Another Vanguard farewell - and thank you
It is with a heavy heart that I join @MM207A in resigning as a Vanguard. Ingress has truly changed my life for the better. I have met people who will be friends for life - I hope to include many of you on that list. I have grown tremendously as a person, and learned a ton about myself and how to work with others. I am grateful for the skills I have gained, and the ridiculous and amazing adventures I have had pursuing green lines and triangles, and trying to move virtual triangles from one portal to another. It has been a pretty wild ride!
I have felt for quite a while that the magic of Ingress is gone. Changes over the last year have led to hemorrhaging of active players and decimation of our active communities. Some of that is probably expected - things change, and it is not reasonable to expect the game to retain that same sense of wonder and enthusiasm for its entire life span. I do think it is reasonable, however, for the company that makes the game to recognize that things are not going in the right direction, and listen to the voices of players who know the issues. I think it’s reasonable for the company that makes the game to understand and value the unpaid labor that has built their game, and that has run their live events for years. I think it’s reasonable for the company that makes the game to value the players enough to make meaningful and transparent changes in enforcing the rules, and for that company to not rely on unpaid labor to police the game for them. Unfortunately, the company that makes our game of Ingress does not seem to be reasonable, and has not shown itself capable of doing any of those things.
There are some really good people who work for Niantic - I do not think this is necessarily a personnel issue. It feels clear to me that as a company, Niantic does not value Ingress enough to understand it - to REALLY understand it. I have messaged this point consistently for two years in the Vanguard program, and I’m at the point where I just don’t want to keep saying the same things anymore. I have devoted a lot of time to making this game a success, and I’m really proud of what this group of people has accomplished. I no longer feel, however, that there is will or capacity on a corporate level to support Ingress as it needs to be supported to survive and thrive.
I am really grateful for the chance to have met so many interesting, creative, committed, and enthusiastic players through this silly game. Thank you to all those who I have met in person, who have carried the Yonicorn banner, run around with me in a strange city, or did whatever ridiculous I asked you to do via comm, Hangouts, Telegram, Slack and even (God help me!) GroupMe! The players are the true treasure of this game and I want all of you to know that I think you are spectacular and my life is better for having worked with you. Thank you thank you thank you <3
Comments
This is so sad to read! Thank you so much for your years of service to the game and especially to its communities and the people in them. I know that even more work has gone on behind the scenes than we can see, and I worry for the future of this game without that input and guidance. It sounds like we are currently witnessing what happens when insightful guidance is not heeded.
Thank you for all of the time and energy you have put into the game and community. Please know that you have been a huge part of my "ingress life" and "ingress family," and will always have a place in my heart. Best of luck moving forward, and I can only hope Niantic takes this to heart.
Today is popcorn worthy
Be well and I'm glad to have met you and the many discussions and opportunities to work on things these past years @pinesinger, good luck with the next leg in life and enjoy it to the max!
Thank you for putting your thoughts into words and share it with the community.
Hope things will be better for ingress.
❤️ Feel you. Nice words. ❤️
Extremely well articulated. Thank you for your time and effort. Please know that we appreciate the labor of love that you, the other Vanguards, volunteer event orga, and even countless other agents on the ground STILL building Niantic's network and content have put, and continue to put in, despite the contempt shown you/us by the game owners. Best of luck. I hope you manage to find some of the magic again in the future 💚
Sad to see you go as well.
Wow 2 vanguards leaving in same day? Whats going on :(
Love you Pinesinger 😘
F
"Niantic does not value ingress enough to understand it"..... truer words have never been said.
All the best @pinesinger
Sensei ❤️
The fact is that Niantik is an evil corporation in which stupid employees work, who spit on Ingress and do not understand the game at all, who do not want to listen to the community and try to destroy it, and who do bad things and k i l l the game day after day.
I totally understand your frustration and disappointment on this new way of management.
In chats... I just read talking about Portal/Pokestops, new events for fast leveling and passcodes.
The game is now on a individual level that only understand the fasted access points available by land or sky... no matter.
Average ingress player age have decrease!!
Thanks for all the pro bono work for the ingress community over those years before and after the Vangurad program.
All the best for you on our new free spirit gameplay.
-BGraca
Thank you for being an amazing person, and above all an amazing friend. This statement is the perfect articulation of how the majority of the playerbase feels about Niantic.
💚💚💚💚💚💚💚
Thanks for the work and effort to make this game better for all.
Thank you for supporting this community, truly sucks it has come down to this. The ball is in Niantic's court...
Please, Niantic, are you listening?!
Have you written off Ingress?
From the beginning of Wayfarer it seems Ingress is the company dinosaur, cute and historic, but no longer worth your time.
It feels like the last chapter has been read and the book has been closed.
Pokemon Go is all that matters and it is a free for all like a 100 acre farm field full of unsupervised toddlers. It's "Lord of the Flies" time.
Discouraged and disappointed in the middle of nowhere.
Truer words have not been spoken. Thank you so much for all the years of your time and energy that you have put into the game. Niantic did not deserve you. I am honored to have met you and worked with you, and wish you all the best going forward. This just makes me so sad. Much love to you.
I can’t say I’m surprised. Especially since around here (I’m local to pinesinger) the game has been pretty dead for a long time, for a variety of reasons.
Thanks for all the work.
Suprised the moderators haven't deleted this thread. Censoring comms and this forum every minute of every day.
@pinesinger thank you for everything you have done for the player community, and for your honest feedback.
Thank you for all your work!
"Love it or leave it"
Thank you for the time you’ve put into the game. I wish that Niantic would listen to concerns that have been expressed, by you and by others.
Thank you for all your hard work. Hopefully things go great for you here on out!
You were one of the first I met in Boston... Oh, Hippo Spout lol, and one of the first I look for at events. Not just because we have become friends over the years, but because you have your fingers on the pulse of the live events and I know you'll point me in the right direction. Thank you. Ingress is amazing as it has brought all of us together - and in doing so has lived on because of those bonds.
I'm sure your wisdom will be missed here...
"Niantic does not value Ingress enough to understand it".
You said what some of us have been feeling all these while. Thank you for your hard work, agent.
@pinesinger Thank you for everything that you've done for this game. Some of the feedback that we've gotten from players is the lack of transparency. As a developer, I dont regularly interact with the vanguards and dont normally reach out on these kinds of issues, but I really do respect all the work that you all put in and so I wanted to provide perhaps a little perspective that might not normally be visible.
*As a caveat, this is my own perspective from what I've seen as a member of this team and not necessarily the teams perspective. As with any sufficiently large project, there are bound to be many different perspectives which vary. *
The one thing I can say for the team is that we know that there are plenty of issues with Ingress. I began to see this when the redacted client which was on a codebase which literally lost support for new versions of apple phones. This essentially forced us to create a new client. Building it took much longer than we had initially planned. So much longer, in fact, that iOS support for the redacted client was already gone. We had a few engineers pull together some unexpected miracles to put together a build which would work on newer versions, but it was a very fragile system. Prime, at alpha had lots of issues. I tried playing with it at an anomaly where I've told many of you that it wasnt at anywhere near an acceptable level of quality. I couldnt even play with it for more than three minutes without it crashing! We went to work hard on decreasing bugs, upping battery life, improving the UI (remember how noisy the original map was?), and improving latency / connection issues. While all of this is happening, our server costs have been through the roof.
We need to have a sustainable game. We didnt want to drive that sustainability through primarily focusing on monetizing players, so we instead focus on reducing server costs. Even with all of the effort on reducing server costs, the servers and infrastructure still cost money; we cannot make the game sustainable without the aid of the players; we have to add some monetized features. Hopefully, we can do this in a way that lets players play without making payment a requirement to have fun or enjoy the game.
With the client team focused on making Prime worthy of our players and the server team focused on getting to sustainability, we've spent quite a large effort just getting back to a point where we can move forward with the game, but the game is essentially the same as it was before we started. Players knew this; we knew this. In order to address this, we recruited Brian, who is one of the original Ingress players from Google. As a team, we went to the Sacramento anomaly. After the event I asked Brian what he thought. One thing in particular seemed to REALLY bother him: we expect too much of players. Players should be able to go to events and play; not worry about permits, police, and the million and a half other things that you all do in order to make our events so great. You should simply show up, have fun and PLAY. As pinesinger said, we should NOT be relying on unpaid labor of players to make this game great. (Again, as far as I understand it) this is the main reason why we scaled down the number of events this year. We, the Ingress team, need to take that work off of the players and learn to do it ourselves. But again, running events costs money. The only way of making this sustainable without asking for volunteer labor is to have paid admissions.
Again, I dont believe that we're doing all of this perfectly. There is plenty of room to improve. But hopefully, you'll see that as we progress through the year, that we do improve at it and make each event better than the last. At these events, one thing that I've made sure that I spend a lot of time doing is talking to players. Our community and player base is what makes this game what it is today. I've talked to many players face to face about what they think needs to be done. A lot of players start talking about getting new players back into the game. After some discussion though, these players admit that while they have been playing for many years are getting bored of the gameplay.
Gameplay has been the same as it was for quite a while. Again, this is my own view, but part of what this means is that we need to make changes. The game cannot be what it was. We need new gameplay to re-excite all of our players; to recapture that original essence, but in a new way. As such, we are working on some things which we hope will engage all players. Part of the reason we dont really talk about this is because we dont want to set expectations about what it is, or will be, because as we work on it, we are changing it to constantly improve it and would feel bad if what we end up with is very different than what we had originally told you about.
The point of all of this is that the really important thing here is all of you: our community. We all deeply care about this game and making it the best it can be. I know that it can be hard to see that sometimes from the outside because we are very rarely transparent about why we do the things we do, and so I hope this gives you some insight to at least the perspective that I have had. Again, thank you so very much for all of the hard work that you and the entire community has put into making this game what it is and I look forward to working with all of you to help fix all of these issues.....speaking of which, noones seen any ghosting on Intel since a few hours ago, right? *crosses fingers*