Thia's Forum Call

Thia, the Community Specialist for Ingress, has had a two hour long call with @van_valdis, randomly picked from the Agents on the forum. In the call, a lot was talked about, including the future of Ingress and what is currently planned.

We want to make it clear that a lot of the things are planned and another lot of things are just ideas. It is not a guarantee that any of these things will happen, as plans can change or be canned completely. A few things are also personal ideas and wishes of Thia as an agent, not from Niantic as a whole, so they should not be seen as things Niantic is actively working on or is even aware of.

The following things is stuff that Niantic is planning or things that they talked about. Again, these plans can change, be pushed back or be abandoned completely. Therefore, don't take it as gospel:

- Thia is pushing for better communication and plans to make a quarterly feature roadmap. The first is planned to go out for Q1 2022 and is planned to follow the same format Niantic already uses for the quarterly Event Schedule

- Thia doesn't like how the forum is structured and wants to revamp it, as people currently see it mainly as a platform to talk to Niantic and not to other agents. She's currently exploring options while trying to leave a place to talk to Niantic as well

- The January Second Sunday has been confirmed, but is currently planned to be the last one to count towards the Mission Day badge. Second Sundays may continue, but will likely receive a new badge in that case. This wasn't planned from the start, because they though the original 3 announced Second Sundays would have been the only ones

- Real Missions Days will continue. Niantic is currently sifting through the old MD applications that were submitted before the pandemic. These include the Mission Days from the canceled Lexicon Hexathlon, as well

- New applications for Mission Days are planned to open this winter or early next year

- Thia is planning an AMA soon™ and wants to include Brian and ofer2 in the first one as well. ofer2 is an Engineer that has offered great insight into the backbones of Ingress on the forums

- The Fingerprint badge, which was revealed to us as being the beta design of the C.O.R.E. medal, will actually get used for something else soon™

- Live Events are currently planned for mid-2022. It was supposed to be earlier, but then the Delta strain of the COVID-19 virus emerged

- These Live Events might also include Shards. Niantic is aware that the #FateOfThe13 shards burned out a lot of agents and is thinking of ways to not make them as exhausting

- Niantic is acknowledging the problems of having permafields over areas. There are ideas, but nothing has been decided yet or is being worked on

- XMAs and Vanguards will be rotated soon

These points are all things that Thia herself wishes to see or wants to change. Again, this is her personal opinion and is not an indicator of things Niantic is working on or that will have any influence over the game:

- As a special guest in the NL-1331 van, the idea floated around to have ofer2 on board. This is very much a "It'll probably not happen, but it would be amazing if" idea

- Thia hopes to see a "Bandwidth saver" mode some day, which could be used in areas with poor signal or to save data

- Thia personally hopes for a lower cooldown to be permanent and to have Heat Sinks rebalanced

- Thia also thinks that the 2x L7 Resonators per agent should stay for a while until there are a few more agents around, but also believes that it is too easy to build L7 portals at the moment

- Thia is aware that there are still open tickets with problems over C.O.R.E. renewals and issues with people not being able to access intel. She's working her way through her list of known cases, but also mentions that the issues around the C.O.R.E. renewals seem to have been fixed and very few tickets regarding it are being submitted

- Thia is reading through the discussions in our IUENG discussion group regularly

- Thia is aware that some people feel Hexathlon are too much "Free for all" instead of "Faction vs Faction". She likes the idea of adding faction-based scoring to future Hexathlons, but nothing has been discussed with the team yet

- Thia thinks part of the problem of permafields is that the only score in the game is MU and thinks having diffrent scores might make Permafields less, well, permanent

- Thia is a bit reluctant to talking on the forums because "damned if you do" - if she starts to comment on posts, agents will demand updates on everything, even if she just wants to banter a bit. She's also hesitant to give her personal opinion on new feature proposals or suggestions because she doesn't want people to view her opinion as Niantic's opinion or endorsement. She worries that if she says "Great idea!", people will think it'll be implimented even though it actually isn't and it was just her own opinion