“Niantic” Community Day and how it could be improved
PkmnTrainerJ
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Looking at the responses here;
It seems like Niantic Community Day has been a shambles for Ingress and for agents, whilst nice things have been done for Pokémon GO & Pikmin Bloom.
Ingress is the only game of these without a specific “Community Day”. We do have First Saturday and Second Sunday, but not a Community Day.
Is that why we are so left out? If we had an Ingress Community Day, what should happen at it? Should it have certain items featured, like in Pokémon GO, so we would have a “Heat Sink Day” for May where we get more Heat Sinks from hacks and 2xAP for some hours in the day for certain actions? Something else as well?
It’s a shame to feel like the game we enjoy is an afterthought and not worth telling the agency staff about.
Ingress is mentioned on the Community Day website, so let’s keep it in mind at the actual events please.
Comments
Apologies for the tag @NianticThia but I would like to think that agents will provide some constructive feedback that can be used for next month and June.
Also tying in this thread.
As much as I loved the stay at he virtual first Saturday because it boosted my stats and let me participate from work, it needs to go away.
Not gonna lie, since it was announced I was already fearing that Ingress would be forgotten. What it caught me off guard was lack of the actual event on some orange-market spots. I was working during the morning, getting ready to go out and take the train just to find out... nothing, besides of the sponsored portals.
Niantic shouldn't forget the game who started it all, but that's only one of many issues.
Of course, I'm not planning to participating again unless important changes are made.
This is the same exact result as the one they did several months back. Some locations had no one show up and many locations had a presence, but no understanding of what ingress is.
Back then, I believe plenty of folks suggested reaching out to the locals on the ground. It’s obvious that suggestion was deemed too much of a hassle or downright ignored.
Niantic, you literally have people begging to help you. You have 50 ambassadors. You have a community specialist. Why do you continue to fail at something so easy? You want people to play the game, you want them to subscribe to your membership and honestly, I think most people playing this game realize more people playing is good for the game. Yet, report after report of ingress agents being ghosted on something you promoted…
Here @NianticThia , I’ll give you a quick vision I have for next month. You put out a call tomorrow on the forums for an agent from each faction with prior in-person FS experience. These folks will be on the ground next CD. You will provide them with cards/codes to give to existing agents and I’m imagining some sort of postcard that gives a very ELI5 overview of Ingress with QR codes to videos or websites giving potential agents (PoGo trainers, etc) an idea of what Ingress is all about. Current agents are happy and you’re putting in the work to attract new agents. On site, several temp portals with beacons and frackers randomly popping. Ideally, I’d love to see people on site who could give a five minute demo of Ingress. It’s overwhelming, so what if there was a temp sandbox, separate from the live game. Someone can explain resonators, links, fields, etc. Show them on a phone/tablet. A little more “hands on” than the tutorial.
Id also love to see a medal associated with it or possibly a six mission banner. Heck, maybe some sort of in game item that’s specific to the load out cards. Like a VR Community Day boost mod of some sort. Something that’s not too powerful, mostly fun, has a use, but gets agents excited about “moving” and meeting other agents.
It’s embarrassing how little effort was put into this, in regards to Ingress. If someone at Niantic is taking this post personally, then you’re the person I’m directing this towards. Anything would be better than what it appears you did and what I experienced at a similar event several months ago (maybe longer).
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TryHarder#TrySo much this ^
We made these for first IFS I organised.
Sausage sizzle laid on, water supplied, three legged race to promote xfac fun.
Was fantastic. Niantic support? Zero. We gave up putting this amount of effort in due to repeated requests to Niantic for support going unanswered.
However I have been Embedded Reporter and organised many events since then.
Niantic can't expect quality support forever from its player base without working with us to assist. People burn out otherwise.
Im writing a Full After Action Report from Mexico City later, but ill leave some suggestions here too.
1- What is the purpose of a Niantic Community Day? How does it differentiates from the individual games events? - this was not made clear on Niantic official websites, so this event was SWALLOWED by Pokemon Go Community Day. I believe the purpose of the event was to #meetyououtthere, wich means that you get the chance to meet people from all Niantic games. Therefore, the event dynamics should include some sort of interaction between players (take a photo with a trainer, and agent, and a pikminer, etc).
- NIANTIC CHAT - Events could have been made easily, one week prior or at the same time the Niantic Portals appeared to create awareness and increase INGRESS AGENTS assistance. I made one within the Ingress Official group so it would be visible to both factions and the majority of Niantic Social users, but only 3 people confirmed assistance.
2- INDICATIONS - one of the main problems at Mexico City was that instructions given by the STAFF (im not going to say Brand Ambassador, since they dont even knew what the Niantic brand stands for) couldn´t be heard because there was too much people, and too much ambient noise (War Band rehearsing 100m from the tent). This could have been easily fixed by creating a Telegram Channel to give instructions, and it works for the 3 games. Scan a QR code at the tent, or copy the link. So simple, yet they were yelling.
3- BRIEF YOUR STAFF - before the event begins, the staff should be briefed on What is Niantic, what are their products, whats the event purpose, what is their role as ambassadors, etc. In Mexico City there was this guy named AlanMB, he is some kind of Pokemon Go emerging markets promotor for LATAM. When i asked about what was the dynamic for Ingress, he rudely answered that all the stuff was for Pokemon Go only. While they had PoGo Trainers collect some postal cards in order to get a ticket for a lottery, we agents didnt know what Niantic Portals and Beacons were deployed for... I asked about Pikmin too, and nothing.... I asked if i could take a picture of the Swag Prizes for my report and he refused. Is this really the people that is representing your brand? I even told him that the event was Niantic Community Day, not only Pokemon CD and he still said no.
4- PRE-REGISTRY: One thing AlanMB did well, is that he came out with a google form to pre-register TRAINERS ONLY. However, since he only speaks for Pokemon Go, Agents only found out thanks to other agents that play both games. (YES NIANTIC, DONT ASSUME WE PLAY ALL YOUR GAMES). I dont know if this was useful or not to estimate how many people would attend, but if it was made a requisite in official media in order to be able to collect swag, it would improve the staff logistics a lot.
5- THE LONG QUEUES: The staff hired was probably 5 people. My estimate of attendance is above 500 people. you have a 3 hour event, 70% of the time was used to be on the line to collect the swag or the lottery ticket. There was simply no time to walk the 5km for the Earth Day dynamic. I captured the 15 portals in about 20 min, just in case that was the Ingress requirement, but again, no one could provide me with that information. The Police had to tell the staff several times that they were creating a mess on the park because of the queues and the big group of people at the tent. Some Community Leaders had to step up and help organizing the people. XMA ambassadors, Vanguards, POCS and Anomaly assistants already know how to handle this events!!! yet, they were not required by Niantic or Ingress....
6- GROUP PHOTO & LOTTERY - This was scheduled at 5:00pm. but in reality, the Lottery ended at around 5:40pm. They had the people grouped for this around almost an hour, with no way to know when the photo was taken. They asked the people to take off any merchandise of Nintendo Pokemon, and other brands (mostly caps and hats). There was no way for the people on the back to hear instructions or know if they won something. They just kept on taking numbers until they were claimed, so this wasnt a very fair process. Again, this could have been done easily with a TG channel, via streaming. Niantic is an AR, technologically advanced company... yet they dont use technolgy on their behalf?
Ill leave it there with my 5 cents and do my full report.
https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/19005/niantic-community-day-at-mexico-city-aar/p1?new=1
Mexico City AAR
I'm a bit surprised they didn't run a few battle beacons on the niantic portals, at least one of the previous community days did have something like that. Having a few temporary portals to play with is nice and all, but you need a bit more than that for an event.
On the bright side, at least one of the folks at the location I went to did know ingress is a thing.
https://t.me/c/1185686093/6325
Thank you @NianticBrian for participating with @Chics on our attempt to get more LATAM Agents get involved at Niantic Community Day!
About Niantic Chat, that's another issue we have here. It's actually too glitchy, too laggy and only avaliable on Ingress by now. So I don't see many use for event-planning at the moment. When I went to the event place I tried to navigate in case there was a group about the community day. I ended frustrated, not only there wasn't a group but Niantic Chat's performance was noticeable poor and made the game stuck with a loading screen when closing it.
Niantic chats a complete waste of time.
In our city, zero people use it.
Niantic Chats could have been better if they left the 'chat' to someone else and provided a social media feed website similar to how G+ allowed groups to connect, post their achievements, show their fun and interesting encounters etc.
Niantic Chat also not being accessible by anything except through the apps makes it clunky and difficult to pay attention to.
its very sluggish yes compared to comm, also when its all in french and u cant change it kinda falls flat..
Welp, that's what you get when you're late at adding a high requested feature that the playerbase themselves already covered by other means from a long time ago. Plus, not being optimized doesn't help too much...
Narrator: “And of course, they did not know what Ingress was.”
Crossing fingers - lol.
"If I hope really really hard, maybe the 'competence fairies' will fix it."
Oddly enough, they have at least three threads in their own forums with a lot of feedback as well…. I’m curious if anyone from the Ingress team will see any of it as valuable or if they’re all working on other games at this point…
And..."silence" was made.
That's why I don't trust Niantic anymore. People keep giving feedback, they keep not giving a ***t.
The Pokémon GO blog has posted a Community Day recap. Can’t wait for the Ingress one!
The Niantic Community Day has been a focus on the Niantic brand more than the games. I think we're in a weird spot because First Saturday (or perhaps Second Sunday?) would be the most logical fit to Pokémon and Pikmin Community Days.
I was at the Jacksonville one this past weekend and they had Niantic material. Benches for people and cornhole for people to play. (Venue could have been better with shade but that's a problem with Jacksonville as the Landings used to have buildings)
I'm not surprised people didn't know about Ingress but I think that's a bit of the beauty - introduce them to Ingress and see if it attracts them.
The Jacksonville, FL Niantic Community Day, NL-1331X Meetup, Mission Day, and Operation Clear Field events that Thia, Ethan, and I attended were a lot of fun, and gave us a chance to connect with Agents face to face as well as with potential new recruits who play other Niantic games. We want to grow our player base and get more people playing Ingress, and I think these Niantic Community Day events could help our efforts if we figure out the right way to do this.
When our Ingress team is present, then I feel confident that we can make that specific site successful. But our team can't be in more than a couple places on a given day, and as you've mentioned we've had challenges with past Niantic Community Day events at other sites where the Ingress team isn't. We've shared your feedback with our Niantic and brand ambassador teams, and we're talking about how we can improve things.
I’d hope that the ambassadors can get it right for Ingress. I wouldn’t have anything against these joint Community Days, so long as they were joint ones. Not just a Pokémon GO community day with Ingress plonked on at the side. Maybe some Ingress codes/leaflets etc. for the next ones?
S-H-A-R-D-S
😂
Also, on this, can you not utilise the XM Ambassadors somehow if they state they will be attending?
Brian beat me to replying but I wanted to follow up as well -- we continue to share your feedback with regards to Niantic Community Day internally. We want a positive experience for our players and I understand that we are lacking.
We want to grow our player base and get more people playing Ingress, and I think these Niantic Community Day events could help our efforts if we figure out the right way to do this.
Lucky for you, you have 2 or 3 threads worth of information to go through and I'm sure you and the team can find a couple of great ideas :)
When our Ingress team is present, then I feel confident that we can make that specific site successful. But our team can't be in more than a couple places on a given day, and as you've mentioned we've had challenges with past Niantic Community Day events at other sites where the Ingress team isn't. We've shared your feedback with our Niantic and brand ambassador teams, and we're talking about how we can improve things.
Then please don't advertise that the other 50 events in the world will be Ingress related when they're clearly not and it's clear you know you've had challenges in the past, yet, literally nothing is different from the events Niantic held in December. You have posted here and in other places about how you share feedback and are talking about ways to improve, but time and time again, it's a repeated affair. Whether that's this style of event or selling swag packs online.
I'm glad you had a good time in Jacksonville, but for other people who drove and spent their day excited about a real in-person event, only to show up and find out no one even knew what Ingress was is a slap in the face. I'm not surprised no one from your team is offering something remotely resembling an apology, #statusquo. Put your money where your mouth is and show us you want to grow your player base because I see you talking about it, but these events are a completely different reality...
The next Niantic Community Day (as it’s always the same as the Pokémon GO one) is 21st May.
We will be having the Kythera event for Ingress:
21-22 May: Kythera Anomaly
on that day. For this one, you will have some community run events for it, as applicants were asked for. Surely it would be an ideal time to send the ENL/RES leads for those events some codes or extra stuff they can share with the Niantic Community during this event?