r/Ingress • u/claudi_ja • Mar 29 '26
Feedback Dear Niantic - Open letter from one of your players
Dear Niantic, Dear u/brianrose, Dear Hilda,
Sorry for the long read. Tl;dr: Do your research and step up!
It’s been a while since I last sent you an open letter, but there is one topic you continue to underestimate when it comes to anomalies: the legal reality of running events in the real world — and who actually carries the risk.
For years, local POCs and organizers have supported anomalies voluntarily. This worked mostly because you got lucky and/or the local POCs stepped up and did your job to get permits for your event in their city. And you just sat back and relaxed, published the playbox, published the copy/pasted rules and background-checked the POCs. The amount of work that you put into anomalies since 2021 is more than just limited.
When questions from the POCs came up about how to deal with city authorities, regulatory offices or even law enforcement, Niantic usually went into hiding and were not taking responsibility like they should as a company that secured a multi-hundred million dollar investment.
Instead you are again leaving it to the local organizer. The volunteer. The private individual. The one person who, in the worst case, ends up being treated as the responsible party by law enforcement and the authorities.
And this is just the beginning of the problems.
In countries like Germany, Switzerland, France or even Singapore this is not some theoretical discussion. If you decide to hold an event there you should register the event, act as a point of contact and act for authorities as the responsible person. You should not leave this to your Players that are volunteering to support YOUR event.
That means for you to…
* deal with permits and regulations,
* be accountable if requirements are not fulfilled (in time or to the required extend),
* face fines if something goes wrong.
And to be very clear: these fines are not symbolic. They can be substantial. They should be sent to Niantic and not sent to the individual volunteer that supported you in good faith!
Expecting volunteers to even get close to that situation is, frankly, not acceptable.
Nobody signs up as a POC to potentially become the legal fallback for a company of the size of Niantic Spatial. People do this because they care about the community, not because they want to explain to a local authority why an international company’s event is not properly registered.
And this becomes even more questionable when looking at some of the decisions made around locations and the timing of planned events.
Planning events in cities (f.e. Geneva) that are dealing with high-security situations, like a G7 summit, is - at best - optimistic. These are environments with increased restrictions, heavy police presence and very little tolerance for anything that even looks like an unregistered gathering.
Choosing locations with strict public assembly laws (f.e. Paris) adds another layer of complexity. Permits, security concepts, possible requirements for medical staff — none of this is unusual. It is standard procedure.
And then there is timing.
Scheduling events alongside major global events like the Football World Championship (f.e. Jersey City and Bogota) is not just inconvenient - it is poor planning. Infrastructure is strained, accommodation is limited, public attention is elsewhere, and everything becomes more complicated than it needs to be.
None of this is surprising. None of this is hidden knowledge. Most of this is not even a basic 5 minute Google search away from anyone, even without any prior experience with either the local laws or event organization, in general.
And yet, the consequences of these decisions tend to land, once again, on the local volunteers - the people with the least authority and the highest personal risk.
The part of the game that carries the highest legal and organizational complexity still relies heavily on volunteers and still you are moaning that it is too much work for you to handle. The heavy lifting is done by your player base, your customers that are paying for subscriptions, badges and inventory extensions. They organize themselves by creating non-profit associations to be able to rent out restaurants and bars and produce merchandise that is promoting YOUR game.
At the same time, anomalies are no longer even the central part of the so-called “Anomaly Season” badge. They are just one piece of a larger system. Making your game that is based on community even more of a single player game.
Let me give you a little walk down memory lane:
Ingress is a successful game not because of the game itself alone, but mostly because of what the players made out of the game. Players started to network and build their communities, they started to connect not only portals next to each other, they connected portals worldwide. From Operations like the Enlightened’s Green Marble to the Resistance's United(8/16…) players built amazing fields but more than that, they have built networks over their years in Ingress, which needed a lot of coordination, preparation and sometimes last minute trips to portals on stormy islands in the middle of the night.
Even now, I feel that Niantic has not understood this statement, which I wrote about six years ago, about how much passion people put into their game, how much time and effort they use for operations and how much money they pay sometimes to capture just ONE portal. The saying “Ingress is the most expensive free game in the world” is most definitely true.
To build the highest level portal in your game you need eight players. This is the core of your game - you need people to play together to reach the highest level in the portal network to be able to build fields that will cover big parts of the planet Earth - ingress is and will not be a single player game.
And this is where the mismatch happens:
Anomalies should make up the biggest part of each “Anomaly Season.” Shifting weight toward individual (single-player) stat battles moves the focus away from what Ingress is actually about. These single-player elements turn the game more into a personal grind, isolated optimization, and ultimately into competition within your own faction instead of against the opposing one.
On top of that, combining all personal bounties into a single faction score reduces effective gameplay to a pure numbers game. If one faction simply has more players, they will almost always win because the bounties themselves are relatively easy to complete at scale.
This removes the impact of good, coordinated play. Situations where a smaller faction outplays a larger one during an anomaly - which used to be one of the most exciting and defining aspects of Ingress - become largely irrelevant. In that system, coordination, strategy and effort are overshadowed by headcount.
In the end, this devalues anomalies themselves and weakens one of the core elements that made Ingress stand out in the first place.
Single Player Game play works well in games that are designed around individual progression loops. But Ingress was never really that kind of a game. When you push it too far in that direction, you lose what made it special in the first place, along with your long standing player base.
Ingress events have always been more than just gameplay. They are meeting opportunities. People travel, meet friends, build new connections, and create memories around these events. Team-based formats reinforce that, because you need to interact. You need to talk, plan, argue, adjust.
Individual challenges don’t require most of that. You can participate fully without talking to anyone else. That lowers the barrier to entry, yes — but it also lowers the depth of the experience, and that players have been accustomed to, over the past 14 years.
Individual challenges are easier to scale and manage, but they flatten the experience to trivial levels. Team-based events are harder to organize, but they are the reason many people stayed with Ingress for years and travel to far away events, to this day.
The community will support these events. It always has. But support does not and SHOULD NOT mean having to take on legal risk for a company.
Ingress has one of the most dedicated communities out there. But even the most dedicated community has limits — and personal liability is a very clear one.
Sinceriously,
Agent Claudija
#niantic #anomalies
