Cancel Core until the Machina situation is handled
Machina is destroying the local community here, and I am sure a lot of other places. The situation is completely unreasonable, and makes it annoying to try to make fields in cities and next to impossible to cooperate with teammates to accomplish something bigger - which was a big part of the game to a lot of us, even if it wasn't important to everyone.
Niantic doesn't appear to listen or be interested at all in complaints in forum threads. Therefore, the best way that I can see to try to make something happen is to cancel our subscriptions. I love Ingress and have happily supported it since Core was introduced, and would have kept that subscription going forward, but I need to vote with my wallet, and I will stop paying money for the game until Machina is significantly reined in in a way that makes the game otherwise playable.
If you agree about Machina, I suggest you do too.
Comments
Perhaps our community manager could weigh in.
lol
Im actually curious if Niantic will use machina numbers to boost their activity numbers they sometimes use at the end of the year or whenever. Ingress agents made 2 million links in 2023. Wait, nevermind, "they" made 8 million links...
Also cancelled.
Cancelled!
Why would I cancel CORE? I'm having a grand good time hunting down red and demolishing it.
The problem is the Machina linking which does not add anything but misery. Let M. cap neutrals but stop there. Then people could still work on Reclaimer and M. wouldn't interfere and make people quit CORE or Ingress altogether.
I canceled it last month, might reconsider if pay2win dissapear.
We don’t have one do we? Just a Community Specialist
Also no global events can also be reason many feel why just pay 10$ for some extra inventory
After the price hike was announced I canceled my Core subscription, which I had from the start.
Fielding is the most important and fun part of Ingress for me. I have organized several multilayer fields in the Netherlands of up to 1.5M MU per layer with groups of up to 150 agents. Preparation of such fields takes months, with hundreds of hours invested by the ops team and other agents in planning, recruiting, pre-clearing, key farming, key distribution etc. I'm sure many of you know the drill.
Lately there have been several changes to Ingress that I can only interpret as anti-fielding: Without MUFG capsules we cannot replicate keys anymore. Linking under fields, makes it easier to block. And most of all the cheating Machina faction makes large fields totally unfeasible in many areas. At one point Machina could link through existing links, which completely breaks one of the basic rules of gameplay, and even worse, some of the Machina links were invisible on the intel map. Not to mention the fact that Machine plays night and day, including areas where there isn't 24 hour access for real players.
It seems these changes are geared towards agents in low activity areas, who just want to walk around their neighborhood and destroy portals. In my view this reduces Ingress to a boring grind similar to games like Pokemon Go, Pikmin Bloom and the late Harry Poter WU. There is no way to outsmart Machina, or surprise them with a smart block link. And there is no satisfaction in knowing that another agent also had to go to that remote portal you just captured. Machina is relentless, soulles and clueless, and blocks what I would say is the central part of the gameplay.
For me Ingress has significantly lost its appeal and in the current state I am not paying for it anymore. I really hope Niantic will manage to turn the game around and make it the fun, vibrant and challenging ecosystem it was before.
By @Fortifer
I don't begrudge you that. But surely it is possible to sympathize with the other half (?) of the playerbase, for whom Machina pretty much ruins the game? It is possible to have it both ways:
Either 1) Machina can't link, or 2) Machina doesn't block human links.
There, we should both be happy. Right?
People should try to play in Norway with machina. Just outside Oslo and all cities in Norway, we have mountains and forests with no signal or very difficult to get to. getting to a portal can take several hours to drive and half a day to walk. I spent 12 hours every day for 3 days and drove 1400 km to clear machina so I could put up 70 fields that gave 1 mill MU in total. When the frogs took down one of the anchors, it only took a few hours before machina arrived with blockers in the forest and on the mountain. It would have taken me several days to clean that up again and 1400 km in a car. Even if you have active players in areas, it becomes almost impossible to clear machina because the portals are in the mountains or in the forest without a signal or too difficult to get to. In winter, you can simply forget to clean the Machina in Norway.
What does a community specialist do?
Wayback Machine for the post that @NianticThia got says;
Responsibilities
How do we think they’re doing at that?
I spent a little time yesterday typing up a response in another thread about the future of Ingress and what that looks like for new agents. It appears to be a big goal for Brian as I'm sure he would prefer to keep working on Ingress versus the game dying and he has to work on PoGo.
I think machina must be his plan for new agents and in some ways, it does make sense. You download the game, open it up, hopefully get through the on-boarding system and now you look around with your scanner. You see some neutral portals, so you learn about those and then you want to take out some of the "enemy." You find some red portals/links and go to town. In a rural area or low-play area, this works and this new agent can play the game and hopefully get hooked and maybe even sign up for CORE. I don't think it's enough to hook a new player in todays world of mobile gaming, but someone probably does. The problem is, while he has found a way to engage a new agent, he's also alienated the existing userbase who helps pay his light bill.
And that's what I was trying to type in the other thread and never posted. Its 2023 Niantic. We're waiting on you to bring this game up to date, engaging and relevant. Old and new players alike are struggling to find reasons to keep playing this game and all you continue to give us is small doses of hope in the form of a 3D overworld, something we've been helping you create for the better part of 3 years now. You took away global events in hopes we'd be okay with First Saturday and Second Sunday and anomalies only the most dedicated or geographically lucky will attend. Those were fun the first 12 times, but we want engagement, a real reason to open our phones and be excited to play. Triangles are cool, but I'd wager decent amounts of money that triangles are not what's going to keep this game afloat for much more longer. You showed us something resembling tasks, then took it away and went dark on it. This game needs to keep evolving and at a much quicker pace than what we've seen in the past three years.
Let me start out by saying I don't have CORE nor did I ever have it so I can't cancel it.
I do however play Ingress and I think the Machima concept is interesting but poorly executed.
As Fortifier said before: BAFs basically are impossible now since there is no way to know when a link will come from a Machima portal. This could easily be remedied from Niantic's side by having all Machima portals link on CP. This way you can effectively clean an area but won't get a sudden link that disrupts the whole process.
I do like the fact that Machima makes linking harder. Especially last summer when I was travelling through rural areas in Colombia. Now you can't just make a link several hundreds of kilometres without putting some thought and effort into it. I think that makes the game better.
However.... The rate at which Machima grows is insane. Areas that are completely green or blue are completely red a week later. This completely overruns normal gameplay as you are always only able to focus on red portals first. Blocking is no longer a requirement since Machima will block for you and will keep blocking day and night. This too could be easily fixed. Machima only has a chance to spawn on portals that have been neutral for 30 days for example and can only link to neutral portals that have been neutral for at least a week. I also feel like the link-range for Machima should probably be reduced since a lot of links areas that take hours to travel through rivers / mountains / other obstacles.
I don't know if people will agree with me on these things but at the very least I can agree with you that Machima in its current form doesn't add much to the game besides annoyance, repetitive gaming and a whole lot of AP with minimal effort.
The main problem is the same problem players have with many functions (or lack thereof) in game. They suddenly appear and disappear without any communication from Niantic and we just have to wait and see if the game will drastically change out of the blue again.
I have pretty much echoed what many actually want with regards to Machina.
But am sill continuing with my CORE Subscription until the end of the year.
Will see what is planned for 2024 before deciding whether to continue with the subscription
That new agent will be seeing L8 Machina portals that he can't destroy with his 20 L1 XMPs and hacking it will completely wipe his XM bar so he can't get enough decent gear to actually do anything.
We all learned at the very beginning when we began our adventures how useless X1s and X2s really are.
Hacking portals grants AP now, so I am unsure how more difficult it would be for a new player to actually level up to L3 or L4
It's not about difficulty...
It's the joy (or better yet, lack thereof) that new users feel.
Imagine you are a new player, the tutorial explains XM, shows you how to hack and shows you how to deploy. You step into the real world and everything is red, so you can't deploy, so you hack( because nothing else has been told/explained to you) and then your entire XM bar is drained as a punishment for not being a high enough level yet.
There is only a very small percentage of people who take joy in being punished. All the rest will delete the game and move on
And I'm still waiting for the machine to capture the last neutral portal in my area of residence. More than two months have passed and it is still unable to capture the residential area. I think that at such a pace the car should be strengthened.
I don’t disagree at all. Though, they would struggle with any L8 portal, blue, green or red. The punishment part is a problem, though, I have a feeling it will only take a couple hacks to figure it out. The other thing, not every single red portal is L8. I think we can all agree this game has a somewhat steep learning curve and that’s just a new dynamic and something Niantic should hopefully keep in mind as they think about how to retain new agents :/
Im not very pro-machina in its current state, so just offering some counter-arguments and I think it’s a way for me to try and understand the reasoning for some of these decisions being done by Niantic.
I'm not sure what's wrong with machina though. It's an easy opponent that encourages people to play. It's not any more difficult than taking down a level 5 portal with two common shields. I'm not sure players even know about the fielding part of the game anymore. It's a lost part of the game. I prefer the machina over my own opposition. Machina isn't going to chase me down and yell at me. It's a nice change of pace. I'm in the minority for sure but I like it.
A L1 agent should be building versus attacking. Even if they get advice from other agents, they will say the same thing. If they're easily dismissed by what seems to be a big power difference, they're not really discovering the network. I know I didn't stop after seeing a high level portal of the opposite faction, I tried to pursue other locations to see where I can interact. Then, I found out about the intel map. Then I noticed deploying gives a lot of AP. (This was all back in January 2013)
Agree, but with Machina capturing every neutral portal (especially if they started in an area with no other players), they can not do anything other than destroy.
Perhaps I was more patient because portals were rare, it was mostly post offices and libraries. A lot of focus on building seemed to be the strategy even if you were under fields. The extra benefit now is adding fields. Machina or the other faction dominating, it would probably seem no different as a newbie.
I was of a similar mindset when I started 10y ago.
But today's generation isn't, they want instant gratification or they'll quit.
It doesn't even matter if it's Machina or enemy controlled, but Machine is much more punishing (as you said)
What does the Machina situation being handled look like for you?
What changes to Machina would make you sign back up to CORE?
Like I said in a post earlier, Machina not linking or Machina links not blocking human links would satisfy me completely.