Showing posts with label COMM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label COMM. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Ingress: And I Am Back


Not really. Over the past few days I have learned that (1) I don't miss Ingress, (2) Push-ups are much better exercise, more fulfilling, and way more fun than walking around staring at the phone pretending to get exercise through walking, and (3) The make money department is more gripping than the game of Ingress and I am better off increasing my hours there, since I work for myself and don't have/need regular "office hours." 

Some decisions. 

(1) I am going to completely avoid the COMM like I did all the way to hitting Level 8. In future my use of the COMM will be almost completely for Squad members. Even there a value is that COMM/G+ socializing is largely a waste of game time. 
(2) I am going to wait for my 1,000 portal submissions to go through before I make a serious effort at team building. 
(3) There is going to be a Greater Jackson Heights Resistance for agents that might not qualify for The Squad, but even that is later, I am in no hurry. 
(4) When I play, I will just rack up some more AP, that is all. I will play rarely. Life/Work/Ingress balance is a value to strive for. 
(5) I am glad for the reinstatement. But mostly I am going to act like the reinstatement never happened. I am going to play much less, if that. 

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Saturday, July 13, 2013

Ingress: Many Many Teams But Only Two Global Teams



There are some basic premises.

(1) This is a game. It is supposed to be fun. This is not a corporate project. There is no boss. Much of the fun in the game comes from the human interactions and the human frailties.

(2) The number one rule in Ingress leadership is you can't tell anyone what to do. But with their consent you can suggest things and share tips and wisdom.

(3) There are only two global teams possible. That is just the way the game has been designed.

Both sides already have started with city teams. The city teams on both sides all over the world cropped up pretty much independent of each other. So the challenge is not what you do when more than one team shows up. The challenge is how do you bring about communication and coordination among teams across a country, a continent, perhaps to span the globe.

There is room for multiple Resistance teams in New York City. I think team building should be encouraged. First of all it is a scalability issue. A G+ group past 500 members does not make a lot of sense. Maybe 200 is a healthy number. Beyond that a group, any group, should do an amoeba split. When you move from 500 to 2,000 agents in the city, some neighborhoods will qualify to have their own groups. Borough groups will no longer be enough. I know I want a Greater Jackson Heights group.

I have met many agents whom I have told, "My team is not the right team for you, you should join the other team." The Squad is not for everyone.

There is a cross faction hangout that popped up in my Gmail yesterday, and most of the usual suspects showed up, chief among them the Keyser. Maybe there is room for a cross-faction squad, and there is room for The Squad to coordinate with the existing organized Resistance team(s) in the city.

At some point the city might graduate to having rival L8 farms sitting side by side, permanently, because we want to seek new challenges other than building and killing L8 farms. Similarly the teams in the city will perhaps graduate to thinking team building is a welcome phenomenon. It is just like farm building, or home territory building. The goal should be communication and coordination, not name calling on the COMM.
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Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Ingress: Swatting Houseflies On The COMM


The COMM is the least well thought through element of the Ingress gaming app. It is just raw.

My top request right now with Niantic is to enable a Block User feature for the COMM. Minus that the COMM has a tendency to degenerate to the lowest common denominator kind of talk.

Also just having an All COMM and a secure COMM for faction chat is not enough. There is room for one more section, one called private COMM: there you only see people you allow.

There are only two global teams possible in the game and that is the way it should be. But every city in the world has at least one local team on each side. And the idea of making it possible to form many, many local teams is not an aside. Making that possible is central to bringing about complexities in the game.

The game has to be kept simple in its basics like it is now. But most of the new complexities and challenges will come from enabling easy creation of new teams. Just like you graduate from building portals to building entire farms the ultimate act in the game is when you build your own team. You don't have to, and most people will not, but that is the ultimate act in the game.

I have a global team in mind. I am going to build the top Resistance team in New York City. And in doing that I am going to build a blueprint with which to build a global team.

The number one thing that has been hindering my team building efforts is a sheer lack of portals in the city. I need my 1,000 portal submissions to go through before serious team building can start. There are people who have been astounded by how prolific I have been at submitting portals, and their reaction is to the 60 or so portals of mine that have gone live. Well, to them I say, wait until I start recruiting people. My portal submissions will pale in comparison to the team building I will do.

In the mean time I get to go on faction chat around 5 PM and swat houseflies. There are about five members of timtomhuze who like nothing better than to pull the conversation on faction chat to the lowest possible denominator. Like I said, I am new to Ingress, but I am not new to political warfare.
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Tuesday, July 02, 2013

Ingress: New Scanner: Version 1.30.2 Update



Being able to see how many keys you have to a portal before you link to it is great. I have over 30 portals that I like to have at least one key of. But I also want to link and field - the most fun part of the game.

I think this scanner favors agents who walk to agents who drive around in cars. That is also a plus. The car advantage might have been diminished. If Ingress could turn America into a walking nation, that would be trillions in health care savings. That alone would make the game worth it. I was not overweight when I started playing, but I have lost weight playing. That is a good thing. My waistline is slimmer. Walking is the best aspect of the game. I was already a walking maniac before the game. Now I am even more so.

What they have not worked on is the COMM. Unless they fundamentally rework the COMM the app is not tremendously helping the social aspects of the game. The COMM is currently the weak link in the chain.

My only bigger gripe than the COMM is that Niantic is not approving portals fast enough. Unless New York City has 10 times more portals it can not accommodate its current batch of players, let alone the expected five times increase in player numbers. I would like to attempt complex fielding, but that is currently not possible. Please approve my 1,000 portal submissions already.
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Thursday, June 27, 2013

Ingress: The Cross Faction Squad


(1) You are past 2.5 million in AP.
(2) You play Ingress for at least 10 hours a week. Staring at the Intel map and G+ and COMM socializing does not count. This is 10 hours of actively interacting with portals.
(3) You personally know someone who is already a member of either The Squad or The Cross Faction Squad.
(4) Induction happens only in person.
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Sunday, June 23, 2013

Ingress: Reporting tomhuze


Dear Niantic.

Yesterday afternoon this guy tomhuze (Ingress handle) and some of his team members spent an afternoon reporting on half the portals in my neighborhood of Jackson Heights in New York City. This is only the latest step in a vendetta campaign that has been going on for weeks now. We are both blue agents.

I have largely built my home territory of Jackson Heights (Ingress: I Can Retire Now) with enormous work over months. By now I believe it is the top home territory in the city, in terms of how many portals it has, and the diversity of portals it has. You can find L1-L7 portals in the territory on most days of the week. It is the top Ingress destination in Queens, for its central geographical location and for the large number of portals. I hope to make it even better: I expect more portals to go live, I expect more close clusters to emerge, and I expect to make more portal submissions, especially all along the 7 train track for what I call "the Disney experience," so agents on both sides can play the game while riding the train. I think it is going to be the top Ingress experience in the city.

A home territory is one where the majority of portals are your submissions. It is not the territory you happen to live in.

I urge you to disregard all his requests to wipe out my portals. They are all legitimate submissions of churches, sculptures, artwork, paintings, murals and so on. Their geographical locations get captured by the camera itself, as you very well know. These portals that have doubled and tripled in count have greatly enhanced the gameplay for local and visiting agents on both sides.

And I would like to point out that my top request right now is that you add a Block User feature for the COMM. The COMM has got to be the least refined feature of the Ingress gaming app. And add a third section. There is All COMM, there is Faction Chat, and there is a need for a private section. Only people you explicitly approve are part of that private section. Kind of like on Facebook you have your social circle, I have mine, and we might even have some mutual contacts. Each agent's private COMM would be unique to that agent.

I believe until you add the Block User feature I am just going to avoid the COMM like I did all the way to hitting Level 8, but back then it was because all the handles and portals came across as gibberish to me. Now it is because there is just too much noise and pollution on the COMM, too much small talk and name calling, bitterness and outright harassment.

So this guy calls himself leader of the NYC Resistance. The vast majority of agents on both sides are not members of organized groups. You can play this game just fine on your own. I only discovered the group after I hit Level 8. Most challenges in the game are on the way to Level 8. Active members are people who show up for your events. Last I knew maybe 15-20 people showed up for his events. That is out of hundreds of agents in the city, soon to go into the thousands.

I think enhancing the social aspects of the game is a good thing. And dudes like tomhuze have put in a lot of work into bringing forth that social experience for people who like that kind of social experience that seems to be heavily organized around drinking beer, attending L8 farm events and going to destroy only high level portals. There are some values that the group has come up with, for example this weird idea that AP does not matter after you hit Level 8. After you hit Level 8 it is more about just plain hanging out with other Level 8s. To each his her own.

We had a falling out a few weeks ago and I am no longer a part of his G+ groups. Since I have focused on building my home territory to go on to build a Resistance team of my own with a different value system. There are only two global teams possible. But you can create as many local teams as you want. Team building is the ultimate challenge in the game, I believe.

Ingress should not be made into a complex game if Niantic is to meet its goal of taking this game to a billion people. By the way, guys like tomhuze happen to think "everyone who wants to play this game is already playing it and when the game goes public maybe the numbers will go up by a factor of two or three at most," a view I strongly disagree with.

But it should be possible to find new challenges in the game, and a lot of that is to do with team building. When you build large, complex teams you can organize large, complex events, and that option should be there. But right now that is the app's weakest link in the chain. It is because the COMM is so poorly designed. I once blogged months ago that Ingress could emerge a major force for world peace. But right now I am thinking it might start new wars! Social filters ought be an option.

And, by the way, I love Google like some people love Apple. You can just do a search on the company's name at my blog and you will see that. (Google Balloon: More Promising Than Google Fiber, Google Glass And Google Car)

In 2010 a blog post I wrote inspired Fred Wilson to put forth a blog post on the same theme that became his most popular blog post for that year, called Mobile First. Ingress is way more than just a game for me. It brings mobile, gaming, local, global, and social -- some of the major trends in tech over the past few years -- all together and so I see it as a major window into the future of tech itself.

This guy's biggest contribution to the game in the city is his whole secrecy paradigm. People are doing L8 farms better everywhere else in the world but he thinks it is a concept he came up with. That paradigm dominates the thinking in both teams in the city and that is why New York City is nowhere on the global Ingress map. I hope to change that. I think both teams should actively blog about their exploits and adventures and should make attempts to become part of the official Ingress report. Our falling out was on this matter.

Ingress: Legitimate Secrets
Ingress NYC Resistance "Secrets"

I have been a fairly passionate player, I started on February 1 and am currently past six million in AP.

Ingress: 300K In 2 Hours 15 Minutes
Level 8 In A Month

Ingress: Open Source Organization And Organic Leadership
Ingress: State Of The Game: New York City (2)

Ingress: Linking And Fielding Types
Ingress: Jackson Heights Mysteries
Ingress: The Squad
Ingress: The Squad: Racially Coded Language
Ingress: Portal Building, Field Building, Farm Building, Team Building
Ingress: Pendulum Swings In Team Momentum
Ingress: Portal Submissions Are The Bomb
Ingress: State Of The Game: New York City
Ingress: That Dosa Thang!
Ingress: L8 Farms: Getting 8 People To Show Up
Ingress: Team? What Team?
Ingress And Complex Strategies
Ingress: L8 Farm Types
Ingress: The Game Changes
Ingress Suggestion: Portal Enhancements
Ingress: Phase 3
Ingress: High Level Stuff
Ingress: A Great Game For The Knowledge Worker

Ingress Tips
Ingress And Location

Looking to forward to keep working on my home territory, and looking forward to building my team once you do your part and rework the COMM.

Thank you.

paramendra (Ingress handle)
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