Best Of

I could not disagree more. The number of intel agents working an anomaly is a small fraction of total attendance, and most are foreign simply because you want people in the same time zone/country of the anomaly working as boots for the anomaly. Many of those people who you are complaining about are also attending anomalies in their own home regions (EMEA/APAC in your example), and then helping out with intel for other sites because there's a need for eyes in the sky that won't take away from the ground game. So this insulting idea that there's a cabal of people taking off-site badges away from locals is utter nonsense.

As boots, dispatch expects you to tell them if a strategy isn't working or if their instructions don't match reality (i.e. go from A to B, but you physically cannot due to real world geography that they can't tell); if you're not doing that and pushing back or working with them, then you're not holding up your half of the equation and that's on you. You're clearly using a bad experience to paint off-site intel negatively with a very broad brush, and that's extremely unfair to those people who genuinely work very hard and do so as volunteers.

"When anomalies come back, they should just make it simple, you hack the registration portal, you get the medal and that's the only way to get it."

There are numerous problems with this, but the single biggest one is the first part. Let's be clear...anomalies aren't coming back.

Niantic was already moving away from them or adjusting them in several ways, for example stopping swag sales and scaling back from numerous cities for a series down to just a single city per global zone. They introduced all these new GoRuck and Intel Ops events, and then stopped holding them at most sites. Think back to how many sites we used to have (both primary/satellite) and how frequent they were during the Interitus/Helios/Darsana days, and how by the time we got Abaddon Prime it was just 3 total global sites with 1 large anomaly in each. Munich was going to be 1 anomaly for the entire series, for the entire planet. That is a sign of them ending as we know them.

Niantic has been moving steadily to put more focus on individual-driven events like First Saturdays and Hexathlons, which are cheaper, easiest to host in more cities, and don't require the liability coverage and expenditure that anomalies do. (They're also nowhere near as fun; I refuse to get on a plane to attend a Hexathlon, but that's for another thread.)

I suspect another reason for putting emphasis on these events is just that Prime doesn't hold up well under an anomaly environment. It's too slow, laggy, and can't easily be force server-synced the way Redacted could. Plus it seems that Niantic genuinely wants to reduce some of the battle aspect of the game, taking away PvP elements and now some faction v faction elements. Removing anomalies is the next "logical" step in this.

Please actually playtest this in low-signal environments before you roll it out? We're a bit tired of unintended consequences from well-intentioned actions.

If this was easy then Niantic would have done it ages ago.

They have already limited the number of outstanding actions you can have in Prime. I suspect that what you ask for would have serious side effects that would make Ingress harder to play. You probably lose your data connection far more often than you think, and not being resilient to a few seconds without connectivity would quickly drive most people crazy.

@cheatch That has not been my experience with American RES anomaly intel. Certainly there are a few people who are just in it for the badge, but the core intel team actually works very hard, harder than just about anyone except the POCs.

But we're way off topic for the original discussion.

"I want my very own badge and if I don't get it it means that Niantic is biased.".. solid argument right there.

Are you doing location edits for more poi, in-game? Or are you making location edits because the real world location is wrong?

From what I've read, location edits are now limited to 15m to limit abuse. I have several location edits I'd like to submit, but many are further out than 15m (some art in our city is rotated or sold). So I bet we have 10-15 portals that need to be moved, removed and a couple that now have doubles as the art moved and a new portal was created.

I don't like the disagree button, so I'll respond instead: this would create not just a major gameplay imbalance, but an opportunity for cheaters, because a <L8 account with a ton of low level bursters could just camp (or spoof) on a portal and slowly degrade it with no recourse.

Absolutely, let's get rid of this exploit once and for all