Brian's Blog: Sept 2019
NianticBrian
Niantic › admin
Our mission when we launched Ingress in Nov 2012 is the same as our mission today — to help enable agents to set off on adventures on foot with others. When I talk with agents about their sitreps and stories, the common threads across them are connecting with others who share a passion for the game, and seeing the world through new perspectives. The game gives us reasons to come together, and it's the community that makes Ingress, Ingress.
A few years ago, a popular compiler or technology we leveraged was shut down. But more importantly, the original mobile app was designed in such a way that made it difficult for our artists and designers to make updates without extensive engineering support. Our move to Prime comes with tradeoffs, but it enables our team to more flexibly prototype and experiment, as well as adopt shared features across other Niantic games, like in-app ticketing with Events, which was extended with personal leaderboards in the recent field tests. We're listening to feedback from agents, and we'll continue to iterate on and improve the game.
I'm focused on our long-term sustainability — the sustainability of the in-game economy, the game mechanics, and the game itself — because I care a lot about Ingress and the community. It's why I came back to Niantic. Ingress has so much potential as a global, competitive real-world game, and I feel, in a way, that we're just getting started. I'm uncomfortably excited about where we're headed, and hope to see you out in the field.
Hack the planet,
Brian Rose
Comments
Looking forward to seeing what y’all come up with!
@ClutterCutter there's some additional behind-the-scenes server work in-progress related to retiring Redacted that we're tackling first, but we already have lots of great suggestions from agents. Stay tuned.
Can I ask, are the paid-only anomalies what you call "just getting started"?
Looking forward to new things! (And not being speedlocked)
I hope all new things will be more inclusive and dont exclude people who cant pay anomalys participation and badges in dollars.
Niantic should think that ingress is a worldwide game, where people economies and local situations are different and very difficult in many countries of the world.
Been in ingress since June 2015 and i will keep playing and being part of this crazy community around the world.
I understand. That black screen with some dots on it would be too difficult to recreate. You had to create this busy screen with shimmery, seizure-inducing portal descriptions.
And yes, anyone can haz my stuff.
Looking forward to more blogs like this!
I have been playing Ingress since 2015, not as long as some of the real veteran players, but longer than many others. I have seen changes, problems, bugs, events all come and go, each with their own particular set of challenges along the way. We Ingress players are hugely, hugely passionate and certainly not shy about sharing our opinions about things. But each step along this Ingress journey of mine, I have seen the people behind Ingress working hard to keep the game moving forward. Who knows what adventures will come our way in the next year? I'm looking forward to finding out., and quite willing to believe that any problems will be sorted out along the way, as they always have been. I'm not overlooking them or pretending that there are no problems- just confident that the folks at Nia together with our community will overcome them. Hope to see you all out on the trails!
Some of us really get a kick out of reading & following details. I really enjoy reading engineering blogs and stories about challenges (like the cloud provider's post-incident reports.) Any chance of an engineering blog in the future?
Any initiatives to reverse agent numbers decline?
My 2¢: Include 50+ players with 50+ eyesight, include older phones; make GPU intensive animations optional/throttle CPU usage, include small screens -no reason to throw away a perfectly fine iphone SE and smaller form factor rugged phones perfect for the field tend to run older OS versions and are not good on cooling. And skip the purple if the game is about blue or green -or make skins optional might help people that needs strong contrasts/have seizure problems! Thx for a great game!
Looking forward to things ahead. This was good to read as it keeps me more confident that Ingress is where I also think it is, almost not even started. Today im going to recurse again for the 4. time(or is it 5. ? badge now says 3, so Ill make it 4... and go on with my 5...) 🤣
Have heard rumors that recursing will stop, hope not. But I would love some tier on recursing. But maybe on a new badge so that it does not hurt the agents that have recursed one time and are OK with that.
Just plans to give Pokemon Go portal review access so we're not needed anymore :P
Players are always coming and going depending on life circumstances. I don't personally know any agents quitting because of prime and anomaly ticketing is irrelevant for 90% of players.
I know some because of Prime. But I think they will return. They dont quit chats... thats a way of saying they are still in the family.
Please find below a translation in French. Hope this helps.
Notre mission, quand nous avons commencé le projet Ingress en novembre 2012, est identique à notre mission aujourd'hui — permettre à des agents de s'éclater dans des aventures pédestres avec d'autres agents. À chaque fois que j'échange avec des agents à propos de leurs sit-rep et de leurs histoires, le dénominateur commun est cette connexion avec ceux qui partagent leur passion du jeu, qui leur permet de voir le monde via des angles nouveaux. Le jeu nous donne des raisons de se réunir. C'est grâce à cet esprit communautaire que Ingress est... Ingress.
Il y a de cela quelques années, un compilateur informatique populaire ou une technologie sur lesquels nous nous appuyions est arrivé à son crépuscule. Mais le facteur déterminant était que l'application mobile d'origine était conçue d'une manière qui rendait les modifications difficiles pour les artistes et designers sans intervention lourde de la part des ingénieurs développeurs.
La bascule vers Prime s'est faite avec des concessions. Mais, grâce à cela, notre équipe désormais est en mesure d'expérimenter, de faire du prototypage flexible, et d'adopter des fonctionnalités partagées par d'autres jeux de Niantic. la gestion des tickets d'événements directement dans l'application Prime a par exemple été étendue avec les classements personnels pendant les récents "Field Tests". Nous sommes attentifs aux retours que les agents nous font, et nous continuerons d'améliorer le jeu, itérativement.
J'apporte une attention particulière à notre durabilité sur le long terme : cela inclut le business-model du jeu, les rouages du jeu, et le jeu lui-même. Si je suis revenu chez Niantic, c'est parce que Ingress et la communauté Ingress comptent énormément pour moi. En tant que jeu global, mondial et compétitif, Ingress a un potentiel énorme. J'ai le sentiment, même si cela peut paraître paradoxal, qu'on n'a fait que le début du trajet. Je ressens une excitation étrange quant à la direction que Ingress va prendre. J'espère vous croiser sur le terrain.
Hackez la planète.
Brian Rose
There has been a steady decline in active agent numbers for the past two years, I'm not talking about Prime and regular churn of casual agents. The number of active agents has been steadily in decline - to the point that Prime, anomalies and IFS are irrelevant to the discussion. How are the number of agents going to increase and when can we expect to see this turn around?