November AMA Questions and Answers
RedSoloCup
✭✭✭✭✭
Agents,
Thank you for your patience as I compiled the AMA questions. The questions and answers for October can be found here:
>>November INGRESS AMA Questions and Answers
Due to the holidays, I will be skipping the December AMA. We will resume again in 2020 with January.
Post edited by NianticOfficial on
12
Comments
Enjoy your holidays!
"We want your money, but at this point we have no plans to implement most of your suggestions"
What I'm getting from this is, no stand alone MDs going forward, no van, no glyph challenge, no merchandise, no Navarro, no Anomaly dates.
But we might be able to be toast again, so we got that going for us, which is nice.
Q: Ishira - I was wondering what happened with the glyph challenge?
A: The social media field art glyph challenge has ended for the time being. With less resources, it became too time consuming to continue to execute.
So it looks like the ingress team has lost (more) people?
@RedSoloCup Did you intend to leave the comments open?
re MDAS - I'm working on an itinerary for 2020 - please note at this time I do not have any confirmation that it will be NIA supported or a MD, but there has been a tremendous amount of interest in doing an ingress themed cruise again - so it's going to happen, even if it's the group of us playing at port and having an amazing time on the water. Expect more news in a couple weeks.
Good question. If they had a subforum to post the answers in....that was locked down to the Niantic user group....oh well...
It's too bad this is even an issue for a highly successful, cross faction event. You'd think they would be emailing you right away and saying "what can we do for you to make this work again next year"
There is tremendous interest in this event. Niantic needs to jump at this and make it an annual event!
I want Ingress to succeed so bad, trust me. Put the glyph challenge on the forums and make people post under a specific thread to save that? First Saturday seems to work pretty well, maybe Mission Day can use an offshoot of that process? I get those things don't make money, but they keep people interested.
Hi Andrew
please look here:
The Support write only Standard-Answers.
Just saw this. This is the opposite of what @NianticCasey said to us. My head hurts
Q: Kliffington - The guidelines still state that military base portals should be rejected if obstructing emergency services. Users are still submitting things in neighborhoods/museums/gathering places on base because there is nothing in the guides saying not to. We know from your August AMA that they should be rejected regardless of other criteria. If that stance has not changed can this be edited into the guidelines with a note that existing base wayspots are ok?
A: Some of these submissions could be from before the launch of Wayfarer. Please follow the guidelines in the Wayfarer site to review these nominations.
What is the distinction between a commercial business like a mall and a commercial business like a McDonalds?
I am very sad that there isn't support for standalone MDs at this time. I hope that support can be found again -- I have very much enjoyed going to a few. It's a great time and a great excuse to go explore another city.
I wonder if the comments will stay open for forever, or if they’ll be cut off eventually.
You probably could just cheat off the Field Tests/First Saturdays homework with MDs, lots of agents want to put the effort into hosting them, have a registration portal for the day, check if people got 6 missions from the approved list, and push badge if they do. If someone manages to game the system so what, it's a terribly tiered badge for what is mainly a fun xfac event to get people out and exploring new places. It is also a great way for local agents to show off and have pride in their city.
POCs for mission day already get permissions from the city, curate the missions, set up the mission maps, take attendance, do the photo, make swag(sometimes), and do lots of the work involved with marketing and organization.
I understand they don't make Niantic money but it is probably possible to automate parts of the process to reduce Niantics time investment in them. MDs encourage people to travel and meet new people and have a large impact on keeping interest in the game. I know a ton of people want to participate in hosting them and attending them, myself included.
Are single letters, or composed art that is primarily a single letter, allowed in mission icons? This rule was left out of the latest revision of the mission creation guidelines (only logos are banned), and is never cited in mission rejection form letters, but in case after case the mission creator communities are seeing missions with art that is, or looks like, a single letter, being rejected and then approved after the art and no other element is changed.
For the specific example I'm thinking of, the author used the "Mission Project" Trick or Treat Halloween artwork, but the mission whose art was most of a stylized letter "R" with few other elements was rejected repeatedly, until the author resubmitted it with no change other than replacing the art with a pair of cat eyes. If that was the reason for the rejection, as dozens of people saw with the same artwork in cities around the world, it's really difficult to read that into a rejection notice that says merely :
----------------------
... Your Mission may have one or more of the following issues:
A lack of a clear and informative description and/or title
Mission Image, description, and/or title are unrelated to the Waypoints chosen
--------------------------
A similar issue happened with the "farewell to Redacted" banner, where a mission that contained the letter "D" and a closing square bracket (two characters, though only one letter), was rejected for multiple mission authors until they added more elements to the artwork.
The process of figuring out by trial and error what the correlation is, if any, between the reason a mission was rejected, the published guidelines, and the multiple broad categories cited in rejection letters is frustrating to authors and contributes to a cycle of resubmissions that wastes a lot of Niantic review staff cycles. Is there something we can do to improve the process?
I would have liked to see an answer whether we will see a return to the Ingress Report, since it helped promote the game's story for people who otherwise are not exposed to it. It could help with player retention.
Could do it under a sub-forum, and set up voting! I'm sure this software has some sort of a poll or voting option or plugin. Could likely get some Vanguards to help with adding in the submissions as valid options for the vote/poll as I'd guess they are pretty trusted with that handy NDA and such.
Anyone else concerned with the quantity of _no information available at this time_ without an _but we're working on it_ to go with?
Makes a person wonder if anomalies, mission days, etc. are just... not going to be a thing going forward.
Yes.
I am very frustrated with the wishy-washy nature of this playground in commercial places thing. I can understand not wanting McDonalds to get a free portal when they could potentially get them as a sponsor but my goodness, quit telling us that playgrounds at fast food places are fine and then that they are not!
Don't worry. Ask next month and the answer will change again.
"Q: @DrAllsopp - When will sorting keys by name be actually fixed so that keys are sorted by name and not "mostly" sorted with random keys in the middle?
A: Brian believes this is fixed. But wants to highlight that there are specific portals that have unexpected portal titles (for example, space before title, emoji in title, etc.) and these inconsistencies will sometimes make the sorting look funny. If that's not what's happening, let us know and we can take a look."
@RedSoloCup I have encountered this issue several times since 2x AP started 15 Nov. Regardless of what @NianticBrian believes, this issue absolutely has not been fixed (v 2.35.2), and is not the result of sorting weirdness, unless the weirdness involves not using the first character of a portal title to sort. I submitted another ticket to this effect just now.
Why is it so hard to get the business playgrounds right? In Australia, Macca's playgrounds are publicly accessible, there's no rule requiring people to spend money to use them. Every Bunnings Hardware warehouse here has a playground and a cafe (there's 2 examples below), as do most of our family restaurant franchises, like theme park playgrounds are allowed but not these??? Are you really trying to say that indoor playgrounds that are free to use are OK, but playgrounds that require payment to access are unacceptable?? It does not compute.
https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=-23.377576,150.50189&z=17&pll=-23.377576,150.50189
https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=-23.334935,150.518991&z=17&pll=-23.334935,150.518991
https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=-23.329901,150.519506&z=17&pll=-23.329901,150.519506
https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=-23.377576,150.50189&z=17&pll=-23.377576,150.50189
https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=-24.984604,151.951673&z=17&pll=-24.984604,151.951673
Someone reached out to me stating the same. They are going to record the issue so I can provide it to the team. It wouldn't hurt if you are able to do the same and willing to as well. You know now to reach me via TG :)
Never understood why this is even a continuing topic.
Playground in a park - place for people to take the kids to. Except when it's super hot, burned tots. Or super cold, frozen nuggets. Enjoy the bird and squirrel droppings.
Playground in a business - place for people to take the kids to. Except you MIGHT have to buy a soda or a burger, wait where's the con? Watch the sidewalks boil or enjoy the six feet of snow in a climate and environmentally controlled area.
Used to boycott a specific business for YEARS because its commercials led me to realize I had some misophonia issues. CROOOONCH cronch cronch. Sluuurrp. CRONCH cronch cronch. Don't worry, you're bugging me way more then I'm going to bug you. Now, unfortunately, we're customers on occasion specifically because their play area puts most of the parks here to shame by far. It's comparatively enormous, and severely lacking in Niantic game content.
Doesn't seem like all of the questions were answered the last few months of questions, is it possible to get them answered before January? @RedSoloCup
It might also be worth running a cleanup of the waypoint database to remove any leading/trailing spaces from the titles. And to remove leading/trailing spaces from waypoint nominations on submission (if it isn't there already). Looping in @NianticBrian
I was going to say the same (I also posted in the App Feedback category a few days after 2.35 came out). However, I was waiting for 2.36 to arrive. I'm sceptical, given that the release notes for 2.36 are tiny and don't mention this issue, but you never know...
Edit: I can now confirm that this is not fixed in 2.36.