Time to get the Recruiter badge or similar back?
in General
On Ingress we had the Recruiter badge for getting new Agents;
which was retired (temporarily?) shortly after Prime came out.
Pokémon GO has a medal for recruiting new trainers.
and also provides rewards to both players if they recruit a new trainer, alongside the badge, and I have just seen that Pikmin Bloom is due to offer a bonus (not known if there will be a badge yet) for recruiting new players there.
As it’s often stated that the number of active players are declining, should Ingress introduce some incentives to draw new Agents in via invites from existing Agents? Should that include turning Recruiter back on, or a new badge?
(Screenshots not mine, I only recruited two Agents, and I have no new Pokémon GO trainers to recruit)
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Something Pokemon Go does way better then Ingress did is having an easier way to recruit friends.
Instead of getting their email before they installed Ingress, they can just enter the referral code up to 72 hours after they started, which is much easier and doesn't require a potentionally unknown person to give out their Email.
If Recruiter ever comes back, Prime needs to use the Pokemon Go code for it, as the old method is convoluted and confusing.
From what I saw, the Recruiter medal more often incentivized multi-accounting than it did recruiting new people into the game. The tiering basically made it an unsustainable pyramid scheme.
Back when the game focused on team-oriented/faction-oriented game play, the actual incentive for recruiting new people was that you wanted more people playing for your side, that you wanted friends and family to have fun with you, etc.
I never was a fan of the recruiter badge and honestly would have it kept in the past.
They could make it easier to recruit, without making it a badge.
Maybe a stat on your profile. People don't cheat for a line deep down on their profile, do they? But it'd be nice to count your recruits.
Ironically I was thinking about this yesterday before I'd seen the post.
Ingress definitely needs an easy path to recruitment - acknowledgement would be nice,
A 'personalized' welcome gift package sounds good :)
They could make it easier to recruit
Could just ended the statement there. We had far more tools once. They've all been removed as they got gamiefied (Niantic's fault) then abused (player's fault).
it was abused too much, just like seer so they removed it, doubt it will ever come back.
Maybe.... while we don't need badge, we do how ever need a recruitment mechanism....
I agree with re-creating the recruitment method. A Friends/gifting system would be quite fun and globally interesting too, by stealing the Pokemon Go method, but just don't tie a progression badge to "How many accounts can I make and level".
The long-term problem with Recruiter is that it's one of the only medals guaranteed to become more difficult to earn as Ingress becomes more popular. (Seer is the other one.)
It was maybe a passable medal when Ingress was new, nobody knew what it was, and the game wasn't expected to last more than two years. There were lots of potential recruits out there with no preconceptions of the game, just waiting to be converted, and exhausting the pyramid wasn't a practical concern.
However, as the game becomes more well known in the wider gaming community, more people make independent decisions about whether to play before they can be recruited, recruiting becomes more difficult, and the pyramid collapses. The gaming commmunity at large is approaching a state where the only people who don't have preconceptions are the young/new gamers who haven't been gaming long enough to hear it all. That's going to lead to a weird situation where the majority of the recruiters are getting older, but the recruits are staying young, and eventually Ingress is a bunch of weird old men trying to recruit teenagers to hang out in parks with them.
Recruiter's predecessor (the Eve medal) was a non-tiered medal requiring 3 recruits. I think Niantic got it right the first time -- if they bring back a recruiting medal, it should be non-tiered. Maybe even a one-and-done medal, because at this point, if you've recruited even one new agent, you're probably above average.
@XK150
It was maybe a passable medal when Ingress was new, nobody knew what it was, and the game wasn't expected to last more than two years.
In fairness, the Recruiter badge started 6 months after iOS had been added and after Eve had happened, and years after Android, and didn't back credit anything. So it was painful for existing players who'd already recruited everyone, and the game was already at it's peak in terms of player numbers.
The majority of people with Black did it by 'other means' even then.
only if you get the recruiter point once the recruited one reach l16.
Otherwise it will be like in 2015 just a bunch of multiaccount like in pogo
On the flip side, think of the gold mine of objectively linking the accounts together :)
That just gives a reason to bot accounts to level 16
agree,,, not sure what takes em so long.
at least my "weekly" and "monthly" "agents recruited" stat isn't stuck at "5" any more...
On an slightly offtopic note...
Why doesn't the included link or even the share text from pikmin include the actual referral code.....
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Join me on Pikmin Bloom! Come grow your own Pikmin squad and let’s fill the world around us with flowers together! When you create your account, don’t forget to enter my invite code to receive special rewards: 20 flower petals and 10 nectars. https://pikminbloom.onelink.me/pWSt/refer
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Also why not the ability to Entercode or activate account on web....
this really needs to come back but with modifications. reward past recruitments by recruited submitting agent who introduced and helped along the way. given new agents ability to reward first agent who got them to install as well as in case its someone different agent who continued to guide them through leveling up.