Woof Woof I am Scout Controller: A Diary of 500 Uniques
"Guys I'm gonda get the thing, gonna get it good, I'm get thing:"
It took me two months, dozens of hours, multiple day trips, and I sacrificed opportunities for hundreds of thousands of potential AP, but I finally got silver scout controller. And I'm done scanning... for good. Why? Well, let me present to you a diary of my scanning efforts, and I'll explain why I'm not going to continue with this particular aspect of the game. I hope that my experience is on par with what most other agents are encountering, and I'd love to hear stories of everyone's efforts.
I started just after the badge was released, and quickly exhausted the ~20 portals in my neighborhood. That was easy. Then in late July I took a trip to Arizona, which afforded me many chances to get the 100 uniques I needed for bronze. But I don't like bronze badges, so when I returned home I began systematically scanning in my home town - a smallish US city with around 800 portals.
The next hundred were easy, and I relied on my local knowledge to pick out the low hanging fruit, the clusters of easily scannable portals. Reaching 250 was... not bad, but I found that I started having to range farther from home to find more stuff to scan. Usually I'd scan on my daily commute, and could get 10-12 uniques each day, but as time went on I found that I had to range farther and farther, and eventually got to the point (at about 350) that I had to set aside dedicated time to scanning on weekends. This is when I started running into frequent problems and challenges, which I'll list below.
In the end, to get the badge, I had to dedicate two all-day trips to scanning uniques, and one of those trips was across state lines - only because I wanted to maximize my potential by visiting towns where I was already familiar with the portal network.
So why will I be stopping at silver? Let me list the good and the bad:
The Good:
1) In a few downtowns, I enjoyed the fun "mini game" scavenger hunt of trying to locate POI. Many were easy to find, some were more difficult. Is the portal object missing, misplaced, or just obscured? I actually had fun searching because it got my face out of the scanner and into my surroundings.
2) Looking at portal subjects more closely meant that I also submitted more photos and edits... so that's a plus for the quality of the portal network.
3) I think the badge looks cool... it's a very nice design.
The bad:
1) Tiers for scout and controller should be swapped... even with the drop to 12k, onyx controller is still (to put it VERY nicely) impossibly obscene and utterly unreachable. I might be interested in reaching for 1K (gold) if I had prospects of actually being able to go beyond to one of the higher tiers, but I know that will never be possible.
2) Many portals are poor candidates for scans. After so many churches I settled on just scanning signs, because I couldn't decide what part of the building to aim for. Then there's stuff with too many pedestrians, or that is too large to fit in the frame. Luckily I knew enough about most local portals to know what parts of town had better portals, but when venturing to unknown territory (for me, Arizona), I had to pass a LOT of portals by.
3) This...
...once I got to the point where I had to start making dedicated day trips, I ran into this limit frequently. My scanning efforts ended up being SEVERELY curtailed, because in one case I had to wait 11 days to get more scans.
4) My wife got mad at me. Guys, that's a big deal! She puts up with Ingres because I can hack and deploy with subtlety, but scanning is awkward, breaks the flow of our pace during walks, and requires me to pause frequently to interact with the scanner. At one park, the family got tired of all the stopping and just left me behind.
5) Uploading scans only works with FULL signal. Try to upload in the field with 1-3 bars, and the whole game becomes unplayable because other actions time out when an upload is happening in the background. Want to attack portals or glyph hack while a scan is uploading? Forget it.
6) What about saving scans for upload later? I got burned several times, and lost a great number of scans that way. Then there's the issue of storage space, when scans take up 20-100 MB each:
7) Speaking of burn, the processing made my phone HOT and used a lot of battery. I know that part of this is due to 90+ degree summer heat, but it meant having to carry around a spare battery and frequently pausing play to let my phone cool down outside of its case. It's not like I have a choice of playing in cooler weather... scanning doesn't work in the dark.
8) Finding uniques becomes progressively harder. I am very close to onyx explorer, and have to travel to far distant places to work on that badge. Scout controller is the same way, and becomes very difficult once you exhaust the stuff within a short drive of home. I can easily hack 100 uniques in a matter of minutes, but can realistically do no more than 15-20 scans in an hour. When doing the tourist thing, time spent on controller is time lost on explorer.
9) finally, the ONLY external reward I got for all this was the badge. I actually gave up a great deal of potential AP, because time scanning was time that I couldn't use for fielding. Scanning needs some additional incentive, and many ideas have been suggested.
My verdict? I'm done. Until significant changes are made to badge tiers, the scanning process, and other rewards are added, it's just not worth it. In my town, I'm the only person scanning... and I've only seen one other person's name in portals outside of Phoenix. What about everyone else? How many players are going for bronze? Silver? Is anyone trying for gold or higher? How many are just ignoring the badge, leaving it locked forever, because it's too much trouble?



Comments
#4 has absolutely happened to me already.
All of these are reasons why the tiers are set too high for the badge to get any meaningful participation.
Well said, your experiences 100% match mine.
It's an incredibly time consuming tedious task with no reward. Encoding takes so long that you waste a lot of time standing there waiting for it to finish before you can scan the next portal. Scanning some objects near people generally feels uncomfortable.
It detracts from the main aspect of the game that it negates any benefit a player may get from it.
There's no indication as to when a scout controller reaches 30 days, so if there are other players it becomes very easy to get confused or lost on what you scanned, often leading to waste a scan on something you've already controlled.
If the tiers were swapped for Scout and Scout Controller, that might make it more appealing, but even then 6k for Onyx Scout Controller is pointlessly tedious. I don't mind the normal Scout badge, because you can complete that one when it's convenient to YOU, Scout Controller is just purely inconvenient at all times.
I do agree that it's nice to find the portals and interact with them more through scanning, I just wish the 10m location edit wasn't so restrictive as I have found so many portals to be far away from where they actually are :(
Got my 500th unique on July 13th and I’ve done exactly 1 unique since. Just spent four days on the road and gained over 200 unique portals, yet, not a single portal was scanned. Like you, I am frustrated, bored and honestly, don’t play this game to scan portals, especially when it hasn’t been confirmed they’ll even be used for Ingress...
Very well put. These are all the conclusions that we came to either theoretically just from how the badge was positioned, or in practice from trying it out. It's a nasty badge; it breaks game flow, eats battery & space & bandwidth, provides Ingress with absolutely nothing in return, is inherently selfish because you can't do scans with your partner and both get credit for controller, AND you can't grind it because of the built-in cooldown.
This is one of the worst, if not the worst badge ever introduced to the game, and it should be stopped or overhauled completely.
I just scanned 2 of my nearby portals lastnight for fun, wow what a pain even doing that :( i cant imagine going further push even the first badge.. it takes forever do this and then sit wait for upload on wifi took forever.... ugh u get no ap, no mu on fields or anything ...... this is not ingress to me.....
The cost of scanning far exceeds the benefit. In order for portal scanning to be worth the effort, there's got to be substantial incentives. Players should be demanding a significant AP reward or CMU for every scan that is accepted. The developers have yet to address the question that is repeatedly asked: How will 3D models be implemented in Ingress and not some other Niantic game?
Lowering the requirement for the Onyx tier did nothing to address the fundamental problem. "Hey, we'll let you upload 3,000 fewer scans for no additional compensation. Thanks for all the free labor!" Only the most hardcore medal monkeys will go for the final medal, and they'll do it anyway even if it meant scanning 50,000 unique portals.
If you're on the fence about the two scanning medals, consider the opportunity costs. At the moment every alternative is better.
Hi, just signing in for the How many are just ignoring the badge, leaving it locked forever list.
Ditto that. It's not game play, it's unpaid work. Zero AP is achieved for this. It doesn't help the POI Network for Ingress, unless of course @NianticBrian or @ace has a specific timeline and can show us how it will actually work within the Ingress Prime client.
With submitting portals you at least gain some AP. Scanning a portal, encoding, and uploading it takes far longer than submitting a portal, but within Prime, potentially not much longer.
I did enough to get both badges to bronze and stopped there. Scanning destroys my Pixel 4 XL's battery even faster than normal Ingress play does.
Just forget about portal scanning until we see the results. Play like there's no portal scanning.
I have 1 in Scout Controller and it is going to be locked for the time being.
I absolutely agree with all the points mentioned here! I am in the exact same boat. I am going to push for Silver Scout Controller eventually but that will be it for me until @NianticBrian really gives a thought into revising the tier requirements. The only reason I will push for Silver is because I don't like bronze medals. However, 12,000 unique scans for Onyx? Forget it. Anything more than 4000 for Onyx is pushing it. I'd be even okay if they switched Scout and Scout Controller requirements. But 12,000 unique scans is just not realistic, manageable, or feasible. I think their greed to get more data by setting the current requirements in will eventually paralyze any progress they could have made by keeping goals more realistic. They may not see it now, but they will eventually when it has been a year or two and little to no progress has been made on their AR modules.
Edit: Even if they added an AP incentive, 12,000 unique scans is not going to happen and the desire to do scans will just die down.
I quite like the idea and scanning. A new angle. Not sure if I will ever achieve onyx. But just got silver. So I guess gold or platinum should be possible. A little like onyx linker. Just a very high bar but it is ok that not every onyx badge can be achieved in a few minutes, days or weeks. Gives a long term goal.