Thank you for all your support, Trading Post Ingress community
Today, we are announcing that the Ingress Trading Post is shutting down on June 9th. The Trading Post was a web3 project from the SpotX team, a web3 research and development group at Niantic, with the goal of connecting Ingress Agents around the world through digital Ingress Bio Cards. Many Agents participated through our Epiphany Dawn Anomaly Series in 2022 and continued collecting, trading, and sharing memories with one another.
Trading Post was an experimentation effort to explore the world of digital collectibles, and while we believe that web3 has the potential to create meaningful experiences in the future, we plan to shift focus to other priorities.
Here is what this announcement means for your Trading Post Bio Cards:
- Users will have 60 days from today to download the Bio Cards held in their collection after which they will no longer be accessible.
- Users will be able to trade and create new Bio Cards for 30 days as of this announcement. There will not be any new packs dropped or frames.
- On June 9, the Trading Post website and associated Niantic Campfire channel will shut down.
Ingress has long been a place where new ideas incubate, and we want to thank our Ingress agents for participating and sharing valuable feedback. You showed us how closely knit the Ingress community is – a core principle unique to Niantic games.
Thank you!
Comments
😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱
It was so interesting service!
Je ne connaissais pas , ou alors je n'ai peut-être pas compris, mais ce programme me semblait totalement inconnu.🤔🤷♂️
Et je pense ne pas etre le seul a ne pas connaitre celà malheureusement.
Peut-être était-il trop tôt encore.
Yes! Awesome! This is the best news I heard the whole day(but it's only 11am)!🥳🥳👏
Nft and crypto are scourge on our society and bring no value what so ever! It's a cesspool of scammers, scalpers, speculators and grifters. Ingress community needs none of that!
If you want to foster player creativity just release all those frames as regular images without all that crypto garbage.
Very happy to hear this. NFTs are super scammy and I would prefer to not be associated with companies pushing them.
Good choice niantic
what idiot came up with putting it all down...
Thank you Niantic - best news all year.
This is great news! Please keep the game free from Web3 forever!
My husband cancelled CORE over this and I'd gone from an over 1000 day sojourner streak to barely active in protest. I'm glad to be able to play again without going against my principles.
Thank you Niantic and SpotX team.
I really like the concept of the Trading Post in itself, but I could never understand why you insisted on shoehorning web3 and NFTs into it. Without it, I would have loved to use it and I know of a ton of other people that would have done so as well.
What's really interesting is I just heard Niantic is no longer going to have anomaly swag available for purchase at sites. If they are doing this to push Niantic Supply, it's finally something logical they have done. No more muling and no more headaches for ordering.
I still wish digital dossier packs existed with the characters. We now have a new template for cards this year.
There were many flaws with the system, but I think it could have been improved into being something much more interesting.
Problem: They were NFTs. There's no reason for that, when the entire system ran on a single website. There were a lot of people who actively avoided it because they were NFTs, when the NFT-ness of it all added absolutely nothing. You could still have allowed people to generate 10 cards from a frame, and kept a ledger of what was where, without adding the unnecessary crypto layer to it all.
Solution: Don't make them NFTs.
Problem: There was no scarcity. The key "benefit" of them being NFTs was to create value in particular cards by enforcing scarcity. But then the market got absolutely flooded with frames. I jumped on each drop I knew about due to FOMO, but I really only made a handful of cards that I cared about.
Solution: Don't have as many drops. Give everyone a small number of starter frames, and then make them "earn" additional frames in various ways.
Problem: Some frames were designated "rare" or "legendary" or whatever, but there was no particular benefit to having those frames, nor am I convinced they were actually any more rare than others.
Solution: Make a game out of having the more limited frames. Assign them points values, or have the legendary frames produce more (or fewer... I can see the logic going either way) cards per frame. Or something.
Problem: There was really no value in having cards at all. I enjoyed seeing some of the creations there, but there was little in terms of bragging rights to having those particular cards in my collection, vs them just being out there and owned by someone else. You couldn't organize your cards, show off your favorites, or get any kind of benefit from having something rare in your collection.
Solution: Enable sorting / showcasing of cards in a user's profile. Give me a reason to have pride in the cards I've collected
Problem: It is too hard to access the text for each card. The stories some people wrote on the backs of the cards were even more enjoyable than the graphic on the front. This is definitely the most minor of my gripes, but it takes several clicks and it was a bit counter-intuitive to find the back text.
Solution: Make the back text immediately viewable by showing both front & back when clicking through to a card.
Basically, I think there was a lot of potential in the idea of having a card trading system, but it never felt like it was completed.
Well, that was all predictable. The product went after a subset (NFT collectors) of a subset (biocard collectors) of Ingress agents.
Still, I'm surprised it died this quickly. Not even 6 months? Totally ruined my plan to make an Instagram post (with charts and graphs, even) showing how doomed Trading Post was.
Thousands of players around the world enjoyed crafting and Trading their digital Trading Cards.
The shutdown reason I don't think is, the reason people here think is.
Since Campfire was enabled for all. Pokemon go Players, and no one else.
The spam across all chats has skyrocketed. Even the Official Ingress Community Campfire has been inundated with spam from pokemon go.
@NianticBrian it is beyond a critical issue now.
We've reported the spam, and spam continues. We have heard nothing from the Niantic Campfire team about dealing with the spam.
And it is up to all Niantic Product Managers to stand up and realize the dumpster fire they've cteated.
How dare you not post the better version
Loki is better than Jeremy Clarkson. 😆
On a serious note, I wonder what market research they conducted to see who thought this was a good idea in the first place.
The commentary I saw was mostly “why are you doing NFTs” and that nobody wanted it, but the decision was to push ahead anyways.
There was no market research. John Hanke got FOMO when he saw other companies making investments in web3 gaming, bought the first web3/AR company he could find, then looked for something to do with it. Ingress got the short straw because it's the game that didn't require a sign-off from an external company's lawyers.
Didn’t the SpotX folks talk about speaking to many agents at in person meet ups etc.?
That's two of the dumbest theories you've ever had in one post.
It took over a week to distribute a "1000 players required." The enthusiastic users of the service numbered in the hundreds at best, and that's while the service was entirely free. This is Ingress -- the minute they started charging for digital collectibles, they would have lost half those users.
They're not shutting down because of spam. They're shutting down because there's no route to profitability.
"Many" isn't a real number, kid. And talking to users after you launch a product isn't market research.
The site itself was a great concept even it was rough around the edges and needed some fine tuning still, the inclusion of NFTs absolutely doomed it, so many people people refused to touch it just based on that and it added absolutely nothing to the site, in fact it was never even truly integrated anyway.
I'll miss the Trading Post, please never bring NFTs or in fact any blockchain into future projects, or if you do at the very very least make it actually matter to the thing it's being put into, but still preferably just don't.
Agreed. Not sure why they thought it would be a good thing.
They were tapping into an emerging market. Which is currently growing exponentially.
Ingress, at this point is being left behind.
Personally I was looking forward to seeing perhaps some sort of mini game. Think Triple Triad from Final Fantasy 8. Just something other than Trading digital cards, and during break time at work, just play a few games until the end of the work day, then go back to making Augmented Control Fields
Please refer to the Niantic Trading Post Campfire, to look at the spam
I’m on the outside (not being into NFTs) but it seems the only people who tell you/say it is growing are those already heavily involved in it, to loop you in the nonsense too.
Maybe that’s not how you feel, but standing outside of it, that’s how it looks.
Glad Ingress isn’t progressing with it.
As for an Ingress card game thing, that might work? But I would think Niantic would rather take an existing card game and do an app for that instead.
Magic The Gathering AR? Yu-Gi-Oh Prime? (That’s my knowledge of trading card games spent)
I'm in the Campfire, but the spam is not (as you implied) a reason for the shutdown.
Dude, they didn't "include" NFTs in the concept. Niantic bought an NFT company. Because that's where everyone told them the money is. It was an NFT-first concept, and a biocard project second.
Agents want physical swag. This was a doomed idea.
The concept of blockchain in itself is not inherently bad. It's the attachment of crypto currency and nft to it that's unnecessary for Ingress.
Blockchain/ledger doesn't have to be computationally expensive the way it is with crypto. There are plenty of legit uses of it, such as transparent inventory tracking (of real world things).