During the Cassandra Prime anomaly in Linz, Austria, Za-Ingress editors suddenly ran into Dominik Schönleben, Niantic EMEA community manager. Dominik agreed to answer some questions — but only after the anomaly finishes. We would like to present you a short interview with @NerdMeetsYou.
ZA: Do you progress well in Ingress? Do you enjoy Ingress or you’d rather prefer Pokemon GO for now?
I am making good progress with AP for Level 9, but I am still missing the right badges. Therefore I am now looking for some beautiful mission banners to get my SpecOps medal to gold. Of cause, I also play Pokémon GO, especially now as Gen 4 has just been released. What game I prefer? It just depends on the mood I am in.
ZA: Have you tested Ingress Prime?
Yes, I even demoed it together with the Global Community Manager Andrew Krug at a special event in Erfurt during the MAG convention. I am looking forward to the moment when everyone gets a chance to try it out. But we are still integrating a lot of great feedback we got from our beta testers.
ZA: How do you like being an Enlightened agent? Why have you chosen this faction: has its ideology inspired you, do you like the color or simply by a spin of a coin?
My girlfriend recruited me. She taught me Ingress and therefore made sure that I would pick her team.
ZA: Ingress has two competing factions and Pokemon GO has three of them. As an active player can you compare the level of competition in both games? What is the level of confrontation and what are relations between the opponent players?
As you pointed out, Ingress is about the battle between two factions. Enlightened versus Resistance is the main point of Ingress. Our events and the daily game play is centered around this. Pokemon GO is a bit different. While there is a conflict between teams for controlling Gyms the main experience is focused on catching Pokemon. As a result, the tension between teams is less in Pokemon GO. For example trainers can battle in a Raid together even if they are on opposite teams. Something similar to that does not exist in Ingress. In my role as a community manager I would love to support more xfaction initiatives that bring Ingress agents together as a community.
ZA: What do you think of cross faction friendship, XF fieldarts, First Saturday events? Many Russian agents are too judgemental: they consider everything mentioned above wintrading and stand up against such in-game activities.
As mentioned already: Whatever brings agents together brings me joy as a community manager. Therefore I would encourage xfaction field arts, mission or hacking tours and cross faction friendships — actually one of my best friends is Resistance.
ZA: We in Russia just can’t believe our eyes: the PokemonGO application has finally appeared in our country Android Market and App Store! What an incredible surprise after 2 years of waiting! Do you know, what is the reason for this huge progress?
I don’t know much about this situation, so I can’t offer any insights.
ZA: Dominik, as far as we know, it was you who solved the issues of Mission Day in Istanbul. What went wrong with that MD and how were you able to solve the issues so quickly?
Any issues with Mission Days are discussed privately with the POCs. But I can say so much: Whenever there is a problem, it is never just one person who helps to solve it. We at Niantic work as a team.
ZA: Earlier this year there has already been a case of misunderstanding between Niantic event managers and MD POCs — the failed Mission Day in Simferopol (Crimea). POCs sent an application, NIA event-manager approved it in private correspondence with them, POCs started to prepare for MD and launched a promotion campaign, suddenly the MD was cancelled by NIA because of its location in Crimea. How would you (hypothetically) solve such an issue?
As I was not with the company at the time, I cannot comment on this.
ZA: How does NIA select winners in #GlyphChallenge? In our very humble opinion, some commendable works were not selected, unfortunately.
We evaluate each submission based on its own individual merits. It would not be fair to only reward operations where 50 people were involved in making a 200km glyph symbol across the region. If you think a worthy mission is overlooked in the future you can tag me or the Global Community Manager Andrew Krug to bring it to our attention. We want to celebrate as many diverse actions as we can. But ultimately we only have a certain amount of codes we are allowed to hand out.
ZA: For Russian agents the issue with the unlocalized TоS still stands. Would the TOS be altered in Ingress Prime and would it be translated into other languages, so that agents with localized scanners could know what they actually sign when entering the game?
We currently only support a limited number of official languages for Ingress.
Question from agent NikaKor: NIA publishes its official videos without subtitles. Is there any possibility to add subtitles? And what about the translation into other languages?
We currently only support a limited number of official languages for Ingress.
NikaKor: Why is the anime real-time story published in Japanese only?
We wanted it to coincide with the release of the anime in Japan. It would not make sense to localize this, as the Anime was just released in Japan.