What is the difference between Ingress and other mobile games?

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  • GreenVamGreenVam ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited July 2021

    We have another problem. The entire competitive part of Ingress is shaken by the latest events ...

    1. We have taken away the factional goal. We tried to fight for her. Now it is not clear why to go into battle.

    2. They tried to "make friends on the first Saturday".

    3. We began to have joint events, such as tessellation. None of the enlightenment wondered why we, the agents of enlightenment, began to fight the Shapers? Don't you think this is illogical?

    3. For a long time there is no plot that explained what we are fighting for.

    4. There are events that are not tied to the plot, it generally makes many people angry. Here's an example ... Protect the portal network when Mercury is exalted from the constellation Pisces by installing 20,000,000 resonators over the weekend. From whom to protect? What for??? How will installing resonators protect the portal network ????

    5. Training is divine, but after it the game is empty, you are left on your own without having the slightest idea of ​​what is happening in the game at the moment. How many questions do you think I heard from new agents about what kind of piece of paper fell out of the portal and how interesting did it get there? Most agents are unaware of the storyline changes, because after training there are no longer any references to the storyline.

    6. There is no difference other than color. We do not have unique technologies that are available only to a certain faction. We are not fighting for getting technologies from corporations, they just appear in the game as a kinetic capsule or drone.

    7. The game is a mess, dialogues in training and monologues from portals have long been outdated. Not finished:

    7.1 Tectulhu

    7.2 Archetypes

    7.3 Many other things that were mentioned in the plot but were not included in the game ...

    A lot of things are broken here, and the ingress itself at the moment resembles a dusty closet overflowing with all kinds of obsolete rubbish mixed with the necessary things.


  • @GreenVam I'm with you on the importance of the Lore - I'm out there to liberate humanity from alien mind control, not to make little triangles. (OK, yes, I know that I am in fact just making little triangles. But the RPG aspect is one of the things that makes the game fun.) Although I loved a lot of things they did with the Tesselation/Nemesis storyline (having Nemesis Jarvis turn and become hard-core RES because of what happened at Cosecha Verde was a wild twist), I agree that it creates problems for the motivation of the factions. If the Shapers are bad news, then ENL has to have a new motivation; some agents have tried to work the line that "there never were any Exogenous, and all of this is just XM-induced mythology," but that's not very compelling and also is extremely hard to square with canon Lore. (One could argue that back when they tried to make RES align with the N'Zeer, it created a similar problem for RES. Many RES never accepted that idea (nor thought of Jehan as a legitimate leader), because it went against the whole purpose of the Resistance. But I think that one is easier to rationalize, because RES isn't exactly united, and it wouldn't be the first time that someone tried to co-opt a resistance movement by attempting to get them to support something that was anathema to what they were protesting in the first place.) So ENL really needs a story bailout at this point, and for things to work it needs to be something that the ENL players can get behind. Making it into some sort of "ENL wants to use XM to be creative" versus "RES just doesn't like XM because they are party poopers" story is not going to motivate anyone. I'm not marching to war over an art project.

    I think you may be a little too hard on the x-fac stuff, though. As characters, we're enemies. As players, we are competitors. But as hobbyists, all of us are enjoying the same activity. It's good to have opportunities for folks to put the costumes aside (so to speak) and celebrate what they have in common. (This also makes it easier to advocate for Ingress as a whole - we all want it to succeed - and helps cool out the drama that can build up from the game's competitive aspects before it gets out of control.) I strongly agree with you that the game itself is and should be adversarial, and that's essential to its appeal. People who want to sing kumbaya with their opponents in-game should play something else. But when we put the scanner down, we should be able to remember that the game is a game, and we are not actually at war over the fate of humanity. (Though it is fun to maintain kayfabe some of the time.) Yeah, we need to maintain OPSEC and such, but otherwise there's no reason that we shouldn't all be allies in real life, even if our characters as agents are bitter enemies. X-fac activities can help remind folks of that, and that seems like a positive thing.

    Finally, one thing that could help with new players trying to deal with the disordered and confusing state of things (and I agree that it is) would be for the player base to create more accessible web sites summarizing the Lore and other matters. MuMu used to do a great job of that, but I've not seen him around in a long time. The Smurfling Guide (https://www.smurfling.guide/) is a good example of a widely used site with practical play advice, and gets used by both RES and ENL players. If we had more such things, and could do a consistently good job of pointing folks to them, this would help. (A better COMM system would also help, because it's harder to reach out to new folks now than it used to be with REDACTED. COMM used to be very salient, whereas now a new player is likely to overlook it (and old players are likely to ignore/forget about it). I used to point new players to online resources, as did others, but now I'm not likely to even notice them....) Still, we can point people to what we have, and that's a start.....

  • GreenVamGreenVam ✭✭✭✭✭

    Smurf to the toad (in some way) is not a friend. Let me explain with a real example. Pokemon go, a bunch of people running around the city. One man recruited agents from Pokémon Catchers. It cost him a global effort to explain why it is impossible to give out information to the Blue agents, why it is possible to disclose information from chats only to trusted persons. Not anyone with a green nickname in the scanner. Because in Pokémon there is no competitive component and there is no battle for world domination. Several Pokémon members of different factions gather under one gym, and everyone knows each other by sight. We have a fundamentally different game. In our game, opponents can say anything, and many players, under the influence of the enemy, change their faction, change their view of the game, so it is extremely important to find a player before the enemy of the enemy finds him and pull what's what. I don't know, maybe in other countries everything is fine, but where I live there are continuous battles for the mind of every newcomer.

  • While OPSEC means that there have to be some limits on what ENL and RES players can share, all of us depend on Ingress as a whole remaining strong. And we need each other: if I successfully recruited everyone in the area to become RES, then there would be no one to play against. The play itself is competitive, but the competition should be healthy. (And while I may, "in character," accuse my ENL foes of being enemies of humanity, it is (hopefully) obvious that this is kayfabe. We're all players of the same game, and we should be able to separate the game from reality.)

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    If Niantic had started charging during peak user time. Sure be complaints, some would quit, most would have handed over the cash.

    Its been badly managed.

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