Tbh, there's a reason for the 3* rating and It's a well deserved one. Every "update" has been a slower and bigger disappointment. And clearly NIA doesn't seem to care much about 3* rating. In my experience(especially past few weeks, i would give it 2* top)
p.s; NIA stop being so damn stingy when it comes to Ingress. Idk how much you make of the game, but if do less, that's on you. You did not do anything creative about that. You just expect people to buy that insanely expensive store items, not gonna happen.
It's about right. 4- for strategy 2-3 for tech. To get to 4 on that front spoof, multiproofing and frequent reset has to be minimized or only occasionally happening. Until Dec. 2019 the joke in my area was you'd be only able to play 45 minutes out of every hour because of freezes, puntmonster kicking you out, or other things that force a reload.
I regularly see spoofers who regularly fly even around the city. Here and there fake portals appear, and if there is an advantage in the number of players of one faction, then such portals cannot be deleted. Portals are often out of place. Some players have modified versions of scanners with which aegis shields are removed in 1-2 seconds and so on. Now tell me why this game put 5 stars in the playmarket?
Updates do not bring anything new to the game in terms of gameplay. And this is from the very beginning of the launch of prime. Custom cursors and a subject to increase experience do not count; they have little effect on gameplay. Once again I ask for what this game to put 5 or not, 3 stars?
When I look at the development of Pokemon Go or Harry Potter, I’m just offended by our game where only a few minor corrections are added per month + several models for cursors that a professional designer can do in half an hour of work.
You also need to take into consideration that more significant changes are still being developed, as well as bug fixing, etc. The visible stuff like cursors etc that you see added are indeed not that resource intensive, which makes them able to promote those sooner than other fixes/addons that require more work.
I remember Pokemon Go being riddled with bugs and poor design decisions for well over a year before getting back on track. It took me until the weather update to stop getting continuous crashes, connection errors, and timeouts. Raids were still hit-and-miss when I stopped playing a year ago, with random lockouts, rubber banding health, and the raid ending before time was up being common issues that went unaddressed for years.
I've come to expect new Niantic products to be dumpster fires for a year and a half before things get to a good state, and Prime is shaping up to be no exception. The upside is that we are starting to see new features showing up in teardowns, so that initial "teething period" may be almost over.
Wizards Unite is developed by a different studio and the difference in polish was noticeable from the beginning.
My dear interlocutor, we all see the result. And we can compare the result of ingress and the results in games about Pokemon and Harry Potter.
I will give you an example from my recent conversation with a newcomer agent. He asked me why the game looks so awful? links are still sometimes displayed even on top devices in the form of dashed lines, texture on the margins as from the first three-dimensional games of the early 2000s. The earth has no textures, the sky has no textures, emptiness around!
Why is the game from the company that released the great Pokémon go more like a beta version of a program written by students for their thesis?
I bought keylockers, bought an avatar, supported the company. And I have the right to say that this is not normal.
I am ready to pay for a game that looks modern and constantly gets new features. Here is an example of what a map might look like. Not darkness around and everywhere, but a really nice-looking map.
You can make the same map of the area in dark colors, There is no difference. But compare the screenshot from ingress and this game. Which of the games is more like a beta version made by two students on an old computer for their thesis work? Waiting for your honest reply.
I know it's no excuse, it can till be improved, just not as much detailed as this.
About the discussion, I would that if you're happy with the game overall, give it a 4, just to help increasing it's rating. Because if it get too low it's far easier to Niantic to just drop it instead of trying to make every hater happy. They clearly don't need Ingress specifically to make money.
Every "update" has been a slower and bigger disappointment.
No it hasn't. Don't be silly.
I've played Prime more or less full-time since general release (I waited maybe a week for Redacted to come out, then switched. I had to go back to Redacted to finish a task on a couple of occasions, and I didn't dare use Prime at the Darsana Prime anomaly). So I know a thing or two about it.
It was buggy as all heck when it first came out, and there were missing features galore. A good many of the updates since then have contained much wanted fixes and were not disappointing at all. My perception as to whether the app is slow or not may be coloured by the fact that I bought a new phone in December, but it pretty much runs beautifully these days, and even before I switched, was running acceptably on my very old Samsung S5. I am pretty sure that updates are not slowing it down.
Don't get me wrong - there are still annoying bugs, and some of the updates have been disappointing in that they didn't fix much (Portal keys in alphabetical order, anyone?). But:
Ingress Prime now is a million miles better than it was at first release
A number of the updates have been very welcome and fixed annoying bugs.
It's not true to say that every update has been a disappointment. Far from it.
The game still has phantom fields, sometimes links are displayed dotted even on top devices. What kind of improvement can we talk about? Here is an example for you. The portal is inside the field that is not displayed. Below in broken Russian is written "the portal is inside the existing."
Existing what? There is no normal translation into the language spoken by a third of the world.
And to all the requests of the community, in particular about the translation into Russian, the niantic does not give a damn about it.
Text for translation in training no more than 5 pages in small print. The menu and gameplay are even smaller. The game has a community with trusted Russian agents. Why in this situation do we have a game that is less than half translated? Since the game appeared in the training process, only one picture has been translated into Russian.
And that is not fully translated.
Once again I ask, does such a translation quality deserve 5 stars?
@Perringaiden Your point about revenue streams is well-taken, but to be fair that is on Niantic not the players. It's also a chicken-and-egg problem. Ingress will require investment in order to gain new players, bring old ones back, and have a solid source of revenue. I spew as much money at it as I reasonably can since I want the game to stick around, but the only things in the game that are worth my purchases are frackers and the occasional beacon. The pandemic has made frackers pretty useless right now, and I suspect that overall fracker revenue went down after they capriciously doubled the price a while ago.
As for the three-star rating, Niantic alienated a fair number of players by basically ignoring Ingress for a couple of years while they produced Prime, and then launching Prime in a hamfisted way. I'm still waiting for the promised feature parity, though it's more of a wistful waiting rather than doing so in a way that makes me think I will ever get it. I love Niantic and especially Ingress and I want both to be successful, but if I evaluate the situation dispassionately something becomes very clear to me. Niantic's great weakness is that they don't make the customer (player) experience a very high priority. I work in a company where asking, "What is the customer experience/impact?" is baked into the corporate DNA. It's really part of every decision we make.
A big chunk of Ingress's low rating is that there was a giant movement to one-star the app in stores after Redacted went away. I believe @NianticBrian has acknowledged that in this forum at some point. I wasn't a part of that movement, but I hope Niantic can understand that it comes from a place of significant customer frustration and work to re-earn the trust of its players though my gut says they think it's players being jerks.
I feel like there's another chicken-and-egg problem, though. It smells to me like Niantic is going to shut Ingress down unless they can make it at least revenue-neutral, but they have to invest in the game and re-earn the loyalty of its players in order to do that. I sincerely hope that they can do so, but I'm not sure the corporate culture is up to that task. I desperately hope I'm wrong.
Niantic definitely failed to build and release Prime appropriately. But a large chunk of those 3* reviews are not rating the current product, they're rating Prime in October 2018 and will never change that review. I've actually had to remind people in chats who say "Yeah Prime's pretty capable now" to check whether they 1*'d the game back then. Many have never thought about it again even though they're now enjoying Prime.
Without raising that review score back up, Ingress will never be suggested to new players by the AppStore or Play Store. Which is going to continue a downward spiral into obscurity.
Basically, if you like Ingress, it's worth more than a 1 star now. There needs to be a way to reset a product's score so that it's rated on the current product, not a mistake from two years ago.
And as for revenue, they're slowly working on it, but even at its height, Ingress never had the numbers of PoGo or Wizards. If everyone playing Ingress put $10 a year in, it would still pale in comparison to $1 from every PoGo player a year. You can't treat games identically if they aren't paid for identically.
That's true. Ingress is a different game than PoGo/HPWU in that those two are about personal stats/gain, and Ingress is about making changes to the playing field. Because of that, monetizing Ingress requires more care so that they don't make it pay-to-win. It can certainly be done thoughtfully and carefully, but the design pattern will be different from the other two games.
Still, Niantic threw away a lot of goodwill and loyalty with the shift to prime. They are going to have to re-earn player trust and delight. "It doesn't suck as much as it used to" isn't going to inspire people to up their rating, or even to play again. I can't find the old post where (I think) Brian was talking about the low rating, but I came away from it with the impression that Niantic blamed players for the rating rather than looking internally to understand why so many people were unhappy. My memory may be faulty on that, though.
I'd rate Ingress 1* for should this be a wayspot, 4* for historical or cultural significance and visually unique, 5* for safe access and location accuracy.
Well i know tons of players that quit shortly after prime came out, many said "im not buying new phone to play ingress prime"... those havent come back still after 1* rating..... even today it has issues with ghost links etc... but overall its alot better then back then sure... but the damage has already been done going by ratings :/ not sure how they can fix it? Now with the corona virus worldwide all fun events anomalies etc are put on hold.. that also will affect ingress since all those events made ingress special....
what about they send an e-mail or something to all those players that havent signed in for 6 months or so with all the things that are new / fixed etc maybe ? They lost many players due to redacted being retired but it wouldnt hurt try get some back maybe.... its a shame looking the ratings that the other niantic games have atleast 4.0 rating average.. and ingress 3.0.....
Comparing the average votes on all 3 games u can tell that ingress players that leave a vote in google playstore either gives a 5* or 1* which is almost as many and 2* 3* 4* is very little and even together.....in pokemon and harry potter majority of players gives a 5* rating.. not many give 1* as much as ingress has got... this is a problem looking at such stats and compare.....
there is almost a 50% chance a user giving a review on prime that is either 1* or 5* not sure if thats so good ?
Pokemon i dont even need to write much.. over 13 mil ratings and majority is 5*
Harry potter is the newest game from niantic, out of 291 616 ratings it has 4.0 rating score
Ingress has out of 414 475 ratings only 3.0 score.
also the latest reviews in my language for Prime shows ppl giving a 1* rating from 2018-2019 so a bit old reviews but they are still there... what are the odds new players will try this game reading those? compared to HP where more leave 4 or 5* positive ratings... i wonder how they can fix this?
@mortuus Niantic has a difficult challenge in getting players to raise the rating of the game. The first thing they have to do is understand why they have the rating that they do, which is that they have damaged their relationship with the players. Niantic needs to own this, and own fixing it.
Trust and loyalty are not things that are owed to Niantic. Rather, they are things that the company earns. Things a really quite delicate-- it is difficult to earn trust but incredibly easy to destroy it. In order to earn back the trust of their players Niantic needs to take responsibility for the ways that they have failed players in the past and then invest in rebuilding the relationship. Niantic is an extremely good company in many ways, but they have one well-documented shortcoming, and that is their failure to make the customer experience their top priority. I have so many examples of this, but there was one interaction that really stands out in my mind.
I was POC for an anomaly, and a couple of weeks ahead of the event I took a weekend trip. I noticed that someone on the plane with me had a Niantic backpack with a Resistance logo, and I struck up a conversation with him. He was a Niantic vice president, and had been in my city to work on anomaly preparation. We talked about a variety of things, but at one point he asked me why we had scheduled our faction's afterparty at the same time as the official Niantic one.
"We had to book our party venue two months ago. You didn't give us a schedule until a week and a half ago so we made our best guess based on the schedules for previous events. We wouldn't have chosen that time if we'd had the schedule earlier."
Niantic had been running anomalies for years at that point, which means they had worked with dozens or hundreds of teams of people who were doing a ton of planning and preparation work for Niantic without compensation[1]. I've been involved with planning for several anomalies, and a constant theme among planners was that Niantic needed to give us better information earlier in the process. Niantic never did that, and they remained surprised and dismayed by scheduling conflicts that they themselves could have prevented.
Back to the rating, though. Niantic needs to think long and hard about why some Ingress players felt so betrayed by the company that they ratings-bombed the game on the app stores.[2] Once they have internalized that then they need to learn how to improve the situation. They need to figure out how earn back the loyalty and trust of their players and then follow through on it. They can't just ask people to change their rating and expect it to happen-- they have to earn a higher rating. I do not envy @NianticBrian the task of cleaning up after past failures.
Please don't read this and think that I am anti-Niantic. Exactly the opposite is true. I want the company to be successful. I want them to be profitable, and I want them to continue making cool games. Niantic has built some really excellent stuff, and I want to see more of it. At the same time, I've been playing Niantic's games for 6.5 years now, and I've seen plenty of both their good side and their bad side. Their number one flaw is that they don't understand the player experience and make it their top priority[3]. I think their long-term success is dependent on them figuring that out and pivoting to be a more customer-centric company, and I sincerely hope that they will take our messages to heart and learn from them. By messages I include things posted to forums, conversations they have with their users, trade press articles, and poor ratings from dissatisfied customers. All of these things are messages to Niantic, and there is much to be learned.
[1] OK, in all fairness I got a special volunteer coin from Niantic for being a POC. I didn't even get free anomaly swag-- I had to pay for my own stickers and souvenir coin. Giving free swag packs to POCs would cost them very nearly nothing, and would still only amount to a few pennies per hour compensation for the time that we put into planning events.
[2] Sure, some of the people did it just to be dicks. Mostly, though, it was the only outlet that people had for venting their frustrations in a way that might get through to the company.
[3] I've seen companies make this mistake before. One of the many dot-coms I worked for after the 2000 bubble burst failed for precisely this reason, and it would be an excellent business school case study. The company had managed to build an extremely loyal and enthusiastic user base out of nothing at all, but the users used the platform in a way that was different from what the company had planned for. A smart company would have worked to understand why the users were so passionate, and would have figured out ways to grow that experience and inspire more enthusiasm and loyalty. They would have figured out how to shift their business model so the could turn their users' passion into something profitable. That's not what they did, and I quit the job two weeks before they laid off most of their employees and declared bankruptcy.
It was insightful! And certainly highlighted the key issues surrounding Niantic's operations. It's a recurring theme which *should* have been dealt with after Pokemon Go multiple initial communication fiascos.
The initial launch of Prime is another prime (heh) example of this behavior. The app's open beta was announced to be open to all Cassandra Prime attendees by the end of summer 2018. Attendees ended up not getting access until October, with no communication on what caused the delay or what to expect.
The beta arrived and lasted for about two weeks before Prime was unceremoniously dropped onto the Play Store in early November with zero warning. No prior launch day announcement, no attempts to build hype beyond a PoGo event, nothing. It just sort of... showed up out of the blue, still lacking needed fixes based on the feedback received from the criminally-abbreviated beta testing.
I am personally hopeful that Ingress is on the upswing, but that is entirely dependent on if Niantic can get out of its own way for once.
From the APK tear down that’s been posted around, it seems they’re going to try and rectify it by having occasional pop-ups like other apps that ask you to rate the app.
Comments
Tbh, there's a reason for the 3* rating and It's a well deserved one. Every "update" has been a slower and bigger disappointment. And clearly NIA doesn't seem to care much about 3* rating. In my experience(especially past few weeks, i would give it 2* top)
p.s; NIA stop being so damn stingy when it comes to Ingress. Idk how much you make of the game, but if do less, that's on you. You did not do anything creative about that. You just expect people to buy that insanely expensive store items, not gonna happen.
lets face it, many players left for good when redacted died.. those aint coming back..
It's about right. 4- for strategy 2-3 for tech. To get to 4 on that front spoof, multiproofing and frequent reset has to be minimized or only occasionally happening. Until Dec. 2019 the joke in my area was you'd be only able to play 45 minutes out of every hour because of freezes, puntmonster kicking you out, or other things that force a reload.
I regularly see spoofers who regularly fly even around the city. Here and there fake portals appear, and if there is an advantage in the number of players of one faction, then such portals cannot be deleted. Portals are often out of place. Some players have modified versions of scanners with which aegis shields are removed in 1-2 seconds and so on. Now tell me why this game put 5 stars in the playmarket?
Updates do not bring anything new to the game in terms of gameplay. And this is from the very beginning of the launch of prime. Custom cursors and a subject to increase experience do not count; they have little effect on gameplay. Once again I ask for what this game to put 5 or not, 3 stars?
When I look at the development of Pokemon Go or Harry Potter, I’m just offended by our game where only a few minor corrections are added per month + several models for cursors that a professional designer can do in half an hour of work.
You also need to take into consideration that more significant changes are still being developed, as well as bug fixing, etc. The visible stuff like cursors etc that you see added are indeed not that resource intensive, which makes them able to promote those sooner than other fixes/addons that require more work.
I remember Pokemon Go being riddled with bugs and poor design decisions for well over a year before getting back on track. It took me until the weather update to stop getting continuous crashes, connection errors, and timeouts. Raids were still hit-and-miss when I stopped playing a year ago, with random lockouts, rubber banding health, and the raid ending before time was up being common issues that went unaddressed for years.
I've come to expect new Niantic products to be dumpster fires for a year and a half before things get to a good state, and Prime is shaping up to be no exception. The upside is that we are starting to see new features showing up in teardowns, so that initial "teething period" may be almost over.
Wizards Unite is developed by a different studio and the difference in polish was noticeable from the beginning.
My dear interlocutor, we all see the result. And we can compare the result of ingress and the results in games about Pokemon and Harry Potter.
I will give you an example from my recent conversation with a newcomer agent. He asked me why the game looks so awful? links are still sometimes displayed even on top devices in the form of dashed lines, texture on the margins as from the first three-dimensional games of the early 2000s. The earth has no textures, the sky has no textures, emptiness around!
Why is the game from the company that released the great Pokémon go more like a beta version of a program written by students for their thesis?
I bought keylockers, bought an avatar, supported the company. And I have the right to say that this is not normal.
I am ready to pay for a game that looks modern and constantly gets new features. Here is an example of what a map might look like. Not darkness around and everywhere, but a really nice-looking map.
You can make the same map of the area in dark colors, There is no difference. But compare the screenshot from ingress and this game. Which of the games is more like a beta version made by two students on an old computer for their thesis work? Waiting for your honest reply.
But this is fake location map. Ingress use OSM.
I know it's no excuse, it can till be improved, just not as much detailed as this.
About the discussion, I would that if you're happy with the game overall, give it a 4, just to help increasing it's rating. Because if it get too low it's far easier to Niantic to just drop it instead of trying to make every hater happy. They clearly don't need Ingress specifically to make money.
@SouLPrison3r
Every "update" has been a slower and bigger disappointment.
No it hasn't. Don't be silly.
I've played Prime more or less full-time since general release (I waited maybe a week for Redacted to come out, then switched. I had to go back to Redacted to finish a task on a couple of occasions, and I didn't dare use Prime at the Darsana Prime anomaly). So I know a thing or two about it.
It was buggy as all heck when it first came out, and there were missing features galore. A good many of the updates since then have contained much wanted fixes and were not disappointing at all. My perception as to whether the app is slow or not may be coloured by the fact that I bought a new phone in December, but it pretty much runs beautifully these days, and even before I switched, was running acceptably on my very old Samsung S5. I am pretty sure that updates are not slowing it down.
Don't get me wrong - there are still annoying bugs, and some of the updates have been disappointing in that they didn't fix much (Portal keys in alphabetical order, anyone?). But:
It's not true to say that every update has been a disappointment. Far from it.
The game still has phantom fields, sometimes links are displayed dotted even on top devices. What kind of improvement can we talk about? Here is an example for you. The portal is inside the field that is not displayed. Below in broken Russian is written "the portal is inside the existing."
Existing what? There is no normal translation into the language spoken by a third of the world.
And to all the requests of the community, in particular about the translation into Russian, the niantic does not give a damn about it.
@NianticBrian see how the main menu is translated.
Does such a translation deserve 5 stars?
Now let's go through the training process.
Text for translation in training no more than 5 pages in small print. The menu and gameplay are even smaller. The game has a community with trusted Russian agents. Why in this situation do we have a game that is less than half translated? Since the game appeared in the training process, only one picture has been translated into Russian.
And that is not fully translated.
Once again I ask, does such a translation quality deserve 5 stars?
@NianticBrian @NianticChiaki @NianticFumi @NianticHilda
Do you generally respond to what is written on this forum? If so, please comment on the problem from the message above.
so sad
If Niantic solved spoofing and multi-accounting, it'd deserve a 5.
People really underestimate, the work they do, and the amount of opposition to that work that they get.
Did you also look at the revenue streams? You don't get developers for free.
@Perringaiden Your point about revenue streams is well-taken, but to be fair that is on Niantic not the players. It's also a chicken-and-egg problem. Ingress will require investment in order to gain new players, bring old ones back, and have a solid source of revenue. I spew as much money at it as I reasonably can since I want the game to stick around, but the only things in the game that are worth my purchases are frackers and the occasional beacon. The pandemic has made frackers pretty useless right now, and I suspect that overall fracker revenue went down after they capriciously doubled the price a while ago.
As for the three-star rating, Niantic alienated a fair number of players by basically ignoring Ingress for a couple of years while they produced Prime, and then launching Prime in a hamfisted way. I'm still waiting for the promised feature parity, though it's more of a wistful waiting rather than doing so in a way that makes me think I will ever get it. I love Niantic and especially Ingress and I want both to be successful, but if I evaluate the situation dispassionately something becomes very clear to me. Niantic's great weakness is that they don't make the customer (player) experience a very high priority. I work in a company where asking, "What is the customer experience/impact?" is baked into the corporate DNA. It's really part of every decision we make.
A big chunk of Ingress's low rating is that there was a giant movement to one-star the app in stores after Redacted went away. I believe @NianticBrian has acknowledged that in this forum at some point. I wasn't a part of that movement, but I hope Niantic can understand that it comes from a place of significant customer frustration and work to re-earn the trust of its players though my gut says they think it's players being jerks.
I feel like there's another chicken-and-egg problem, though. It smells to me like Niantic is going to shut Ingress down unless they can make it at least revenue-neutral, but they have to invest in the game and re-earn the loyalty of its players in order to do that. I sincerely hope that they can do so, but I'm not sure the corporate culture is up to that task. I desperately hope I'm wrong.
Niantic definitely failed to build and release Prime appropriately. But a large chunk of those 3* reviews are not rating the current product, they're rating Prime in October 2018 and will never change that review. I've actually had to remind people in chats who say "Yeah Prime's pretty capable now" to check whether they 1*'d the game back then. Many have never thought about it again even though they're now enjoying Prime.
Without raising that review score back up, Ingress will never be suggested to new players by the AppStore or Play Store. Which is going to continue a downward spiral into obscurity.
Basically, if you like Ingress, it's worth more than a 1 star now. There needs to be a way to reset a product's score so that it's rated on the current product, not a mistake from two years ago.
And as for revenue, they're slowly working on it, but even at its height, Ingress never had the numbers of PoGo or Wizards. If everyone playing Ingress put $10 a year in, it would still pale in comparison to $1 from every PoGo player a year. You can't treat games identically if they aren't paid for identically.
That's true. Ingress is a different game than PoGo/HPWU in that those two are about personal stats/gain, and Ingress is about making changes to the playing field. Because of that, monetizing Ingress requires more care so that they don't make it pay-to-win. It can certainly be done thoughtfully and carefully, but the design pattern will be different from the other two games.
Still, Niantic threw away a lot of goodwill and loyalty with the shift to prime. They are going to have to re-earn player trust and delight. "It doesn't suck as much as it used to" isn't going to inspire people to up their rating, or even to play again. I can't find the old post where (I think) Brian was talking about the low rating, but I came away from it with the impression that Niantic blamed players for the rating rather than looking internally to understand why so many people were unhappy. My memory may be faulty on that, though.
i am pretty sure most of those who change their rating to 1* in september still play 😂🤣
I'd rate Ingress 1* for should this be a wayspot, 4* for historical or cultural significance and visually unique, 5* for safe access and location accuracy.
Well i know tons of players that quit shortly after prime came out, many said "im not buying new phone to play ingress prime"... those havent come back still after 1* rating..... even today it has issues with ghost links etc... but overall its alot better then back then sure... but the damage has already been done going by ratings :/ not sure how they can fix it? Now with the corona virus worldwide all fun events anomalies etc are put on hold.. that also will affect ingress since all those events made ingress special....
PoGo and HPWU, but in two games many troubles too 🙃😁🤗🤷🤷🤷
what about they send an e-mail or something to all those players that havent signed in for 6 months or so with all the things that are new / fixed etc maybe ? They lost many players due to redacted being retired but it wouldnt hurt try get some back maybe.... its a shame looking the ratings that the other niantic games have atleast 4.0 rating average.. and ingress 3.0.....
Comparing the average votes on all 3 games u can tell that ingress players that leave a vote in google playstore either gives a 5* or 1* which is almost as many and 2* 3* 4* is very little and even together.....in pokemon and harry potter majority of players gives a 5* rating.. not many give 1* as much as ingress has got... this is a problem looking at such stats and compare.....
there is almost a 50% chance a user giving a review on prime that is either 1* or 5* not sure if thats so good ?
Pokemon i dont even need to write much.. over 13 mil ratings and majority is 5*
Harry potter is the newest game from niantic, out of 291 616 ratings it has 4.0 rating score
Ingress has out of 414 475 ratings only 3.0 score.
also the latest reviews in my language for Prime shows ppl giving a 1* rating from 2018-2019 so a bit old reviews but they are still there... what are the odds new players will try this game reading those? compared to HP where more leave 4 or 5* positive ratings... i wonder how they can fix this?
@mortuus Niantic has a difficult challenge in getting players to raise the rating of the game. The first thing they have to do is understand why they have the rating that they do, which is that they have damaged their relationship with the players. Niantic needs to own this, and own fixing it.
Trust and loyalty are not things that are owed to Niantic. Rather, they are things that the company earns. Things a really quite delicate-- it is difficult to earn trust but incredibly easy to destroy it. In order to earn back the trust of their players Niantic needs to take responsibility for the ways that they have failed players in the past and then invest in rebuilding the relationship. Niantic is an extremely good company in many ways, but they have one well-documented shortcoming, and that is their failure to make the customer experience their top priority. I have so many examples of this, but there was one interaction that really stands out in my mind.
I was POC for an anomaly, and a couple of weeks ahead of the event I took a weekend trip. I noticed that someone on the plane with me had a Niantic backpack with a Resistance logo, and I struck up a conversation with him. He was a Niantic vice president, and had been in my city to work on anomaly preparation. We talked about a variety of things, but at one point he asked me why we had scheduled our faction's afterparty at the same time as the official Niantic one.
"We had to book our party venue two months ago. You didn't give us a schedule until a week and a half ago so we made our best guess based on the schedules for previous events. We wouldn't have chosen that time if we'd had the schedule earlier."
Niantic had been running anomalies for years at that point, which means they had worked with dozens or hundreds of teams of people who were doing a ton of planning and preparation work for Niantic without compensation[1]. I've been involved with planning for several anomalies, and a constant theme among planners was that Niantic needed to give us better information earlier in the process. Niantic never did that, and they remained surprised and dismayed by scheduling conflicts that they themselves could have prevented.
Back to the rating, though. Niantic needs to think long and hard about why some Ingress players felt so betrayed by the company that they ratings-bombed the game on the app stores.[2] Once they have internalized that then they need to learn how to improve the situation. They need to figure out how earn back the loyalty and trust of their players and then follow through on it. They can't just ask people to change their rating and expect it to happen-- they have to earn a higher rating. I do not envy @NianticBrian the task of cleaning up after past failures.
Please don't read this and think that I am anti-Niantic. Exactly the opposite is true. I want the company to be successful. I want them to be profitable, and I want them to continue making cool games. Niantic has built some really excellent stuff, and I want to see more of it. At the same time, I've been playing Niantic's games for 6.5 years now, and I've seen plenty of both their good side and their bad side. Their number one flaw is that they don't understand the player experience and make it their top priority[3]. I think their long-term success is dependent on them figuring that out and pivoting to be a more customer-centric company, and I sincerely hope that they will take our messages to heart and learn from them. By messages I include things posted to forums, conversations they have with their users, trade press articles, and poor ratings from dissatisfied customers. All of these things are messages to Niantic, and there is much to be learned.
[1] OK, in all fairness I got a special volunteer coin from Niantic for being a POC. I didn't even get free anomaly swag-- I had to pay for my own stickers and souvenir coin. Giving free swag packs to POCs would cost them very nearly nothing, and would still only amount to a few pennies per hour compensation for the time that we put into planning events.
[2] Sure, some of the people did it just to be dicks. Mostly, though, it was the only outlet that people had for venting their frustrations in a way that might get through to the company.
[3] I've seen companies make this mistake before. One of the many dot-coms I worked for after the 2000 bubble burst failed for precisely this reason, and it would be an excellent business school case study. The company had managed to build an extremely loyal and enthusiastic user base out of nothing at all, but the users used the platform in a way that was different from what the company had planned for. A smart company would have worked to understand why the users were so passionate, and would have figured out ways to grow that experience and inspire more enthusiasm and loyalty. They would have figured out how to shift their business model so the could turn their users' passion into something profitable. That's not what they did, and I quit the job two weeks before they laid off most of their employees and declared bankruptcy.
Wow, That was supposed to be a quick five-minute note before bed, but I got pretty long-winded. Sorry about that.
It was insightful! And certainly highlighted the key issues surrounding Niantic's operations. It's a recurring theme which *should* have been dealt with after Pokemon Go multiple initial communication fiascos.
The initial launch of Prime is another prime (heh) example of this behavior. The app's open beta was announced to be open to all Cassandra Prime attendees by the end of summer 2018. Attendees ended up not getting access until October, with no communication on what caused the delay or what to expect.
The beta arrived and lasted for about two weeks before Prime was unceremoniously dropped onto the Play Store in early November with zero warning. No prior launch day announcement, no attempts to build hype beyond a PoGo event, nothing. It just sort of... showed up out of the blue, still lacking needed fixes based on the feedback received from the criminally-abbreviated beta testing.
I am personally hopeful that Ingress is on the upswing, but that is entirely dependent on if Niantic can get out of its own way for once.
From the APK tear down that’s been posted around, it seems they’re going to try and rectify it by having occasional pop-ups like other apps that ask you to rate the app.
I always knock a star off for that!
why ?
It's intrusive and annoying.