As someone that was active in community in other games (competitive TF2) I can understand how exhausting and infuriating can be when you invest your time, sweat and blood into this game and want only the best for the community and the game yet the company doesn't listen to its users and focuses solely on cash grabbing techniques.
All I can say is a really BIG THANK YOU for making the game a lot better for many of us.
We shall see what the future will be for this game, I just hope it's not too late and even though we might not get back to 2013-2017 glory I still hope something awesome will come of it.
I weathered the rampant cheating (multiaccounting that I reported dozens of times) in my small town for years. It was very disheartening; so much so that I stopped playing locally. But, I kept playing anyway. When I heard about Prime, I was excited. My friends and I were hoping for some new innovations, rules, items, power-ups, and any other cool ideas that just the few of us had thought up. What we got was a rehash and a bunch of clunk. It made me think that Niantic was a bunch of noncreative posers who got lucky when they stumbled onto this ultra-original game. So, from this thread, I realize I was correct in my assessment. I will NEVER play prime except for maybe getting upv's and as for giving them any real money, hell no.
An ominous sign. Rebuilding the community is going to be key to the game's future, I think - hopefully that will be reflected in future events (instead of the focus on individual-level play and removing POCs from the loop, which appears from the outside to be the current trend).
So many of the comments here correspond to my own experiences. Quite a few high level agents from both factions have either quit entirely or else minimized their participation since Prime came into play. The obvious cheaters have gone unpunished - I'm located near one of the Brokers Guild founders who was caught using 3 devices at once and nothing happened to him. The constant need to reload and glitches make Prime difficult to play. I can see why a Vanguard would quit.
Thank you for your feedback and all the best for the future.
There where days, about 2 years ago when my local community players where eager to pull in players and teach them the game. New players would join weekly, sometimes daily and we had a busy and active playerbase. Portal ownership never lasted any longer than an hour and team meetups would be weekly.
Today, my local area is dead. Nobody plays and there hasn't been any new players for months. The enthusiasm has died, so did the magic, the pride and the sentimental aspects in this game that we stood for. The last anomaly we had was 3 years ago and the only meet ups we look forward to is FS.
If anything, I'm super grateful for the bonds of friendship I have made in this game, friendships that surpassed ingame activities. I'm also grateful for the friendships that didn't- they taught me many life lessons.
But ingress has died. I've eventually accepted that. I'd really love to see the playerbase flourish and become what it once was but you are correct; there is no more hope for Niantic, they have failed their playerbase far too many times to have any confidence and hope in them.
The fact that Niantic has not even acknowledged that two hand picked "Ingress player advocates" have quit speaks volumes about their communication ability. This is the official community forum, right?
Like not even a generic "Thanks for all your time and effort on behalf of the community"
I have remained baffled how a company with so many flaws managed to make a game with such elegant and interesting underlying game play.
I had a fond memory tonight down in NYC as I walked past the after party bar from the first Cassandra event. There was free swag, free drinks, and much hands on of Niantic. Everyone had a great time and the race for portal submissions and eventually missions began. From our hard work and dedication portals became pokestops and wizard somethings. The number of agents decreases daily.
Thank you to the hard working vanguard volunteers, I feel your sadness
It's going to take more than that, Brian... I don't think you fully grasp the severity of the situation.
Your most devoted players are feeling abandoned and jumping ship, you don't have a community manager in place, and this is starting to generate negative media coverage that will spill over onto the PoGo cash cow.
Thank you for doing your part to help make Ingress a better game. I can only hope that Niantic considers and responds to concerns that have been expressed in light of recent changes.
my biggest issue is how Niantic has decided to pay wall almost every single new feature they have add in the last year or so. It seems that the biggest complaint isn't that people aren't willing to pay money for the games it is the ramp up of the cost to even play the games. A lot of people are scaling back purchases or quitting the games due to perceived value in the games disappearing when to even actually enjoy the games is $5 here $5 there left and right. The monitization ramp up is ruining the games and shrinking the playerbase. Niantic not adding substantial content to ingress in years and then doubling the price in the shop for items along with attempting to charge $15 for community organized anomalies has been doing nothing but gutting the player base who is just moving on to other games or doing something else with their life. The formula of doing the same thing over and over again is causing fatigue with players.
Ingress' problem is that the portals were the content, as were the players; and if the playerbase dropped, like any other MMO it got problematic. Spoofer and backpacks never got resolved to anyone's satisfaction either which gutted the high end fielders playerbase (the casuals probably weren't as affected). And with no endless pokedex of things to catch, they ran out of steam after hitting Level 8, or level 10, or level 12.
From an ingress-first perspective not sure how "new content" will affect me, and I'm not sure if pogoers will suddenly decide to stay just because there are now Level 16 resonators or media to catch from the ground randomly to add to a pokedex
Don't get me wrong, Andrew Krug was extremely valuable as a go to person for issues and player advocacy. Kudos to him.
However, he was extremely hamstrung in what he could or couldn't comment on.
This led to player resentment of Niantic. (Most of the hardcore player base in my experience are extremely intelligent people and know when they are being fed a line).
With the job advertised for a new Community Manager I really hope this person is allowed by Niantic to comment negatively as well as positively on decisions by Niantic, or at least speak more openly.
Also, remember there is still a player base out there that just play the game, they don't read forums, Reddit etc, they just play.
"Work with the Product Management team to conduct research that offers insights into the attributes and needs of both existing and potential users. Help identify product gaps where Niantic could better satisfy end users and partners."
Sounds like some community manager type functions.
Please note, however, that this position is primarily about marketing. Yes, there is some contact with the community, but I can't see anything in that job description that looks anything like a real community manager. IMO, a company that values its player community is going to have a position dedicated to truly interacting with them in a meaningful way, not just as product research.
Comments
As someone that was active in community in other games (competitive TF2) I can understand how exhausting and infuriating can be when you invest your time, sweat and blood into this game and want only the best for the community and the game yet the company doesn't listen to its users and focuses solely on cash grabbing techniques.
All I can say is a really BIG THANK YOU for making the game a lot better for many of us.
We shall see what the future will be for this game, I just hope it's not too late and even though we might not get back to 2013-2017 glory I still hope something awesome will come of it.
Thank you for everything you have done for this game.
#byefelicia
I weathered the rampant cheating (multiaccounting that I reported dozens of times) in my small town for years. It was very disheartening; so much so that I stopped playing locally. But, I kept playing anyway. When I heard about Prime, I was excited. My friends and I were hoping for some new innovations, rules, items, power-ups, and any other cool ideas that just the few of us had thought up. What we got was a rehash and a bunch of clunk. It made me think that Niantic was a bunch of noncreative posers who got lucky when they stumbled onto this ultra-original game. So, from this thread, I realize I was correct in my assessment. I will NEVER play prime except for maybe getting upv's and as for giving them any real money, hell no.
I still remember a flag with the great inscription that was created for Umbra anomaly in Dresden. So... Once again... Thank you Niantic for nothing...
An ominous sign. Rebuilding the community is going to be key to the game's future, I think - hopefully that will be reflected in future events (instead of the focus on individual-level play and removing POCs from the loop, which appears from the outside to be the current trend).
So many of the comments here correspond to my own experiences. Quite a few high level agents from both factions have either quit entirely or else minimized their participation since Prime came into play. The obvious cheaters have gone unpunished - I'm located near one of the Brokers Guild founders who was caught using 3 devices at once and nothing happened to him. The constant need to reload and glitches make Prime difficult to play. I can see why a Vanguard would quit.
Thank you for your feedback and all the best for the future.
There where days, about 2 years ago when my local community players where eager to pull in players and teach them the game. New players would join weekly, sometimes daily and we had a busy and active playerbase. Portal ownership never lasted any longer than an hour and team meetups would be weekly.
Today, my local area is dead. Nobody plays and there hasn't been any new players for months. The enthusiasm has died, so did the magic, the pride and the sentimental aspects in this game that we stood for. The last anomaly we had was 3 years ago and the only meet ups we look forward to is FS.
If anything, I'm super grateful for the bonds of friendship I have made in this game, friendships that surpassed ingame activities. I'm also grateful for the friendships that didn't- they taught me many life lessons.
But ingress has died. I've eventually accepted that. I'd really love to see the playerbase flourish and become what it once was but you are correct; there is no more hope for Niantic, they have failed their playerbase far too many times to have any confidence and hope in them.
The fact that Niantic has not even acknowledged that two hand picked "Ingress player advocates" have quit speaks volumes about their communication ability. This is the official community forum, right?
Like not even a generic "Thanks for all your time and effort on behalf of the community"
I have remained baffled how a company with so many flaws managed to make a game with such elegant and interesting underlying game play.
Thank you for your work as a vanguard
I had a fond memory tonight down in NYC as I walked past the after party bar from the first Cassandra event. There was free swag, free drinks, and much hands on of Niantic. Everyone had a great time and the race for portal submissions and eventually missions began. From our hard work and dedication portals became pokestops and wizard somethings. The number of agents decreases daily.
Thank you to the hard working vanguard volunteers, I feel your sadness
@MM207A Thank you for your honest feedback, and for being an advocate for the player community.
Thankyou, it was a privilege to directly witness you support our shardnanigans from almost literally the opposite side of the planet. 🐸💚
It's going to take more than that, Brian... I don't think you fully grasp the severity of the situation.
Your most devoted players are feeling abandoned and jumping ship, you don't have a community manager in place, and this is starting to generate negative media coverage that will spill over onto the PoGo cash cow.
Do something.
thank you for all your work!
Thank you for doing your part to help make Ingress a better game. I can only hope that Niantic considers and responds to concerns that have been expressed in light of recent changes.
I wonder when they take away fields and make it a game about catching shaper artifacts in the field to fill a pokedex/wizard registry
Noooo, not another collection game!
Thank you for being a Vanguard.
I gave up playing both HPWU and Ingress because of how the game play and organization seems to be changing in Ingress.
I don't want to give Niantic money for HPWU if they wont support Ingress, much to the dismay of my kids who really liked spending my money haha.
my biggest issue is how Niantic has decided to pay wall almost every single new feature they have add in the last year or so. It seems that the biggest complaint isn't that people aren't willing to pay money for the games it is the ramp up of the cost to even play the games. A lot of people are scaling back purchases or quitting the games due to perceived value in the games disappearing when to even actually enjoy the games is $5 here $5 there left and right. The monitization ramp up is ruining the games and shrinking the playerbase. Niantic not adding substantial content to ingress in years and then doubling the price in the shop for items along with attempting to charge $15 for community organized anomalies has been doing nothing but gutting the player base who is just moving on to other games or doing something else with their life. The formula of doing the same thing over and over again is causing fatigue with players.
Ingress' problem is that the portals were the content, as were the players; and if the playerbase dropped, like any other MMO it got problematic. Spoofer and backpacks never got resolved to anyone's satisfaction either which gutted the high end fielders playerbase (the casuals probably weren't as affected). And with no endless pokedex of things to catch, they ran out of steam after hitting Level 8, or level 10, or level 12.
From an ingress-first perspective not sure how "new content" will affect me, and I'm not sure if pogoers will suddenly decide to stay just because there are now Level 16 resonators or media to catch from the ground randomly to add to a pokedex
Thanks for the hard work these past few years.
Thank you for writing this.
You are so right.
Ingress started going down hill when Niantic was spun off from Google.
It was slow at first but has been accelerating more recently.
It is clear that Niantic has totally lost touch with the players. The departure of Andrew was the last straw really.
Don't get me wrong, Andrew Krug was extremely valuable as a go to person for issues and player advocacy. Kudos to him.
However, he was extremely hamstrung in what he could or couldn't comment on.
This led to player resentment of Niantic. (Most of the hardcore player base in my experience are extremely intelligent people and know when they are being fed a line).
With the job advertised for a new Community Manager I really hope this person is allowed by Niantic to comment negatively as well as positively on decisions by Niantic, or at least speak more openly.
Also, remember there is still a player base out there that just play the game, they don't read forums, Reddit etc, they just play.
@NianticBrian
Where do you see a community manager position advertised?
there is no community manager job post out... doubt it ever will be,
https://nianticlabs.com/jobs/
Was this one.
"Work with the Product Management team to conduct research that offers insights into the attributes and needs of both existing and potential users. Help identify product gaps where Niantic could better satisfy end users and partners."
Sounds like some community manager type functions.
Please note, however, that this position is primarily about marketing. Yes, there is some contact with the community, but I can't see anything in that job description that looks anything like a real community manager. IMO, a company that values its player community is going to have a position dedicated to truly interacting with them in a meaningful way, not just as product research.
@NianticBrian was not part of Niantic when the Vanguard program was implemented. He probably can barely even speak about the extent of the program.
Brian is working under a different position than Andrew did. @RedSoloCup was in more direct communication with the Vanguards.
Finally, good riddance.