Ingress in 2024
PkmnTrainerJ
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in General
What do you expect? What do you want?
We already have some Anomaly dates:
On XM Anomalies 2024
NIA Researchers have detected XM signals indicating Anomalies on the following dates:
- 17 February 2024
- 16 March 2024
- 18 May 2024
- 15 June 2024
However, none in January or April have been announced. Do you think we will have them or have some Anomaly-less months? I’m okay with that.
For 2024 myself, I’d like to see features finally fleshed out and finished.
- AgentOps - I know many link a task based system to Pokémon GO as it’s another Niantic title and they have it there. However task based systems in mobile games have been around for ages and doesn’t indicate that Ingress is becoming Pokémon GO at all for me. I’d love themed monthly tasks which would take time to do and offer some nice rewards (maybe even CMU in some cases?) and then once sorted and running well, we could look at Paid AgentOps. Pay £5, get special tasks, complete them and get a badge. This would help those who want to feel like they earned the badge rather than forked over money for a badge.
- FitRep - Now to counter everything I just said about Ingress not being Pokémon GO. FitRep is pretty pointless right now. In Pikmin Bloom & Pokémon GO, I get rewards based on how far I walk (group challenges for Pikmin Bloom & individual distance for Pokémon GO). Ingress is also meant to encourage me to get out and explore (“Time to move Agent.”) so it could give the little push with FitRep rewards which were mentioned during Q1 2022 and then forgotten about.
- Friends - Recently, Niantic has been all about “parties”. In Monster Hunter, I can form a party with Friends battle monsters. In Pokémon GO, I can form a party with Friends and do challenges which get all of us extra rewards and greater damage dealt. In Pikmin Bloom, I can form a challenge and see who walks the most & work together. Friends system on Ingress exists but isn’t used at all. I have a few ideas for Ingress but a Party sounds like a good idea to me as well. You can already boost up a Portal with a lot of Agents, but I am thinking of attacking. For example, you go out and gather up some other ENL, and form a party in game. Then your weapons do extra damage to Portals, perhaps even being able to sync up your XMP blasts to go at the same time. Then you get rewards based on number of Portals claimed or resonators destroyed etc.
It goes without saying that I’d like to see lag sorted too. As for some other rambling thoughts.
- Level 17+ please
- A reason beyond bragging rights to recurse (maybe 17+ needs one)
- Duplicating keys (sell Very Rare KCaps that do it, I don’t care)
- Months with events beyond the usual FS, SS stuff (will be an especially bare month in January/April if that’s all we have)
Anyways, I think that’s it from me.*
*I should add an addendum that if there’s a few responses I’ll probably read a few out on the podcast (probably for the 25th December episode). If you’re not cool with that, please do say.
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Comments
Some possible ideas :
I like the idea of choosing some badges to pin, and extra actions when doing a Mission. I’m sure Niantic would love to have one that says “Scan this portal” but then you have people without that ability and people who may be doing the Mission in low light (being dark around 4pm now, I won’t be able to scan much for a few months).
I agree scanning is annoying in the dark. Alternatively, scanning of nearby portals can be a possible method to override passcode missions if the agent is unable to enter the correct passcode.
Sounds good. Maybe during a certain timeframe it could ask “Is it too dark to scan?/Unable to scan? Please hack the portal instead.”
I expect less then 2023
Ingress is still around in 2024. That's pretty amazing already. I'm not sure the players are still around though. Many have switched over to the newer better looking games. Instead of the generic triangle looking icon used for the player it would be nice to see a character instead. The game feels extremely basic compared to other games. Some kind of visually appealing animation would be nice. Something to give the game a more current feel rather than looking like a ten year old game. And yes fix the lag. With as few players left there should be no server lag anymore.
Drones still have plenty of options for finishing off.
Still missing unique drone visits ring, when using the drone layer.
Drones Flying on links I've said many times before. Adds a new dimension to Anomalies and shard games.
Tasks need to be finished. There is so much opportunity here, not only in agent engagement, but in overall use of the game.
Drones need some love. Still annoyed these can be returned so easily. Go on a vacation to some cool city and my drone ends up returned before my flight home has landed, that’s lame. I also think different modes of travel would be slick. Would love slightly further hops or traveling by links.
Events and not anamolies. Would love a return to a 7-10 day event with some silly goal that takes planning and resource management. Make 1331 links or do 1000 hacks, etc. Get some medals involved. I think we had one in 2023? I swear when I started they had them every few months. I’m glad some of y’all can build triangles for AP everyday and stay content, but I’m not and I’m boredddd! FS/SS, boring… I like routine in some aspects of my life, but Ingress shouldn’t be it, so doing the same things all the time is kIlling me…
I say this all as someone who has mostly stopped playing due to some things I need to focus on in real life, but also because I’m just bored and don’t have anything holding my attention with the game. Chipping away at onyx medals could be a thing, but just…not my thing right now unfortunately.
I think being able to scan as an alternative to the required action would be good. So if you wanted to, you could scan the portal instead of hacking or linking etc.
I would like to see a new anomaly format, one that isn't primarily driven by nose count. I have a lot of ideas for different types of in-person competitions but they would all require significant software development effort so it isn't likely to happen.
I want the Missions interface to be reworked so that banner missions are all rolled up and nested under the first mission in the series. Trying to find individual missions in areas with lots of banners can be really frustrating. I know Niantic doesn't currently have a concept of banner missions but I know how I would implement it:
I would like quite a few quality-of-life improvements in the scanner, things that remove tedium so that people can spend more time on interesting gameplay and less time on boring repetitive stuff. For example, it would be nice to be able to recharge keys without taking them out of capsules. I would also like to just drop N (cubes/hypercubes) into my inventory as it is currently sorted and for Ingress to go down the list and top off every key until it either runs out of keys to recharge or it has exhausted the cubes that I allocated. I would like to be able to set simple/complex and key/no-key as defaults for glyph hacking so I don't have to repeat them with every single hack.
Personally i would like drones travel by links.
Niantic do acknowledge banners as a thing now.
If submitting a banner, it must be a 6 or 12 mission banner; First Saturday and Second Sunday banners larger than 12 missions will be immediately rejected.
They could do hexathlons again, i never did one but it sounded fun. Mix that with agent ops
It's funny because even if I think you have a point about improving graphics in order to appeal to new players, I really like the "simple" graphics that makes me really feel like an agent of an intelligence agency which uses the Scanner just as a tool. I'm one of those boring people who actually thinks that the old Redacted look was really cool
I haven’t done one either. I’m up for some different event formats for sure.
It doesn't matter what I provide, this year was quiet for the game. I suppose FS becoming physical will grab local or regional interest. Niantic needs to push something here for Ingress in 2024.
But the API needs to be updated to also establish banners - grouping the banners would be such an improvement in the app for missions. It would be like using the Bannergress website.
@MoogModular Grouping banners would also make life much easier for people like me who mainly do individual missions. I treat missions as travel souvenirs and trying to find single missions among the huge list of banner segments is like trying to find a needle in a haystack explosion. Rolling banners up is a win for people who enjoy banners and want to see the whole banner in a single view and it's also a win for people who don't enjoy banners and would like the mission list to be easier for us to consume.
looks q1 2024 calendar with sad face
We still have the rest of 2024. Maybe Chronos will be a Hexathlon?
(Nobody notice I am covering all my bases with what Chronos could be in various places so I can say I was correct whatever happens)
I recall my comment on the new years resolutions thread for 2023
What’s your New Years Resolution as an Agent and what should Ingress’ be? — Ingress
The personal goals for 2023 were achieved - I co-hosted a first saturday in London in February 2023 and I recursed as blue shortly after the Brighton anomaly. My personal targets for 2024 will be to level up all the silver I can to gold in my badge profile, recurse again and contribute towards a large mission banner in London.
The new years resolutions I suggested for niantic were advertising the game better and restoring the 90 second cooldown time down from 300 seconds. Niantic haven't advertised ingress at all as far as I know so this new years resolution for niantic gets carried over into 2024. With respect to cooldown, the introduction of overclock has somewhat mitigated the negative effect of the 90 seconds back to 300 seconds decision. So that more portals can be overclock hacked, and so that scanning related badges can continue to be earnt by players who want them niantic's 2024 resolution should be to roll out scanning support across more mobile hardware.
Definitely a global event like the Kinetic Caps and current Machina Reclaimer
That's exactly why I see it as a quality improvement altogether because you can then filter out banners
we can hope
Upon reflection there are some other things that I would like to see:
I want a way to balance the cell score so that static fields aren't continuously rewarded, and an outnumbered faction can still be competitive. My favorite proposal for this is that each septicycle is won or lost based on the MU delta from the previous septicycle rather than the raw amount of MU, but I also see the flaw in that.
To go with that I would like rewards for MU destruction that parallel those for MU creation. Taking down an opponent's field contributes to playfield control just as much as putting one up does. I would love to see a leaderboard for MU destruction that parallels that of MU creation, and I would love to see badges for fields/links/MU destroyed.
I would like to see better a better mechanism for handling portals that have become essentially impossible to get to even though they might have been accessible a couple of years ago. The combination of practically inaccessible portals plus years of key duplication means that durable portals can be endlessly abused at no cost to the faction that owns the portal. I don't have any great ideas for how to handle this but I recognize that it's a big issue for people who like to play the tactical game. While this is often a factional issue at a local level it impacts both factions more or less equally at the global scale.
Meta summary of the above three ideas: I want the game to focus more on competition and playfield control and less on individual stats.
I would like to see gear vaults available for purchase, for temporary gear storage such as when you are preparing for an anomaly or are about to recurse. I imagine them as large capsules that you could load or unload at will, but with a cold-storage feature. Once you have loaded the vault you could seal it for cold storage and the gear inside the vault wouldn't consume any inventory space. Once the vault was sealed you couldn't alter the contents except by breaking the seal, and when you break the vault open all of the contents of the vault are returned to your inventory at once and the vault self-destructs. You could only unseal the vault if you have room for all of the contents in your inventory. Probably you can only have one vault in your inventory at a time but they would be available in multiple sizes. I see some possibilities for abuse here and I haven't thought through all of the details and corner cases.
I only ask for one thing:
Better communication and plausible anomaly goals, what happened at the end of Ctrl must not be repeated again. I play for the lore as well and I felt betrayed by NIA when they imposed the RES goal regardless the ENL won. Same as the anomalies, why playing if they give advantage to the other faction to set the score outside the anomaly? This is not the RES fault, but makes the game driven by: "OK, lets make the lore be directed to the direction NIA wants". It makes me feel less eager to participate and spend money travelling.
PS: As I said before this is not the res fault, it's the referees one (NIA). If I were RES, I would feel like dissapointed as well.
XMA ambassadors to actually chat in the official ingress Campfire chat. It feels surreal to have the only CA trying to understand their concerns and be their voice is from the Pogo side. The group feels Niantic has abandoned them. Do something. As a Pogo CA I can only pass it on and hope for the best as well as pogo redirecting traffic.
It’s weird how Pokémon GO Community Ambassadors get marked and called out specifically.
but nothing for Ingress XMAs (I wouldn’t complain for WF Ambassadors either). I feel we need a shuffle around in the XMAs and new direction to them as to what to do too.
Ingress XMAs needs to have a real purpose.