The base, revenue, and engagement. Or lack thereof.
For as long as I've been playing this game, it feels like Niantic are not really paying attention. Not really listening. Sure, we get answers to a lot of questions, but how often is it that either our suggestions seemingly wind up in a file cabinet, or that when something is done, it's just not effective or sustainable.
Here's the deal: this game is stagnating, at best. Lore isn't driving new players, media isn't either. There's no significant income, apparently, and there's no telling how many of us have made valid suggestions as to what we'd happily pay for. We get it, the game isn't the cash cow. It's not the profit center. Maybe it wasn't meant to be, but it can't just operate at a loss forever. But without advertising, without engagement, without something besides "hey players, go bring us more players" this is going nowhere fast. Lots of hints about that marketable ideas are in the pipe, but meanwhile we have literally been clamoring for YEARS for merch, swag, items, and even virtual goods. We're not asking for game-breakers or all-out pay-to-win. And let's face it, anything you sell is going to tick someone off, so let's not even sweat that point right now. Without any indication of what we can expect to throw money at, while constantly hearing "we can't give you what you want if we aren't making any money" it becomes increasingly frustrating. Lots of ideas are on the table. We keep repeating, and while not every idea is valid or realistic, surely something can be gleaned from it all. We're not asking for solid yes/no every time, but some breadcrumbs, some manner of "hey, here's a few things we like that you suggested , got any input" would be great.
Niantic, you want to make a game that will be enjoyed and sustain itself through various revenue sources. you're a business, you're in it to make money. We're here because you offered a fun way to explore and learn while engaging and meeting new people, making life a grand adventure. You want to make money, we want to have fun, and we can make it all happen, but there's got to be a way to bridge that gap without all the secrets, barking in the dark, and hoping something changes. Help us help you. Give us something besides "we're trying things" "we're working on it" or "we need to make money before X can happen". Does the dynamic, the meta, need to change? Perhaps. Probably. But we need to work TOGETHER.
Comments
For sure community and the Ingress team in Niantic must work together.I agree with your thoughts and i would like to add one or two of mine.
A)The Forum grows day by day and new discussions are initiated. But it is really difficult for someone not to create a duplicate ( or worse ) of the same issue or idea. Maybe the admins must find a way to summarize things and merge somehow similar issues or ideas.For example ideas to monetize.It is not easy for a user to read all suggestions and not create another same discussion by mistake.Also things can be quantified easier when summarized and duplicates suggestions removed. I will propably suggest that accordingly
B) Teams of forum members can be formatted and collaborate with ingress developer team and @NianticBrian in brainstoming sessions about ingress. Preparation for those sessions can be made based on forum discussions and posts.Sessions about issues that seems to be of high priority for community and the officials also.
We all want Ingress to thrive and grow its playerbase.So as you suggest we have to work together.We can do it for Ingress.
And in my opinion admins do not maintain contact with the community. When asked to translate training into Russian (which is spoken by more than half a billion people), there was no reaction at all. There was not even a small response indicating that the request of many players was heard.
Since I apparently can't edit my own post anymore, tagging @NianticBrian and @NianticCasey in hopes they are watching/listening. Here's to not getting lost in the noise!
It occurred to me that at this point, Niantic's Ingress team is acting like a Dungeon Master who has a Really. Cool. Plan!(tm) with a HUGE backstory that he thought of and planned out in the bathtub last night And if you'd all just SHUT UP AND LET HIM TALK you'd figure out how absolutely awesome this plan was!
Except none of the players are falling for it. They are all looking at each other, sideways, and trying to tell the guy that it sucks, that the DM going on and on about the backstory of the hot blonde elf isn't helping, and by the way -- we're out of Mountain Dew and Jerry is hoarding the Doritos again and CAN'T WE JUST PLAY THE GAME!?? Oh, look at the time, I have to leave......
As the post says above, we get it -- you need to make money. So, a suggestion? Drop the lore. Drop paying actors and actresses to portray characters -- nobody cares. Drop the storylines. Drop the videos/media. Surely that costs a buttload and I cannot imaging that the return is worth the investment. At this point the story is so damned convoluted that it's merely a distraction -- not a core element. I don't know a single player who honestly lives and dies by it.
Pour that money into community, team building, game fixes, game enhancement. Go ahead and work to pay people instead to glean the best ideas from your community, Vanguards, and leaders. Rank them, prioritize them, put them into action. Be completely transparent about it, too! Show the plan! Say to the community: "We will be doing X, then Y, and then Z. We need to do A to make money now, B to possibly make money later, and C is an option too." Listen to the feedback. Glean the good ideas. Engage with people to become an active, open part of it. TRUST US! Why won't you trust us??
I drew people into this game after it drew me in because it was like nothing else, and the people likewise. You can -- and should -- push to make it this again. Put the money and resources where it counts and I guarantee this will be successful. Your community wants it to be.
So, a suggestion? Drop the lore. Drop paying actors and actresses to portray characters -- nobody cares. Drop the storylines. Drop the videos/media. Surely that costs a buttload and I cannot imaging that the return is worth the investment. At this point the story is so damned convoluted that it's merely a distraction -- not a core element
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Maybe not drop the lore. But certainly, don't spend any money on it. Stop spending on videos. 99% of media I never open.
Grab that list of player suggestions that MUST exist, (surely?!) and go through it. Cross out anything that's not possible/Niantic will never do.
Resubmit it to the players for voting on ideas.
The Vanguard program, whilst a good idea, was never transparent enough for the player base. They were bound by NDAs and too scared to talk about anything. We have no idea what feedback is going to/fro from Niantic. Is it lots, none, in between? Do ideas get listened to?
All we see is silence, sudden strange decisions and Vanguards deciding to quit. Oh and constant mistakes, audio on frackers wrong, you have ONE anomaly announced and the date was gotten wrong... (for the last two recent examples). I mean really?
The scanner app itself, is MUCH MUCH better. This seems to be a null issue now at least.
If Niantic wants the community outside Essex to engage with the story, they need to find a way to integrate it into the scanner itself. At least enough so that players can understand some of the terms being thrown around. I was half through typing up an explanation of the names of the new scanner avatars when I realized it read like a Scientology book does to the uninitiated.
I could not disagree more on dropping the Lore - without the Lore, the game is a dull triangle making festival (at least for some of us). I am not thrilled with the Lore reboot, and IMHO the original writing/etc. was generally of higher quality; of late there has been more camp than is apt, and the simple and effective "humans versus aliens" battle lines has been too badly blurred. But still, some of us aren't going to play this game if we don't get to be fighting for humanity (in whichever way, depending on faction). I would further note that there are communities that are very into the decoding scene and such, and taking that away would harm a whole group of players who are very dedicated to Ingress.
The bottom line is that Ingress is many things to many people, and that's one of the things that keeps it alive: if you make it a monoculture, it will collapse at the next downturn. But I do think that the core glue that holds everything together is the community of high-dedication agents (whence folks like POCs and Vanguards are drawn), and that has to be sustained, cultivated, and expanded if the game is to survive. Doing other things to (on the one hand) bring in new players and (on the other) pay the bills is necessary, but it's a good idea not to try to **** out things that have long-term communities attached to them. Once they're gone, you'll never get them back.
Decoding and lore is basically another game. Most agents IMHO care not for it beyond the core basics (Defend humanity against poorly understood alien tech vs embracing the new gift from the aliens).
I followed lore for a while, and then it just got too crazy and difficult to follow. So I reverted to the basics, I'm happy making and killing triangles and seeing new places. I realise that for a core group, the lore is very important and I do like the decode challenges being part of the game.
Perhaps compromise and reduce spend on vids whilst keeping the core going? Bring back investigate ingress, that was great.
What is Essex?
(I'm working on the assumption that you we're not talking about an English county north east of London here)
As a relatively new player, I've found Lore both utterly incomprehensible and completely irrelevant. I've tried watching a few media files, and it just feels like a really low budget sci-fi movie has been chopped up into a thousand pieces, and those pieces have been scattered around the net at random, with no way for me to know what order they should be viewed in. After several incredibly frustrating hours I came to the same conclusion that many others have - if you're unfortunate enough to get a media file, the best thing to do with it is recycle without opening it.
If Niantic wants to grow the player base, they should drop the Lore, or shift it out of the game and onto it's own funding model (Patreon perhaps?). It's currently really offputting to new players.
Operation Essex, a group of people who follow the story (and occasionally get used to help it unfold).
Essex is a group started by Niantic as a place to investigate the storyline alongside their character edgar allen wright. Its where people interested in the lore and figuring it out come together to put storyline pieces together, sharing theories, and at the moment trying to figure out what nemesis's true goals are etc. It was created years ago on gplus, turned into a discussion group on hangouts from that, and is now a tg chat sync'd with hangouts. We still occasionally have character and player interactions like with the tesselation drops. Stuart, a niantic character, comes in and gives us some clues from time to time.
I feel like I tripped someone's Google Alert...
casual players dont care for lore thats a fact, i agree that dropping that would be better imo and listen to ideas what all vanguards bring up to improve the game because its needed.
Niantic needed Ingress for a long time. They needed us players to create their database of points of interest. Now that pokemon players can make them too means they have even less of a reason for keeping Ingress around. The player base isn't what it use to be. It's a dying game. I'm really surprised it's lasted this long. But I really cannot see it going much longer. They had their day but it will never be what it use to be. With the old players gone it's not the same game. Now it's just used as a distraction while players are driving. Lore doesn't make up for the lack of interest in the game. It feels like Niantic doesn't care and we see it.
Well, some of us oldies still do big ops and continue the good fight. It's quieter, but still happens.
Anyone want 100's of remote keys I'm charging :)
I am a casual player who cares about the in-game/youtube lore.
Though these new actors are really, really, bad at acting.
So much cringe.
But the story isn't cohesive anymore
Some people like the lore and videos, some don't. I ignored lore for 2 years but got into it with dunraven.
Now that dunraven is done, you'd be surprised how little those videos cost to produce (marginal cost per 30 min video). Non-union actors cold reading scripts by themselves or maybe against one other actor for 30 mins (+60 mins prep time, at least). Sets are already made (and taking up space) and production equipment/cameras are already bought or are outsourced. Writers and camera operation are probably Niantic staff, so you're paying maybe two people two hours each for their time per 30 minute video. Editing time and minimal vfx might take one person two hours per 30 min video. Maybe an additional hour or two for release, distribution, and communicating with community. So 6-7 hours for production+distribution, 1-2 hours for actors per 30 minute video, which should come in around one to three thousand dollars. The shorter tethered hand ones are probably half that.
Compared to the cost of hiring more developers or any kind of meaningful marketing campaign, these videos are pretty effective at keeping players engaged and giving a starting point for players that are interested in lore stuff, IMO. Probably cheaper and more effective at reaching broader player basethan flying actors out for anomalies.
I'd say like 95% of the players I know don't follow the lore at all or very little of it. It's too confusing and convoluted, poorly delivered and just not all that interesting most of the time.
Even the people I know who are in Operation Essex agree.
Totally agree.
The biggest problem now is the lack of new players. Prime drove a lot of older players away and they're not comming back. Prime is better now, but it's too late. If we don't manage to get a lot of new active players I think it will soon be over. Play used to be very active in my city, even just one year ago and now there is only a handful of active players and they also play less, because without other players it's no fun. It's a downward spiral at the moment.
Niantic should use Ingress as an R&D project for their other games if they want to get something out of this in the future, I don't think it's ever gonna be very profitable and this is a way to make it valuable to them. Use Ingress to try out new features/technologies.
I started 4 years ago and the game was dead! The score screen used to have 25 players from both sides and now it's full both sides. I don't believe the game is dieing.
The problem with the lore is that they are a external fact. You need to leave the game to see it. This should be incorporated inside the game, like the sos task force of wizards unite, the classic way of games, with heads poping up telling stories, and archives inside the game. Ingress don't even have a news/notifications backlog as the others 2 Niantic games already have. There's probably a lot of people who are missing the current event because they not engaged with this website or local telegram groups. The didact event pop up was show only once and it's gone.
With respect to player numbers, was going to say something similar. I started at a similar time to yourself and overall I'd say there was more life locally now than there was back then. Sure, some of the older players have departed for whatever reason, but we've also had a load of new players on both teams. That's not to say more players wouldn't be nice, but it's a very long way from dying.
i don't think the game is dying, plenty of people are playing. it's the community that seems to be dying. most of the players in my area have no interest in engaging with the community. they don't respond to COMM messages, they don't want to join chats, they aren't interested in team fielding ops, they just want to play the game alone. no real strategy being employed, just random capturing and linking, more focused on individual stats.
strategic, team play is suffering but Niantic can't really do anything about that
Niantic is not exactly encouraging strategic teamplay at the moment. Only one anomaly this year, events that are more and more based on XF and easy medals, more and more pay-to-win, it all encourages individual play over teamplay.
yeah and this sadly will just make more players quit, without cool anomalies to look forward too and battle with your team, this game is like any other solo game, u might aswell play pogo or harry potter lol.. dont see how they can go profit without all anomalies unless they go pay 2 win, buy res 8 and xmp 8 in the shop... otherwise idk how make game profit with so little active players now....
Yeah, how about looking into the only leave cause we can fix?
There are plenty of players who left or are about to leave the game because of other players and so far I've seen little effort from playerbase side to fix that :)