Comparing the Catan to the Ingress community
InvestigateXM
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With Catan on the horizon, it has received it's own community forum (https://community.catanworldexplorers.com), just like Ingress, Harry Potter and Wayfarer. In contrast to the Ingress community however, Catan has a lot more functionality, stuff that I'm not quite sure why it isn't in the Ingress forum too. Lemme start to list a few:
A functional bug report tool
I believe the Wayfarer forum also has that. Let's face it, Ingress is not without bugs, and the current way to report them is... inefficient. Why not use the same bug report system you use on the other forums?
Groups/Communities
This also seems like a no-brainer to me. One of the main reasons G+ was so beloved is because you could easily create communities for whatever reason you saw fit, be it for local communities, IFS, NL-1331 events or anomalies. All that helped connect agents in an "orderly way" which can't really be replicated by Telegram, Discord or whatever is used currently. In Catan, although you can't actually post in them, you're able to create groups which you can set to either private, public or secret. Those groups would help connect and organize massively in Ingress too. Speaking of connecting:
Community Map
Long ago on ingress.com, there was also such a community map on the main ingress.con website which linked to various G+ communities. New agents are often confused as to where to ask for help or where to find a community. Even veteran agents who are looking to connect to a specific area often have to search for a long time to find the specific community within that area. As this map supports lots of links to different services (Telegram, Discord, Facebook and the forum itself), I implore you to please think about putting this into the Ingress forum too. You can even create temporary entries that will be deleted from the map once a certain date has passed, perfect for IFS or other events.
Private messages
This one I can kinda understand not being available as some agents are vicious, but still, private messages are way safer then transmitting a message to an agent via COMM. In fact, when the Ingress community first started, the feature was enabled, which probably means @Ishira and I are the only ones who ever sent messages via this forum 😅
I would love to see the forum evolve and have it be a place akin to the old G+ days. Please take those things into consideration, as all forums run on the same software, it shouldn't be too hard to add those things.
Comments
Also just saw that the game feedback is working with the bug system too, aka upvoting and changing status. That would also be really cool to have, if just to see that Niantic is reading our suggestions or feedback.
Could it be that when they create a new board, it's a newer build of Vanilla Forums? I feel old for mentioning this but the InvisionFree Boards back in the early 2000s were loaded by the site owner. I think even MediaWiki (the software for Wikipedia and Fandom) has to be uploaded to use the latest features.
Alright, time to bring this up again.
I have been playing Crash Bandicoot: On the Run since it launched last Wednesday. This mobile game was gone by King (I know, I remember when the bandicoot was a Naughtydog property) and to my amazement - there's a support forum for the game. The bigger amazement was the support forums are on Vanilla Forums as well!
Look at how detailed their forums are for the new game:
Nice big images that prevent any miscommunication.
Images to state which game forum is which - something that would be nice to direct users to the Wayfarer forum.
We have imagery that can be used here that also doesn't **** mobile data for visitors. The icons we see in our scanner can easily apply here. You can even have the imagery from the Ingress website incorporated onto here.
What's the budget for King Support and the revenue from Crash Bandicoot On the Run?
No idea for now. They also added "Crash Bandicoot passes" that are similar to Season Passes - $5 for how long they run and the current one is 5 weeks.
I can only imagine how much revenue they have from Candy Crush
That's kinda the point though. Niantic doesn't have a large support presence on forums, because their biggest money spinner doesn't have a forum. So they don't have a large support team that can easily absorb one tiny game added to the pile, like King can.
Ingress - Outsized needs, undersized revenue.
If they even had one person as dedicated to forums it would seem better than nothing.
The design presented takes literally minimum time to set up and that's speaking as someone with low to medium knowledge of HTML, CSS, and programming. It's a no-brainer to provide these portions so it's also easier for the staff as well.
They're hiring.