Best Of

For questions, please contact @InvestigateXM, if you send it to the Glyph account, it'll get lost.

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Agents, the Glyph the Planet event is well underway, and new glyph sequences which include the NL-1331 glyphs have been spotted! The Glyph Journal requests your assistance in collecting data on all available sequences during this event.

To participate, you need to glyph hack a portal, screenshot all glyphs during the result screen of the glyph hack and send the screenshot to @UncoverXM. It doesn't matter:

• If you didn't draw all glyphs correct
• If it doesn't contain the N - L - 1 - 3 glyphs or
• If you have already submitted the same sequence.

Screenshots where not all glyphs are visible are not counted*. As long as all glyphs are visible, everything is fair game. Please only submit screenshots you made yourself, starting now. Please don't submit screenshots you have made before the contest started.

*Exception: If Prime isn't displaying a glyph due to a bug, it will still be counted.

The contest starts now and runs until Friday, June 25th, 16:00 UTC (which is also the end date of the Glyph the Planet event).

After the contest is over we'll count all submitted screenshots. The top 3 agents who submitted the most sequences and the agent nearest to the average will be able to pick from the prize pool, with the 1st agent going first and the average last.

The prize pool consists of character badges for your scanner: 1 NL-2020, 1 ADA'19, 1 Misty Hannah'19 and 1 Stein Lighman'19.

NL-2020 badge

ADA'19

Misty Hannah'19

Stein Lightman'19

Happy glyphing, everyone!

A few possible, complementary paths could be taken by NIA:

• Reduction of noise and cadence. Spotting out abuse of the support and blocking, throttling or timing out the abusers from further reports if a malicious one is found.
• Cluster analysis of top reporters and targets. This might help spotting out abusers (and their cluster of accounts) and potential victims.
• Crossing out in-game information with the report. A level 1 or newly created account should not have the same relative weight as a report from a seasoned or active player. If they do (which I almost bet they do, due to the sheer volume here mentioned), it's trivial to abuse the system in an automated/semi-automated fashion by creating new accounts and use them to mass report.
• Disincentivization of malicious use. Treat support as part of the game and, treat abuse of support as abuse/cheating and apply sanctions to the individuals/groups that indeed abuse it.

Due to the way big SWE organizations work, the Support and the Engineering/Investigation team often do not work directly together, which makes these suggestions albeit interesting, hard to implement properly and fairly.

I could be wrong though, but setting up a triage system overlooked by informed, real humans who understand the game dynamics, could help as well.

This name issue proves that Niantic acts based on mass reports. If Niantic just used a simple Google translator or contacted the user to know the meaning of his name nothing like this would have happened.

If niantic acts based on mass reports with agent codename I guess they to the same on other issues like COMM bans or spoofer reports and this show us that if a group of agents wants to punish an agent they can do it by doing a mass report.

Now we want to know what will happen to those agents who have reported this, will they be punished for false reports or nothing will happen and they can do the same to other agents?

Since quite some time we're (thankfully) back to 1x L8 reso per agent. Thus the count of agents needed for an L8 portal is back to normal. But we still need just 1 agent for an L6 portal and 2 agents for an L7 portal. I'm looking forward to see those set back to 2 and 3 agents respectively. I'm also expecting people to disagree because current situation gives access to higher level inventory easier, but I still disagree this should countinue.

Capsule operations - when you load or unload a capsule, there should be a “Close” or “Complete” option, instead of “Cancel”

screenshot after loading a capsule:

So, Support! Yes, we all know that system is not working properly in a lot of cases. I'll keep it short.

I've been opening some tickets to support for the past days for different matters and found out, by reviewing different IDs (which are sequential) that support is getting about 15K tickets EVERY DAY.

We have witnessed several cases where system applied sanctions with no fundament to do so, being the most recent one in the forum this one. The recent addition of @NianticThia to the team has been a lucky strike for this one and the incorrect sanction was withdrawn, and this, I'm afraid, proves that the system is not just working properly, it is completely automated, which perfectly fits to the insane amount of daily tickets received by support.

Niantic has stated many times that the are people reviewing the tickets, but that is not entirely true since NO HUMAN BEING would find any ToS violation, for instance, in a COMM message with a copy-paste of the most popular and historic quote of the US Mail Service ("Neither snow nor rain nor heat..."). No human being would either find a reason for a sanction in a COMM message where no agents are tagged, no names are named, a call for peace is being stated and no previous COMM messages in at least 5 months were posted.

So, if we want support to be human, there are A LOT of things to do. And the first one should be DISABLING XF COMM chat.

-The rest of Niantic games lack chat for several reasons, so nothing new.

-The amount of income tickets would reduce without big dev cost for Niantic.

I'm aware there are a lot of agents that would just miss it, but is it fair for those who just can't use it without risking a ban for it? Is it fair for you to say "Hello, welcome to my city" if I can't even post an emoji without receiving a mail from Sofonisba telling me that I've violated the ToS?

Cheating destroys the game. Cheating is an abuse. But is not the only abuse. So, before getting the game to grow, abusers NEED to be cutted. And, by losing COMMs, perhaps those who are neutral to the situation because it does not affect them, might, JUST MIGHT, decide to take care of it.

There aren't forum signatures 😅

IMO the most pressing need is to go back to 10AP per recharge, so that it's worth more AP to build once a week than just recharge it. The second most pressing is going back to 5 minutes (or at a compromise 4 minutes minimum) for cool downs.

Call it what you will, replacement, upgrades, overlays etc, but we all have heard the idea of improving mods once all four slots are filled.

History

Back when Ingress first started, you could deploy four mods at 125AP each. You could also "remove" mods that you (and only you) deployed, which would destroy the mod and free up the slot.

Then came Zipcar, and they removed the AP from deploying. But you could still deploy 4 mods, and remove your own.

Then they changed it to give the AP back to us, but you couldn't remove mods, and you could only deploy a single mod.

Well.... you can guess how the last part went down with the community.

So they rolled it back to the middle ground we have now.

• Deploy two mods.
• 125 AP per mod.
• No removal.

Desire

One of the requests that's been ongoing since they took away our ability to remove our mods, is to allow "Upgrading of mods" like a resonator can be upgraded. The desire is to improve on a set of mods that may have been placed in error, or without foreknowledge of changes to the situation. To make the common shields stronger etc.

Ideas

So here is a compilation of some of the ideas people have raised over the years, since the conversation came up in IUENG again today.

#1 Simple upgrades

The simplest method is to allow upgrades in place, similar to how resonators work. Where there is a Common Shield, you can place down a Rare or Very Rare Shield to 'upgrade' it. The Common Shield disappears, and is replaced with the new one, in the same way that resonators are upgraded. You can't upgrade a shield with a multi-hack etc, or change the type of mod, but the strength can be improved.

#2 Removal of personal mods

Again a simple method. Give us back the ability to remove our own mods. This does have the complication that some people will deploy less mods, for fear of being told to go back and remove them by an overbearing teammate (as happened 'back in the day').

#3 Overpower Upgrades

Similar to Idea #1, but the upgrade costs two or three times as much. To upgrade a CS to an RS would require two or three RS consumed. This is to encourage the use of higher level mods initially, and generate the continuing "choice" requirement when deploying mods.

#4 Crafted Upgrades

In the same way that we can craft higher level items in a Kinetic Capsule by walking, some sort of 'factory' element to the UI, where we can craft upgrade modules. This would be similar to #3 in cost, but would allow people to store and trade upgrade modules even when there isn't a portal in range. It would be a great way to "get rid of the excess mods", especially commons. For example, maybe you could turn 10 CMH into a Rare Multi-Hack Upgrade Mod, that allows you to deploy a CMH and upgrade it to an RMH (at a cost of 11 CMH). We all know the times when we have far too many of the 'useless' mods, and being able to make use of them without hundreds of portals in range would be great.

Anyway, those are some of the ideas that have been raised in the past. What other ideas do people have specific to the desire of "Improving the Mods already deployed"?