I have played this for close to 18 months since Terence introduced it to me. Perhaps the only other game I have played longer would have been Tribal Wars. Within this period, a number of friends have also joined this game. They are Ridzuan, DK, Roger, Jean, and Sue and her fiance. Ingress has been quite interesting in the beginning, and it has served to be the only exercise I can get. I also get to meet new people from time to time and it has helped me made new friends. There are also those who are nothing more than an annoyance, but this is not a post about their antics, as those losers are often treated as cheap entertainment, or served as an example what a sorry excuse of a human being would be.

But it has come to a point I have decided to scale down the amount of time I spend on the game, and also to leave the local Resistance community. When I told DK about this matter, I was told that Ridzuan has “retired” from Ingress as well.

It is totally expected, as I have already expect more and more people to leave the game until Niantic get its act together to deal with the rampant cheating in the form of bots and spoofers happening in Singapore. If certain people believe they can gain the upperhand by cheating, then one of the solutions maybe to give it to them. Assuming that one faction controls all the portals in Singapore and the other faction is completely rendered ineffective through cheating, so what? It’s not like one can wear that as a badge of honor or that it is going to earn them some big money like other gaming competitions.

In any case, Niantic has demonstrated that it is completely inept (if not clueless) in dealing with Ganess – the problem at the root of the spoofer / bot issue. It is even more surprising that they have not taken any legal action against Ganess, since its makers are now profiting from something that is free by charging money for Ganess accounts. At times I have even wondered whether any intellectual property laws have been broken if those chaps have actually taken the original Ingress application and modified it.

Niantic claims it is making an effort on that. In fact, that effort is best demonstrated in its enthusiasm in dropping the ban-hammer on players who used clients like “broot“. “broot” contains a number of features which many players actually welcomed. It was a wrong target because the ability to disable some useless features like unnecessary animation has been a great energy and time saver. It would have been better had Niantic shown more enthusiasm in evaluating why the “broot” features are welcomed by players and improve the occiFAIL official client. But very little of those features were implemented, with the exception of portal key count and inventory count (and even that was pathetic attempt). It took them long enough to come up with a mass-recycling feature too. Perhaps, Niantic either has hedge some of its funds in power-generation companies, or those in high places within those companies may have been investors.

Back to the matter of bots and spoofers. A ban is pointless in addressing the real issue because new disposable email accounts are easily obtained. By the time the cheats are banned, enough damage would have been done in the game to dishearten and disillusion players who had put in footwork and sweat in the real world to play the game. Every genuine Ingress players understand Ingress is a game that cannot be won, because even capturing an anomaly (i.e. winning a particular event) means pretty much nothing as the opposing faction can turn the tables in the future. But all of them expect to be at least able to get ahead at certain times as long as they put in a lot of effort in the game. Bots and spoofers make a mockery of that. What point is there to plan and send teams to several remote locations and work in conjunction, when a cheat with several accounts can reverse days of planning and hours of hardwork by using several disposable accounts in a matter of minutes? Really, no amount of hardwork any player puts into the game can be effective in a fight against a group of players who are running several bots on several cheap Made-in-China devices in the comfort of their home.

The next evil would be multi-accounting, which started off as a minor evil primarily due to the 2000-item limit in the game. Niantic has repeatedly ignored the feedback from players to do something about the item limit. Some players have suggested that portal keys should not count towards the item limit, while some suggested designating a portal as a vault to store “excess items” or items less used, such as keys obtained during overseas vacations. That portal will then be accessible by a designated key which cannot be used for linking nor can it be recycled. Really, the concept of a vault / bank / house is not novel, as they are present in MMORPGs such as Ultima-Online.

Thus, even though multi-accounting is against TOS and definitely against the true spirit of the game, it has more or less become a tolerated evil among some players. Offenders who are discreet about it generally get away with it. Unfortunately, multi-accounting has been taken to the extreme by some players to build level 8 portals with less than 8 people, or to show up alone to crash an opposing faction’s farm with 2 devices (and worse when those devices have more than one account where they can switch on the fly). Just like bots and spoofers, a ban is equally pointless. That’s not mentioning that perhaps even my grandmother could have acted faster than Niantic on the reports on those cheats. In one particular case, one of the offenders who has often showed up with two accounts to crash a Resistance flash farm survived for more than half a year. Even so, I was told his main account is currently only suspended, not banned. To rub salt over injury, Niantic didn’t even suspend all of his other accounts. That’s not mentioning the number of other blatant offenders who are guilty of constantly building high level portals at their own areas of play remained go scot free.

Anyway, the fact that each portal key counts towards the limit means that the problem is further exacerbated with the subsequent explosion of portals in the game. Everyone wants more portals to play with, but the lack of quality control in the portal approval and review process has been an ongoing problem for a long time. If anyone wants a quick example of the lack of quality control, one should take a look at these examples^{[1] [2] [3]}. It would have been pretty obvious to even the untrained that these are objects from the same playground which are less than a few meters away from each other. In short, if they are placed at their correct location, they would have violated portal density guidelines and should never been approved. Notice how they are placed apart such that a small sham cluster portals now exists in the otherwise uninteresting location where these portals are located.

There is nothing bad about more portals in general. In fact, for the purpose of farming, clusters of portals near to each other is great as long as the objects truly existed, and they meet the so-called portal submission guidelines. It saves time and effort in obtaining (farming) more equipment. However, sham portals in utterly remote and uninteresting, especially those in private residential areas submitted for the benefit of the lone agent residing there, are not. Even worse are non-existent portals whereby in several instance it took months before Niantic is convinced the object really doesn’t exists. On top of which, Niantic would approve any stone sculptures or signboards regardless how common they have been. Even rubbish bins with some designs are accepted as portals. To put it bluntly, all of these low quality portals completely destroyed the reality of the storyline. Whoever the “shapers” are, they apparently see that their attempt to reach large masses of the (probably) better cultured and more intelligent human population has failed and it would be easier for them to do so through mundane objects. So much for that kind of “enlightenment”.

It is also perculiar that while Niantic has considered kindergartens and private residential areas to be off limits, the same does not extend to military compounds. Niantic is said to be set up by Google to obtain location data to improve its database, and it makes us wonder what Niantic / Google wants to do with the information on objects within foreign military bases outside the United States. It is also a complete failure of Singapore’s Total Defense concept when some servicemen do not take the security of their camps seriously.

Much has been offered by the player community to help Niantic address the portal issues. Players have suggested ideas from regional moderators from both factions to even building portal verification process (for both portal candidates and portals reported to be invalid) into a game. As usual, Niantic has disregarded such offers. Some players have suggested that Niantic do not want players to be involved to avoid accusation of bias, or to ensure the integrity of the location data gathered through Ingress. What integrity of data are we talking about when fake and non-existent objects have been made into portals? Meanwhile, Niantic set up a portals appeal community in Google+, which allows the players to contest a rejected portal candidate or a portal edit that has been rejected.

Which leads me to the next point. It is all for show. Because when one go through some of the appeals, one would either find that the so-called portal guidelines are not only as elastic as Mr Fantastic, the process itself is probably run by monkeys. There is absolutely no consistency, which leads to the famous statement: the only thing consistent about Niantic (or whatever that is even considered a process for portal reviews and submission) is its inconsistency. The lack of quality control is obvious whereby objects on a single wall art or many inane objects within the same structure end up as complete sham clusters. Niantic even went so far to say a prior approval / or removal of another portal does not set a precedence. So, whether a portal stays or goes really depend on which monkey (Oops, I apologise!) person is looking at it. Perhaps it also depends on whether this person woke up on the right side of the bed that day, or whether he had great sex the night before or even a proper breakfast that morning or not.

Finally, there is the matter of perceived bias towards the other faction on the part of Niantic. The accusation is not restricted to the Resistance. But from the perspective of Resistance players, the shifting of three artifacts to the designated Enlightened home portal in the current “Helios” anomaly series served as the most tangible evidence of this perceived bias. That’s not mentioning that Niantic has disregarded the clear evidence of cheating through the use of spoofers in one of the satellite sites during the previous “Interitus” series and handed the victory to the Enlightened. In fact, I have even heard the joke that even players with multiple accounts, bots and spoofers are given ‘preferential treatment’ depending on their faction. It maybe true considering how long the various incarnations of the “B00MZ” bot survived before they are banned. Some even believed that portal candidates submitted by the Resistance are scrutinized more stringently and often rejected. Even after those portal candidates are accepted, they are believed to be easily removed when reported by the Enlightened. Furthermore, the fact that even the Enlightened faction logo looked way better than that of the Resistance does not help. Whether the alleged faction bias is real or imagined does not really matter since Niantic doesn’t give a flying fxxk about the opinion of the players, or how some felt about it.

Anyway, there is really nothing much players can do about Niantic. As one of the agents pointed out, this is Niantic’s game and the players can only suck it up. Players can accept those rules (or whatever passes off as rules), or well, accept those rules. Perhaps Niantic may take notice only when there is a negative growth in overall game activities, but by then Google may decide Ingress has served its purpose and wind it down. Meanwhile, since it is a free game, anyone who is unhappy with Niantic can always just leave the game.

Similarly, anyone who is unhappy with how the faction community is run, can also just leave as well. As one of the Malaysian Resistance agent I met recently told me over a friendly cup of tea, no one has any right to tell another player what is important and how to play when it is the player’s own time and effort, and that player pays for his own device and data plan.

Good point. Even though that came after I made the decision to leave the community.