Bitte lesen und teilen wenn es euch gefällt! Für die Erwachsenen unter euch!

Originally shared by Avery Cannon (DESSYX)

DANGER, long read ahead! Major props to anyone who makes it all the way through:

I received my Ingress invite in early December, and for the last four months I have gotten a ton of exercise, learned my way around the city I live in and many others, and met some fun and interesting people.

And today I quit.

I’d first like to explain my history with the game, then tell you my reasons for quitting and offer suggestions as to how Niantic may fix these issues. I’m not the first level 8 to quit and I certainly won’t be the last, but while I’m sure most quit out of boredom, that was not the case for me.

When I started my city was entirely blue. There seemed to be no other Enlightened players in sight, so I spent my time in smaller towns farther away where there was limited to no activity and portals simply sat unclaimed. I made as many links and fields as I could, then waited for everything to decay so I could do it all over again. Eventually I was high enough to start taking over portals in my own city, and from then on I dominated. No other local players showed the kind of dedication I did, and despite being outnumbered I was able to keep the city almost entirely green.

In early January I finally hit level 7, and for a brief time I stopped worrying about AP (level 8 seemed so far away) and turned my attention to more interesting ways to play. It was at this time that I established my first megafield completely on my own. Though it said the field was worth just shy of 100,000 MU, I felt it had to be much more as the links on each side were close to 100km each. After this accomplishment I got bit by the AP bug again, and a couple of weeks later I hit 8.

Once I hit 8 I turned my attention back to my own city. Despite still being outnumbered I did all I could to lock down control of as many portals as possible. At one point I even had a Resistance player say to me „at least let us have SOMETHING, we have nothing to farm“. It was clear that my attempts to starve the Resistance of resources was working, and I intended to keep it up. I made frequent trips through town after work in order to collect XM and top off any portal decay. Of course this was before the increase from 10% to 15%, but I digress. My reason for locking down the city was simple; Up to this point I was still the only active Enlightened here, and I kept holding out hope that we would get more people on our side. I didn’t want the Resistance to get too out of control until such time as the faction populations balanced out. Unfortunately attempts to train new Enlightened agents would fail as I and another high level Enlightened agent from out of town would spend some nights helping them level and then never see or hear from them again. I even posted several creative artwork pieces on this very page in hopes of getting some invite codes to recruit with, but Niantic ignored them.

Eventually it got to the point where whenever I saw a new name pop up in town it was blue. For every 3-5 new Resistance agents that appeared the Enlightened would be lucky to get one. And while at least one (if not more) of those Resistance agents would have the time and dedication to level fast and turn everything blue, our few Enlightened agents would end up being EXTREMELY casual, anti-social and/or just refuse to be team players. One of them even said, and I quote; „I don’t monitor the comms all that much and am a casual player“. As if it’s hard to monitor the COMM while you have the freaking app open, am I right? At least I don’t have to worry about him seeing this post.

Anyway, I’ve spent the last several weeks just throwing megafields over the city every other day to annoy my opponents and hinder their growth, but watching numerous active Resistance swarm the city with the occasional Enlightened popping out of their hole to blow up one portal and calling it a day has finally driven me over the edge and makes me wonder why I bother fighting at all. What green portals are left are part of our farms and are 15-20 minutes away for most members of both factions, yet the Resistance still insists on leaving us nothing, not realizing that it’s because of us and our ability to farm that gives them a game to play (as without us there’s no opponents, and with no opponents there’s no game). After seeing even more new blue names pop up this morning, and after having our farm blown up for the 3rd time in less than 24 hours, I decided to call it quits.

So let’s cut to the chase here; The first major problem right now is population imbalance. Thanks to the „Guess Player Levels“ plugin for IITC I can confirm that in most of our state (and many other places I’ve checked) the Resistance simply outnumbers the Enlightened by a ridiculous amount. Why? First of all I think it’s because the game itself seems to push you in the direction of the Resistance right from the beginning. You even start as Resistance before picking a faction! Then there’s the fact that thanks to various forms of media (movies, television, etc.) people are inclined to pick the „good guys“ and when they see a big blue button that says „Join the Resistance“ they let out a „DERP“ and just press it without putting any thought into why. To fix this, here are my suggestions:

1. We have neutral portals, why not a neutral faction? Or more specifically just start new players out factionless so they don’t think they’re supposed to stay with the Resistance.

2. Have some kind of message before the faction select screen that shows regional statistics and then say something to the effect of „It is recommended that you pick the faction with the least amount of control in your area. This will give you more targets and allow you to level faster.“

3. I would love to see a mentor system be implemented. Let agents of a certain level and above opt into being a mentor and when a new player starts they are presented with a list of nearby mentors for each faction. When they pick a faction, each of those mentors is notified by email that this new player has started in their area and the mentors are then able to reach out and provide whatever kind of assistance may be needed. This gives the higher level players something to do and prevents new players from becoming discouraged too quickly. It also promotes and inspires additional teamwork.

4. Change the @#$%ing faction name. „Enlightened“ is unique, but unknown. „Resistance“ is everywhere, and people make assumptions based on the name alone. Looking through the data files I see the Resistance stuff labeled as „Humanists“. Why not go with that?

The next issue is portal defense. Portals used to put up a decent fight, but not anymore. Decay was increased from 10% to 15%, presumably to help people flip portals more often. It’s like Niantic doesn’t want anything to last very long. Recharging as a defensive measure is useless for many reasons I won’t go into here (but I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about). The only real way to defend is to be at a portal to re-deploy resonators, but this does nothing to help prevent a single player from taking down a high level farm (if I’m defending an L6, L7 or L8 farm by myself then I can only rebuild it to L5, and the attacker still accomplishes what they came to do). Here are my suggestions for defensive improvements:

1. Make portal shields useful again. When you removed the AP for them I didn’t much care, though many did. When you made them break faster than an L1 resonator, I cared. A LOT. Shields drop less often than any other item (except maybe keys) and yet they are the first thing to get destroyed now. No way to recharge them, and I’ve literally watched a level 1 player strip four shields off of an L7 portal without much difficulty. Stupid.

2. Reflection – This stat has been visible forever now, so USE IT. Give us a mod that when placed on a portal allows a certain amount of XMP damage to be reflected back at the attacker to drain their XM.

3. Absorption – This stat has ALSO been visible forever now, so once again; USE IT. Give us a mod that when placed on a portal allows damage from an XMP (maybe even a friendly one) to be absorbed in order to restore energy to the portal.

4. Balance the ratio of XMP damage to portal energy so that it takes, say, the equivalent of 8 players to knock out a portal that took 8 players to build. I’m sick of seeing a single enemy player come through our farm at stupid hours of the night and blowing 10-20 L7 portals to hell without breaking a sweat. It takes a lot of work to put those up, especially being as outnumbered as we are.

Another issue I want to talk about is the fact that most of our actions in this game don’t actually count for anything at all. Mind Units is the only „score“ we’re given, and that does absolutely nothing for anyone. Hell, the servers can’t even report it correctly half the time and so we’re left wondering what’s really going on. Here are my suggestions for this one:

1. Links are used to make fields. I get that. But what are fields used for? MU? Pointless. We all know neither side is ever actually going to win. Right now the only effect fields have on gameplay is to prevent links and fields from being made within, on both sides. For starters, a GREEN field should only block BLUE links from being made, and vice versa. But make them do other things. There are so many possibilities for this, but a few I can think of off the top of my head; more XM under the field for the faction that controls the field, stronger portals under a matching color field, better hacks from portals (maybe even enemy ones) for the faction that controls the field they are under, etc.

2. Linked portals should benefit from each other somehow. Shared energy pool for example. Perhaps the ability to send items through a link as a way to „email“ an item to someone at the other end. Cool stuff like that would go a long way to making links seem like more than just another source of AP, and give max level players a reason to do it.

3. This one could just as easily go in the list of portal defense suggestions, but I’m putting it here; A portal could be immune or at least very hard to damage while linked to other surrounding portals and within a control field. At this point the objective would be to knock out the surrounding portals first in order to destroy the links and fields blocking the more central portals and be able to deal normal damage to them. This would allow the defending side to protect certain portals and have time to mount a defense while the attacker knocks out the supporting portals/links/fields.

Finally, a few issues and suggestions relating to how Niantic handles updates, communication and other such things:

1. Be more open with your players. Let us know what you’re planning, what exciting things you have in store for us. Part of why I played for two months after hitting 8 was because Joe Philley stated that „soon“ we would see more levels added. It can’t be that hard, so add them. It’s time us dedicated level 8 players were able to make some more progress. Maybe don’t even put in a level cap (or make the level cap so extreme that nobody can hit it) until you have some sort of „endgame“ in mind. It can’t be that hard to just keep scaling the AP requirements for each level, the power of higher level resonators/XMPs, etc.

2. Listen to your players! I’ve seen some wonderful suggestions floating around since I started playing that have yet to be implemented and would be SO simple. Many of them I have talked about already, but then there’s even more basic stuff like an item counter in your inventory so we don’t have to bust out a calculator every time we go farm, or a way to drop multiple items at once so we don’t break our fingers. How have those simple little things not been implemented yet?

3. Stop shutting down useful community-crafted things like IITC or Ingress Verifier. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but you are alienating your fanbase with these Apple-like decisions and it goes completely against the concept of the game. You rely on us for data collection, and many of us spend a ton of money on gas to do for free what Google employees would get paid well for. Either change your TOS or give us an API. At the very least don’t shut something useful down until you can back it up with an official equivalent.

4. You seem to be spending a lot of time on developing a story that to me shouldn’t be moving along until the game goes public. Spend more of your time fixing bugs, like the nasty GPS drift or the COMM messages vanishing into nothingness. I will give you credit for fixing some of the lag, I haven’t had issues with hacking or firing XMPs in a while. Also, add new mechanics, new items, etc. It’s a beta, and probably the most beta of anything I’ve seen come out of Google, so go nuts! Try something crazy, and if it doesn’t work change it back. I thought that was the whole point of this „testing period“? I’ve been playing for almost four months (which is certainly not as long as some others), but for that entire time I have not seen anything new added. Power Cubes are coming „soon“, I know, but if all they are is boxes to store XM I am going to be extremely disappointed. You can do better than that.

5. These events you do (like the one going on today in Los Angeles) are pretty cool, I’ll give you that. But most of your players miss out on them. Let’s see the in-game Missions tab be used for something besides the initial tutorial that is completely useless after the first time. Give players objectives that reward them with resources. Let’s see some ways of getting items besides hacking, or even items you can only get from completing missions.

6. My earliest portal submissions that have yet to receive a confirmation or denial were sent in on February 5th, but I know others who have been waiting much longer. I know you’ve got a TON of them to sort through and I’m not about to just say „work harder“, but perhaps you could hire additional staff from your increasingly large pool of qualified applicants? Hint hint… 😉

Okay, so I don’t expect any of these changes to happen overnight. Hell, we’ll be lucky to see any of them at all. But I can’t just quit this game like I would World of Warcraft and move on. Ingress has done a lot for me. It’s gotten me to crawl outside of my shell and changed my personality in ways I never thought possible. It’s been one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had. I want to see it succeed, I really do, and I want to help in whatever way I can. I’ve submitted tons of portals and pulled off in-game feats that many only dream of doing. But these issues have continued to dishearten me over time and I just can’t do it anymore. I look forward to returning when there is more to return to, and until then I wish you all the best. It’s been a hell of a ride.

Joe Philley Brian Rose Brandon Badger