Best Of
Re: Super obvious spoofing, No actions after report
If this blatant cheating requires the use of TR because the Support ticket was closed, it's pretty much confirmed that Support is useless.

Would you sacrifice all new features since Prime release for playing on new servers now?
Once Ingress Prime was released, the team began refocusing on fixing bugs and server updates. However, the new server still appeared to be roughly a year away from completion...
-- @ofer2 , February 2020
Considering that Ingress Prime was "fully" released in September 2019, if the abovementioned deadline of one year was met, we might've been playing on the new servers for a few months this moment.
On the other hand, we would not have (most of) the features which were added since then:
- Apex
- Battle beacons
- Drones
- Portal scanning
- Kinetic capsules (though the already existing functionality in Pogo would allow them to be implemented way faster)
- (was there anything else?)
And at the same time, things we could get right away from new servers, hypothetically, are:
- unique hack and capture display - one of the most requested features of this time!
- adventure sync
- faster, more stable server response to your actions, in solo play as well as in big events such as anomalies and first saturdays: lightning fast reso deploy, linking, burster explosions.
- lifting of server performance restrictions for huge link stars (beyond ~8400 links)
- removal of possibility for crossed links - with all its cons (for field arts) and pros (for day to day gameplay)
- probably the app with fewer bugs and some client-side only features (no new features to add would mean more time to fix bugs in the app - like the annoying COMM bug, crashes, and so on, and add teh 60 FPS mode!)
Unfortunately there's no option to add a poll in there so this is my question to you:
Would you sacrifice all features from list 1 for playing on new servers right now (and probably since a few months ago)?

Re: Would you sacrifice all new features since Prime release for playing on new servers now?
"We could be on new servers"
Or the game could have folded due to no bug-fixing, no new features, no attention, for more than a year, during a global pandemic, leaving even fewer players, and removing the need to complete new servers.
Re: What is 'community' and how can Niantic 'help' it?
Again, since I am an engineer, I cannot talk about unannounced projects and cannot make promises about what we will or will not implement in the future.
@ofer2 I wonder if you see that total absense of developer notes or similar insights is not good? That it's a missed chance to develop some hype and keep people excited about the game?.. Can we do something about Niantic's harmful "we can't tell you anything up to the moment a thing is released" policy?

Event ideas
I've never taken part i any events as covid was about when I started. So I've heard about events that happened before but cant be done now. So I figured it might be a fun thing to do to suggest some ideas for events that can be done within covid guidelines
My idea is to have each agent recieve random portal pictures within a set distance, they then need to send their drone to those portals, either using their own knowledge, or asking other agents knowledge (gets some teamwork in). Rewards can be increased from hacks and glyph hacks by double one time when you find the portals. The caveat of course is that the drone had to start on the agent and cant return (not including being on a portal that gest destroyed) to the agent, so needs the agent to pay attention to time the drone has. Its probably not that much fun an event but its a small one that could be entertaining

Re: What is 'community' and how can Niantic 'help' it?
So, with regards to communication, I typically try and respond to posts that I am tagged in. Notable exceptions include "I've been banned for the wrong reason," because they usually are cheaters trying to figure out how we've caught them (although I must apologize here in that some people dont know that theyve cheated because we've just acted upon something that we've detected from long ago and we dont tell them what exactly theyve been caught for (primary examples here include buying items/services from 3rd parties or using multiple accounts)) and posts about things that have been done where I have no context because I just cant contribute meaningfully. Other than that I do try, but I also have my engineering responsibilities to tend to. Again, since I am an engineer, I cannot talk about unannounced projects and cannot make promises about what we will or will not implement in the future. That being said, on MANY occasions I have lifted some of the things that I have read in threads and pinged people (specifically brian) about doing them directly. Sometimes this leads us to actually work on it, but we cant also always shift course for every new idea. One of the things that we really do want to focus on are the community and new players, so as I said earlier, there are some cool ideas in here that I have asked Brian about and I think would be awesome to do, but I can make no promises. That all being said, we've been hard at work and hopefully you all can see some of the stuff we've been working on soon.

Re: Reseting a portal that has been spoofed, why this needs to be improved
Any script can restore those links.
Oh no! There is a link crossing the link I'm trying to restore! Retrieve info from intel, terminate the link, give the used key back to original thrower. Repeat until no links cross the link I'm trying to restore. Repeat until all restored links are placed.
Please, someone estimate this effort in hours of work, thanks.
Feature: Sort keys by energy status
like what the title says.. give us the option to sort the keys by energy status
Re: New feature request: uniques mark
By now, rough guess of maybe 9 million or more. You wouldn't need entries for every portal though. Only entries for things that are non-zero.
Couple of points on this though:
- Every portal does have a unique ID.
- There's no such thing as 'permanent user data' on a client install, except for authentication credentials. The "cache" on a phone is usually things like portal images and map backgrounds, and AFAIK even those are redownloaded regularly. So this data would have to be downloaded on handshake and regularly synced during a session (because players can and do use different devices).
- To store a GUID + two flags table in memory for every portal that a player has visited would take about 2 MB of memory for anyone with Onyx Explorer. (And including transmission of that data each time you log in and syncs)
- @ofer2 has pointed out here why the information is not currently readily accessible: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/comment/126507/#Comment_126507
Again, the issue is not that it can't be done, but that it will take intentional development, and a lot of careful design to ensure that it doesn't significantly impact performance.
Re: is it time to stop double R7 deploy?
Double 7 deploys should be a permanent change. There aren't that many players anymore.
