What should keep people excited about Ingress future?
TL;DR: Has Niantic thought what should keep Agents in the game? What should be exciting to them? Why they should continue opening scanner daily, far past Level 16? What future they should look forward to? Then WHAT THAT IS?
During the 6 years I'm in Ingress, I tried everything of my interest the game could provide. From participating in, and then organizing, a few dozen of field arts and BAFs, to Field Test, Hexathlon, NL, Anomalies, decoding (Tessellation). I had a global shard in my neighborhood and intel operated the world's first level 7 homogeneous field. I spent weekends in towns of 3 hours train ride away just to make all 28 submissions coming from Prime+Redacted so those towns could have 30 portals instead of 2. I took down someone's guardian portal at day 140 in the forest in winter at night. I tried to submit a banner and completed a whole lot of banners. I created a fan site and wrote IITC plugins.
I thought Superposition would be a blast, a spark that would return some of Ingress glory, but then Niantic made the stupidest thing possible (which isn't surprising) and decided to give badges to anyone interacting with 10 battle beacons... thus making lots of people canceling their bookings. This is such a slap that if I could participate and have already booked, I would only come to see friends, maybe also for a Mission Day and auxiliary events, and not participate in the actual anomaly. Leave those 10 BB badges to yourselves thanks. This joke of an anomaly isn't even going to have recharge rooms to participate remote properly with at least some degree of organization and teamplay.
There was a talk about the start of Mission Day applications "this winter or early 2022". According to this https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/18751/transcript-24-march-2022-q-a-with-brian we were supposed to have the application form and the guide back in April. Today is end of June. Does anyone know where I can submit a Mission Day application?
Where are Dev Diaries?
What future awaits Ingress? Does the future even exist? When will Niantic understand that surprise releases don't work and instead share what's coming?
When will Ingress team properly communicate now that it has a Community Specialist? Why Andrew Krug still participates in chats, while the Community Specialist whose job that is, does not?
(Pinging @NianticBrian @NianticThia of course because honestly I don't believe they read everything by themselves)
Comments
more free swag, hahah
to me it feels like they think they have figured out. There is apparently enough agents out there who will just keep playing with the current level of communication and care from the ingress team, that worrying about these forums or trying to actually increase people playing seems like an afterthought.
Kinda beating a dead horse here in the forums, but just kind of a bummer to see no real active interest from them. I started this game in year six and seeing all the videos and activity and excitement (which was dying out at that point, I’d later learn) had me super excited about the game. I realize that there was a budget for all that and it’s not likely to do those things forever, but it just seems like such a different game, communication wise. And I’m not talking about the forums, but in all means. Seems like a couple folks doing damage control in the forums and other places people frequent, Brian just posts on twitter, other folks, more or less gone. But no one from Niantic hyping this game up and staying involved. People want to feel like their “parents” love them and are wanted. I don’t get this feeling from anything at Niantic. It’s a stark difference even in year six when I first downloaded the game. But this must be okay. They hired a community specialist who seems to only do support and post randomly on twitter.
This game needs a dang hype man…
edit, just wanted to add that it seems like Ingress has become this resume builder for people like Brian and the other devs. Features that no one asked for or have any real interest in using, but we keep getting them while other features have bugs or just never seemed to be completed or long since updated. Missions, long overdue for some attention. Drones, are we done with this, at least three super easy medals that could be dropped for this and get "some" people excited. But you can sure as heck by some expensive headphones to hear a couple new sound files while you try to defend portals, but struggle because a lag issue that has been around for about the past year. I'm all for new ways to play and experience the game, but it kinda feels like devs are more interested in padding their resume with these things they helped with rather than work on keeping the game fun, fair, balanced and exciting. Oh well. That's probably why I spend more time on my PS5 or drinking beers with my homies versus dealing with this game lately.
R.I.P. Joe Philley
Let me give you an example from the life of our favorite game. Yesterday I came under my opponent's home portal. I began to attack and saw that over the past 5 years not a single major problem has been fixed. Let's start with the fact that my opponent's portal was moved under his balcony. And this is 25 meters from the real location, and maybe more. This portal was a temporary object placed on a temporary footing. And then I started playing as an honest player from one account. And he started playing with two. I began to attack his portal and due to the scanner freezing, my attacks were superimposed one on one, at this time I could release up to 10 bombs in one second. How long have we been asking Brian to fix this???
What's next? I demolished his home portal, put resonators and the coolest shields that he demolished in 2 seconds and the portal turned blue again. Protecting the portal in this case is meaningless and the battle ends if one of the parties runs out of ammunition. And if the other side has bags at the same time? And if in these bags quantum capsules make 100-200 level 8 bombs every day? + again, a cheater can put 4 mods instead of 2 mods from an honest player. + Our game has had modified clients for a long time, which help to automatically protect portals. I somehow came under such an indestructible portal. As soon as the first bomb was released, the defense immediately went. I demolish some of the resonators and put new ones in the portal + modifiers are immediately put into it. + besides, if I somehow miraculously capture this portal and put 2 very rare shields in it, after 1-3 seconds there will again be a fully equipped blue portal with mods and resonators.
Do we have a fight with modified clients? - no.
Do we have a struggle with playing from two devices by one person? - no.
Do we have a well-developed protection system for the portals? - no.
Do we have a struggle with the use of bags? - no.
And that is not, and this is not. And helicopters fly every day.
An honest person hates to play by such rules.
Both myself and many other agents have written about these core gameplay issues. But no, no one fixed it, but they added a lot of things that we don’t need at all. Potal scanning, support for a certain brand of headphones, a poor copy of reddit...
They make as much money as they can :))
Fix the lag.
Interesting. While Niantic seems not concerning about how to keep people excited about Ingress future, some players do.
Same gameplay, just deploy, build, and destroy portals doesn't sound really exciting. The game developer's way of keeping it exciting is just to change the rules from time to time to confuse the players more. Implement anomalies here and then but it doesn't really mesh with the story of the game. But, those actions are not really something new that could convince players to stay long enough to recurse. Lastly, the lag is annoying and forces other players to abandon the game altogether.
I just started playing again... it's pretty tough to have fun. It doesn't feel team like. Perhaps I'm too new. I don't know the secret clicks ect. But I'm loving getting outside. Not loving the toxicity
did u get in touch with your local community ? try that maybe.
Anomalies at moderate intervals, mission days, and meet-up events like Hexathlon and NL1331.
We do not want monthly anomalies, but we also do not want a situation where we only hold one anomaly a year, as we did at one time.
We want three or four anomalies a year, a hexathlon to fill in the gaps, a mission day once a month or so, and the occasional NL1331.
Today, many of the core players in Ingress base their schedules on events.