What do you think should be ingress prime to earn 5 stars in app stores from google and apple?
Since the developers don't want to consult with us about what we really need, let's at least discuss it among ourselves. And let each of you answer in this thread.
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I will describe my opinion.
1.Integrity of the concept. Ingress is primarily a tool for use by an agent. Each action when using this application should be logical and consistent with the concept of this game universe. There should be no mention of Pokemon and other company products here. Each event and scanner element must be plotted and logically grounded. The news tab is generally a "separate song". At the moment, the integrity of the game universe and the scanner as an agent's tool is out of the question. Events, this word should not exist at all. Call it what you want - predicting bursts of anomalous activity within the portal network, or unforeseen anomalous phenomena, but not events. Agree, the concept of an in-game universe must be respected. The addition of any innovation must also be presented with a plot! And not just that a new object or functional innovation appears in the scanner from nowhere. The plot should also be logical! Why, according to the plot, there are no exogenous creatures, but in the scanner we are constantly told that they exist and a threat comes from them ???
And most importantly !!! The concept of the game is based on a battle between two factions. Why do we love your game so much? For its unique competitive element, for that battle in the real world, which is nowhere else. Do not **** it with the stupidity of events on which we have to cooperate with each other, We are not friends, toads hate Smurfs and Smurfs respond with mutual hostility, and this is normal. We shouldn't spend every first Saturday together discussing "who lives how". We have to compete every moment of our playing time. And the competition must have a goal. But the goal of enlightenment was removed from the concept and the new one has not yet been delivered. We need long-term goals whose prospects are worth fighting for. But so far they are not in any other faction. Like singing in one wise song "from unnecessary victories only fatigue remains if tomorrow does not promise anything new." Why should we fight if globally there will be no changes for any of the factions? I mean, there will be the same triangle battles day after day, year after year. and that's it, it will not be reflected in the in-game universe in any way.
2. The client of the game must be attractive in terms of graphics. The design we have now turns off many users as it looks like an 80s-style neon sign from a cheap roadside motel. Design needs style, the right color palette. The design should be in a certain corporate style. NIA's corporate style is what the design lacks. Take a look at this example, here's a style that I think the game lacks so much.
The old scanner looked like an agent tool. And it looked exactly like a tool, and not like something visually looking like a game! Let's not forget this!
Big stuff is missing at the moment. My box has enough stuff going on so that I only notice big stuff is missing during down time. Covid makes big stuff very difficult to pull off right now.
Otherwise, for 5* the tech needs to catch up with the play value. Lag, airplane mode tricks, multi-accounting, and spoofing need to go away or become so blatant that it's the equivalent of an alkali in an acid pool during a litmus test.
I have, and will continue to rate the app 5* because I enjoy it and I want other people to come to the game. This game is more fun when more people play it. Especially when we get new agents. An app with a 3.5/3.6* rating as it has now on the Apple & Google stores respectively is going to turn off a lot of would-be agents.
This in no way means the app is perfect. There are a lot of areas for improvement. There are dozens if not hundreds of threads devoted to issues, complaints, and feature requests, and I agree with many of them. But downrating the game becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The closest thing to getting me to downrate the app was the CORE subscription renewal issues that plagued the first few months of the subscription rollout because taking money and not giving the thing that was paid for in return is a cardinal sin, but that now seems to be resolved.
Low ratings don't lead to improvements. The things you want can't be fixed with the flip of a switch, they take time, money, and resources to implement. You don't get that by scaring off new agents, you get that by welcoming them in to this dysfunctional family and helping them see that for all its flaws, Ingress is a pretty special game.
Agree!
Ingress roots are XM from artworks (portals). (Secret) agents are participating in the fight (using fields) between ENL/green and RES/blue for MU. The agent's tool are the scanner (that runs on XM), the intel map for overview and comm for communication.
These roots have in my opinion become fuzzy in the 2nd generation of the game (Prime) among playgrounds, recursion and x-faction/purple.
Personally I agree 100% the scanner should be a scanner and not a game. "Ingress is not a game"
Personally I agree 100% the colors are too deep/strong/dark agents have said this since forced upgrade to Prime day 1 (before they did quit).
Funny I myself just came to the same conclusions this morning and compared colors: the two left pics (two succeessful game UI) are lighter colors easy for the eye and Prime to the right has very bright/strong colors with a lot of purple which is a fact that many men has problems with because of color vision deficiency. Why is this?
The UI needs an overhaul i my opinion. Make the portal name readable when linking while at it the text (the most important info!) is too small and at the far bottom of the screen. Maybe it is soon time for the 3rd generation of Ingress? It can maybe be accomplished with small means UI changes? This would loose the bagage of low rankings in the stores from agents that have rage quit playing and that might start playing again with a tweaked UI who knows?
The old lore movies are still great! and can be (re-)used: like this one!
"Buyers beware! Glitchy phone via online auction!" / ben jackland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUA3SuH2kR4
Nia, Thanks for a great game!
At this point, I have no idea what brings improvement. I thought signing up for CORE would bring improvement, it hasn't (for the most part, we did have the big layer/intel map upgrade). They read all reviews, yet the forums are quiet. We ask for updates about bugs, the forums are quiet.
Like, how long do you give them what THEY want before getting what WE want? Little has changed over the past year and in some ways, things have gotten worse. Comms, slightly better. Latency, way worse. Drones, no changes. Missions, no changes. Scanning, improvements (funny this is something that helps Niantic, but has no in-game value). AMAs, more or less missing. Communication, some improvement. First Saturdays, no changes besides less quantum caps. Second Sundays, watered down mission days that appear like events.
I wrote up a blog post about the changes in Ingress since the introduction of Prime because I kept answering the same questions when agents returned after a long absence. That post is only about significant and enduring changes to gameplay, and there's actually quite a bit that has happened even in the last year.
We're not quite a year since the introduction of Kinetic Capsules (October 19, 2021), and we've seen a few improvements, new recipes, and some events based on KCaps in that time.
You mentioned the unique layers, but I'm going to repeat it because it was a HUGE quality of life improvement.
You say they've made no changes to drones, but it was May of this year when they made drones visible through a scanner layer and added a stat to indicate when drones are sent home. They also added a new badge (Maverick) for the number of drone hacks performed. I'd also wager that more changes to drones are coming in the near future based on the media drops that happened a couple of weeks ago.
In April of this year they added a new stat & badge & reward for maintaining hackstreaks (Epoch)
Beyond that, they have done a lot of events.
In addition to the Second Sunday events you mentioned, they've run a special event about once a month to keep players engaged - Optima Kinetic Challenge (March & September), Courier AP Challenge (August), Field Art Challenge (July), Mercury Retrograde mod event (June), Operation Sentinel (May), Matryoshka Fielding (April). They started doing quarterly event calendars to help agents know what's coming up.
They ran a series of in-person NL-1331 events in the western US in August - I know the rest of the world is still waiting but it was the best they could do with Covid-19 and some argue it was still too much.
And there's stuff in the pipeline too:
Brian just announced they are getting close to introducing Adventure Sync, which represents not just a common feature request, but also progress toward integrating Ingress with Niantic's Lightship platform which should bring even more good things.
They are beta testing Niantic chat, and while I have significant reservations about that, it is definitely a thing they are doing with the goal of improving things for agents.
I have gripes. I want mission approvals/rejections to be more transparent and consistent. I want the scanner to be more stable/responsive. The scout controller badge has more problems than I'm going to rattle through here. Cheaters are a perpetual problem. Communication could always be improved. But I stand behind the sentiment that the way to work on these issues is by participating in the forums, not downrating the app on the app store. That's all.
Great response, thank you! Definitely some things I'd spaced on like the maverick badge. Though I'd argue that adding the "drone" layer is mostly a useless feature when I'm guessing a majority of agents would have preferred the layer feature would match how the others work AKA we want to see where our drone has been.
So maybe not quite as stagnant as I implied, thank you. In my opinion, the Ingress app/service, is not at a 5 star level.
The scanner should use simplistic graphics, or failing that, have a "basic" mode that:
A) Is easier to view in sunlight
B) Uses far less data.
At the moment during the day I tend to play "hide the phone in the shadows", either by putting my back to the sun, stepping into doorways, finding a tree etc purely so I can see the screen better.
In low signal areas, I have resorted to using a second phone, with all apps other than Ingress removed in order to try and get enough data throughput to play.
Agree on events as commented above, yes, there are events, but they should be worked into the storyline.
Giving away cheap or free badges, no. Every badge should be earned through play otherwise you cheapen badge value.
The addition of layers was awesome.
Improve the support experience. There are a ton of threads on this.
And sigh, improve communication, at least make the forum the PRIMARY point of information release after Prime itself.
Localised minigames!
There are lots of players who don't want to spend gas money and travel miles and miles to reach some stupid playground in order to create yet another triangle. That concept is stale, and has been for a long time. The average player stays within their city, and has little to no impact on regional scoring. So why not a nice shards minigame within a 10km area? Level 9 or 10 cells?
Have unexpected things happen with portals that makes you WANT to go out there and collect rewards, or big AP bonuses, whatever. Every other GPS game I've played has this, but I feel it has always been lacking in Ingress.
There's got to be more you can do with this vast database of POI's?
They need fix the lag thats been ongoing for so long now, and we have now Core subscription but it seems it hasnt changed much in terms of improving stability of the scanner its like you pay but the game is still so broken. They need also deal with cheaters, spoofers and multi accounts maybe introduce that you need verify your account with your phone number to link perhaps? It could make things a bit harder for those that want abuse.
Also now we dont even have a story and lore to follow - how do you even explain that to new players? Here is a green portal go take it down and thats it? Ada and Jarvis would be fun if they gave ingame story missions or something to keep new and old players engaged to that.
Ingress has a 5* rating from me right now, though that was a carefully-considered decision on my part. The game is far from perfect, but I still find it sufficiently compelling that I play every day... and on some days I play a lot. It's been almost eight years and the game still holds my interest.
The thing I wish for from Niantic: Focus on the user experience, and think about the game from the perspective of users. Niantic has a long history of having great ideas but implementing them in a way that is awkward or sub-optimal for usability. My recent example of this is portal history. (@ofer2 is an absolute god for his hackathon project and driving it into the final product, and I do not in any way want to undermine his efforts in what I am about to say.) I wish that somewhere in the process a product manager/designer had asked the questions, "Why do players want this? How will they use it? How can we best support their use cases?" If someone had taken that step they would have realized that players want to find things that are unique for them, and that the best way to support that use case would be to highlight things that are unique rather than ones that aren't. Staring at a sea of red rings trying to find the two things that aren't highlighted is difficult. If I was staring at a sea of unhighlighted portals and there were two that had red rings about them then I could make a beeline for them and scoop up the uniques I'm seeking. In many ways I find that this is a metaphor for how Niantic approaches Ingress-- they come SOOOOO close to getting it right and then slightly miss the mark because they fail to think like a user.
When not only product,but even support page has own errors(eg try to change nickname via site not) - product can't be rated 5*.When after each update i have a message "rate us" it's annoying.Also we have connection lags for some month.And laggy store which is unfortunately used when passcode arrives. And no language switch(which could help while main translation is bad). And no notification sound but sfx_notify is in assets. And most bugfixes in previous releases are mostly damaging not helping,but we need to update to worst one or we can't even connect.And so on...
Sorry,but for me 5* means standalone working product with priority to stability and balance/bug fixes,not laggy one used to betatest all features for other projects.
One more thing. It's also bypassable but will give bad actors a pain. Currently all Niantic products have SafetyNet defence,but it can be bypassed. How about magisk memory leak detection as Ukrainian digital passport "Дiя" app does?
I'm actually OK with current app in general terms, but the reason I 1* rated it was because support. When you rate the product, you have to rate it as a whole and the whole is 1* just because support is a 0.
Until support gets real attention, I don't think anything else will improve strongly enough to raise the game again.
I have given Ingress Prime 5* because I am rating the game more than rating the app. I do agree with many of the criticisms such as the dreadful colour scheme. Readability is a serious problem for most users, but it is frankly prejudicial against visually impaired people. When Prime as announced I was looking forward to a new and cleaner interface along the lines of what they had done for Pokemon Go. What we were given was a hot mess which looked like it was designed by a child.
I teach IT and Computer Science, and the younger students always go overboard with features when they're making a PowerPoint: too many animations, sound effects, colours, etc. I absolutely got the same vibe when I started using Prime.
Nevertheless, I play Ingress daily and I enjoy playing it despite any complaints I have about the UI. There are other apps which run more smoothly, etc, but I don't have any interest in playing them.
Please add a language selection or an easier switch for English on Android devices. I like Ingress in English (but I prefer all google apps in German) and it would make it better to share screenshots international on events and more. Also should there an access to all done missions for core players in intel and then I would rate 5 of 5.
Reliability.
Ingress ratings has an albatross hung around it's neck by old players ratings who were angry about the transition to prime. Most people hate change and the UI update was radical. Worse it took many months really stabilize causing old players to cling to redacted and rally against prime.
All that said, in the here and now, prime is 5 stars.
But it needs some significant things to rejuvenate activity in most areas. The game needs to be altered to break the current area control game most old schoolers play.
Should be incentives to build tiny triangles instead of massive ones. And to generate action the score board should measure more than just MU. And winning team of each cycle should be incented, although you have to be cautious about game balance.
Fix the lag its been going on for so long dont be suprised when people rate low due to that, nothing worse when something happens out of our control..
Also we need a new plot/story to get ppl excited again , ingame missions from jarvis or ada could be a thing if live actors like before is not an option for obvious reasons. Maybe a new tesselation inside the scanner could be fun ?
Rating from older versions of an app count less towards the current score than newer versions. So every 1* rating it got when Prime was released means nothing in todays score.
If you really want to up Ingress' app rating, you need to rate it 5* every new release instead of a one and done approach.
I'd also deduct points due to lack of feedback on these forums.
If you want 5* fix the following. Spoofer/Multiaccounter removal (Permabanning, or fruit of the poisoned tree - all actions done by agent in question undone ), Taking TOS violations seriously, Laggy play only happening when something truly is broken or under scheduled downtime.
Strategy side is NOT the problem. Techside, "we are not amused" is the best way to describe the situation.
Improve the communication from noantic to the players (that's something something should do for all games, seriously, I've never seen a company so bad at dealing with uts customers and so out of touch with what it's player bases wants)
Yeah i agree, i wish niantic would communicate a bit more here in the general thread overall its very little activity most threads ever gets a reply from niantic and now that we have a community manager i thought things would look different then before but feels not much has changed on this matter all we hear is that they read everything but how do we even know that for sure when they reply so few threads...
I had been putting 5* monthly until I saw no communication from the new Community Specialist (for example, there was exactly ONE her comment on these forums for the past two weeks). This was a deal breaker because I had a glimpse of hope that with the new Community Specialist will come good communication. It didn't. So 1* and never looked back since then.