A shame they didn’t do a “half way” bonus, back to normal, say 10% resonator decay, 8 hacks before burnout at 150 seconds cool down, the equivalent of Rare Hack Mods on portals than VR. Just to ease us back into it.
Its time for cell activated boost on drones if any are in that cell ie PA02-Sierra (Greater Melbourne) to have 20 mins drone cooldown with imcreased cube hack output
So this topic is very divise. One half of the playerbase want decay to return to normal so that they can selfishly go back to 'normal play', the other half wish for the decay rate to stay due to a GLOBAL health pandemic. The impact of one option far outweighs the other.
I can completely understand 'being bored' because of the slow decay, but at the same time, some of the people that are complaining have no lockdown restrictions, so they can go play and do whatever they want. The other half of that camp may have some restrictions, but it's not imposed strictly.
Let's take a look at a few places around the world to compare
Melbourne, Australia: (As everybody else was complaining about their selfish desires, I'll complain about my selfish desire)
We are in our second wave where a State of Disaster was declared
- Curfew between 8pm and 5am
- Cannot go further than 5km from home (if you know anything about Australia's sprawling land-use, 5km is nothing. Most of us live spread out in suburbia, big houses, big gardens, etc. Complete opposite of places like New York City)
- Can only travel for essential purposes; food, care, exercise and essential work
- Can only go outside for shopping or exercise for a total of 1 hour
- Face masks are mandatory
- Social distancing
- Purchase limits for groceries
- Permits required to be outside and beyond 5km
- Closed borders
- All but essential businesses are forcibly closed
- Police checkpoints everywhere
- Extremely expensive fines for breaching rules eg. ranging between $1,600 to $19,000 AUD
- lots of other smaller rules (like school closures)
Basically we can't do anything until mid-September, pending how the cases go. If there are still many cases, it's likely we will see even stricter conditions. Otherwise, we'll slowly ease restrictions, so even then we won't be able to do much.
Queensland, Australia:
- Eased restrictions since 3 July
- No restrictions to movement
- Gathering of up to 100
- Social distancing rules still in place (one person per four square metres)
- Limits to capacity of people inside buildings (eg. a concert can only have 50% capacity)
- Border closures
France:
- No restrictions on travel
- Must wear a mask at all times
- Limit of 10 people gathering in any public space
- Shops, bar, restaurants, etc. are all open (some limits on capacity)
I'll add here that due to political corruption, the French Government has simply allowed things to continue with relative normalcy because they want to keep the flow of revenue generated from tourism, disregarding human life.
America:
Simply f##ked.
- "Restrictions" vary state-by-state, for the most part actions are simply recommended.
- Social distancing is encouraged.
- Face masks are required in some areas
- Some limits on gatherings and capacity
Over 5.5m cases, 170,000+ deaths. Does the American Government actually care about the health of its people? Seeing it as an outsider, apparently not.
Comparing Melbourne and Queensland is like apples and oranges. One has almost complete freedom, the other is in a complete shutdown. Which do you think would be a lot more vocal complaining about slow decay? Given the lack of restrictions on movement, there's no reason why they can't simply go play elsewhere (like the next suburb over or whatever), instead of constantly complaining about how decay is affecting them and only them.
I won't even bother commenting further about America, the complete disregard on the value of human health and life is simply atrocious.
Why is this matter so important to me? As mentioned myself and the whole Victorian Ingress community face the strictest restrictions in the world. We have no option where we can go and play Ingress, many of us do considerable recharging and that's ALL that we can do, otherwise we face harsh penalties, fines and confrontation with the police and army (whom have been deployed to ensure people adhere to the rules). I did my recharging last weekend, and I recharged 3m XM in that session, I know others that also regularly recharge 1m or 2m XM or more - this is the ONLY gameplay option that we have available until this pandemic is over.
Why do we recharge so much? Let's compare to America in this instance. Australia and America has similar landmass, population is 25m vs 328m. America would therefore have a lot more Ingress players and they are also split by smaller states. Australia has far less players, but a huge amount of strategic potential across its land with only a handful of players recharging things. Returning decay back to normal whilst health restrictions are imposed makes it impossible to get sufficient cubes for recharging as we are not allowed outside to gain the cubes in the first place. The Drone method is ineffective, nor can we go outside to farm gear.
Niantic has succumbed to the whim of a vocal minority that only look at their immediate play areas, instead of actually looking at the state of the world and taking a proper considered approach to address these issues. This topic is divisive and I expect lots of disagreements, but I don't care, what I do care about is the health and wellbeing of all people first and foremost - which Niantic clearly does not.
I would suggest finding a balance instead of reversing the COVID bonuses.
^This was a good suggestion and if decay is staying back to normal, then if recharging is more effective to balance it, then that makes things fair. So what if people who are out playing start complaining that their opposition recharging against their attacks, they have the FREEDOM to be outside, others do not, so they can deal with it any many different ways.
Or how about providing free cubes each day? PoGo, HPWU and Catan all give freebies every day, why shouldn't Ingress?
Or add a pack in the store to purchase 100 PC8's at a heavily discounted rate? Niantic want to monetise, this could be a decent option for a decent amount of cubes (I go through a lot more than 100 at a time when recharging for example).
Anyway, I look forward to Niantic continually ignoring the community and not ever seeing any response or update on the announcements made (*cough*scout controller*cough*)
You know, one of the biggest drops in game population was the result of the devra virus-- increased decay, because recharging except when it's on an attacker feels like a job. It is not fun in any way.
Frankly imo, the decay rate reduction is the best thing to ever happen to the game for retention. It made it feel like playing a game rather than having a second job.
In areas with both factions in quantity-- it changed nothing on turn over rate, because people were turning portals over via attacks.
In areas with one faction it made people search for new portals and make new subs. Isn't finding new cool things part of the point of the game?
Frankly the "grey faction" even after months of reduced decay is the massive winner over all, go to almost any city and the majority of portals are grey. Go to any rural area... majority of portals are grey. Same is true of almost every cell and area.
There is no lack of things for people to do, even close to home, the only thing it changed was they had to leave their block to play instead of just redeploying it every week.
Podunk canton Ohio-- 70% were grey (~1450) out of ~2k.
14th biggest city in the US, Columbus, Ohio ... i couldn't get it to load fully but what did load was right around ~8800 portals of which 60% were grey (~5250).
AM02-KILO-05 a very rural cell, top 1/3rd (couldn't load more than a 3rd) of it 88% were grey (~970) out of 1100.
Anyone claiming they need to have faster decay so they have something to do is a joke at this point, all they're causing is the people maintaining farms and rural players to burn out and quit-and the total players in the game will be less.
To be frank-- the grey team is kicking the **** outta both the enl and res at the same time combined. Until that changes, even 1% decay would be perfectly fine.
You recharged 3 million XM in one session? That’s 1250 level 8 portals at 5% decay. How many portals are you recharging and how often do you recharge them?
I based it off a fully charged level 8 portal decaying 5%. A level 8 portal has a max level of 48,000. 5% of 48,000 is 2,400. 3,000,000 / 2,400. = 1,250 portals.
I recharge almost every day, but I don’t know if everyone else does that. That’s why I asked.
3,035,058 XM recharged across 700-800 keys, with a couple of Apex's it netted me 453,475 AP, which is the only way I can make AP without breaking the law. Before the bonuses, I would usually recharge 1m XM per session, which was usually twice a week. Now I'm recharging every 2-3 weeks, I try to time it with First Saturday
This is something most of the people asking for higher decay rates probably didn't understand. I love the slow decay, its the best change they made for a long time. Let's keep it permanently!
Yay, we'll simply recharge less portals (and play even less). Slow decay is good because it reduces the amount of time you have to spend on stupid tasks.
@NianticBrian Maybe we could see an increased rate of Cubes dropping from Drone hacking? This would help those who are in areas that are currently in more of a locked down or stay at home state, while those who aren't confined to such constraints can still enjoy the 1 week decay, before they can play again.
This idea came up in a chat I'm in and it wasn't my idea, but it seems like it could be a good one.
Other potential thoughts, not sure if you have the ability to do them are:
Geo Fencing - At the country level (could even do state / province level potentially depending how far you want to go
Using Geo Fencing you could (once built into the system if it's not already)
Assign certain areas for Increased or Decreased Deployments of certain types of Resonators
Decay Rates
Hack Burnouts
Time between hacks
Hack output
Drone Hack output
Or whatever else you want
And as a reminder, since @thesolo mentioned it elsewhere in this thread, are we ever going to see any sort of bonus or "reward" for Recursing? It was promised long ago, then nothing ever really seems to of come of it other than the Wings showing how many times we've done an Onyx Badge basically. There have been a ton of great suggestions, but it feels like we are still just waiting for a response. I've recursed three times, but I've decided this is my last one until we get any sort of response on the benefits of recursing.
Recharging activity depends on action in cell. My cell is hyperactive. I've seen, during Covid, a 1 million MU field getting taken down and put back up twice in the same cp. Other cells if a field goes down it's big news.
If we are going to have to recharge more from next week, are you going to fix the bugs that are making recharging so infuriating at the moment? Ideally the alphabetic key sorting, which has been broken since June 2019, but certainly the one from the last couple of weeks that is causing softlocks every 5-10 minutes of recharging portals:
When it is in this state, obviously you can't recharge anything because you can't see any keys. Often, just before this happens, a cube has failed to activate, or a menu box (such as the "Name / Distance" one on this screen) has failed to accept any selection (same has also happened for the "Recycle these items?" question). But sometimes if the game has been running for a while since I last had the keys up, it will do this as soon as I try to look at my keys.
I believe this bug is related to having the Name option selected, because you can sometimes get the keys to reappear by selecting Distance.
Comments
Thanks for listening. Was getting tired of waiting 3 weeks to play in an area again.
Good change.
Consider removing double L8 deploy. Double L7 can stay, it’s harmless.
A shame they didn’t do a “half way” bonus, back to normal, say 10% resonator decay, 8 hacks before burnout at 150 seconds cool down, the equivalent of Rare Hack Mods on portals than VR. Just to ease us back into it.
yeah remove the double r8 but keep the double r7 for the time being..
Its time for cell activated boost on drones if any are in that cell ie PA02-Sierra (Greater Melbourne) to have 20 mins drone cooldown with imcreased cube hack output
So this topic is very divise. One half of the playerbase want decay to return to normal so that they can selfishly go back to 'normal play', the other half wish for the decay rate to stay due to a GLOBAL health pandemic. The impact of one option far outweighs the other.
I can completely understand 'being bored' because of the slow decay, but at the same time, some of the people that are complaining have no lockdown restrictions, so they can go play and do whatever they want. The other half of that camp may have some restrictions, but it's not imposed strictly.
Let's take a look at a few places around the world to compare
Melbourne, Australia: (As everybody else was complaining about their selfish desires, I'll complain about my selfish desire)
We are in our second wave where a State of Disaster was declared
- Curfew between 8pm and 5am
- Cannot go further than 5km from home (if you know anything about Australia's sprawling land-use, 5km is nothing. Most of us live spread out in suburbia, big houses, big gardens, etc. Complete opposite of places like New York City)
- Can only travel for essential purposes; food, care, exercise and essential work
- Can only go outside for shopping or exercise for a total of 1 hour
- Face masks are mandatory
- Social distancing
- Purchase limits for groceries
- Permits required to be outside and beyond 5km
- Closed borders
- All but essential businesses are forcibly closed
- Police checkpoints everywhere
- Extremely expensive fines for breaching rules eg. ranging between $1,600 to $19,000 AUD
- lots of other smaller rules (like school closures)
Basically we can't do anything until mid-September, pending how the cases go. If there are still many cases, it's likely we will see even stricter conditions. Otherwise, we'll slowly ease restrictions, so even then we won't be able to do much.
Queensland, Australia:
- Eased restrictions since 3 July
- No restrictions to movement
- Gathering of up to 100
- Social distancing rules still in place (one person per four square metres)
- Limits to capacity of people inside buildings (eg. a concert can only have 50% capacity)
- Border closures
France:
- No restrictions on travel
- Must wear a mask at all times
- Limit of 10 people gathering in any public space
- Shops, bar, restaurants, etc. are all open (some limits on capacity)
I'll add here that due to political corruption, the French Government has simply allowed things to continue with relative normalcy because they want to keep the flow of revenue generated from tourism, disregarding human life.
America:
Simply f##ked.
- "Restrictions" vary state-by-state, for the most part actions are simply recommended.
- Social distancing is encouraged.
- Face masks are required in some areas
- Some limits on gatherings and capacity
Over 5.5m cases, 170,000+ deaths. Does the American Government actually care about the health of its people? Seeing it as an outsider, apparently not.
Comparing Melbourne and Queensland is like apples and oranges. One has almost complete freedom, the other is in a complete shutdown. Which do you think would be a lot more vocal complaining about slow decay? Given the lack of restrictions on movement, there's no reason why they can't simply go play elsewhere (like the next suburb over or whatever), instead of constantly complaining about how decay is affecting them and only them.
I won't even bother commenting further about America, the complete disregard on the value of human health and life is simply atrocious.
Why is this matter so important to me? As mentioned myself and the whole Victorian Ingress community face the strictest restrictions in the world. We have no option where we can go and play Ingress, many of us do considerable recharging and that's ALL that we can do, otherwise we face harsh penalties, fines and confrontation with the police and army (whom have been deployed to ensure people adhere to the rules). I did my recharging last weekend, and I recharged 3m XM in that session, I know others that also regularly recharge 1m or 2m XM or more - this is the ONLY gameplay option that we have available until this pandemic is over.
Why do we recharge so much? Let's compare to America in this instance. Australia and America has similar landmass, population is 25m vs 328m. America would therefore have a lot more Ingress players and they are also split by smaller states. Australia has far less players, but a huge amount of strategic potential across its land with only a handful of players recharging things. Returning decay back to normal whilst health restrictions are imposed makes it impossible to get sufficient cubes for recharging as we are not allowed outside to gain the cubes in the first place. The Drone method is ineffective, nor can we go outside to farm gear.
Niantic has succumbed to the whim of a vocal minority that only look at their immediate play areas, instead of actually looking at the state of the world and taking a proper considered approach to address these issues. This topic is divisive and I expect lots of disagreements, but I don't care, what I do care about is the health and wellbeing of all people first and foremost - which Niantic clearly does not.
I would suggest finding a balance instead of reversing the COVID bonuses.
^This was a good suggestion and if decay is staying back to normal, then if recharging is more effective to balance it, then that makes things fair. So what if people who are out playing start complaining that their opposition recharging against their attacks, they have the FREEDOM to be outside, others do not, so they can deal with it any many different ways.
Or how about providing free cubes each day? PoGo, HPWU and Catan all give freebies every day, why shouldn't Ingress?
Or add a pack in the store to purchase 100 PC8's at a heavily discounted rate? Niantic want to monetise, this could be a decent option for a decent amount of cubes (I go through a lot more than 100 at a time when recharging for example).
Anyway, I look forward to Niantic continually ignoring the community and not ever seeing any response or update on the announcements made (*cough*scout controller*cough*)
A family of 4 who have all reached 16 and recursed, in my plan. If they've all done that, they've earned it.
You know, one of the biggest drops in game population was the result of the devra virus-- increased decay, because recharging except when it's on an attacker feels like a job. It is not fun in any way.
Frankly imo, the decay rate reduction is the best thing to ever happen to the game for retention. It made it feel like playing a game rather than having a second job.
In areas with both factions in quantity-- it changed nothing on turn over rate, because people were turning portals over via attacks.
In areas with one faction it made people search for new portals and make new subs. Isn't finding new cool things part of the point of the game?
Frankly the "grey faction" even after months of reduced decay is the massive winner over all, go to almost any city and the majority of portals are grey. Go to any rural area... majority of portals are grey. Same is true of almost every cell and area.
There is no lack of things for people to do, even close to home, the only thing it changed was they had to leave their block to play instead of just redeploying it every week.
Podunk canton Ohio-- 70% were grey (~1450) out of ~2k.
14th biggest city in the US, Columbus, Ohio ... i couldn't get it to load fully but what did load was right around ~8800 portals of which 60% were grey (~5250).
AM02-KILO-05 a very rural cell, top 1/3rd (couldn't load more than a 3rd) of it 88% were grey (~970) out of 1100.
Anyone claiming they need to have faster decay so they have something to do is a joke at this point, all they're causing is the people maintaining farms and rural players to burn out and quit-and the total players in the game will be less.
To be frank-- the grey team is kicking the **** outta both the enl and res at the same time combined. Until that changes, even 1% decay would be perfectly fine.
You recharged 3 million XM in one session? That’s 1250 level 8 portals at 5% decay. How many portals are you recharging and how often do you recharge them?
You miscalculated something. Last ifs I did 9.500.000 with just about 600 portals, mostly lv5 and 6. It costed me about 150 hypercubes.
I based it off a fully charged level 8 portal decaying 5%. A level 8 portal has a max level of 48,000. 5% of 48,000 is 2,400. 3,000,000 / 2,400. = 1,250 portals.
I recharge almost every day, but I don’t know if everyone else does that. That’s why I asked.
3,035,058 XM recharged across 700-800 keys, with a couple of Apex's it netted me 453,475 AP, which is the only way I can make AP without breaking the law. Before the bonuses, I would usually recharge 1m XM per session, which was usually twice a week. Now I'm recharging every 2-3 weeks, I try to time it with First Saturday
I don't think anybody recharge everyday. He clearly is doing it once at 2/3 weeks.
This is something most of the people asking for higher decay rates probably didn't understand. I love the slow decay, its the best change they made for a long time. Let's keep it permanently!
Yay, we'll simply recharge less portals (and play even less). Slow decay is good because it reduces the amount of time you have to spend on stupid tasks.
@NianticBrian Maybe we could see an increased rate of Cubes dropping from Drone hacking? This would help those who are in areas that are currently in more of a locked down or stay at home state, while those who aren't confined to such constraints can still enjoy the 1 week decay, before they can play again.
This idea came up in a chat I'm in and it wasn't my idea, but it seems like it could be a good one.
Other potential thoughts, not sure if you have the ability to do them are:
Using Geo Fencing you could (once built into the system if it's not already)
And as a reminder, since @thesolo mentioned it elsewhere in this thread, are we ever going to see any sort of bonus or "reward" for Recursing? It was promised long ago, then nothing ever really seems to of come of it other than the Wings showing how many times we've done an Onyx Badge basically. There have been a ton of great suggestions, but it feels like we are still just waiting for a response. I've recursed three times, but I've decided this is my last one until we get any sort of response on the benefits of recursing.
Recharging activity depends on action in cell. My cell is hyperactive. I've seen, during Covid, a 1 million MU field getting taken down and put back up twice in the same cp. Other cells if a field goes down it's big news.
If we are going to have to recharge more from next week, are you going to fix the bugs that are making recharging so infuriating at the moment? Ideally the alphabetic key sorting, which has been broken since June 2019, but certainly the one from the last couple of weeks that is causing softlocks every 5-10 minutes of recharging portals:
When it is in this state, obviously you can't recharge anything because you can't see any keys. Often, just before this happens, a cube has failed to activate, or a menu box (such as the "Name / Distance" one on this screen) has failed to accept any selection (same has also happened for the "Recycle these items?" question). But sometimes if the game has been running for a while since I last had the keys up, it will do this as soon as I try to look at my keys.
I believe this bug is related to having the Name option selected, because you can sometimes get the keys to reappear by selecting Distance.