Best Of
Re: Goodbye scanning, goodbye CORE
Moog is right - it's in the contract.
IMHO there's a *huge* difference between "playing ingress" and scanning.
Re: Why the 20m proximity rule for portals needs to be reduced or removed
Submitting portals takes time and effort. Why spend it if you already know it will be for nothing?
Re: [Discussion] Operation Chronos
Overclocking is currently a terrible game mechanic that doesn't even work on most portals. This seems to be yet another move to get more players to engage in a part of the game that is both dysfunctional and not fun. I will by trying but.... this is going to be miserable.
Re: [Discussion] Operation Chronos
Sure glad that they made it so everyone has access to a bunch of overclockable portals, right?
If not, that's an awful lot of portals to try to capture and mod.
Chronos - Impressions from Day 1
So it’s less than 24 hours into the Chronos global challenge. I’m currently on about 1670 - so about a third of the way to 5000.
To start with, it’s great to see Global Challenges back. They are one of my most favourite parts of the game - taking this sandbox game and tweaking the rules to turn gameplay upside down.
It’s unfortunate that there are only two tiers, the past few years have set a precedence for three. A tier that everyone can attain, one for most people and a challenging tier for those who work for it. In future, it would be nice to see a return to 3 tears.
The artwork isn’t particularly special. It looks like something you will see in an FS media, just a generic blend of green and blue. A stack isn’t really going to make me think of this event, unlike the characters from the Nemesis series: (Aurora, Didact, Optima etc.)
I like how there are multiple ways to earn points, than the event based on one specific metric. This helps people play the event in a way that suits them and their resources.
This event also gives a very long time window, rather than the conventional 10 days. This will help more people find the time to play.
Now for the main part, Overclocking.
if I was to summarise, I would say that the network is not ready.
We’ve recently had a wave of android devices no longer being compatible with scanning, so there is a large chunk of the community feeling disgruntled. I’m fortunate enough to have a high-end iPhone so these changes don’t directly affect me, I have to acknowledge that this event is significantly harder for others.
Many portals need more scans. Put simply. I live in a medium city that has had a lot of scans, people scanning for Battle Beacons, many people scanning portals for their scout controller, (uniques scout controlled) and at the start of this event, only a very small minority were actually eligible for overclocking.
I’ve had to spend my time trying to scan different portals to make more eligible for overclocking, but as familiar with the rules know, scanning, does not earn points for the event metric. Immediate feedback I would give to the team is to include a successful portal scan upload to count for a Chronos Point, it is contributing to the event, the network and is a necessity for a number of people.
The actual process of making a portal eligible for overclocking is extremely convoluted. Members of the community must scan the candidate, successfully upload the scans, then access the Wayfarer App (still in beta), create a lightship dev account to be able to see how many scans are needed and then request VPS activation.
I’ve found, and this is in my experience of about 15,000 scans, that probably between 50 and 80% of my slow, good scans are actually accepted by the database. so this would require between 15 and 20 scans to be uploaded, to meet the minimum requirement of 10 accepted scans to request VPS activation.
Even then, I have found in the field that just because a portal lets you overclock, it is not necessarily a good experience. Some simply do not want to calibrate or it can take multiple attempts.
The only reliable way I have found is to try and overclock portals I know have got upwards of 100 scans, that myself and my teammates have done.
There are wayspots that I know have been tasks in Pokémon GO, requesting scans for premium items that have 50+ scans uploaded on the wayfarer app, but then cannot be VPS activated because of the poor quality scanning.
Pokémon GO players are not scanning to build the network, they are doing it, begrudgingly for free premium items. As Ingress does not have incentives like that, only badges. Most Ingress players are scanning because they want to scan, and the quality seems to be better.
I’ve also noticed that VPS enabled portals on the lightship app I’m not showing as overclock eligible in Ingress, still wanting to receive more scans. I went to a park where the Wayfarer app said the majority of wayspots would be VPS enabled, to find only a pitiful, minority or actually overclock eligible. So instead of earning points for the event, hacking the portals with overclock. I found myself scanning.
As for the actual hacking process.
When it comes to citing the glyphs, not all glyphs are built equal. Some are exactly how they appear in 2D, but just rotated - these include: ‘civilisation’ and ‘shapers’.
Others are not clear representations of their 2-D counterparts, these include - Potential, Pure, Capture and Chaos, for example.
It is also not clear what orientation and agent should be facing to see the glyph clearly. Many people in my groups have sent videos of them frantically circling around, trying to get some resemblance of a glyph. Even for experienced glyphers, this is not interesting, fun or engaging.
Some kind of indicator of what angle you should be facing the box for the cliff to correctly resemble needs to be added to overclocking.
The box does not seem to be stationary, in my experience, and from videos, other people have shared people are trying to circle the box to see the pattern from a different orientation, and the box is rotating with them. This does not help some glyphs that have a mirror image like ‘Create’ and ‘Destroy’ or ‘Simple’, ‘Gain’ and ‘Lose’.
I have also seen a bug where the glyph appears as very thin lines and is not clearly visible.
One thing Niantic has taken on board is the timing. It is much better and actually gives agents enough time to recite the pattern. I think this is finally at a happy medium. So one thing I will say thank you for is that
This is my feedback from day one, I’m happy to have a global challenge back, but these are a combination of my thoughts and what others have shared in my communities. I hope I can take this on board and make the game better for everyone. Thank you.
Re: Ingress Lore Primer
For the people interested in the current story:
After the entire scoring phases provided, the following is a summary of the universe we're in:
TS-1218 is the version of events Agents investigated from 2012—2018. TS-OSIRIS is the version of events accessed via the Ingress Prime Scanner. What we’re experiencing now, following the aftermath of the Epiphany Dawn Anomaly Series and Machina’s ingression, is something altogether different.
This isn’t mass hallucination or a false memory, like the Mandela Effect/Kureze Effect. We’re firmly planted in a new and alternate reality, codenamed TS-RUBICON. (The Rubicon is a shallow river in northeast Italy, and was the decisive point that no army was meant to cross without permission of the Roman Senate. Its name is a reference to the ruddy color of the soil on its banks.)
The Niantic Project at CERN was not the first time a sculptor, a quantum biologist, a reality TV show host, a club DJ, a linguist, and 8 others had met. This random gathering of people wasn’t random at all. In TS-RUBICON, Agents are investigating how these 13 people would eventually come together to set a plan in motion that would ultimately lead to an exploded Hypercube and XM Scanner technology leaking to the general public.
Re: [Discussion] Operation Chronos
remember when ingress medals were tied to gameplay, not scanning?
you can shove your overclock medal
Re: Button for scan missing with updating of Ingress
I referenced this bug ticket in Brian's latest ingress post regarding the Chronos Challenge.
It is not a trivial fix, but an extensive migration upgrade from ARDK 2/2.5 to ARDK 3.
The team are aware the need to update their ARDK version, only after this version change should this Overclock challenge have been released.
I am truly sorry for everyone who does not have a compatible device for this event.
