【Ingress】 Once in a duodecade

Previously, I talked about Ingress' past here. I'll use this note to reflect on the present. And I'll write a new note with some thoughts on the future (eventually).

But first, here's the video I originally meant to share with my 2023 advent calendar entry:

2024 was primarily about live events. Dispatch (Daily Bounties and Global Campaigns) evolved out of learnings from running Hexathlons, HexQuest, and our New Agent Training experiments. We want to keep Agents playing Ingress as much as and as long as we can, but many new recruits find Ingress too hard to understand and have difficulty getting started. In order for Ingress to grow, we need to keep as many existing Agents as we can, and we also need more new recruits to join and to stay. Giving all Agents small, achievable daily goals was one way to say, "If you aren't sure what to do next, try doing this." More than 2X 2sday, more than our New Agent Training experiments, more than Handbook—giving Agents four daily tasks got more people playing, more often.

Daily Bounties didn't just help new recruits; veteran Agents who were playing maybe five or six days a week started to play every day. And when Agents play Ingress every day, then deploying/hacking/attacking/recharging can become a part of their daily routine. You can form a new habit that sticks, and stickiness is good.

But while we could see on our dashboards that more Agents were playing every day, as a player I think it was hard to tell because most of the Daily Bounties were designed to be easy. Recharging, Drone hacking, and glyphing are easier to complete but harder to notice than actions that change the game board and show up in COMM, like capturing, linking, and fielding.

It's not enough to have more Agents only recharging or hacking if they aren't also actively battling for their Faction. Ingress is more fun when there's a back-and-forth volley for area control, as opposed to total and complete domination that never changes. So we're working to design more reasons to play, for Agents to travel outside of their regular routines, and encourage more Faction vs. Faction competition.

Where Daily Bounties were designed to be small, achievable goals that most Agents can cross off their todo lists in less than a day, Global Campaigns were designed on top of this system with bigger challenges that can span a longer stretch of time, and be repeated so there's unfinished business left to complete. We're still playing with different ways to use Global Campaigns (and Dispatch in general), so expect to see new events coming soon.

Later this week on Dec 7, we'll field test our new server infrastructure that improves how XM Shards are handled. The Shard Skirmish events have highlighted several issues in how Shards spawn and how they jump, which (and I hope I didn't jinx it) should be addressed in this upcoming field test. 

Finally, we've been working to optimize and upgrade our render pipeline, which noticeably speeds up app startup time. Gotta go fast. Our tech artist Alex will share more info when we ship.

All of this is to say, the Scanner tech that enables Global Campaigns and Anomalies and live events is one thing. The Agent community is what powers Ingress and makes it work, and what makes it worthwhile. Looking back on the year, all of my favorite Ingress memories came from hanging out with our community, so here's to making many new memories together with even more Agents.