Impossible to play with Prime in low network areas

Hey guys, I know this complaint has been voiced before but I thought I'd let NIA know anyway.

My playing is 90% in the woods and on fields while walking my dog. I have dozens of remote portals that are ideal for creating links and fields that are hard to destroy because people would have to walk quite a distance. Playing Ingress there was always hard and required patience because of low network coverage.

With Prime though, playing has become impossible. I can't glyph-hack my remote portals any more, so I can't acquire new keys. Normal hacking works sometimes, but I can't place keys in capsules, so I get exactly one key per trip, if I'm lucky.

Linking doesn't work at all most of the time, setting resonators is equally fickle. I've just spent 30 min on one portal to get 7 resonators in before I gave up.

I've tried to suggest new portals, and that didn't work at all either. Even when I started the process and then walked back to an area with better reception, they wouldn't go through.

Playing like that is no fun. NIA, you may think that only accounts for a minority of players, but that's not really true. Even the city players sometimes try long links for big fields and need to remove links in the woods, or want an anchorchain that can't be reached quickly by car. They get quite p***ed when they spend 30 minutes walking to a chosen portal only to discover that with Prime they can no longer use it.

Since sitting at home and recharching portals is not my idea of Ingress, I give up and stop playing. Thanks for the good times with Redacted, but Prime is just not working for me any longer.

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Comments

  • starwortstarwort ✭✭✭✭✭

    It's very difficult to play even in the middle of a city if there are less than 2 bars of 4G signal. Sometimes when there's a city event on, I've had to give up Ingress completely. Of course this is largely up to the mobile providers not having enough capacity when there are lots of people on the streets, but sometimes even when SpeedTest works Ingress Prime still takes up to a minute to place a single resonator.

  • I can't stress enough how much the Prime switch devastated me and my friends playing the game. It's horrible. You know the old saying "don't fix what ain't broken"? Well, classic example come true. I used to play a lot. We all did. But ever since redacted was taken offline and Prime is the only option, we stopped pretty much all operations. It's a horrible layout, drains battery even worse, visually disgusting, and not worth having or playing anymore. I was telling everyone about ingress before Prime. I loved ingress before Prime. I wish you guys would've left both redacted and prime as options and personal preference. But you lost a good 10 players in my neighborhood, easy. I don't speak the words "ingress" anymore. You guys let me down with Prime. That is all. Holler if you bring the classic back. 🤞(but I ain't holding my breath)

  • jontebulajontebula ✭✭✭✭✭

    I hope kg Niantic fix the bad signal bug the bug fix GPS drift bug to.

  • I just want my compass to work again.


  • TheFarixTheFarix ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited November 2019

    Redacted was very much broken to the point that Niantic could not update it and have the update on iTunes Store or Google Play. Prime was absolutely necessary for the game to continue evolving. Just because you could not see the brokenness doesn't mean that it was not broken.

  • Redacted was broken on the server side. Prime is broken on the user side.

    We've pointed out a number of functional and design issues, but the way forward is the way back.

    Yes, ingress needed a new platform. Yes Niantic claims none of the graphics or controls can be saved.

    But the look, feel, function, and game requirements of prime will have to be made a lot more like redacted if they want to save ingress.

  • Still no need to copy&paste posts in various threads...

  • GrogyanGrogyan ✭✭✭✭✭

    In low signal areas, try setting your device to use 3G

    This is easy to do in Android


    I had to do this many times especially when Redacted/Classic was around

  • It seems that Prime consumes much more traffic, comparing to Redacted, and almost unusable without strong 3G/4G connection. From my point of view, it may be caused at least by following differences:

    • Even if you're only walking on the map, Prime, at least on close zoom, always loads portal photo for this crappy useless visual effect.
    • When viewing portal details, Prime always loads all alternative photos of portal
    • Cache size seems to be too small for active players which have lot of keys or portals to play on, Portal photos are purged from the cache too quickly and have to be downloaded again. I'd prefer to have cache size configurable.

    Also it seems (of course I may be wrong) that now all network operation are serialized and executed sequentially. I.e. you cannot hack or charge until all previous requests to server (load a map for remote view, load portal photo, load some other ****) are complete. And loading a 200-300Kb of portal photo on poor 2G/edge connection will take forever.

  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭

    Not sure why prime is so heavy on active network connection.. less then 3g and its a stop ? makes no sense when other apps runs fine etc.. not everyone can or has 4g in a big city this is bad development.....

  • GrogyanGrogyan ✭✭✭✭✭

    Ingress, as far as I know is still running on the Classic Server, which is a tad slow for the modern client, whereas WU and PoGO use the new server base platform.


    We are, expecting, sometime very soon, for the new server backend to be upgraded, and live before the end of the year.

  • Excelente analisis, my friend,pero niactic no hace nada al respecto

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