Proposed Event Schedule
MonkeyPelt
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I, like most agents, am ECSTATIC that competitive Ingress is back. It’s been a blast teaming up with friends, strategizing, meeting new people and exploring (nearby) new places!
Though competitive, the Kureze Effect is far from a large scale typical anomaly, yet it’s a great interim event series while the pandemic is still ongoing.
I felt uneasy about a monthly anomaly event when Kureze was announced but thought it would just be for Q1. In the Phase 2 Final Report, Niantic announced that Kureze is one of four temporal seasons, that each quarter would be its own anomaly season. My assumption (yes assumption, not fact) is that the next three seasons will follow the cadence of the current season and become monthly events. This makes me nervous that if anomalies become this regular, they’ll lose the gusto that anomalies had pre-pandemic, become an “Ingress Third Saturday” event, and lead to burnout.
While I don’t want anomalies to disappear for another two years, every month seems far too often. Here is a very rough outline of a proposed event schedule cadence (for when travel and large meetups are safe again) that mixes competitive and casual Ingress:
**Note: this doesn’t include events like IFS or I2S or seasonal events like Valentines or Halloween. Those events should absolutely continue as is.**
Q1: Competitive
-2 normal anomaly weekends (10-20 sites globally per weekend with attached MDs, GoRuck, NL at a site)
-A tiered challenge badge
Q2: Casual
-Stand alone MDs
-NL-1331 tour
-Revamped Hexathlon
-A tiered challenge badge
Q3: Competitive
-1 normal anomaly weekend (10-20 sites globally with attached MDs, GoRuck, NL at a site)
-Something similar to original Eos Protocol (competitive global event that spans a few phases and has a clear faction winner)
*or*
Something similar to the Dark XM event in early 2018 (each faction gets secret starburst targets, or must link between two distant target portals, etc.)
Q4: Finale
-Abaddon Prime anomaly system where one region will have a single huge anomaly every month but the “off regions” get Kureze Effect style events (minus pay-to-win) with 25ish sites per region that can effect the primary site’s score.
-MDs at some of the satellite sites
-Regional NL tour that ends at each region’s finale site
-A tiered challenge badge
The point isn’t the order of quarters, but a cadence to encourage different types of engagement and to prevent monotony and burnout.
Comments
I really think kureze & related stuff is a test for nia to iron out things b4 bbecome we go back normal again.
or its the new type of anomalies vs how they were in the past ? maybe we will never go back to how things were..
This feels more likely given that Kureze turned up as an Anomaly badge, not just an event.
I think putting 2 weekends to Q1, 1 weekend to Q3 and 1 weekend to Q4 is not the best idea. majority of anomalies are on northern hemisphere (I assume majority of players as well), and warmer weather is better for competitive play.
also making 1 big finale style site with 25 satelites is counterintuitive. for finales, you want to go big. if you put 25 satelites into regions, attendance will be maybe 30% of potential. splitting to so many cities means we will probably never have global meetings as we had, might be future, but I am not happy about it, and I would not suggest it.
well it would be better then having just 1 like the last one requiem that is on hold until further notice ? not everyone can afford travel long so its better to split them up in regions instead whenever that will be possible. but maybe niantic wants to hold 1 big anomaly with full niantic staff and afterparty and all that, a bit hard if u split sure since they cant afford send niantic staff all over world no...
Not a fan of monthly anomalies on a local or close to scale, that leads to burnout.
If theres travelling involved within the greater region/subcontinent, id be more keen
And only count Nia deploys, no more player deploys.