Best Of
Re: "Upload Failed" on Submissions and Scans
No further news on this? I’m starting to delete the scans I could do again, because scrolling through to get to my latest scans is so annoying, but I don’t want to lose the uniques from my holidays. 😢
Re: Niantic makes money by constantly tracking our location, right?
That's a far better proof than:
I know because I'm cynical and with zero evidence I've chosen to believe the worst of everyone.
But sure, you do you.
Re: If we’re not allowed to nominate schools, why this??
The "binocular things" are Field Trip cards. Wayspots nomination rules don't apply to Field Trip cards, because those weren't nominated by players. They were curated by Niantic content partners, as part of a content program that ended years ago.
I doubt taking it up with Wayfarer will do anything, because I doubt Wayfarer manages Field Trip waypoints. I doubt anybody really manages Field Trip cards now, because there are a lot of out-of-date cards. In fact, I'd bet 5 bucks those things are embedded in a legacy Ingress system that isn't being actively updated.
Anyway, the reasons for blocking schools as portals doesn't really apply to Field Trip cards -- no students are getting distracted trying to complete Ingress missions in class.
XK150
Re: Add an alert when mods are being destroyed
when deploying put one reso near the center. no more mod US without knowing
Khatre
Slowdown earlier today
Hi everyone, we had an incident earlier today where the client was slowed down to various degrees on different devices for about 30 minutes. The issue has been resolved. I apologize for the interruption to the game.
ofer2
Re: LA Anomaly Feedback
Hi @ofer2 & thank you for the feedback. I'm glad that you were able to part in the Anomaly in LA & I hope you had a great time!
Apologies in advance for any repetition of points that have been made previously but I think some are worth reiterating.
In terms of the feedback provided
Scanner freezing + crashes - similar to lag (below), scanner instability is a recurrent and persistent issue both for events and more broadly
Server lag - i think you are fully aware of the general issues around this subject but lag at Anomalies has been a 'feature' for the last 10 years
The massive amount of non-niantic tools needed to participate including everything from verifying player team, to private communication, to watching what's happening - for a game that's fundamentally team based & has built a large community around it, I wouldn't find player developed & non-Niantic apps/tools hugely surprising. We all interact in ways outside of Niantics sphere of influence on a day to day basis so it's only natural for us to want to leverage that during an event.
Each Faction has developed various means of interacting as a community and assisting with events which I think demonstrates the strength of community around Ingress.
Niantic is not in a position to be able to replicate this especially as we already have what we need, so why use something else?
Not being able to know what the score at any point was - this used to exist and I think can happen again but it's limited by resource availability within Niantic. Having said that, Battle Beacons do go a way to helping with this (🙊)
Having there be a massive player imbalance between the teams - for LA I would challenge that. My understanding was something in the order of +/-10% between the Factions which is fairly reasonable. Events in other areas can be very much more uneven in player numbers. There may also be variation within an Anomaly site depending on the priorities of your Faction at that time in your area which could lead to a perception bias. I could easily argue complementary positions for Union Station to give an example.
Being "stuck" at a specific place for a while fighting over a beacon instead of being able to go see the whole play box - there was an element of the rules introduced a few years back to address this (unique portals visited) and encourage movement around the playbox. It was unfortunate not to see it used in Superposition or Epiphany Dawn (so far). This was also something of a catch up mechanic that an outnumbered Faction could leverage to bridge the gap… kind of a double loss in that case.
Regarding some of your other points:
Battle Beacons/Inventory - the move to using Battle Beacons for Anomalies rather than all playbox portals wasn't one that many thought/think is a good idea. They will necessitate more inventory usage as each RBB will be more hotly contested and the time for contest is now 9 mins rather than a 2 min measurement window before their implementation.
The concept of the CAT level increased output was never going to work in an Anomaly situation and, quite frankly, isn't something that players use at all…. It's a mechanic without a point really. If you want to get more kit quickly, you use a fracker and ITO+/- etc not an RBB
Anomaly Duration & Breaks - Anomalies are intense, they always have been, so I'm surprised that after 10 years you are realising this. The length of an Anomaly was reduced to 3 hours quite a few years ago now so it would be interesting to know why Niantic thought the move back to 4 hours for Epiphany Dawn was a good idea.
Having breaks in play is doable and comes down to the rulesets really but having limited RBB also limits Agents' ability to interact with them as the mechanism to earn the medal onsite. Why the move away from 'interact with X Anomaly ornamented portals' was taken - you'd have to ask internally. Irrespective, Anomalies will always be busy and I think the intensity is overall a good thing personally.
Advance Intel - having a winning Faction gain extra intel for subsequent events would generate a win-more loop so that's not a good idea really. The info from Goruck/Intel Ops/Decoding has been a good way to both have players help their Faction remotely as well as support in ways outside of normal Anomaly play. Expanding again to make more of these options happen would be a good step.
Thank you again for your input and the input of everyone else who has responded to your post.
ATR0P0S
Re: Concerns re: Spoofing [A Dedicated Thread]
I'm not even asking them to investigate those mild ToS violations like multi-accounting that are extremely hard to prove. I've pretty much given up on getting those banned especially when you consider Niantic pretty much is soft allowing multi-accounting in their other games. Simply go to any Pokemon Go events or groups, and you'll see loads of people openly playing with 2-3 phones at the same time. Do you ever see Niantic enforcing ToS even at their official events?
Back to the topic anyway, I've reported and seen so many obvious cases that would have raised serious suspicions by any agents who played this game for more than a few days, yet they go unpunished for months straight. Some examples:
- Multiple accounts using automated programs to fire XMPs for hours with zero breaks. No reaction even if the portal in question has gone neutral for hours. That's apparently Niantic believes how real agents play: fire XMP every 2 minutes at practically nothing (just hitting shielded portals at edge for <1% damage). Okay, maybe in some exceptional cases one guy is actually crazy enough to do that for hours, but how do you explain 3-4 accounts coming here to do the same thing every day.
- Agents who owns 8 accounts so that they can build P8 anywhere by logging into each account one-by-one... slowly. You literally just have to tap their alt's monthly stats to see that all they ever do is deploy resonators/mods. I guess the only explanation is that he magically managed to enslave 7 other people who must follow him across multiple cities religiously. He also managed to get all 7 of them super interested in Ingress to the point they can always fire up their account on-demand to deploy resonators, but not interested enough to actually play the game. Oh, and despite theoretically having 8 real people in the same spot, they are strictly forbidden to deploy at the same time and somehow must wait at least 2 minutes between deployment.
- New accounts who level to L8 in a couple of hours and is never seen on the comm again. Suddenly coming back with Onyx glyph badges because new people like to play intensively for a few hours and then suddenly decide they will start glyphing 24/7 for the rest of their life and never interact with the game anymore. Same thing for those suspiciously new accounts with unusually high maverick/recharger/trekker stats. Niantic literally have information about the stats distribution across the entire playerbase; just find some interns to automate flagging those extreme outliers for manual review.
- There is one agent in my city who kept getting harassed by a bunch of disposable accounts while he was trying to achieve 1billion AP. All of these accounts are named after his codename by flipping letters around or just changing 1 to I or l. There are also griefers who are dedicated to start new accounts based on other agents' real names or license plates. Niantic could have prevented it by brining the "verified medal" system back, but they would rather just allow players get doxxed and waste their time filing support tickets. The verification also plays a huge part in actually taming bad actors in this game. It is not a perfect mechanism but at least it can be a serious deterrent so that they can't just spin up a bunch of disposable accounts at will.
- A year ago there was a period where my cell's top 3 scores were constantly occupied by random L3-L5 accounts, and that is in a cell with 30-40+ active agents on both sides. Somehow new accounts just keep popping up every week and always manage to out-field all of us. Why Niantic isn't automatically flagging new accounts whose first badge earned is platinum/onyx Illuminator is beyond me. Does anyone actually meet a legitimate new player whose first few actions in-game is making a few BAF and then just decide to retire?
Despite whatever lies they always seem to claim, it's really hard to make us believe that they are handled by real person when even the most obvious ToS violations like those above simply get ignored for months/years. Does the mythical "real person" behind even believe any of those are normal gameplay?
The truth is that I don't even recommend people to play Ingress anymore these days, and that's from someone who has been playing since Ingress launched in late 2012, organized many new player events and spent countless hours helping new agents get started. It's just not worth the effort and mental stress to risk getting constantly spoofed/doxxed and then fight a dysfunctional support system. It's supposed to be a game where you go out and meet friends, plan huge ops and actually have fun, but so far all I can see is that it has been reduced to a platform for griefers.
So that's it, for Ingress's 10-year anniversary. All I hope right now is that NIA will soon dial the Machina event up to 11 so those bad actors can see how pointless it is to spend so much effort cheating in this game. At this point fighting against emotional-less machines in PvE sounds more appealing to me than fighting spoofers 24/7.
PkmX
Re: Meet-in-the-middle Suggestion for limited access areas with lots of portals.
This sounds like a truly awful proposition. Controlling access to durable portals is a core gameplay mechanic.
Niantic destroyed a portion of this when they decided to enable under-field linking. That took some of the *control* out of *control field*.
joecain
Let Us Reorganize and/or Hide Badges from Gameplay Badges
Please implement! People have been begging for options to rearrange badges. Thanks.