New features to lure new agents and keep existing agents around
I want to start with, I'm a pandemic Agent, I started playing at some point last year when Pokémon go got stale for me, (I've since gotten back into it) and I've always been somewhat of a solo player in all Niantic games. Remember that last part for later, that's important
I had started ingress up a long time ago, in 2013 maybe 2014 on my first smart phone. I didn't really understand what I was looking for at the time or that I needed to move IRL in order to move in the game. but I was in love with the idea of it immediately. a few years later Pokémon go caused tremors of footfall when everybody went outside to catch Pokémon in the real world.
I had had a few ups and downs with Pokémon go but generally I was a daily player, usually I still am. there is usually some time or another when I can figure out something to do while I wait or sometimes ill even play for a chunk of the day if I'm really feeling GBL battles, which brings me closer to my point.
In the beginning Niantic had a lot of promises to fulfil based on the trailer it put out initially. from release in 2016 to now the game has changed so much. Albeit a lot of the features suffer from bugs for some users or even more widespread but the game is a lot closer to what was promised than where it was. not gonna lie, Pokémon go had monetary transactions almost from the very beginning so its no wonder its had as much attention in the Niantic viewpoint.
That was a lot about Pokémon, I know but hear me out to the end, please.
Niantic, at least as long I've been playing Ingress, has had some awesome features that I wish could be in Pokémon go. Especially with the introduction to lightship and Niantic social, both of those features are going to one day be amazing in building the AR Metaverse that Niantic has been talking about. Pokémon go has needed a chat/social platform the second that raids came out.
I want to talk about the other side of that coin, things that Pokémon go has that I think ingress would benefit from. the very first thing that comes to mind is quests. (not to be confused with ingress' missions)
Having a daily task or even a list of task to complete for the day or the week made Pokémon go fun again, it changed the game from something that I just picked up when I was out in the city to something I could get into and have fun playing everyday. sure there are medals you can make progress on all the time on ingress but its not the same, pogo has both, pogo has a lot of medals. Giving agents daily "ops" could give mods or gear, that would help newer players and keep older players engaged with the routine of it, a lot of my fellow faction agents don't really play the game for much else other than remote glyph hacking due to the pandemic and such. plus quests for AR scanning is in POGO too, why couldn't there be scanning 'ops'?
If agents scan enough portals to be trusted with the lightship enhanced scanner why couldn't there be a little more incentive to do so. For example like how Pokémon go has team go rocket members that rotate in and out of pokestops,
"[REDACTED] has begun taking over portals world wide Agent! keep your wits about you as you face this new challenge. Its time to Log in."
have agents scan portals that are corrupted with a new form of dark xm to study it and in doing so the agent unlocks that portal to be used as normal.
personally I would like if the corruption could happen to any portal, the game board is too easily dominated on a local level. players are able to take control of large amounts of the local area, and as soon as its broken, they have enough gear and keys to just knock it down and set it back up again. making it hard for newer players to get into the game when everywhere they would be is under a gigantic field. these corrupted portals could produce more of a challenge for those veteran players that like to keep their big fields and give newer players the chance to be able to field in closer areas as well. there could be some kind of rare mod that aids in keeping your fields corruption free as well.
When team go rocket was first introduced to POGO I had to see what it was all about, save the shadow Pokémon from team rocket, purify, etc. It was awesome, there was a reason to go out and spend some time tracking down and fighting team rocket with my arsenal of Pokémon. Truly a childhood dream come true. but from a gamer point of view it became something that any player could enjoy. I was already ready for grunts and only the boss Giovanni gave me any real challenge (at least when he first came out) but then as I still ran into people playing at the time. newer trainers had a harder time with it, they didn't know the type advantages for each Pokémon, I was a nerd, I have played Pokémon since i was very young. So when people asked me what they should use against this leader or what works well against this type of Pokémon or that, I was excited to be able to share what I knew with someone who was just starting to be interested in Pokémon.
I got to be on the other side of the fence with Ingress when another agent explained glyph hacking to me. I didn't know anything about it and it felt like a hidden secret because it doesn't really show you how to glyph hack in game. at least not to my knowledge. once I started glyph hacking I got really into it, learning what certain glyphs meant, tagging my workspace or notebooks with glyphs when listening to phone calls, the list goes on. You can spend nearly a life time learning and getting proficient at Pokémon battling and/or glyph hacking but Pokémon battles are used for more than just team rocket, they use the same system for the pvp system. So one learned skill with multiple applications. With Ingress it is just glyph hacking, that's all.
It would be awesome to see glyphs implemented in other ways, maybe something as simple as free glyph hack battle beacons. or something more direct like maybe it could be mod. you can lock your portal down so that its impervious to xmp or ultra strikes unless an agent cracks the glyph codes to release it. it could even evolve into something amazing with the power of lightship, imagine the AR experience of having a glyph battle against another agent over a portal. it would be like the ingress anime.
Alright, I could go into some other ideas with drones and other ideas about how to put more lore and story into the day to day gameplay but ill save it for later, please if anybody has other ideas. let me read them, Let Niantic read them. share this if you want.
Lets build the AR Metaverse, for all of us!
See you out there!
Comments
First off, Pokémon GO is collection game, it's PvP came well after the game released, and is still in poor condition.
This type of game appeals to a lot of people in different ways.
Ingress is a Persistent Real Time Strategy Game.
I am happy to hear people try out different games, see if they like them, or not.
Ingress has stagnated in terms of engaging in organising and take down, of large fielding OPs.
This is a multi pronged area, and many people have different opinions.
* Classic Ingress UI was clean and intuitive. But the code was a mess
* Prime Ingress isn't as intuitive, but the code for it has been re-engineered from the ground up.
Specifically to utilize the features that Niantic Lightship has to offer, which pokemon go was used to build that set of APIs.
Newer players just want to play Ingress in their local city or town, and not interested in travelling (😥)
The quests you mention, is called a bounty board in other games.
You'll notice that the main menu in Ingress is half empty, I believe that this space might be used for such a bounty board.
Transformers Heavy Metal, is largely focused on the bounty board, however, I like Strategy Games, and feel that, Transformers Heavy Metal is more of an action game with a. Sprinkle of strategy.
i feel like people might be getting the wrong idea here, i love ingress, i love the concept i love the activity, and i love the community (for the most part)
but, as far as I've observed the game has stagnated due to the pandemic and tbh the game has remained largely the same for nearly a decade. i just wanted to put some ideas out there to see if others might be interested in new ideas for ingress.
for me its easy to draw comparisons between Pokémon go and ingress because of the amount of fun, travel and community I've been able to experience while playing Pokémon go.
I love the ideas behind ingress, the capability to drop trade items to other players, in game chat system, its all really freaking cool. I want to see that innovation expand. As i mentioned before, I've only ever been an active agent throughout the pandemic era we're in and travel has become more difficult to coordinate with safety as a consideration as well as maintaining a job to support my portal hopping habits.
while travel is a key aspect of the game, so is teamwork and coordination. For someone like me, if i want to field anywhere near where i live i would have to drive 30 minutes in any direction break down the massive BAF that covers about half of my regional scoring zone first, 30 minutes back and so on. A lot of the existing players in the area have retired from the game aside from drone hacking, so for me coordination is difficult in my area, holding on to newer agents and trying to get them started on enough to help pull off coordination and leveled enough to take down their own portals so I don't have to be with them in order to play anywhere nearby.
i understand and appreciate all the veteran ingress agents that have supported Niantic games over the years, you made games like Pokémon go possible and to the part of me that held onto the dream of being out on my own and catching Pokémon with my friends got to become a reality in 2016, because of the Agents that played in the 1218 node (REDACTED Scanner). I love these games and i want to see them flourish, look at harry potter wizards unite. it had a strong following and a huge franchise (despite the authors nonsense).and yet, Niantic has pulled the plug on it. honestly it makes sense why they would, the game came out with a lot going on for it but it didn't gain the amount of traction that they wanted it to have. it wasn't the next or even contending Pokémon go. i know ingress is Niantic's lifeblood and they probably wouldn't pull the plug but if there isn't any signs of growth for the game, why would they continue to support it. people that fell off the game during the pandemic may not come back to the game at all. we also have to be prepared for the pandemic era to just be the foreseeable future. in both cases, Ingress has to evolve and grow from what it is if it wants to lure in any new player base. recruiting to the game is challenging when the concepts aren't able to be grasped on the daily or local scope.
that's all I'm trying to say. if you disagree go right ahead, chances are ingress wouldn't adapt any of my suggestions but i do think additional features are needed to keep newer players interested in the game.
I’m right there with ya. It’s easy for OG gatekeepers to hold onto memories of the game from five years ago, but I’d say in most areas, the game is nothing like it was five years ago and hanging onto those memories of yesteryear is doing more harm than good. I’m not saying we need to turn the game into PoGo, but the game isn’t evolving at a sustainable pace.
But it all comes down to the heads at Niantic being able to figure it out for us because they certainly don’t care to have these frank conversations with us or even acknowledge they’ve read them. I imagine once Ingress goes dark, they’ll all have easy transitions to PoGo and wish they had done more to keep up and keep this game alive.
I wonder how John Hanke see ingress. Is he even aware of the lag issues etc and stagnant game play for a very long time now ? ...
I see no issue with adding some things that worked in pogo into ingress, I like the idea of daily tasks and then even a weekly set of tasks
So daily tasks could be things like
1 capture 3 portals
2. Fully deploy on a portal
3. Destroy 16 Resonators
4. Walk 2 kilometers
5. Earn 30 glyph hacking points
6. Hack 10 different portals
Stuff along these lines that would give common and rare mods, resos and busters
While weekly could be asked towards these and add in mu captured, running a kinetic capsule recipe, making a few fields. These would gove rare mods and completing them all could give some vr mods. Could maybe even do monthly tasks that give viruses, itos, possibly even frakkers?
It'd not like it would become pokemon go as some of the older players seem to think it would, but it would actively encourage playing the game, at least for a bit,
Having corrupted portals that can't be hacked, deployed or linked to and need to be scanned to fix would be a cool idea, though I'd say if its going to be all portals, have it be that there's a 12 to 24 hour warning of some kind so that people can cancel it out early. Plus side to that is if there's remote portals that people go to once a year but are used for permanent bafs, they wouldn't be used to keep areas stagnant. They wouldn't even need to be massively regular occurances, a portal could maybe only have it happen twice a year
I think you have some very good ideas. Corrupted portals, quests, and glyphing to unlock (or something). Hmmm....
Thanks for joining Ingress, sticking with it, thinking creatively, and sharing!
I would love it if we had a Glyph Diary and every new glyph sequence we got 100% on added to the Diary.
I'd love new glyphs thats been so long since we had the new ones (not event ones)
Or adding a 6th glyph for bonus (100% key drop chance?) as for most 5 glyphs sequence in complex is really easy.
In many ways, you are right, but there is one problem with ingress. Prime does not provide a complete picture of the game world. Those who find the old scanner still understand what real ingress is, with regular media in the ingress report style. What do we have now? An unfinished plot that is partially outdated in the description of training, sounds from portals, and so on and so on. We do not have a complete picture of the in-game world. I have to explain each time to each new agent that there will be no shapers, despite the fact that they are still referred to as enemies in the scanner. The design of the scanner is also dull, it is not ergonomic or coherent. here the buttons are round, here are rectangular, here the menu is in one style and here it is in another. It seems that several people worked on the design and each of them had their own vision.
So I wish in the new year to remove all inconsistencies in the scanner, clean up the design, and finally start the plot.
The story was always somewhat disjointed even with the old scanner. We're hopefully seeing some story later this month but unsure if anything will change in the scanner for the short term.
one word...REDFECTION
cc: @Perringaiden
one word...REDFECTION
cc: @Perringaiden
I guess I'll play the role of OG gatekeeper today. (Do I still count if I started in Ingress's third year?)
What makes Ingress special is its linking mechanic and it's "non-local" mechanics. Namely, three things must be true simultaneously:
Linking gives rise to collaboration and teamwork: the longer the link, the more help you'll need satisfying all those conditions at the same time.
Linking gives rise to exploration: portals off the beaten path often make for great links.
Linking is what made the anomalies of old interesting.
It's well and fine — even necessary — to build out other features in Ingress. The game would get dull, otherwise. But are those features so exciting that you could sell someone on the game with only those features? Failure to build upon and around the linking mechanic also leads to dullness.
I’m not saying making triangles should be removed or not even the continued main part of the mechanic, but, in my opinion, there needs to be some innovation.
Its like playing super Mario for the original NES and never upgrading consoles or games. Sure, some people will play that game forever and some people will play here and there for nostalgia, but when it’s much more fun and engaging playing the super Mario games on the switch, who wouldn’t want that?
I think they could add a lot more travel incentive if portals had a sort of slow-charge buffer of hack output, so a portal which was rarely ever visited would have built up a larger supply of higher value items, but if you just spam-hack one portal, you won't get as much because it's always mostly tapped out. To give a better gradient of time spent vs. drive-by hacks, the output could be more heavily weighted in favour of glyph hacks.
First of all, you should be scanning zero portals until niantic
1) finds a way to compensate agents for their labor in building out the lightship network POIs, either in real money, free core, CMU, etc
OR
2) portal scan data somehow makes its way into ingress, otherwise you're working (for free) only to build niantic's other games
Chicken and egg problem.
2)
Need enough high quality scans to introduce features using the tech.
But players need to see the features in game before they will commit to scanning as part of normal gameplay.
1) I firmly believe that there should be a free option for a player to gain CMU.
By, scanning x number of portals
Or by completing various bounty board tasks
The opportunities are there, just the shear amount of work to even fix bugs puts these things back into a later development cycle.
What the Ingress dev team needs is more developers.
But also a sufficient income to pay for those developers.
Again, it is another chicken and egg problem.
Need enough high quality scans to introduce features using the tech.
But players need to see the features in game before they will commit to scanning as part of normal gameplay.
First feature to introduce: Model Progress View.
I know plenty of people who would scan just to see this model progress. Apparently there's some information in the Wayfarer app that no-one has access to, but this would get me scanning, just to see how well it works.
The Scanned photogrammetry wayspots with enough quality scans, should have been made available worldwide by now, as mentioned in their earlier Lightship Dev Conference.
People have access to that information, it has been shown off in a lot of demos of late.
But they're just that, tech demos, and mainly revolve around the Niantic Dotty.
The VPS model data is not directly addressable YET (Scaniverse), not sure it will ever be.
Seems Niantic are deciding that they prefer devs to use the wayspot services server to make contextual actions to be more, cross platform, ie to also work directly in HTML5 mobile web browsers.
Enough of the technobabble for now.
In a months time we should see something implemented, after the Epiphany Dawn Anomaly
You mean like this kind of data?
I believe Lightship recently announced that they're working on devs being able to actually access and use the 3D scan data, as well as finally giving access to the entire Wayspot database and not just the VPS activated ones.
!when
Where did you find this data?
This is part of the Wayfarer app, which is currently in closed beta. You can see all Wayspots in the database and see their scan status.
Yeah, that app is only on iOS at the moment. It was supposed to be out of closed beta in September
VPS is to see the results of the scans though the Wayfarer app, whenever that releases.
"whenever that releases" is part of the problem.
Not really, we know the coding is there and they have data for it. It's something with actual proof for once.
Yeah but so far Niantic has "not released" a dozen products, such as Catan, Heavy Metal, the original Campfire, and so on.
Or the Q2 roadmap!