But are any of the deficiencies in the existing gameplay being addressed with development? Or is it focused on new gameplay?
I did notice the additional stock filters on the Intel map which are useful for those players that still use Stock but don't impact a vast number of players, because we've used IITC for years. We're still hoping for new functionality there, like Inventory details, field MU values and unique details.
Yes, but what I'm trying to explain is the order of priorities as far as gameplay goes. That being said, there are prorities outside of gameplay as well. As much as I would like to tell you that we can do all of the things, we cant. We're still definitely aware that the client itself has some improvement to go, we're aware of stale gameplay and the need for new things, and we're aware that existing gameplay isnt quite there either. We need to decide how to balance between these things. Most of the time (in my experience) what will happen is a focus on gameplay + client improvements with fixing existing gameplay happening opportunistically.
All that being said, keep your eye out for some new stuff that I think you'll like :)
Can we get an in-game subscription item where the funds go directly to @ofer2? Your posts are always insightful, helpful and honest. Knowing that someone of your capability is on board and that you're willing to communicate earnestly with the community is really refreshing and reassuring. You show the players support, so it would be great if the players could show their support back.
I still wonder how come Niantic decided to drop standalone Mission Days for a while and to make 1 anomalous city for an entire year. In my opinion those were one of the worst decisions ever made.
Mission Days for example, come as an exploratory/social event for your classification. But that's not just some random missions which are out there: these missions are done directly by people who live there, and want to show off their city. Thus, the missions usually show the most interesting and unique places. Not just those inside a playbox for example.
Here I'd like to compare them with Hexathlons by the way. In Mission Days, firstly there's no competition and virtually no way to compete. In Hexathlons however, you have to rival all the other agents including your factionmates! And it is not about faction v faction. This feels...weird. I don't want to fight my factionmates in order to get a better badge. Next, in Mission Days, there's not much rush unless that is chosen by the player themself (wanna pass missions in 2 hours and do other stuff next). You can walk around pass missions all day long. You can choose which of the whole set you want to pass, etc. A Hexatlon, however, is 1.5h (or whatever) of rush and running while staring at your phone, otherwise no way you're getting that high-tier badge. That's not to say that Hexathlons are a waste of time, no. I would still participate in them but... I would be more excited to hop in for a Mission Day instead of a Hexathlon in a city which I've never visited previously. I simply would know that Mission Day is going to show me the best parts of the city with no rush while enjoying a company of friends. That is one of the definitions of "exploration" in Ingress for me.
Talking about Battle Beacons as mini-anomalies. For "true" anomalies, Niantic is the "mediator". Formally it's them who setup this battle. It makes no sense to me that a faction vs faction fight for a portal with the usage of BB need to be arranged by the same people who would then fight. (No one would show up otherwise if I just threw it on a portal somewhere). The emphasis on "fight for control over portals" kinda misses the point also: if I want to control a portal, I would just go and capture it without putting a BB first and, sometimes, without even wanting the other faction to know that this portal is going to be used in an Op for example.
Good man, when will niantic finally learn how to finish what they are introducing into the game?
1. You have implemented the concept of magnuss and archetypes that never appeared in the game,
2.you implemented recursion, which never gave the agents any significant benefits.
3. You presented 13 types of exogenous creatures in the story, but nothing really got into the scanner.
4. Even increasing the level from 8 to 16 did not provide any new gaming experience for most players.
Yes, I respect the players who love the game for its slow pace and classic gameplay, but this gameplay has become boring even for many old "players. It's like eating the same dish every day according to a standard recipe.
Even now, when everything according to the plot should not be exogenous, there is still talk about shapers inside the scanner.
And the main thing. The game has been lacking dynamism lately. There is no dynamically changing situation that would force the players to act. Do something about it.
Our favorite game has huge potential. We could take 1st place in the hit parade of applications from Google. But over the past few years, the game process has been in a certain state of stagnation. And this began to repel newcomers, who, after level 8, understood that "at level 9 we will play the same way as at level 15".
Well, you understand, that unforgettable atmosphere of a secret agent or secret order disappears in the game ... Try to get it back, please ... This picture from Pinterest captures the spirit of what the ingress was at the very beginning, when Suzanne was still reporting on YouTube ...
The image shows an aspect of the game as it was. But Operators/Dispatch have never really been closely incorporated into the game ever. The Intel map is useful as a data feed, but only just got filters like hiding the fields.
The true feel of Ingress is still captured by one of the original trailers:
I dont really have any context about the decision regarding mission days that you're referencing. I will say though that as a player, I was mainly introduced to mission days because they followed an anomaly. It was cool to have the competitive event followed by a casual one where people could more casually hang out.
Yeah, I (any many others that I've talked to on the team) have had ideas about missions...there are some missions which genuinely take you though a lot of the cool places to see...to the point that its actually almost better than a tour guide and definitely better than a tour map. The problem is that its hard to separate which ones are the good ones from the rest....we also have this Mission Title 2019, Mission Title 2020, etc. which makes it even more confusing. I kind of wish that we could have the mission day missions promoted to "NIA Sanctioned Status" or something like that that lets you A. see those ones by themselves and B. redo them with some sort of metric / medal. As I've said before, we would all love to do these things, but there are only so many priorities we can have at a time.
As far as competitiveness of Mission Days, I think that there are players who are interested in that sort of thing. That is to say that I dont think we would want to close off that idea as a possibility, but I do agree that currently the non-competitiveness of it balances out the competition of an anomaly quite well. Interestingly, when the Ingress team went together to the Sacramento anomaly I was talking to Brian and he had noted how anomalies had changed quite a lot. In the early days, anomalies werent nearly as competitive as they are today; they were much more: lets casually walk around, talk, and capture / flip portals at the same time.
As far as your last paragraph, I'm not sure I understand what the first half is trying to say, could you explain a little more? As far as the second half, I get where you're coming from, but really the main point isnt to be utility focused like a burster, link amp, etc. Its really just to have fun with a group of people in an area. A few experiences of mine where it would have been fun to have one: I was sitting in a conference and there just so happened to be other ingress agents there, so, naturally, we just began fighting over the portal that was right there. The problem was that there never really felt like there was a winner, we would just keep going back and forth. It would have been nice to have this to be able to fight over it and actually be able to say "I won the portal, hah!" (Note: we also have a portal near our office that this happens with all the time too). One of my ideas for how to make this more practical is to compare it to basketball: sometimes you want to play a game with your friends and not just **** hoops by yourself. If I continue that analogy further, it would also be nice to have "pick up games." The corollary for battle beacons would be to have a battle beacon automatically deployed to certain portals once a week.
Again, as with all these ideas, we dont want to build a ton out and then not have it resonate, or build the wrong feature (e.g. is the once a week feature more important than the real time metrics? or the battle beacon bomb?). So we want to do a little bit and see how it goes, see whats important, etc.
As far as story goes, the creative team is.....very creative. They do so much with the story. At the same time, engineering has been working on the client, the server move, etc. so there wasnt time for the engineering team to implement a lot of the creative teams ideas. We are trying to get more in line between creative an engineering, but its a process.
Recursion, as I've mentioned before, is something we're keeping an eye out for to add ways to make this more impactful. We havent done a lot with it, sorry about that.
And the main thing. The game has been lacking dynamism lately.
Yeah, this is one of the main things I've been trying to get across: the game has gotten stale from a gameplay perspective. Everyone has their own ideas of how to fix this, but what we're trying right now is Battle Beacons. If that doesnt help, we'll try something else.
I see where you're coming from. I think theres a healthy tension between resistance + enlightened, but there are times where that becomes unhealthy. I agree that cheating contributes, but I dont think its the sole cause. We definitely want to help communities come together in a healthy cross-faction manner, but aside from trying to deal with cheating (which we constantly spend time on, btw), do you have any other ideas to help?
I know that probably wasn't intended seriously, but one of the things I'd pay a subscription for is to have some influence on which projects get development priority. Offering players the chance to set priorities rather than guessing internally would be a win/win for Niantic, as they would make more money and deliver the features and fixes the players want most, and not use precious development time on dead-ends.
Of course this would need someone with both technical and communication skills to operate it... a role that @ofer2 would be perfect for.
@ofer2 What are your thoughts on the possibility of new in game things being released as new story content is released?
This was something I mess dearly from the old days, when new features would have story content around them and the thing would be released. Power cubes, Ultra Strikes for example.
I have always said that a focus on the community aspect is where this game needs to keep in sight. Especially the things that foster the meta communities, those have a positive feedback loop to the local communities. Shards do this but they're so incredibly exhausting. The linkstar event was great, but still isolated. The challenge badges tend to focus on individual stats too much. I'd love something like "link across a cell from either side" or something like that which really forces the collaborative effort needed. #2cents
Tell me, why don't you introduce something into the game that mechanically resembles raids from Pokemon Go? Random events on an ongoing basis. Or some kind of shards could be constantly played. Or the same beacons would look just great in this role. Or make something like a virus from plague inc, which was transmitted between enemy portals and discharged them. This would be not just an interesting plot move, but also a wonderful gameplay update.
We may have misunderstood each other regarding competitiveness. In Mission Days there's no competitiveness and that is totally fine! I compared them to Hexathlons to say that, in my opinion, absence of competitiveness is better than fighting everyone including your factionmates for a better badge.
You wanted me to better explain my last paragraph and here you go. Sorry for my English by the way, it's not my mother tongue :/
You see, there are two factions in the game which are originally supposed to fight each other. Not to agree on something, or arrange something, but to fight. In case of anomalies, the massive faction fight is organized by 3rd side, that is neutral: Niantic. Niantic says "ok guys there's the playbox, there's the dates, there's the rules. fight.". That being said, during these years people developed sophisticated tactics and psychological tricks to capture and hold portals they need. And for most cases, simple direct fight with the opponent on a single portal is not even an option. For Battle Beacons, there's no 3rd neutral organizer side, represented by Niantic. Do you expect that people who are fighting for years would go ahead and arrange battles using Battle Beacons? Well... Probably in places where there are good relations between factions, maybe. But for us here (we have around 100 active agents combined in our city) this isn't really an option. Nobody ever used a BB here since their release. People here are way more interested in battling the other faction in more "global" scale (fielding over our city or large parts of it). Your use case where there happened to be multiple agents attending the conference is legit, but that is because you didn't arrange them to be there. You were lucky that you have had them together in one place.
The corollary for battle beacons would be to have a battle beacon automatically deployed to certain portals once a week.
There is a single problem with everything that chooses portals randomly: couch portals, portals on closed territories, strategically important portals an so on. I think a faction which has control over a specific portal and fields on it would be pretty annoyed if there happens to be a random Niantic's BB on it. You'd need to somehow filter portals to prevent the deployment on portals with huge amount of fields, those that stay for long (meaning that a single faction has control over it), those on closed territories and so on. So those portals need to be chosen by hand and stay the same for a few weeks, for people to change their usual gameplay. The people would then account that, for example, they don't want to link on portal A because that portal will have a BB on it which will drop their fields.
And as always, thank you very much for your attention and transparency.
No no and one more time no. Beacons, like other micro-anomalies, must be deployed in random order. Tell me why would an agent go to a city with no portals? And it makes no sense, but this is for now. Now imagine that a certain force will appear near the most distant portal that will affect the entire portal network within a radius of 100-200 kilometers. And if it is not destroyed, then it will affect more and more. For example, it can discharge portals that can be reached by links. Or imagine an object, a virus, it captures a modifier slot in an enemy portal, then the second, third and fourth. and then it begins to be transmitted through random links to the places of empty slots in modifiers, to the next portal and to another one and on one more so until the entire portal network of the enemy is discharged. Or if the same virus is installed on your portal, then it will recharge the portal and be transmitted in the same way, but already capturing 1 slot at the same time, giving you the opportunity to set modifiers. To create or prevent the spread of a virus, it is necessary to build a plan to limit or connect the portal network! How many opportunities for strategy and tactics! how it diversifies the gameplay. You can even not make a virus object, but make portals sources of the virus, which, if not destroyed in time, will spread the virus to the entire region.
Agents need to go to the field to destroy a cluster of distant portals, what could be better? and such an anomaly can occur anywhere. That's what action is. I once played Pokemon and saw how people for a rare Pokemon went to the most distant portal. I don't want to introduce Pokemon here. But the very process of setting a task for the player in the form of a raid is simply amazing.
Dear Niantik employee, do not pay attention to the fact that many innovative ideas on your part are severely criticized by some players. Many of the players over the years of the game got used to monotonous gameplay and do not want innovations that will force them to move to a remote portal, etc. Alas.
Or imagine that here and there certain portals with special properties appear, and groups of shards that need to be directed to certain portals to neutralize them. What a potential for daily activity! What a scale for the development of the plot!
And the first idea with viruses and the second idea with shards do not violate the concept of triangles that many players love.
I will repeat myself once again in addition to my coming message. Look at the profits from Pokemon Go. People like the raid system, and they are willing to pay for it, they are ready to go to a unique PokéStop or Gym because it has a chance to get a unique gaming experience or a prize. They are happy to buy items, as a result of which they will have the opportunity to get something for always, for example, a rare Pokemon, or some other valuable reward. They do not pay money for a Pokemon battle that will end sooner or later (I’m making an analogy about beacons), they pay for the opportunity to get a prize that will remain in their inventory. This is me about berries, raid passes, and more.
Implement this approach with random anomalies in real time and in our game. And don't listen to those snobs who don't need anything but triangles. Our game should bring you profit, but how to do it? You already have an example. But for heaven's sake, don't make new Pokemon go out of this game - come up with something unique, or do something from the players suggested.
Yeah, I think we generally want it to run this way. The problem is that we generally dont want to constrain the story to things that engineering has time for because engineering has spent a lot of time on server improvements, client fixes, etc. which you cant really make a story around. Hopefully as we move forward, we need to do less of that stuff and we will have more time to implement things this way, but I cant really say.
The main difference is that PGO is a game about collection whereas Ingress is not. That being said, I'm thinking that Battle Beacons could be the ingress version of a PGO raid. There are tons of things we would need to get right in doing this, but hopefully we can make our way there.
Your english is great! I didnt even notice anything. Sometimes I just have a hard time understanding what people are saying.
But for us here (we have around 100 active agents combined in our city) this isn't really an option.
It seems like this is the core part of what you're saying: in small environments there isnt really a big draw. Thats fair enough. We've moved our office, but our old office was next to this sandwich shop. The owner of that shop is a huge ingress fan and there are three portals right next to his shop. So every few days, we would go get a sandwich for lunch and fight him over the portals. It wouldve been cool if we could put down a battle beacon and have a full competition. I guess what I'm saying here is that even for 1v1 or 2v1 Battle beacons should be fun. We playtested it this way when we were working on it and it was a lot of fun.
There is a single problem with everything that chooses portals randomly
Note that I didnt say randomly. I said certain portals. The reason for that is exactly so that people will know "hey, this portal is going to be a challenge... I have 15 minutes...lets go fight someone there". Hopefully this method would help build local communities. There are lots of considerations / nuances into going there and as of now there arent plans to do this, its really where I personally would like to see it go.
We dont really do "virtual" portals. From a gameplay perspective: what would we do with the originals? Remove them? Should originals be affected by XMPs? From a thematic perspective: I agree with the others that portals are supposed to reflect real world places / entities so it doesnt really make a lot of sense to me to have non-real world entities.
The creative team has talked about 3rd faction + virus type things a lot. Its not off the table, but we have other things / ideas we want to try first.
Comments
But are any of the deficiencies in the existing gameplay being addressed with development? Or is it focused on new gameplay?
I did notice the additional stock filters on the Intel map which are useful for those players that still use Stock but don't impact a vast number of players, because we've used IITC for years. We're still hoping for new functionality there, like Inventory details, field MU values and unique details.
Yes, but what I'm trying to explain is the order of priorities as far as gameplay goes. That being said, there are prorities outside of gameplay as well. As much as I would like to tell you that we can do all of the things, we cant. We're still definitely aware that the client itself has some improvement to go, we're aware of stale gameplay and the need for new things, and we're aware that existing gameplay isnt quite there either. We need to decide how to balance between these things. Most of the time (in my experience) what will happen is a focus on gameplay + client improvements with fixing existing gameplay happening opportunistically.
All that being said, keep your eye out for some new stuff that I think you'll like :)
@ofer2 I really appreciate you taking the time to post here.
Can we get an in-game subscription item where the funds go directly to @ofer2? Your posts are always insightful, helpful and honest. Knowing that someone of your capability is on board and that you're willing to communicate earnestly with the community is really refreshing and reassuring. You show the players support, so it would be great if the players could show their support back.
I still wonder how come Niantic decided to drop standalone Mission Days for a while and to make 1 anomalous city for an entire year. In my opinion those were one of the worst decisions ever made.
Mission Days for example, come as an exploratory/social event for your classification. But that's not just some random missions which are out there: these missions are done directly by people who live there, and want to show off their city. Thus, the missions usually show the most interesting and unique places. Not just those inside a playbox for example.
Here I'd like to compare them with Hexathlons by the way. In Mission Days, firstly there's no competition and virtually no way to compete. In Hexathlons however, you have to rival all the other agents including your factionmates! And it is not about faction v faction. This feels...weird. I don't want to fight my factionmates in order to get a better badge. Next, in Mission Days, there's not much rush unless that is chosen by the player themself (wanna pass missions in 2 hours and do other stuff next). You can walk around pass missions all day long. You can choose which of the whole set you want to pass, etc. A Hexatlon, however, is 1.5h (or whatever) of rush and running while staring at your phone, otherwise no way you're getting that high-tier badge. That's not to say that Hexathlons are a waste of time, no. I would still participate in them but... I would be more excited to hop in for a Mission Day instead of a Hexathlon in a city which I've never visited previously. I simply would know that Mission Day is going to show me the best parts of the city with no rush while enjoying a company of friends. That is one of the definitions of "exploration" in Ingress for me.
Talking about Battle Beacons as mini-anomalies. For "true" anomalies, Niantic is the "mediator". Formally it's them who setup this battle. It makes no sense to me that a faction vs faction fight for a portal with the usage of BB need to be arranged by the same people who would then fight. (No one would show up otherwise if I just threw it on a portal somewhere). The emphasis on "fight for control over portals" kinda misses the point also: if I want to control a portal, I would just go and capture it without putting a BB first and, sometimes, without even wanting the other faction to know that this portal is going to be used in an Op for example.
I'll buy a @ofer2 supporter-badge any day.
I'm wondering if anyone from Nia reads what we are writing here? When will Brian or someone else answer us what we have written here?
Oh, sorry I didn't notice. I just thought all the employees of niantiс begin with a nickname with niantiс.
Shhhh, don't tell him there is already a person from Nia here in the thread!
@ofer2 is working at Niantic
Good man, when will niantic finally learn how to finish what they are introducing into the game?
1. You have implemented the concept of magnuss and archetypes that never appeared in the game,
2.you implemented recursion, which never gave the agents any significant benefits.
3. You presented 13 types of exogenous creatures in the story, but nothing really got into the scanner.
4. Even increasing the level from 8 to 16 did not provide any new gaming experience for most players.
Yes, I respect the players who love the game for its slow pace and classic gameplay, but this gameplay has become boring even for many old "players. It's like eating the same dish every day according to a standard recipe.
Even now, when everything according to the plot should not be exogenous, there is still talk about shapers inside the scanner.
And the main thing. The game has been lacking dynamism lately. There is no dynamically changing situation that would force the players to act. Do something about it.
Our favorite game has huge potential. We could take 1st place in the hit parade of applications from Google. But over the past few years, the game process has been in a certain state of stagnation. And this began to repel newcomers, who, after level 8, understood that "at level 9 we will play the same way as at level 15".
Well, you understand, that unforgettable atmosphere of a secret agent or secret order disappears in the game ... Try to get it back, please ... This picture from Pinterest captures the spirit of what the ingress was at the very beginning, when Suzanne was still reporting on YouTube ...
WHY?? You know that now he is going to be pinged in literally every delusional topic? You could spare him!...
A major issue you have is cheating though. Battle Beacons require coop between factions.
Due to rampant cheating going on, a lot of areas have factions who basically don't talk to each other.
I have not seen a single bb deployed in our city mostly due to this.
A normal anomaly was a grand combat, organised by a neutral third party.
PS. Thankyou @ofer2 for providing feedback. It is hugely appreciated.
He told us. We all know. Because he has a little box that says "NIANTIC" next to his name in his posts...
The image shows an aspect of the game as it was. But Operators/Dispatch have never really been closely incorporated into the game ever. The Intel map is useful as a data feed, but only just got filters like hiding the fields.
The true feel of Ingress is still captured by one of the original trailers:
I would love to see the trailer remade like this, with the Prime Scanner. The current ones make it seem far more 'game like' than 'secret agent like'.
Also, the Redfection idea would introduce new gameplay and require people to "act".
I dont really have any context about the decision regarding mission days that you're referencing. I will say though that as a player, I was mainly introduced to mission days because they followed an anomaly. It was cool to have the competitive event followed by a casual one where people could more casually hang out.
Yeah, I (any many others that I've talked to on the team) have had ideas about missions...there are some missions which genuinely take you though a lot of the cool places to see...to the point that its actually almost better than a tour guide and definitely better than a tour map. The problem is that its hard to separate which ones are the good ones from the rest....we also have this Mission Title 2019, Mission Title 2020, etc. which makes it even more confusing. I kind of wish that we could have the mission day missions promoted to "NIA Sanctioned Status" or something like that that lets you A. see those ones by themselves and B. redo them with some sort of metric / medal. As I've said before, we would all love to do these things, but there are only so many priorities we can have at a time.
As far as competitiveness of Mission Days, I think that there are players who are interested in that sort of thing. That is to say that I dont think we would want to close off that idea as a possibility, but I do agree that currently the non-competitiveness of it balances out the competition of an anomaly quite well. Interestingly, when the Ingress team went together to the Sacramento anomaly I was talking to Brian and he had noted how anomalies had changed quite a lot. In the early days, anomalies werent nearly as competitive as they are today; they were much more: lets casually walk around, talk, and capture / flip portals at the same time.
As far as your last paragraph, I'm not sure I understand what the first half is trying to say, could you explain a little more? As far as the second half, I get where you're coming from, but really the main point isnt to be utility focused like a burster, link amp, etc. Its really just to have fun with a group of people in an area. A few experiences of mine where it would have been fun to have one: I was sitting in a conference and there just so happened to be other ingress agents there, so, naturally, we just began fighting over the portal that was right there. The problem was that there never really felt like there was a winner, we would just keep going back and forth. It would have been nice to have this to be able to fight over it and actually be able to say "I won the portal, hah!" (Note: we also have a portal near our office that this happens with all the time too). One of my ideas for how to make this more practical is to compare it to basketball: sometimes you want to play a game with your friends and not just **** hoops by yourself. If I continue that analogy further, it would also be nice to have "pick up games." The corollary for battle beacons would be to have a battle beacon automatically deployed to certain portals once a week.
Again, as with all these ideas, we dont want to build a ton out and then not have it resonate, or build the wrong feature (e.g. is the once a week feature more important than the real time metrics? or the battle beacon bomb?). So we want to do a little bit and see how it goes, see whats important, etc.
As far as story goes, the creative team is.....very creative. They do so much with the story. At the same time, engineering has been working on the client, the server move, etc. so there wasnt time for the engineering team to implement a lot of the creative teams ideas. We are trying to get more in line between creative an engineering, but its a process.
Recursion, as I've mentioned before, is something we're keeping an eye out for to add ways to make this more impactful. We havent done a lot with it, sorry about that.
And the main thing. The game has been lacking dynamism lately.
Yeah, this is one of the main things I've been trying to get across: the game has gotten stale from a gameplay perspective. Everyone has their own ideas of how to fix this, but what we're trying right now is Battle Beacons. If that doesnt help, we'll try something else.
I see where you're coming from. I think theres a healthy tension between resistance + enlightened, but there are times where that becomes unhealthy. I agree that cheating contributes, but I dont think its the sole cause. We definitely want to help communities come together in a healthy cross-faction manner, but aside from trying to deal with cheating (which we constantly spend time on, btw), do you have any other ideas to help?
I know that probably wasn't intended seriously, but one of the things I'd pay a subscription for is to have some influence on which projects get development priority. Offering players the chance to set priorities rather than guessing internally would be a win/win for Niantic, as they would make more money and deliver the features and fixes the players want most, and not use precious development time on dead-ends.
Of course this would need someone with both technical and communication skills to operate it... a role that @ofer2 would be perfect for.
@ofer2 What are your thoughts on the possibility of new in game things being released as new story content is released?
This was something I mess dearly from the old days, when new features would have story content around them and the thing would be released. Power cubes, Ultra Strikes for example.
Thanks for the transparency @ofer2 , it's great!
I have always said that a focus on the community aspect is where this game needs to keep in sight. Especially the things that foster the meta communities, those have a positive feedback loop to the local communities. Shards do this but they're so incredibly exhausting. The linkstar event was great, but still isolated. The challenge badges tend to focus on individual stats too much. I'd love something like "link across a cell from either side" or something like that which really forces the collaborative effort needed. #2cents
Regarding cheating being primary cause. I think it is. When we got pretty clean on both sides here, xfac really became a thing.
Disintegrated again once cheating started again.
Tell me, why don't you introduce something into the game that mechanically resembles raids from Pokemon Go? Random events on an ongoing basis. Or some kind of shards could be constantly played. Or the same beacons would look just great in this role. Or make something like a virus from plague inc, which was transmitted between enemy portals and discharged them. This would be not just an interesting plot move, but also a wonderful gameplay update.
I don't think that would be an "interesting plot move", as well as not a "wonderful gameplay update".
We may have misunderstood each other regarding competitiveness. In Mission Days there's no competitiveness and that is totally fine! I compared them to Hexathlons to say that, in my opinion, absence of competitiveness is better than fighting everyone including your factionmates for a better badge.
You wanted me to better explain my last paragraph and here you go. Sorry for my English by the way, it's not my mother tongue :/
You see, there are two factions in the game which are originally supposed to fight each other. Not to agree on something, or arrange something, but to fight. In case of anomalies, the massive faction fight is organized by 3rd side, that is neutral: Niantic. Niantic says "ok guys there's the playbox, there's the dates, there's the rules. fight.". That being said, during these years people developed sophisticated tactics and psychological tricks to capture and hold portals they need. And for most cases, simple direct fight with the opponent on a single portal is not even an option. For Battle Beacons, there's no 3rd neutral organizer side, represented by Niantic. Do you expect that people who are fighting for years would go ahead and arrange battles using Battle Beacons? Well... Probably in places where there are good relations between factions, maybe. But for us here (we have around 100 active agents combined in our city) this isn't really an option. Nobody ever used a BB here since their release. People here are way more interested in battling the other faction in more "global" scale (fielding over our city or large parts of it). Your use case where there happened to be multiple agents attending the conference is legit, but that is because you didn't arrange them to be there. You were lucky that you have had them together in one place.
The corollary for battle beacons would be to have a battle beacon automatically deployed to certain portals once a week.
There is a single problem with everything that chooses portals randomly: couch portals, portals on closed territories, strategically important portals an so on. I think a faction which has control over a specific portal and fields on it would be pretty annoyed if there happens to be a random Niantic's BB on it. You'd need to somehow filter portals to prevent the deployment on portals with huge amount of fields, those that stay for long (meaning that a single faction has control over it), those on closed territories and so on. So those portals need to be chosen by hand and stay the same for a few weeks, for people to change their usual gameplay. The people would then account that, for example, they don't want to link on portal A because that portal will have a BB on it which will drop their fields.
And as always, thank you very much for your attention and transparency.
Why is it so much trouble to just create a virtual portal on BB use??
Because there shouldn't be such thing as "virtual" portals? A portal is always something connected to reality.
there should be a virtual playbox where bbs can be deployed day and night outside the normal gameplay.
No no and one more time no. Beacons, like other micro-anomalies, must be deployed in random order. Tell me why would an agent go to a city with no portals? And it makes no sense, but this is for now. Now imagine that a certain force will appear near the most distant portal that will affect the entire portal network within a radius of 100-200 kilometers. And if it is not destroyed, then it will affect more and more. For example, it can discharge portals that can be reached by links. Or imagine an object, a virus, it captures a modifier slot in an enemy portal, then the second, third and fourth. and then it begins to be transmitted through random links to the places of empty slots in modifiers, to the next portal and to another one and on one more so until the entire portal network of the enemy is discharged. Or if the same virus is installed on your portal, then it will recharge the portal and be transmitted in the same way, but already capturing 1 slot at the same time, giving you the opportunity to set modifiers. To create or prevent the spread of a virus, it is necessary to build a plan to limit or connect the portal network! How many opportunities for strategy and tactics! how it diversifies the gameplay. You can even not make a virus object, but make portals sources of the virus, which, if not destroyed in time, will spread the virus to the entire region.
Agents need to go to the field to destroy a cluster of distant portals, what could be better? and such an anomaly can occur anywhere. That's what action is. I once played Pokemon and saw how people for a rare Pokemon went to the most distant portal. I don't want to introduce Pokemon here. But the very process of setting a task for the player in the form of a raid is simply amazing.
Dear Niantik employee, do not pay attention to the fact that many innovative ideas on your part are severely criticized by some players. Many of the players over the years of the game got used to monotonous gameplay and do not want innovations that will force them to move to a remote portal, etc. Alas.
Or imagine that here and there certain portals with special properties appear, and groups of shards that need to be directed to certain portals to neutralize them. What a potential for daily activity! What a scale for the development of the plot!
And the first idea with viruses and the second idea with shards do not violate the concept of triangles that many players love.
I will repeat myself once again in addition to my coming message. Look at the profits from Pokemon Go. People like the raid system, and they are willing to pay for it, they are ready to go to a unique PokéStop or Gym because it has a chance to get a unique gaming experience or a prize. They are happy to buy items, as a result of which they will have the opportunity to get something for always, for example, a rare Pokemon, or some other valuable reward. They do not pay money for a Pokemon battle that will end sooner or later (I’m making an analogy about beacons), they pay for the opportunity to get a prize that will remain in their inventory. This is me about berries, raid passes, and more.
Implement this approach with random anomalies in real time and in our game. And don't listen to those snobs who don't need anything but triangles. Our game should bring you profit, but how to do it? You already have an example. But for heaven's sake, don't make new Pokemon go out of this game - come up with something unique, or do something from the players suggested.
one of the things I'd pay a subscription for is to have some influence on which projects get development priority.
I would love to see access to a beta stream be part of that subscription (if it's the only way we can get it).
no matter what niantic will do they can never make everyone happy thats just impossible.
Yeah, I think we generally want it to run this way. The problem is that we generally dont want to constrain the story to things that engineering has time for because engineering has spent a lot of time on server improvements, client fixes, etc. which you cant really make a story around. Hopefully as we move forward, we need to do less of that stuff and we will have more time to implement things this way, but I cant really say.
The main difference is that PGO is a game about collection whereas Ingress is not. That being said, I'm thinking that Battle Beacons could be the ingress version of a PGO raid. There are tons of things we would need to get right in doing this, but hopefully we can make our way there.
Your english is great! I didnt even notice anything. Sometimes I just have a hard time understanding what people are saying.
But for us here (we have around 100 active agents combined in our city) this isn't really an option.
It seems like this is the core part of what you're saying: in small environments there isnt really a big draw. Thats fair enough. We've moved our office, but our old office was next to this sandwich shop. The owner of that shop is a huge ingress fan and there are three portals right next to his shop. So every few days, we would go get a sandwich for lunch and fight him over the portals. It wouldve been cool if we could put down a battle beacon and have a full competition. I guess what I'm saying here is that even for 1v1 or 2v1 Battle beacons should be fun. We playtested it this way when we were working on it and it was a lot of fun.
There is a single problem with everything that chooses portals randomly
Note that I didnt say randomly. I said certain portals. The reason for that is exactly so that people will know "hey, this portal is going to be a challenge... I have 15 minutes...lets go fight someone there". Hopefully this method would help build local communities. There are lots of considerations / nuances into going there and as of now there arent plans to do this, its really where I personally would like to see it go.
We dont really do "virtual" portals. From a gameplay perspective: what would we do with the originals? Remove them? Should originals be affected by XMPs? From a thematic perspective: I agree with the others that portals are supposed to reflect real world places / entities so it doesnt really make a lot of sense to me to have non-real world entities.
The creative team has talked about 3rd faction + virus type things a lot. Its not off the table, but we have other things / ideas we want to try first.
Dear @ofer2, can you just somehow indicate some ways to donate you? 🤣 Thank you so much for this involvement in discussions!