Lore vs Intel

Is there a way to separate lore from intel and intel from lore?

I am Enlightened. I have not changed factions since starting this game. I have fought hard for my faction in RR and on the ground during anomalies. Intel missions and global challenges and shards. I love every minute of it and want my team to win every event against the Resistance.

I am also a Mod in Operation Essex. I assist in gathering lore and positing theories about lore both in Essex and on this forum. Within Essex, there is no faction. It is occupied by both Enlightened and Resistance agents. Factions are not discussed as lore is more important than faction bias.

Usually, lore is easy to see. It’s what PAC posts or has posted on the various medium available to him at the time. His own website, a blog, this forum. Most times, it contains a clue, a passcode to some inventory items. Sometimes it contains clues to much bigger intel. Intel crucial to a factional win. But most times, it’s just lore.

So how do we separate it? Is all lore intel, thereby making it opsec? What if it’s posted on the forum? Is it still opsec? What if there is no intel in the lore? Does it still stay hidden because one side is waiting for the other to post? 

It has been known that sometimes clues come to Essex before it goes to the forum. While puzzles and clues found in Essex are free to all agents for them to try deciphering and decoding on their own, the same can not be said in the reverse. OpSec has, on more than one occasion, complained about intel and tessera already announced on the forum being posted into Essex. I have a problem with this attitude. As members of Essex, are we to sit on our hands and not note what may or may not be lore because we have to wait for OpSec to decipher what may or may not be intel? If it’s posted to this forum, are we forced to wait for Opsec to find nothing until they are ready for us to talk about? And what if that forces us to wait until the event is over? 

Not all intel is lore and not all lore is intel, so there has to be a way to separate them so that both Opsec and Essex are happy, because this is causing a lot more stress than should be for a game everyone should be able to enjoy. 

@RedSoloCup @NianticBrian


  • In my honest opinion, as of this event, ALL Lore is Intel. Withholding any type of information from the opposing faction is crucial to gain an advantage over them.

    I appreciate the work you've done in the Essex Channel, I feel that you're torn between spreading the lore to the community and having to help the Enlightened at the same time.

    I believe we need to do focus our actions for the good of the majority, and sorry for saying this, but the Essex community is not the majority.

    In essence, the Essex is in the bring of experiencing a "hiatus" because of this. My suggestion is that any information that is related to the lore to be compiled and to be published once the event is done.

  • I'll keep my two cents brief: this game is a war. Blue vs green. You gain advantages with information or manpower. Given we're dead even and this game is often called a "calvinball," and the nature of how tessera and advantages are handled in anomalies, this game is leaning more and more towards a pure information war. I believe the only true way to benefit everyone would be to have Niantic provide a distinct separation of lore and intel. If digging into intel provides lore, but also faction specific advantages, that creates a HUGE issue, and that written story will never be shared outside of that faction. This has to change for the story to keep thriving.

  • When you have a challenge that relies on arcane knowledge and memory of lore to solve puzzles and find and decipher clues, it seems a very strange time to alienate experts in lore.

    OpSec is crucial for competitions and it doesn’t take much experience to know how bad things get when it is missing.

    The two don’t seem mutually exclusive to me. Value the expertise and utilize the resources available to help your team win, and acknowledge where those resources are and the effort that has gone into maintaining them.

  • this event is a different situation, it heavily involves Lore but is a fight between Green vs Blue, ultimately people need to decide where their loyalties lie. If their faction comes first then opsec is very important and posting in Essex or other xfac needs to be avoided until it is cleared that it can be posted.

    for those who think lore is more important than faction are free to talk about it in Essex but shouldn’t be in any faction only chat, people put in a lot of effort in the game for their faction and it’s unfair on them that others can happily leak that information

  • Has anyone considered maybe the game designer's mission? The bigger question is: Is it a "war game" or a different kind of social game?

    To me, it is a wonderful game where we can think about these things.

  • Why do you assume Ingress is a game?

  • I do understand your points and maybe things are kept secret for longer than they should but then that’s a discussion that needs to happen in each faction.

    in this particular case an agent decided that they could decide on their own what they will put into the public/xfac area.

    if someone declares that they won’t keep information that the faction isn’t happy revealing yet private then there is no other choice but to remove them from discussions that they might choose to post publicly.

  • Kick the Can!!! That is a game.

    What this game has evolved into, is more of a privileged and confidential scenario. Privileged because it is confidential. That is not how that works.

    Privileged and Confidential is a legal term.

    Confidential deals with security or restricting knowledge.

    Privileged is the problem here, with this Social game based on having a fun virtual war with your neighbors.

    Ingress has evolved as a war game in the last 7 years. Mr. Hanke was surprised about the social aspects of this "game". Like the ingress babies that started to happen within a year of this games start up.

    That the communities and personal relationships that have begun due to niantic's little research project, and have not evolved with the game mechanics.

    We are stuck in little tiny fiefdoms of conflict. Niantic needs to take responsibility for their inaction.

    Each community faction can have despots or Mods that control their factions or to control the information. To include or exclude.

    Or they can inclusive.

    As an example I refuse to go to First Saturday's and it started here.

    It is not fun. It would be better if first saturdays were more like mini anomolies.

  • ToxoplasmollyToxoplasmolly ✭✭✭
    edited November 2019

    As regards The Tessellation, what happens if the Resistance scores the most points? Enlightened? Nemesis?

    We've usually known, up front, what was at stake with these challenges and competitions, and that knowledge helped inform discussions about what can be shared with whom and when.


    Practically speaking, this is up to Niantic and the gamemasters to clarify. If agents can't be certain that some piece of "lore" will never factor into "intel", the only choice is to keep it as "opsec" until the end of time. Which would be sad for Essex, but The Tessellation seems to have broken the implicit understanding we had of the relationship between the two.

  • Because that is the category it is in on the App Store and Play Store?

  • I hope someday Niantic puts even half as much forethought, effort, passion, and resources into in-game events and their effect on actual play that the players who love this game do.

  • Kind of reminds me of why countries have patent law. It's good for a country as a whole if technology described in patents is published so others can learn and improve upon it, but the inventors should also get some benefit to profit from the with they put into to their invention. The government gives the inventor a limited term monopoly on the invention in exchange for the inventor publicly disclosing how to reduce the invention to practice.

    Information can then have a lifecycle enforced by the NIA: private release until it's longer gives a competitive advantage, then public release. You can't rely on players to release info, because they don't know the lifecycle. Releasing info also boxes NIA in so that they can't use it again later, and the public release signals to players that it is no longer useful - which itself is a clue to ongoing puzzles.

    So I think the integration of lore and intel can be managed, but I don't think the players should be expected to handle managing there separation of lore and intel. In fact, it's probably safe to assume players should hide intel indefinitely as the value and lifecycle is unknown until the NIA eliminates the value with a public release.

  • It’s important to remember that Ingress is a game built on trust, whether it’s as small as not giving away location for socials or bigger when you are planning BAFs it’s all the same principle.

    while I do understand the frustration of the OP there is reasons why both sides are reluctant to give information away, people are spending time deciphering clues, asking people to be at specific locations, factoring in time, petrol potentially entrance fees to get to portals so it’s important any advantage either team has is kept only within their own faction.

    this event is also strange that Niantic want as many people to be involved as possible but then that creates issues with Opsec, the more people with information makes leaks/accidents more likely. At the end of the day though if they want certain information in the public/xfac channels that is a decision they can make on their own, they have all the clues and if they are meant to be seen by everyone then they have their own methods of putting them into Essex

  • As for the Essex chat: If Niantic chooses to post in there it becomes an official source of information (and a very established one at that..) And like with intel from the forum it will find it's way to everybody that needs to be involved (and happens not to be in the chat/on the forum)

    Since Essex has been open to everybody (from both factions) for years it is not only more than fair but an even more fun way of releasing intel...

    (Remember fun? It's why we started playing games in the first place. That, and exploring and learning new stuff.. ^^)

  • I'm noticing that this thread seems to be a one-sided discussion, and most of the people here are talking with dislikes, rather than actually replying to the arguments that are being made. It's pretty clear which side is completely replying to points being made against them. Make of that what you will.

    Your argument has a few issues. First off, videos that Niantic pushes during anomalies publicly are very obviously lore, and will end up distributed and treated as such. Even if they have intel, these were initially given out publicly in the scanner. Keeping them classified serves no purpose.

    Saying that opsec and essex both have their purpose, and that "not everyone like the lore, understands it or even wants it to be a part of the game, it still is" serves to only show how one sided your argument is. Just because Essex exists does not mean any of us should be compulsed to share information to it. Sharing anything to Essex is not a requirement, it is done by those who wish to share information with it. It is not a requirement for either side to do, and using that as the basis for your argument won't get you anywhere. If anything, Niantic should be sharing this information more publicly through their channels of communication (this community page and telegram).

    Also in general, use the quote button, or directly quote people's messages. Proper chat etiquette, please.

    I agree, the creative work has been fun to watch unfold.

    "Fact is, if Niantic did not want Essex Involved in lore, or the Tesselation, they would not be having Stuart Lightner leak info to Essex!" you've got it backwards. Niantic is giving out pieces of information publicly. Part of it is being released publicly. This is an information war. Saying some of the information is public, so all of it should be made public just makes no sense! "Denying players... the ability to participate in, or have access to, any part of the storyline" our community is not the issue here. We were given rules within a sandbox and it is both of our goals to win within these rules. If anyone is denying you access to the storyline, Niantic is by not making all of this story public for people to follow along with. Demanding players of a game release advantages because some information is given out by the game master and it hinders your ability to read along and interact, and then doubling down that this is the fault of the playerbase makes no sense. Not a damn **** of it.

    It's like you didn't even read the posts on this forum that you posted to discuss people with. Kinda weird you didn't read the replies to your discussion. @crystalwizard pretty blatantly states "And in an event like what's going on now, with the tessara, and the fact that gaining each piece first is critical to who gets the most points, and thus who wins - as long as those tessara have not been found, even if a post is made by Niantic in a public forum, it should NOT be reposted to open groups. Each faction has the responsibility to find those posts and make their team aware of them," and he's 100% right. The game is an information war. That is not the fault of the player base. We did not decide the rules of the game of tessellation, we decide how we work within them. How the enlightened are working within them is clearly working, so why would we change that? It makes no sense to ask a participating party to change how they are playing a game if they are already winning.

    "But this last one seems to be the biggest problem. A number of agents feel the investigative community shouldn't have access. Because they are xfac. That's it. That's the only reason. Cross faction." You say that as if it isn't a REALLY BIG ISSUE. "Yeah, the two human sides of this battle come and talk about story. So what?" have we already forgotten what happened when a throwaway telegram put a map to a tessera inside xfac comms? The resistance got it. And then did NOT share the intel they got from it. So yes, that is absolutely a huge issue. No "so what"s about it, sharing anything that could be intel through xfac communication channels is a huge risk, and we've seen that demonstrated before, outside this event and inside, multiple times.

    "Well let me tell you something. Niantic knows this. They wanted this. They created Essex. And they use the hell out of Essex. If they didn't want Essex involved, they wouldn't involve Essex." If they wanted more information to get to essex, they could just share more information to essex. And that is the issue nobody seems to be able to wrap their head around: Niantic needs to change how they handle lore. Period. You cannot continue harassing and whining at the players for being players. Why would we do something that runs the risk of putting us at a disadvantage with no real reward? Pushing the storyline forward holds no strategic value to the green or blue side. Period. That's a fact, not an opinion. If you want story to come out, it will need to be done by Niantic, the game master here. Not the players. Niantic, and only Niantic, knows what can and cannot be publicly distributed. And they really need to start using this knowledge to help Essex, because the players stand to gain no benefit by helping a community proceed with the story.

    "So yes I will continue to shunt forum posts into Essex, because I want it to reach as many agents as possible." This is Niantic's job. Not yours.

    Overall, I'm pretty disappointed with how a lot of people have been carrying themselves within this discussion, but I'm more disappointed with Niantic for allowing this to spiral out of control within the game. The storyline should be shared by them, period. @NianticBrian please please please take note of this. It's absolutely unreasonable to expect either side to publish their story findings throughout the whole game, because either side can never be certain something will give the opposing one an advantage. Niantic needs to get it together and make everything that can be open open if Essex is to be able to keep up with the story. Neither side will ever "get better" at distributing lore, because, as @OXIIISIXAS and many others have said, "ALL lore is intel." We have no idea what we can share and never will, so it is much easier to simply never take the risk for a community who wants to read along with a story.

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