Ingress AMA Archive
July 25th 2017
Q1: As for many countries with very low portal count, the current OPR mechanism will not help add up a decent number of portals for Ingress to continue and for agents to stay active. Is Niantic ever interested to allow different new portal creation rules to encourage the local communities of these countries?
A1: Yes. We plan to open portal submissions in the future.
Q2: Can OPR show 'disagreements' as well?
A2: Great suggestion. I’ll pass it along.
Q3: Level 11 and OPR, any date set?
A3: No. Not at this time.
Q4: Any consideration given to indicating in the scanner when an agent gets 2x, 3x etc black medal? For some agents, that’s what they have left.
A4: It’s been discussed along with many things for veteran players. But to my knowledge, nothing has been decided upon.
Q5: Any chance of adding a skip portal option for those ones that we are unsure about on opr.
A5: I think you can skip a portal by simply refreshing the screen to get a new portal. It might be tied to a timer. I’m not 100% certain. But I know you essentially request a new portal that way.
Q6: What characters will be in anomaly cities?
A6: That will be revealed soon. But, if what I heard is correct, people who haven’t been to areas will be appearing at them. Subject to change of course I suppose.
Q7: OPR: In several parts of the UK, we're not seeing any new candidates to review -- some reviewers have had nothing for nearly a fortnight. Is this down to the local backlog being cleared, or just that some candidates are being held back for later review?
A7: From what I understand about the UK situation, it is because the local backlog is cleared.
Q8: When can we name our capsules.
A8: Hopefully soon. I would love to have the feature personally.
Q9: Does using an JARVIS or ADA on a portal you have never visited before count as unique portal capture?
A9: I don't know. I'll update this thread with the answer when I get it. My gut says no. But I haven't tried it recently to test that theory.
Q10: What Niantic do or will do against cheating? (Multiple accounts on different mobile devices, fake GPS and similar things?)
A10: I’m going to be blunt, probably against better judgement, in my response. Every day multi-accounts are banned. Every day spoofers are banned. The latter is a problem that doesn’t have a single simple solution. To understand why, you have to understand that a person on an Android phone (and iPhone to an extent) has full control over their device. To include the ability to control what information is being sent from the device. This is why you can’t simply ban an IP address, MAC address, device ID, etc. It feels like every week we are tweaking things with the system. Improvements happen all the time. If you look at the situation today versus three years ago, today’s environment is significantly better than it was back then. Part of the issue is that Ingress Agents are very invested in the game. Because of this, one bad actor that slips through the cracks or figures out a loophole to the system can cause significant problems and it 100,000 accounts banned that day don’t really matter to the people that were impacted by that one person. We are improving though. Constantly.
Q11: So, how about some rules?
A11: I know… I know… Sometimes things don’t go according to plan. All I can say at this point is that they are being actively worked on. I’ll keep relaying the feedback.
Q12: Would underwater portals ever be A Thing? For example the MUSA Museo Subacuático de Arte in Cancun
A12: Interesting question. I think some exist already. We don’t take height into account. I personally don’t see a difference between summiting a mountain top with specialized gear any different than needing specialized gear to submit an underwater portal. Just my opinion though.
Q13: Do you like 🍆.
A13: I’m more of a 🍑 man myself.
Q14: Last time you told that you like Ukraine field arts. Which of them did like most off all?
Q15: Hello +Andrew Krug! I hope your morning is going well. My question for you is do you know what has happened with Oliver and Jarvis since the disbanding of the Magnus? Thank you for reading, I hope you have an amazing day. I know it's storyline stuff but I figured it could be a nice difference from the other questions.
A15: How interesting... it seems much remains to be learned about the fate of Jarvis and OLW.
Q16: Many of us who purchased packs from the NL-1331 van were met with codes that were already redeemed, or cards with no codes printed on them. According to Ethan, this is due to a printing error. What recourse do we have for these items? Money was exchanged but we did not receive valid codes. Thanks!
A16: Send me a HO or Telegram message. If you have and I missed it, ping me again and I apologize for missing it the first time.
Q17: Hi! We had a player who seemingly got "insta-banned" for using a xioami phone. Are there any plans to address this or reinstate these players wrongfully banned due to GPS issue devices?
A17: Send me the players name and I’ll see what I can do.
Q18: How far are you with your ambassador- and second-chance-programs?
A18: Closer than I was several weeks ago.
Q19: Since the development of #Ingress 2.0 is on the way and update of hosting platform is happening. Did you guys considered spicing things up by adding 3rd faction into the game? – RED for instance.
A19: This has been talked about. But I wouldn’t hold my breath for a red faction. That’s my advice.
Q20: How can one remove OPR medal from scanner? Can one ask support to remove it?
If one asks support to close/delete OPR account without closing Ingress account, will badge disappear?
A20: Send me a HO or Telegram message.
Q21: Again, what are the considerations to keep portals in dangerous areas?
A21: It’s hard to comment without knowing the specifics. I’ll say that what one person considers dangerous, maybe others do not. For example, there was an issue recently about a lighthouse. One faction claimed it was dangerous. However, the other faction routinely captured it without incident.
Q22: Andrew Krug you said that mass report doesn't work against spoofers. What we have to do to have a fast ban to players who are bots?
A22: If you are referring to using the ticketing system there isn’t a faster way to submit a ticket. However, feel free to reach out to me and I’ll see what I can do. That said, I get a lot of messages every day so it can take me 48 or even 72 hours before I can respond sometimes.
Q23: Will it ever be possible to have temporary portals for events? So they will only be live during an event and get deleted after.
A23: Yes. This is what happened for the Agent Olympiad and also for Camp Navarro.
Q24: Hello +Andrew Krug. I heard that NIA is going to limit the NL medals or NL related character medals only for on site participants?
A24: Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.
Q25: Hello Andrew. I Guess that i put my secondary location at OPR too close to my home location by mistake... Is there a chance to change that sooner than a year? Thanks!
A25: I believe you can submit a ticket to get this fixed.
Q26: can you do these ama sessions on reddit
A26: There are millions of Ingress players on Google Plus. Moving this to Reddit would reduce the audience these questions are exposed to.
Q27: Would you rather fight one duck the size of a horse or 100 horses the sizes of ducks & why?
A27: Bring on a large duck. I’d fly it off into the sunset and name it Rhaegal!
Q28: for the upcoming anomaly events, ingress posted that all badges will be pushed. Does this also mean that character badges will automatically be pushed?
A28: No. Character badges will not be pushed automatically. They will still have codes that need to be redeemed.
Q29: Is the OPR stat in scanner up to date now, or is it still slowly counting old reports to be close to the stated number of agreements in the OPR profile?
A29: I believe it is still slowing being processed. Originally, agreements for beta-testers only counted from mid-March on. The engineers are working on a fix for this though. So you might see a mismatch but that should be resolved… soon.
Q30: Andrew Krug, is it hard to work in +Niantic?
A30: Is it hard work or is it hard to work? It’s hard to work for Niantic? I consider myself extremely lucky and blessed to be in the position that I am in and working for a company that positively impacting the lives of people around the world. So no, it isn’t hard to work for Niantic. Everyone at Niantic believes in our company mission. But is it hard work? I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t. But it should be. What we are doing is blazing the trail for a new genre of entertainment. We are still figuring out many things and making adjustments when required. Where some see failures, I see learning opportunities. Where some see success, I see room for improvement.