"At Ingress Prime release press conference, Mr. Hanke gave a shout out to TheSilphRoad acknowledging the important role TSR plays in the community"

#PokemonGO: The whole article is worth a read (esp. for Agents but also for Trainers whom like to better understand the reasonings/philosophy/mind set at Niantic).But among all that they touched on G+ closing (their central platform for communicating with Agents) and how they hope to find and nurture a new place that can be as huge as our TSR.   Question: When you look at the community behind Pokemon Go, a lot of it is built by the users. It happens in places like Discord and other third party applications. Is anything going on with Ingress Prime to centralize that? Do you want to bring that community closer through a read-only API or something like that?Hanke: The community that exists in Go creates because we gardened it and nurtured it based on the Ingress community. The 40,000 Ingress user groups that popped up globally during the game’s launch showed us how real-world communities could work, this idea of MMO guilds in the real world. We were deliberately trying to nurture that with Pokemon Go in the way the game was designed. Certain things like raids were about local collaboration.We never set out, though, to build ourselves the social network infrastructure where those communities could organize. That’s partly because, in different countries, people prefer different social networks. Discord is popular here. WeChat is popular in China. KakaoTalk is popular in Korea. People may prefer Telegram in Europe. It varies, and our feeling is that should be the choice of the local users. As long as there’s a way for them to get together and organize their meetups and stay in touch with one another, we’re supportive of that.A challenge for us was that Ingress was originally launched inside Google around the time that Google+ was launched. We launched the game to Google beta testers, which was a pretty tight group of a few tens of thousands of people who were vetted by Google. We launched on Android only. The Ingress community naturally sprung up, originally, on Google+. It’s persisted there. If you think about Google+ as this shopping mall where everybody’s left, there’s one anchor store in the corner that still has a huge amount of activity. It’s the Ingress store.And now the mall is closing. The realtors have decided to bring in the wrecking ball. [laughs] It’s a challenge for us to figure out how to help Ingress find that new version of–the Silph Road is obviously huge on Pokemon Go. That has to happen. We frankly acknowledge that’s something that we have to help with. It’s a challenge to help that get transplanted to a new home. Another interesting bit for P-Go’s future: more indoor features   my philosophy is a game should have maybe 30 percent of the gameplay happening indoors and 70 percent that requires you to be active [...] With Pokemon Go, there’s some of that with evolving a Pokemon. I’d like for there to be more. We want to strike the right balance with all of our games. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2zKPq82