Idiotic events that are increasingly taking place in the game.
There is a wonderful series of James Bond films. A secret agent, handsome, strong man who has a set of skills, gadgets and a specific clear and logical goal for each mission.
And there is ingress. it also has agents who periodically receive event-tasks. And if earlier the event was logical, interesting, as well as tied to the plot and was understandable even to the simplest high school student, now this is a stereotyped "it is not clear what is happening and why."
https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/15347/coming-soon-mod-madness-weekend-event/ is a prime example. Why is this being done? By whom? Why are there such changes in the portal network that we have the opportunity to get the installation of not 2 but 4 modifiers?
Imagine a film about Bond where the plot is next. Agent needs to disarm in an hour and a half, 50 terrorists, neutralize 20 bombs, rescue 40 hostages and one president. No, you heard right, just such a plot - nothing more, he walks from room to room stupidly filling up the score, without unnecessary dialogues, without a specific plot background, but there is only one sentence in the title of the series "We are starting a new episode in retrograde Saturn and our James Bond needs to do the following to obtain a plush unicorn. " Would you watch a movie like that? And many ingress agents are forced to take part in these kinds of roles because there are no other assignments. There is only stupid filling of the game score. No, it will not affect the fate of the world, no, it will not spoil the nerves of the enemy, this is just typing another meaningless number.
The latest events are of the same type. do this action 200 times and this action 400 times to protect the portal network. Protection from whom? What happens on the portal network? How exactly will my actions with the portals help protect the portal network?
At the time when Suzanne conducted ingress reports, then there were quests, there was a struggle for peace and there was a holistic feeling from the gameplay. And now? And now an agent of the secret faction can drive around the streets with a piece of toast. Without any explanations of the plot, he may have or disappear functional "I meant the pulse effect", from where a new factional drone will appear. I will not be surprised if one day instead of the usual arrow, Pikachu will jump or Harry Potter will fly on a broomstick.
Developers, what are you doing? Why are you destroying the atmosphere of a serious game where most agents are already over 30?
And look. There is a new agent whom I brought into the game. Sunday event. We must do this and that. The same agent in Pokémon will receive an explanation from the Pokémonology professor. The same Harry Potter player will receive the plot and available information from whom? From the characters in the game. And we have? We just need to do something, it is not clear why. In general, the player does not understand who Roland Jarvis is, who ADA is, what kind of heads they fight at the beginning of the game for control of the player. How can I explain why the enlightenment is fighting for the sake of the plot if there are no shapers anymore, but in training, ADA says that the threat is still coming from them. And glyphs about them appear in the portal network. Don't you find a fair amount of nonsense in this?
The plot is very poorly implemented in the game. Agent training is awesome. In the style of this training, each event could be played. But no, ingress is an alternatively gifted game in which this is not provided. Schizophrenic ADA continues to broadcast about shapers, Sclerosis Jarvis continues to declare that those whom we have driven away long ago are our best friends. The universe of the game contradicts itself.
Brian, community manager, do you read this forum even sometimes?
Comments
To summarize: players need some plot.
It's due to the fact that plot creates motivation. If special events want success then it would be a win-win if motivation of players could be catalyzed and adding some plot is a good way to do it, instead of barely announcing "hey you now can deploy 4 mods at this weekends so let's play".
Am I reading this right?
James Bond needs to do the following to obtain a plush unicorn.
Sometimes, the quest for the Unicorn IS a primary plot point.
Aside from that, the Ingress storyline does need a reset, because it spiraled so far away from the game for many years that it became a life of it's own, largely disconnected from the game. I heard rumor that the creative team moved on, which may account for some of the lack of connection, but the story 'as it was' ever since Dunraven started, has had zero relevance to the game for most people.
Previous comments on the topic:
Way back when, you asked a similar question about why we should keep building fields and I think the answer still holds here:
Ingress the Animation provided the best description (paraphrased).
The world is in danger. Many forces seek to harness the power of XM. Those forces are divided into two factions. The factions are in conflict. The Enlightened and Resistance hold each other in balance.
XM has always been around us and it's been exerting its effects on humanity since the beginning. XM is ordered data, a key, a signal. One that touches and unlocks parts of the brain. The factions are divided by a mysterious difference in perspective.
The Enlightened feel XM is a way for us to discover ourselves and our true destiny. They say our relationship with the portals is symbiotic. A part of nature.
The Resistance disagree. They see XM as a threat. They want to understand it, contain it. They want to use this power but only if it can be controlled and bent towards humanity's interests.
A gift or a threat. It's a battle for minds.
The XM in the fields influences the people it touches. Each faction want's to influence people touched by XM towards their mindset. Mind Control Fields can't completely control their minds, but it can influence ideas towards a given faction's mindset.
Once they restart the storyline (and I expect they will), I hope this is the direction they take. No Shapers or N'zeer. Just humans with different opinions doing their best to bring the world to their perspective, with the corporations taking on the antagonist role playing groups off against each other.
Mod madness could of just been listed as a throw back event. Because if you've been around long enough you too remember when you could add 4 mods to a portal. Or even remove and add mods!
A multiverse is pretty much the plot point for a soft reset of the game's plot. You can see the game "soft reset" a few times before even Prime. It seems we're inbetween story planning elements right now which makes it a bit hard to further the game's immersive setting.
I lost interest in plot after the Via Noir events, where outcome of anomalies basically meant nothing. What year was this? I don't even remember :(
Via Noir was November 2016. It pretty much was a tail end of the events within the 1218 universe. Tecthullu technology was found, OLW's plans were stopped, Susana Moyer was found to be an XM sensitive as part of her father's research, and ADA was able to contact to her multiverse selfs due to Exogenous technology
There's a part of me that wonders if there's a legal reason for the non sequitur event descriptions. In the past, there has always been a hard line between game development and story development. Take Eos Protocol, for example: the in-game announcement was basically "hey we're working with Hulong Transglobal to do stuff. Have fun" and didn't really state anything about the intentions of the event. The meat of the lore was released as part of the Investigation section of the forum. The fact that they mention Hulong at all is shocking.
It seems like it'd be simple to come up with some basic story to move things along, but that's not what's happening. My theory is that the dev team isn't allowed to touch story elements (like mentioning certain character names or adding new plot points) without approval from the story team, and with the story on ice for the last few months, they're just making stuff up to fill the time. Just including PAC in the recent events took months, and even then he didn't really do anything except announce more in-game events.
It's just the nature of an arg that you are supposed to discover the story on your own
Brian: (nervously) "haha, but toast!"
@GreenVam you leave the sacred toast out of this, you!
Out of the 3 Niantic games that I play (and can play, being geographically locked from the others), this one has the weakest plot line, by far. Of course, Pokemon and Harry Potter were both huge before being made into a geolocation game. And creating a compelling story is much harder than developing a game - something that's not easy to start with.
Having said that, I don't think not having a coherent story necessarily a bad thing for the game - to me. You may be after a difference experience, and that's OK. To me, the fun in the game comes from capturing, fielding, glyphing, and occasionally missions, and when I have the chance, exploring new places. I don't need the lore to guide me. The events throws in a little temporary difference into the game, and I welcome that. It's OK to not like it, but using the words in the title of this post is, I feel, going too far.
tl;dr: To me, having such events is more interesting than not having them at all.
Yeah, I'm totally not in favor of those toast things at all. Actully I personally don't like some previous plot that somebody was killed by something repeatedly either. Please someone of Niantic introduce Sarah Coppola from the Ingress Animation back to the game. I love angels leading our way for new special events. Jack Norman is good too.
Well I might be wrong but as far as I remember the toast thing was introduced by Andrew and has nothing to do with Brian and I don't see Brian advocating the toast thing
Which is unfortunate, because it has the best premise for a location-based mobile game:
"Scientists discover a new type of matter, unseen to the **** eye, which influences human thoughts. A rogue researcher uploads the source code under the guise of a video game, triggering a secret war for the fate of humanity."
It explains so much, so elegantly. Why can't we see XM in the real world? Because the human body can only sense it subconsciously. Why is such a top-secret program accessible to everybody? Because it was intentionally leaked.
The problem is, the story has been retooled, rebooted, rewritten, recast, and retconned with no single source of truth to back it up. A new player can't really figure out what the heck is going on without sifting through broken links, missing Google+ pages, and wiki pages with outdated storylines. The Prime story reboot was supposed to help wipe the slate clean, but it did it half-heartedly with a sort of "yeah it's a new universe but the old stuff still counts so you still have to know what all this stuff is in order for it to make sense, good luck" storyline that was no more clear or accessible.
The toast was a joke and then it became an inside joke which you can now get as a plushie. It's really more of the Prime development team were testing notifications across redacted and Prime.
Look. There is a new agent whom I brought into the game. Sunday event. We must do this and that. The same agent in Pokémon will receive an explanation from the Pokémonology professor. The same Harry Potter player will receive the plot and available information from whom? From the characters in the game. And we have? We just need to do something, it is not clear why. In general, the player does not understand who Roland Jarvis is, who ADA is, what kind of heads they fight at the beginning of the game for control of the player. How can I explain why the enlightenment is fighting for the sake of the plot if there are no shapers anymore, but in training, ADA says that the threat is still coming from them. And glyphs about them appear in the portal network. Don't you find a fair amount of nonsense in this?
The plot is very poorly implemented in the game. Agent training is awesome. In the style of this training, each event could be played. But no, ingress is an alternatively gifted game in which this is not provided. Schizophrenic ADA continues to broadcast about shapers, Sclerosis Jarvis continues to declare that those whom we have driven away long ago are our best friends. The universe of the game contradicts itself.
Small correction, the toast joke originated from a bug. Early on, the scanner showed Toast error messages that didn't say "Thing X broke", but instead "This is a toast notification" (Toast notification = Pop ups basically. The Hack output is a toast notification as well.)
With how bugged Prime was at launch and with how many errors you encountered, you saw the phrase "This is a toast notification." quite a lot, and it became a running ga.g. Niantic then cashed in on that by pushing notifications that followed those error messages shortly before April Fools 2019.
Those are not toast notifications, btw. They just copied the text from the bugged error message.
EDIT: why the heck is ga.g a forbidden word
The creators of the game just grew old. What used to be a hobby of a passionate group of friends is now just a job. There has come a family, children, mortgages and other worries. Some may have changed jobs and been replaced by new strangers. This happens to all startups ...
Do the events need a plot? Or a reason in game? The main reason is to keep interest in ingress since, from what i can gather, the game is losing players and the new ones that come in tend not to last long. Niantics using what worked in pogo and putting events in to keep the game feeling g at least somewhat fresh, that would be my guess
give us global challenges back.
In Pokemon, each event is justified, unlike our game. And Professor Willow regularly gives explanations about what is happening.
*New agents looking for Ingress lore*
That just seems like bad Google searching skills
But I get your point, it would be amazing if there was a better way to communicate the story to agents who never got into it.
Explain to me something else, why the gamers has to look for something outside the scanner?
That is the whole point, bro, just trying to make a joke/point!
It looks like one of them got....Jammed...Raspberry. There's only one man...who would dare give me the raspberry! Lone Starr!