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So the suggestion to make Scout Controller a challenge equivalent to Pioneer comes from a Level 8 player with no badges (somehow?!). The lack of badges and overall in-game experience (based on overall AP) questions our confidence in the decisions being made. Since you clearly don't play, maybe it's best to listen to the people that do play?

That's enough from me, I hope you will take agent's feedback on board.

If it is easier to UPC than unique-scout-controller and has a rate cap, then isn't unique-scout-controller of 15k orders of magnitude more time consuming and difficult than Pioneer 20k?

Needing to hold for 30 days and having the stats public also make this easily griefable if people cared by taking back portal controller status on a portal after 20 days.

Were the Vanguards even consulted about this? Or was this just another thing Niantic have shoved down people's throats without any thought about its impact to the game or its players?

You are forgeting that hacking, capturing, linking, etc, are parst of the game. The others badges are action of gameplay, you can get the other badges by naturally playing the game, and if you want to, reinforce your achievement by focusing on that and playing in specific ways. Scaning isn't part of the game (yet at least), is just a feature developed to gather data for future use. The only reason to do scans now is to get the badge, anything else. Scans don't change the portal network, don't provide points, cmu, score, anything. in the other hand taking extra pictures and editing tittle/description at least provide some AP and can improve the gameplay, (but that doesn't even have a status record on profile).

It was a nice idea to add some kind of competition on scanning, but is basically just to compete who scan more?

Until the scan feature proves itself being usefull and improve the portal network, becaming essential gameplay feature, scanning is just free labor aimed for badgehunters only.

Wait a minute, what?

I’ve re-read this a few times and are baffled at the thought behind this.

I originally thought this to be unique portals scanned, but the concept of a battle to have the most scans on a portal for it to count as one is ludicrous.

Scanning portals isn’t a core gameplay mechanic, it takes time, is clunky and a lot of data.

A better incentive would be to track unique portals scanned, a metric for one scan per portal, this will encourage more scanning and adds to the Niantic aim of exercise and exploration.

Even if the stat was for one scan per portal, the numbers are exceptionally high.

I’d suggest:

Bronze: 50

Silver: 200

Gold: 500

Platinum: 1000

Onyx: 2000

Making a badge that is going to be quite probably as challenging as Onyx Connector that will distract from the core gameplay of making links and fields for something that doesn’t net any AP, is without logic.

If Niantic wants to encourage more scanning, great, I’m sure it can really help some of the AR+ features, but there is a more sensible way to encourage agents to scan.

Plus there is still a pandemic on, so people aren’t playing as much as normally, so if the current level of scanning is low, once the global crisis is over, scanning is likely to increase without any intervention.

I feel like there is a very definite line between reality and illusion, and I feel like that line is being crossed here. 5000 scans for Scout Controller would be challenging. I say this because I religiously do portal scans every 13 days. I am at 1591 right now (I lost 9 due to the initial bugs on your end and despite contacting support multiple times, I never got credit for them).

When you say you will see how things go over the next 2 weeks before you revisit them, it feels like you are only hearing but not actually listening to our very valid concerns. I have to side with @oscarc1 on this that perhaps you or your team needs to actually play the game to see what is feasible and what is not. 15000 for Onyx Scout Controller? I am afraid it is neither realistic nor feasible.

@ikaros02 that's a good point, gaining AP for each successfully uploaded Portal Scan would be consistent with other actions. These are early days for Portal Scanning, and iterating on making the act of uploading Portal Scans (reducing the byte size of each Portal Scan; improving the upload flow) as well as exploring ways to use the AR maps generated by Portal Scanning in Ingress are being worked on.

Have you considered a small AP gain for every uploaded Portal Scan? It wouldn't need to be much, like 50AP per scan, but it would make sense, since other actions that improve the portal network also give AP, such as taking photos and adding descriptions.

Also the uploading from settings menu could use some new features. I'm thinking of text before and during uploading that would say "x Portal Scans waiting to be uploaded" and "Uploading Portal Scans, y/x uploaded"

15k...

Regular scout need 6000, and because the delay it need 2 years of intense scanning. Just scanning. Controller you need to be the best scanner, is 15 thousand unique portals, Wich equals more than 15k of scans. This is probably take 8 years until the first agent be able to get this. Congratulations in advance, agent! You're awesome!