[Discussion] 2022 Q1 Ingress Schedule
NianticOfficial
Niantic › admin
Soon(tm)
From thia:
Before I open this for discussion, I want to address two things that will be mentioned:
Latency and Anti-Cheat: I know there will be disappointment that these are not called out specifically. These are still being looked at/worked on and are important, we wanted the first one to focus on positive. (Well, we want all of them to be positive :))
This also does not list everything we are working on; it is a high-level summary and some stuff is intended to be a surprise or may take longer to develop.
Q1 was a little on the late side due to the scheduling (and rescheduling) of things so I apologize for that, but I've scheduled Q2 to hopefully be available at the start of Q2.
I look forward to reading all of your comments and iterating on this!
Comments
So, a discussion thread is started, but it's locked. Great!
In any case, fix the game latency, nothing else matters at the moment.
After that, fix the bugs regarding XM, etc, before adding new features please. The latency is driving players away, so please make this the number 1 top priority.
Latency and Anti-Chat: I know there will be disappointment that these are not called out specifically. These are still being looked at/worked on and are important, we wanted the first one to focus on positive. (Well, we want all of them to be positive :))
Well it's hard to be positive about anything if you take in consideration the fact that the latency has been around for a year now, things are fixed with a speculative fix, only the fix never works and the issue is never mentioned again. Really, fix the game already.
Because of spoofers and the helplessness of NIA Ops, today I canceled my CORE subscription that I had from day one. Thank you Niantic for making my life better... without Ingress.
It sounds like you’ve got a good handle on where you’re taking Ingress.
Can we have an idea of the rewards we will see from FITREP? Also, with Pokémon GO & Harry Potter: Wizards Unite (RIP) I get how they’d use AR camera functions but can’t think how it’d work on Ingress, so am interested to see what you come up with.
Oh right. Forgot the required comment.
Grrr, latency. Gragh, spoofers and multi-accounters.
Congratulations on the initiative, Nia! Anything that improves our beloved game and the community is welcome.
However, there is a lack of actions against spoofers that are Ingress's cancer. I don't understand why you don't focus on this initiative, because in my understanding this is the premise of the game and priority 0.
Pokemon GO 2.0 looks promising.
Jokes aside, I'll welcome the new SS medal.
Anti-chat🤨 or anti-cheat?
Regarding portal scanning, it's obvious that Niantic is pushing extremely hard for people to scan things. But portal scanning is 100% disconnected from the core gameplay loop of Ingress.
I think there are 3 types of players: some who think portal scanning is stupid and it's just unpaid work for niantic, some who genuinely enjoy the process and some who just stand in one spot, wave their phone just to get the badge. Adding carrot on a stick for scanning will mostly move people from the first group to the third.
If you want more people to scan, figure out how to make it part of the core Ingress experience. Not shove it into every UI element, but actually integrate into gameplay mechanics.
Ffs, I don't think there's even been any storyline about what portal scanning is.
Thank you for the updates! I'm particularly looking forward to Mission Days returning in Q2 (hopefully). Also will be curious to see if Second Sunday shifts toward other tasks besides missions, as Brian has suggested before.
I wish the Second Sunday badge wasn't going to be a carbon copy of Mission Day. I am really hoping the tiers are going to not be similar to IFS.
LOL - maybe this was a subconscious typo.... thank you - fixing!
Anti-chat, for those against Comms and Niantic Social. 😆
you know, i was surprised how diligently NIA worked on "delete account" feature in a few last releases. supposed to be a killer feature literaly.
The issue is scanning is disconnected from the immersion regardless of the game. If they focused scanning on a new proof of concept experience that showed what Lightship does with the environment - I feel like that would be overall beneficial versus trying to monke wrench it in.
Fix latency or anything else just isn't worth doing.
Many agents have canceled their CORE membership due to the lag issues. I play far less than I normally do, due to the lag issues. Recruiting new agents is already hard enough, when they experience lag, usually I don't see them again. 😥
pls fix the lag, it will be not that fun with events and the ongoing lag is still present.
Not acknowledging the big elephants in the room (persistent lag issues, spoofers, multiaccounting) and waiting to mention them in a secondary comment looks like you're trying to gloss over the issues. This isn't a good look. It feels like your comments here are just to try to keep the people having these issues happy, that they're an afterthought.
I'll keep my CORE cancelled, thanks a lot.
Portal scanning - I agree, make it more part of the experience. Also, in regards to the community rewards. How well is that working in PoGo? Is there anything the Ingress team can pick up from that game to make it a better or more useful addition to Ingress? In my opinion, the bonuses are more or less worthless for the amount of work. The time it takes to scan something 50 times you could easily just go spin a few other poke stops and make up that “bonus.”
Missions - Is there any plans for ANY updates to missions? A better review system, an updated mission planner, anything?
Regarding weekly summaries and (possibly) portal scan meter: please be cognizant of the disruption pop-ups can have on gameplay. The weekly summary is fine currently and can be easily Xed out of, if adding rewards and adding pop-ups relating to the Portal Scan Meter aren't able to be quickly downsized, it's going to cause a lot of frustration for agents who are opening their app to respond to portal attack notifications. Those few seconds of delay could cause an agent to lose a portal if they can't recharge in time.
Specifically I'm thinking of how many notifications I have to close out of when I open PoGo, or the Daily recap in Pikmon Bloom that I can't skip. If I had to go through something like that for Ingress and it caused me to lose portals, it would certainly be a significant negative impact in my enjoyment of the game. It's already difficult enough to defend a portal due to the latency issues, and I could see this sort of thing driving players away from the game if their core gameplay becomes disrupted enough.
That's what I've said from day one of scanning. Show us it being actually used within Ingress. Actual proof of concept. I don't care if the proof of concept is in their "BETA Environment" but show us what we are actually scanning for. Until then I see no point in scanning anything.
Yup. Who cares about new features if they’re not playing the game. (Which is what is happening now.)
It’s also nice that we get a roadmap, which I know is something people had asked for, for a while. Wayfarer have theirs;
Waiting on the one for
Catan: World Explorers Harry Potter: Wizards UniteTransformers: Heavy Metal and Pikmin Bloom now from the main Niantic products.We have chatted enough. +1 to ending all social aspects of Ingress. 🤣
great job, agent!
I’m an idiot. It’s obviously these Scanner Crates for AR Camera stuff.
"Scanner Crates" have already been playtested and are said to be an AR geocache, which you can apparently find with the camera at portals. They contain "rare in-game items."
Can anyone who’s playtested these tell us more without breaking their NDA? Or maybe @NianticThia can yay or nay on whether this is the thing?
I must say, it was a good Q1 till now. The problem with an spoofer was solved after 2 two Months. Kureze was fun and we have two new players.
But making new missions is still frustrating!
Sorry, but I'm going to be blunt:
Latency, latency, latency. That's the 3 things you should be focussing on. Everything else is meaningless if you don't fix your game.
Secondly, AR is a dead end. It's been shown to be a dead end in Pokemon, and it's obviously going to be a dead end in Ingress, because even if we did ever become a society that buys thicker, heavier, more expensive phones that have enough battery life to make it theoretically workable, it's still not going to be socially acceptable to point your phone camera at people and things as much as AR gaming needs you to.
If you want to "work towards financial sustainability", fix latency so CORE subscribers return and stop wasting money on AR.
Which I guess also links in to these from the Lightship event?
Scanner cards/crates that other Agents can hide and then both Agents get a reward when they’re found?
There is literally nothing Niantic can say on the topics of latency and cheating that would actually make people happy.
If the lag isn't solved, people will complain. If someone's arch nemesis spoofer isn't banned, they will complain. The only thing that actually matters is what Niantic does. Saying, "We're working on it!" doesn't cut it (case in point: the comment I'm replying to).
Just fix the spoofers glory hole and that damn lag. Don't care about the dumb AR stuff I see, it's goes nowhere and we just want to link, hack and field.
I like what I hear so far but you still need to address portals that are significantly misplaced. Currently the ability to correct the placement of a portal is too limited and people can still abuse the feature to misplace the portal anyways. My suggestion would be allow agents to summit a portal Stan to prove the portal is in the wrong place and to require a Portal scan of all portal location edits as the means of defining the correct location. This it will enable a much more accurate "edit location" and still allow a significant distance from the original inaccurate location.