Best Of

Push notifications when I can move my drone again as the next easy thing.

My proposals from the first days when drones were first released were

• Recon drone: sees other drones with owner faction and (even better) owner nicknames, in a certain radius. Sees all kinds of drones - including other recon drones. Can't hack.
• Alarm drone: alerts his owner when any portal in certain radius is under attack, no matter if the owner has their reso/mods on it or not. Can't hack.

That's very rough but you get the idea. The one we have now is primarily for resource gathering and sojourner purposes.

I like the list, but last mark is not a good deal.

I'd request instead to be able to get a valid portal hack for a mission completion through the drone.

Ever happened to you that you can't complete a banner just for that one portal out of range inside a temporally restricted access area? The drone can solve the problem!

@BERN1ESANDERS

Unless someone is using massive numbers of low-quality scans to maintain Scout Controller status on a portal, thus preventing others from gaining that status, this all feels to me like a solution in search of a problem. Someone else's low-quality scans have no real impact on me or the game. Given that, and the fact that there will always be people looking to see what they can get away with, I think I'd rather flip the question around:

What can Niantic do to incentivize high quality scans?

I completely agree and made a report on this back in December, where NianticBrian said he was working on a fix.

In my case, the people "scanning" the portals are on the same level as spoofers. Unrealistic travel times and no proof of actually being at the portal (take a look at their scans for instance and you won't see the portals, just the inside of a car or train). This is especially evident when it's after sunset and it would be too dark to conduct scans ordinarily anyway.

What is an impossible number of scans? I've got double Onyx Scout and Onyx Scout Controller, but that was done through a lot of hard work and commitment. There are a few others with both Onyx too.

Everything else you say is true, I assume people doing fake scans are just trying to get the numbers for the badges and/or the AP, but they don't appreciate the exploration aspect of scanning. It's sad really.

I am still secretly hoping NianticBrian is forced to watch every single scan for imposing Scout Controller on us (with a ridiculous comparison to Pioneer), but I know that will never happen lol

Hi all,

I'm aware that the scout medals can be somewhat of a controversial point. While some people enjoy contributing to Niantic and improving the overall quality of portals, other people feel that farming out scans to players is free labor and refuse to do it (even though not even Googlemaps cars can reach certain portals, it's beyond me how people think it's Niantic's job to scan).

That being said, everyone is free to scan if they agree and ignore the medal completely if they disagree.

I happen to belong to the first group of people - I enjoy contributing and uploading pictures (even though the photo sync bug's still not working, I'm stubbornly sticking at it), so I take my time to scan portals properly and claim the controller to work on my medals. This sometimes means some work, as some portals are hard to scan, difficult to find, displaced or straight-up non-existent. Other times, there are bugs that ruin your scans, and you have to start from scratch. It's time-consuming - but after all, there's merit there in the medal.

My issue is with agents who systematically upload fake scans. I've seen an agent upload scans from displaced portals (even portals that irl are a 5-minute walk away, no joke). I've also seen impossible numbers of scans on scanner profiles. I've seen an agent drive under a bridge that's a portal and upload the scan later (how on Earth were they able to scan anything usable from a moving car on a bypass under a bridge?). So here are examples of agents who want to scan everything regardless of what they're really scanning for the sake of getting points towards the medal.

I've also seen an agent stand right in front of a portal, jab their arm in and out with their phone pointing at the ground, stop, tap their phone, walk up to another portal waving the phone at the ground, stop, tap their phone wave it some more at the ground... A little while later, they claimed the scout controller with several scans. There were perfectly scannable portals in front of this person, but they chose to scan the ground. In this case I assume the argument is "I don't want to do free work for Niantic" and yet, they scan.

These are the instances I've seen personally - I'm sure there's much more... And worse.

I feel this sabotages not only the work that honest scanners do, but also the whole point as to why Niantic implemented portal scanning for future features. I think that if certain agents disagree with portal scanning, they simply shouldn't scan and that's that, ignore the medal entirely. It's disheartening to see dishonest agents make a fool out of those who do put in the work! Their medals are based on lies and are getting equal merit to the ones achieved honestly.

How could this be controlled? Is there any way to comb out the cheaters? Does anyone know if there are any plans to?