Open Letter on Open Letters

Dear writers of open letters on the Ingress community,

While reading open letters was once a fun activity, lately it has become more of a chore. It’s as though you don’t even care about positive change anymore, and instead just have a laundry list of gripes with no clear solutions or measures of success, scattered with matters of opinion that only about half of the player base shares.

Specifically, these issues need to be addressed:

1. Write better. I remember a day when open letters were written with a style and flourish that entertained and informed the readers. This day might not have actually happened, but it’s what I remember, and I demand you return to that tradition.
2. Stop complaining about Prime. Redacted isn’t coming back, and Prime is actually better anyway. Linking to multiple portals is so much faster. You can easily launch a power cube without exiting the burster/recharging/resonator screen. Recycling items is faster – especially keys. Upgrading resonators is way more intelligent. Sliding to hack or attack is amazing. Are there things I liked better about Redacted/v1? Sure. But on balance we really have a better client now.
3. Opinion and facts are different things. Unless it’s my opinion. And then it’s a fact. Missions are the best thing to ever have happened to Ingress. AP engines are terribly boring. BAFs should last five checkpoints and then destabilize. If you disagree with these points, you’re wrong.
4. If you are going to write out seven points, make them seven different points, and don’t just write out variations on a single theme.
5. All of your points should be different from each other.
6. Ask for things that can be fixed, and define what success looks like. Bad: “Ingress is buggy.” Better: “After recharging 5-10 portals, recharging hangs.” Best: file a bug report, an open letter is not how you fix stuff.
7. No game is perfect. Except Super Smash Bros because randomly mashing buttons to make Pikachu deliver a Thunder Jolt against Yoshi was seriously cathartic. But honestly, I’ve been playing Ingress for 7 years and I still love it. So maybe Ingress is actually better than Super Smash Bros.

In any case, if you do not take immediate steps to improve the letters, I will have no choice but to stop reading the letters on the Ingress Community Forum altogether and go read open letters on the Silph Road subreddit instead. The trainers over there know how to rant. Can you believe that Niantic is forcing Pokemon Go trainers to get within 40 meters of a POI even though the pandemic is still raging in parts of the world? That’s only twenty times the distance that the CDC and WHO deem safe. Now that’s quality ranting.

In the mean time, I ask all agents to boycott open letters with me. And I will link back to this letter on every tangentially related forum post until these problems are resolved.