Ingress: The Worst and Best

On the Ingress Colorado Enlightenment site, we had a thread about Worst and Best things about Ingress.  Here’s what I came up with, some of which are ideas that others had, some of which are restatements of things I’ve recorded in recent blog posts here.

TOP TEN WORST THINGS ABOUT INGRESS:

1. A regional / metro death spiral into one side dominating the battleground. Even were things can be taken back, it’s brief, as the other side has been able to farm their much-more-drop-friendly portals to gain an imbalanced inventory.  
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Increase the hack reward from enemy portals, esp. of Bursters.
b. Do something to dynamically increase the powers of, drop rates to, success rates of the lower level team (e.g., based on the distance to the nearest friendly portal). (The opposite could be done for the majority team, but I don’t want people to feel penalized by success.)
c. Add another faction (or two). This divides up the population enough that one side is less likely to dominate.
d. Add an NPC faction, that can focus somewhat more on the majority in an area.
e. Make zapping portals easier, building them harder (either through drop rates, or the effects of bursters vs energy of resonators).
f. Increase decay rates based on proximity of others portals. Make creating a farm (including a regional farm) harder.
g. Having a portal key gives you an additional advantages when hacking an enemy portal (more drops, greater damage, greater AP).
h. Inventory item decay.  Above a certainly medium number, inventory items (at each level?) decay at X%/day. That controls inventories, reduces the pinata drop advantage of friendly farms, encourages people to use it or lose it, but doesn’t penalize folks who are stocking up for a big event. Maybe make items that you can’t use yet immune to that decay.

2. There is an evident barrier (esp. in #1 situation) to low level players, especially ones without higher level mentors or the ability/finances to drive all over God’s creation.
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Increase the power of low-level Bursters. L1 Bursters presently are a joke. L2s are not much better. (Optionally, have that effect fade when you get X levels above the level of a Burster, encouraging L7s to drop their L1 Bursters for lower level folks to use.)
b. Increase the hack AP reward against enemy portals. This benefits low-level players most (as a percent-of-level).
c. Limit Burster Level use to Portal Level +2. E.g., high level players can’t drop L6s on that L1 portal. They have to slug it out some.
d. Alternately to (c), limit who can (within a 5 minute period) attack a portal to someone at Portal Level +3 or less.  So an L8can’t just knock down L4 portals, only higher level ones. (As the portal is attacked, though, its level drops, thus the time period within which an L8 can take down an L6 portal even when it dips to L4 and below).

3. Doing something — sometimes taking several minutes to do so (driving somewhere, maneuvering around with cranky GPS signal. etc.) — and having it give you nothing.
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Every hack should net you something.  Maybe not much, but no effort should go without some reward.

4. Slow responses from Niantic regarding portals — new portals, portals without pictures, duplicate portals, portal bad locations, portal bad names, etc.  The last three are definitely dings on the perceived quality of the game.
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Error correction / quality should take priority over bringing new portals online, esp. in areas where there are already substantial numbers of portals.
b. Add more tools to facilitate error corrections (e.g., to submit a new picture for a portal).

5. Lack of keys, which hampers building links and CFs, which not only slows progress but denies one of the most awesome things you can do in the game.
SUGGESTIONS:
a. More key drops.  Or maybe more key drops on enemy portals.
b. Alternately (but, I think, less desirably  have keys be permanent. Once you have the key to a portal, you can link to/from it indefinitely. This maybe makes things too easy.

6. Mobile platforms are cool, but not the easiest to interact with. The Intel page is great, but highly limited.
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Allow recharges (and view of portal key possession) from the Intel map. (Really, Google can tell where my location is on my PC, so why not let me use that?)
b. Allow (or make straightforward) portal submissions from the PC (maybe through G+).
c. Provide inventory control from the Intel map.  Do I have that portal key? How many resonators do I have?  It’s ridiculous to spend a minute to open the mobile client in order to determine that.
c. Rationalize the interface between the PC and Mobile versions. Where to enter in codes, for example, is a completely different affair.
d. Allow Faction chat to be set as the default.
e. Inventory interface on the mobile device needs to be greatly improved. Takes too long to see what you’ve got, let alone use it.
d. Anything that can be done to reduce power usage on the phone should be. That might include allowing the screen to blank/dim but still be picking up XM. My Moto Razr Maxx works pretty decently, but even I get drained; I have no idea how others with smaller batteries mange.
e. The GPS control in the client seems much less stable than, say, what Google Maps is able to figure out from the GPS. Please fix this, as it makes hacking or attacking some portals change from a 5 minute task to a 15 minutes task.
f. Portal key management on the mobile needs to be completely redone. Sorting alphabetically is rarely useful. I want to be able to sort by proximity. I want to be able to filter out which keys are to portals that are friendly (that I might recharge). I want to be able to star/flag portals that are of particular interest to me.
f. Both mobile and PC should notify you if your resonators are under attack.
g. There’s a lot of wasted time hacking portals before they are ready to be rehacked. The mobile client should monitor this and not let me re-hack until it’s time to do so (maybe even with a timer over the hack button).
h. The game seems too easily hung up, requiring a Force Sync or Force Stop of the app. This gets really frustrating in the middle of trying to take a portal. Um … fix this.
i. If things get hung up, it seems the device being used (e.g., a Burster stuck in mid-burst) gets lost, even if there’s no effect. That should change.
j. The press-to-fire option on the mobile device only picks the highest level Burster you have. But there are empty boxes on the interface — why not second-highest and third-highest (to encourage finesse)?
k. When I hack a portal, I want the results to show up in the COMM window, too, just like with code entries.

7. The decode codes are, unfortunately, very easily accessible to some people (who monitor the decode sites and can easily get to their client) and not to others. This engenders resentment, annoyance, or just a plain feeling of unhappiness.
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Codes need a longer lifespan. Much longer.
b. Code access should be part of the game, not a matter of personally decoding or monitoring independent decode sites.  Maybe some hacks give you codes, or codes are found on documents at some portals, or ADA suggests a code to you …

8. Even if regional balance is in place, it’s an endless war, with no real difference between the sides, which eventually can get boring.
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Create faction-specific abilities (changes in hack results, for example — builders vs destroyers; variation in how deploying, or linking, or decay works, etc.). This requires some careful balancing.
b. Rather than every player being the same at each level, allow some sort of personal specialization or simple skill tree — improved bursting, improved resonator placement or energy levels, improved hacking. Not wildly different, but enough to allow some variations based on the player’s preferred style.
c. Have the rules vary over time. This could be arbitrary, but could also be cyclical (and thus strategically usable), e.g., it’s easier to burst things during Full Moon, while resonators placed at the New Moon have more energy.
d. Have portals be defined by type — POs, libraries, police stations, public art, “Other” — with differing natures (drops, vulnerabilities, XM strengths, link ranges) depending on the type.
e. There should be some positive effect — beyond the initial AP reward and wildly abstract global numbers — to having and maintaining a CF. That’s the metagame goal, but nothing in the actual game supports that. It can’t be imbalancing (see #1), but maybe a convenience — increased XM recovery while in a friendly CF, for example.

9. People with no lives too easily dominate those of us who have to work (study, caretake) for a living. Some of that is inevitable, but … well, I don’t want to frustrate people who have a chance to play, but casual players need a chance to be competitive, too, and an obsessive few can have too great a control over too much of an area.
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Create hourly activity caps — X hacks, Y bursts, etc., then a 15-30 minute cool-down.
b. Alternately, reduce effectiveness over time (after X hacks per hour, the drop rate goes down; after Y bursts per hour the range or strength starts to drop).

10. There’s a huge meta-story out there, but it doesn’t really impact on the game.  (And some people aren’t interested in tracking it).
SUGGESTIONS:
a. Events in the story feed back into the game (through client updates).  E.g., something happens that changes Resistance abilities, and the scanner notes that when applicable. “Your bursters seem weaker than before. Perhaps Professor Smith’s theory is correct.”  It’s not deep immersion, but it’s more than happens now.
b. Game event info shows up in the COMM. “ADA: Be on the look-out for Professor Jones.” (Maybe with a minor reward if you find a portal that has Professor Jones hanging around it for some reason.)

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TOP FIVE THINGS I REALLY ENJOY:

1. Creating a link is great.  Creating a CF is awesome.

2. Though not a social kind of guy, the discussions and occasional activities are keen.

3. Exploring my city — the streets, the art, even the post offices and libraries.

4. Playing with my wife.

5. Running into another player. Even an opponent. It adds a sense of reality to the game.

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And, needless to say, the Top Five Enjoyments are, for the moment, greater than the Top Ten Worsts.