Nelkon

It's gone. The [redacted] scanner is gone. Ingress stays. The Prime scanner is only a tool in a whole ecosystem around this Niantic game. This blogpost is about the things beyond the scanner and I'll tell you a big secret at the end. Ecosystems evolve through change. Some veteran agents used the shutdown of the old scanner as a breaking point to leave the game. The game and the vivid community were a huge part of their life in the past years but now they decided that it's time to move on and to seek out for new inspirations. That's absolutely legit and a sound decision. In order to give them and the [redacted] scanner a worthy goodbye we did a farewell event 09-29-2019 in Cologne (see my Instagram Highlight story for some impressions).

We all had a lot of hope that Ingress 2.0 will give us new servers and awesome new features for the "old" scanner. What we got is Ingress Prime and the (old) [redacted] scanner. While usually people love what they know and are critical about changes the nerdy Ingress player base is usually very open for improvements and developments. This is a turkish street food restaurant that I recently stumbles upon in my hometown Berlin-Spandau. I had to memefy it instantly on location while waiting for their delicious Prime Kebap spezial dish. But when Niantic finally made their new Prime Scanner in 2018 public, the reactions were very mixed. While it had a modern looking user interface, brought one finger map rotation and a cool way to recharge xm with power cubes, it was slower than the old client, crashed a lot and had major bugs that prevented proper gameplay (e.g. not detecting every linkable portal).