumvent your fields... Think of how this can be used as an advantage to bolster your fields.
A lot of semi permanent fields have slightly easier anchors within them. The concern I keep seeing is that they'll take those... Hollow your field and use your spine to throw to them.
What I can't understand is why this isn't a golden opportunity to throw inner rails from those same inner anchors that you can never touch cause your field is up.
What is this ****?
I hope you are joking.
Please think about it and change your mind.
Thanks for making important changes to break the routine playing ingress. it will be fun!
In future, please consider intermediate options between how you can play before and after the event. I personally like the idea of permanently being able to create fields under fields with conditions (for example, only by creating small links).
Do not be afraid of important changes, just have to think well and test in an event.
Hope ingress get more new users being able to reach high levels.
Problem being, Ingress has been instructed by Niantic to be self-sustaining. Keep pushing out new players, we won't have Ingress anymore. The directive handed to the dev/business team is "if this game can't compete with pokemon go, we're shutting it down".
They can keep operating under the incorrect sunk cost fallacy of "retired" players coming back but that's not going to earn new players for us unfortunately.
"Making it more interesting does NOT equal making it super easy" <--excellent statement
Good experiment for a week I suppose. My hunch is our average 1-3M mu win will increase as we can layer under the already substantial fields built in my cell....but you never know....
I understand the concerns of those that can't play under fields -but- my perception is that most of the players that complain about this have no issue driving around the city or region for hours upon hours to catch poke and capture gyms.....taking down fields and playing ingress just isn't their priority (understanding this isn't the 100% complete entirety of the players effected by being covered....just 95% of them).
If this thread is a representative slice of the ingress world I'd have to say that dinosaurs like myself and the OG's I play with (who prefer to play to win rather than chase vanity AP) are in some kind of minority. If this is the direction of the game just tear the band-aid off and get rid of the mu scoreboard for cells. I'd guess that a vast majority of the types that play the 5 hour game would quickly become indifferent to their area control strategies, start derp linking for vanity AP themselves and -maybe- occasionally tune in for builds that might effect the world score.
If this needs to be a 'thing' in the future to keep players in the game/keep game alive (the instant/easy gratification, everyone needs a trophy, everyone is a winner age is strong here apparently) how about only 1km or less links are allowed under fields or something along those lines(??)
Chess to Candyland seems apt.
FWIW we should experiment with ability to do crosslinks for a week as I and many others have plenty of souvenir keys many thousands miles away that I'd love to blow through🤡
(edited a misspelling)
This is brilliant and I'm loving it. Also loving the hilarious rage it's brought out in some of the players.
If they ever implement it to stay, than not rewarding mu for fields under fields might be the solution we are looking for.
That rant/rage part is the thing i don't like. It's always the same story 'give us something new -> NO we don't want that change and we don't want these new things (drones for example)' & 'give us events with badges -> NO how dare you to put on an event during a pandemic' & 'we want now badges/medals -> we don't need another hacking badge, just retire sojourner'
I can understand some of the reasoning , but if we keep acting like that ... how will Nia ever be able to do something that doesn't end in ranting just because of personal reasons.
I don't think so.
Spoofers are more likely to show up for sabotage.
And the ability to link under fields gives them more room for that pesting. After all, you can link inside a field from a bed to somewhere in the center of triangles like this, and such can come at any moment of the operation:
And those who start cheating because of their own laziness - they will continue to do so. This is not their game, and such players are generally not needed.
In addition, I'm more than sure that these "lazy" players won't pay for anything in Ingress.
And I laugh at the glee and schadenfreude of people who simply do not know how to make such complex large constructions, not enough brains.
Such "innovations" will not attract new players. And even if they do, people who are too lazy to get up from their couch and go to the neighboring area, certainly will not monitize the game. Why do they need it, because everything is easy to pass?
I can't BELIEVE!!! Innatural, it's crazy.
Seems ridiculous to mess with game mechanics. Seeing that the coding is now capable, why not include shards as a part of the overall game? Such a cool feature that is hardly used.
Why not try a new scoring method like a curve... based on the number of people playing per cell per faction?
There are many more things to make this game more interesting.... this is not something I consider keeping my attention
Niantic has the capability to allow Mini events that could be held in each individual cell. They choose not to implement. Point being is that there is much that can be done to keep our interests, but it feels like they have already given up without trying. I certainly don't mind this feature for an event. The problem is that it's more than likely going to stick permanently
I like the idea of having this permanent if the fields created under a field counts as zero mu gained. It will allow people to play the game in a way that isn't necessarily destroying the scoring aspect of the game. The strategy of covering an entire area so that nobody can link or field just stops people from playing. This would allow the large fielders to still be effective for the score and the micro fielding grinders to still be able to gain ap. Let's face it, if nothing changes then the player base will continue to fade away and the game will shut down sooner than later.
Thoughts and prayers 🙏
Their response being upset about having to drive around all weekend to defend their streak is very telling.
"I don't want to spend time playing the actual game and competing hard, instead I want to control how others spend their time playing the game so they quit!"
This is the core mentality that's killing competition and the game as a whole.
If you don't agree, you're not required to play during the event, it's temporary.
It will be interesting to see all the disaster this will cause.
It is an opportunity to make field art under massive and permanent fields. As an example, **** the spine and the make **** C ... U And then microfield under the opposing agents last field and see how long it takes for them to put it back. But with all the multi accounts and cheating that occurs in this game there is no intetest in being this damn petty in this "game". Most people just quit playing ingress.
Why play a game when the rules are ingored by agents and by niantic. Changing the rules temporarily will not help Ingress be a fun game.
Time to let Ingress Die.
Can i have some cheese? As there seems to be much whine here already..
As someone that lives under a BAF, let me tell you: BAFS are horrible. Worse when it is your own color.
I cannot link. I cannot field. This means I cannot score any AP for links or fields; I can make no badge progress for link count, field count, or MU's covered. I cannot get scoreboard presence or yearly contribution badge. And until this new badge for weekly progress on hacking, there was no way I wasn't going to be badge blocked.
Even now? Given how low my link and field count is (I had a helpful faction member that helped me out with MU's, while I just stood there and took the keys from a container), it's a LOT of "too little too late".
The real problem is that high-end play consists of blocking low-end play.
So what's the problem with this new event?
Here's something to try next time, that I think will work much better: "Links/Fields" created under an existing field count for your agent stats, badge progress, and AP earned, but will not actually change the board. So if you field under the enemy color, you have a triangle, but the inside is still the enemy color.
Now, mark that as a "suppressed" field. Take down the outer field, and the next bigger field becomes unsuppressed -- if you took out a bigger enemy field, suddenly now your triangle is the controlling one and becomes active.
Now the game can be played while under a field, and you won't alter the board. People still have an incentive to make BAFS -- control territory -- but others can still play and are not locked out.
And if anyone thinks that "big fields don't actually stop people from playing", just look at the giant fields in this area: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=34.394036,-117.792823&z=8
Blue has some massive BAF's, anchored in gated communities or satellite-data only places. Worse, before Blue got portals in the gated communities, green used to have their own BAF's anchored in satellite-data only places. When people would spend $10k per year on data access, they were (and still are) less willing to open up for casual players, so casual players drop out / stop playing.
When I started playing, my area was full of green links and portals. So I took blue so I had something to attack. I've been blue BAF'd probably 80% of the time.
you apparently don't have spoofers in your area then - that's hardly the incentive when the highest levels of spoofing are where there are a lot of players, a lot of activity, and a lot of turn-over of almost all portals. The spoofing you hear about, where hard anchors are taken down, isn't nearly as frequent as what you don't hear about unless you're local. And in a lot of cases, the fields that are dropped aren't covering areas where there are any actual players, but they ARE getting a lot of mu for the cell they are in.
>my perception is that most of the players that complain about this have no issue driving around the city or region for hours upon hours to catch poke and capture gyms.....taking down fields and playing ingress just isn't their priority (understanding this isn't the 100% complete entirety of the players effected by being covered....just 95% of them).< we've got one of those here. The agent cant' be bothered to drive 20 minutes out of the way to drop the fields, but that agent can sure whine about the fields to everyone that'll listen. That agent has even told others in their own faction, in cities a couple of hours away from where that agent even plays not to put up fields there. That agent is a pokemon go player who started playing ingress just to submit new portals so that there would be new stops - and who moves portals around so that they can control where gyms are place.
>Their response being upset about having to drive around all weekend to defend their streak is very telling.< when was the last time you did a week long op and spent several hundred hours on gas doing it? Did you not notice the event's a week, not just a weekend?
>Here's something to try next time, that I think will work much better: "Links/Fields" created under an existing field count for your agent stats, badge progress, and AP earned, but will not actually change the board. So if you field under the enemy color, you have a triangle, but the inside is still the enemy color.< That's actually a good idea for THIS event - that way, if the other faction wishes to field, they can but all they'll be doing is increasing the score of the faction they are fielding under. That'll solve the issue with score being adversely affected by this nonsense.
But let's not do this again. Ingress - for all that the pogo players want to change it, and apparently some at Niantic want to change it - has always been a war between both factions for control of the XM - and that's done by fielding over the areas where the XM generates. That's the core of the story line, and the core of the game, and what makes it a competition. Let's not lose that. The factions aren't supposed to work together, they're not supposed to help each other win (called win trading, right?) Let's not create a rule that basically sanctions that.
Yes, Ingress needs to pay for itself, and a lot of us have made a large number of suggestions over the years - starting with a lot more swag in the store - we'd like physical things back. But only a small fraction of what we've suggested has even been listened to, yet alone implemented, which is odd because we've said we'd buy those things. Maybe if Niantic started actually taking our suggestions seriously most of the time there'd be more players and be more money coming in to the game.
Maybe, as a suggestion, Niantic could run ads for Ingress INSIDE other games (not inside pogo) that would appeal to players that want to compete, like, well, all the other games out there do.
This event seemed like a good reason/excuse to play a bit harder after a break -> subscribed to CORE.
Thanks for trying something different.