Niantic Chat Closed Beta
NianticBrian
Niantic › admin
Our top goal is to grow the global Ingress community and encourage more Agents to play Ingress. Ingress is the Agents, and we build Ingress for the Agents. For existing Agents, we prioritized bringing back live ops that Agents can look forward to by publishing our July-Sept Season Calendar in advance, and easing our way back into distributed live events through Second Sundays and NL-1331X meetups. For new players, we’ve started multiple rounds of experiments to the New Agent Tutorial to learn how best to introduce new recruits to Ingress, and teach them about the game over time.
This all leads back to the Agent community. I believe one of the best ways we can grow and connect the global Agent base is by integrating an upcoming Niantic Lightship social feature into Ingress. We started our Niantic Chat Closed Beta with Vanguards and XM Ambassadors, and over the next several months, we’ll be opening up Closed Beta to more folks.
Niantic Chat complements COMM and the Forum by enabling Agents to join and create their own public or private groups directly from Ingress, no app-switching required. Agents can coordinate events, farms, or meetups with reminders pinned to the Niantic Chat world map. And Agents can optionally choose to temporarily share their location with their groups to help with coordinating ops.
Niantic Chat will change and evolve quickly during Closed Beta. While we’re eager to add more Agents, we’re doing so in multiple waves to give us more time to launch and then iterate on Agent feedback and suggestions. The first wave of invites outside of Vanguards and XMAs has now been added. (Please note that Niantic Chat Closed Beta invites will come via [email protected], subject line: Ingress x Niantic Chat Closed Beta.) The next waves of invites to be distributed over several months will include NL-1331X Meet You Out There meetup attendees and C.O.R.E. subscribers. We’ll share more about Niantic Chat here in the Forum soon.
Meet you out there,
Brian Rose
Comments
One thing to note is that Google / GMail, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the invite emails are spam and filed them accordingly. I'm not sure if there's anything Niantic can do about that, but if anyone's interested in the invites, glance at your spam folder once in a while.
over the next several months
Bruh
That's a good tempo you have here... /s
Brian, we really love the efforts you and your teams are doing to introduce new features to improve our current game. However, COMMs are still not safe, in many areas is toxic and easy to weaponize.
wow months? long wait then until all will get this..
I can also read this as "over the next several months we'll be messing around with Niantic Chat instead of doing something to the actual game and gameplay".
Hope I'm wrong
You don't want to see how the sausage is made... You'd rather get the final product..
So is Ingress a game or a chat application?
In order to use it do I have to open up the client or can I access the chat from a web browser?
Can I send images and links in the chat? Can I directly pm someone?
How do we add people to the private chats? Same as telegram?
Is there any Niantic access to our private chats? That's a big one there...
If you invite someone to a chat, will they get an annoying popup while they are busy trying to field, because they just started using an Apex? (ie weaponized, annoying)
I'm sure have more questions as I think about it some more.
Well, thats the point of a beta, isnt it? Try it out when Niantic gives you access and give them that feedback. Right now, the chat is bare bones, which is why its labled "beta".
NO me sale en el scanner para probar XD y el visto bueno....
Sigo esperando XD
I'm excited for enhanced chat, my biggest complaint that still stands today with Prime is that is pretty much destroyed the discovery of community with the breakdown of chat from interactions.
in OldGress when I entered a city easily 8 out of 10 times I would get an interaction from a local, be it same or different faction, since Prime, that falls down to maybe 2 out of 10 times, with similar travel, and many overlapping cities.
I have met some pretty amazing people because of cross faction interactions in cities I have stayed in with other travelers also visiting the same city. So something that can bring chat and conversation back into the game app will be very welcomed by me.
I really hope there is a community/geofence component to this chat for discoverability of people open to chatting vs just an alterative to a local telegram/discord/
trashslackI think the biggest advantage of the Niantic Chat is that it's native to the Scanner. There is a difference between "Hey download this Messenger you probably didn't use before and sign up just to talk to us" and "Hey I just send you a private message via the Niantic Chat and invited you to our local group". This will have huge effects in retaining new players, and if nothing else, you can still pull them over to Telegram later.
I have already played around with the Niantic Chat in Catan (and I assume the same version is used in Ingress), and yes, at the moment, there are no features that would beat Telegram, Slack etc. But if the Niantic Chat Team is taking feedback to heart, I'd bet money that this will be a major platform (for Niantic players, maybe not overall lol)
so now, pls giv beta to me
If it's a Niantic-wide feature they're developing for all games, it probably has its own team working on it and not the Ingress team.
I mean, Niantic employees please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd be surprised.
Wow😮
Sure, more questions. Will it block messages not telling you which innocent word it did not like?:)
Way chat in Ingress when most of the agents use Telegram. Niantic remove and dont relese it.
Niantic Chat is meant to be a one stop chat platform, regardless of Niantic game.
Because of the diverse 3rd party apps, it is really difficult to have new players join those groups/apps such as Telegram.
It is not intended to replace these 3rd party apps.
So for example you travel to another city for a weekend or more, and want to join in whatever local event is on, might not even be game related, using Niantic Chat is intended to assist players to take advantage of those.
Meanwhile, others are looking at how to capture new players more easily to their preferred 3rd party chat program, through Niantic Chat.
Where do I sign to participate on those betas?
I do hope there is a mute/block option or some way to help handle abusive chat...
And also the biggest disadvantage... Nobody uses COMM for coordinating efforts because it's not secure (also 99% full of toxic funky **** BS). Why would this be any different? Not having seen it I can only guess, but the reason Discord etc are used off-game are because they are secure.
Niantic Chat functions on a similar basis as Discord. When you create a group, you can have it either public or private. If public, you can join it from the map, if private, you can only share it when someone gives you the invite code. That's already miles more secure then COMM.
Most are used to telegram by now, even new players u want quick learn to use telegram.
I stay on Telegram. Mutch better drain low battery and lots of new users learn quick to use Telegram. Heard lots of agents dont like use chat in Ingress and only use Telegram.
That varies by location. I can't recall the last time I used Telegram, but use Discord everyday...
Why on earth did the word "m o n k e y" get nerfed in my reply... but BS is OK? :)
So the game will need to be updated more frequently and you have to have the scanner open just to use chat? So chat will be weaponized just as comms are? And will likely be covered under same tos.
Someone didn't think through all the works. 🙂
Brian. You need to move your drone!
Great
I might suggest that Founders be part of the next beta group.
It sounds like it'll be great for onboarding new agents. No need to get their Google account information or ask them to download a third party app right away. Just get them into your room on Niantic chat (I assume you'll just use their IGN to invite), keep them in there until they've gone through your vetting process, and then you can invite them to your main group in Telegram/Slack/Discord/whatever.
Wrong direction. Scanner is a tool to detect and operate XM. It should be as simple as possible. Extra feature brings into scanner more size, more data transaction, more server load, more bug, more security flaw, more and more problems.