[Feature Request] Portal Submission Credits

One of the things that I've always hated about the modern credit system, is that I can't bank a whole pile of credits, and then go to a town in the middle of nowhere and submit 50 good portals, to help build regions with no portals.

It also doesn't reward good behavior, but simply doles out 14 credits a fortnight (21 if you also have Pokemon Go) and whether they're good or bad, simply gives you more.

This idea was originally floated in January, and I've incorporated the tweaks that people came up with, primarily to address non-reviewers still being able to submit a smaller amount of portals.

Overview:

The primary concept is that a successful portal submission will return double the credits used, and a failed submission will not return anything.

Credit Types

In order to avoid preventing people from submitting completely, credits should be (internally) separated into two types. Basic credits and Quality credits. All credits can be held indefinitely when awarded, and do not expire.

Basic Credits

Every 7 days, every Agent receives 1 basic credit. This credit can be used without restrictions, similar to the current system.

Quality Credits

Whenever a submission is successful, the Agent is awarded 2 Quality Credits. A Duplicate or Too Close submission refunds 1 Quality credit (even if a basic was spent). An unsuccessful submission does not refund any credits.

Additionally whenever a player gains 50 agreements in Wayfarer, they are also awarded 1 Quality Credit.

Credit Cap

A credit cap should be put in place, but high enough to ensure that it's not particularly limiting. I would suggest that a cap of 100 total credits would be sufficient.

If an Agent is at the Credit Cap, every 7 days instead of awarding a new basic credit, a quality credit is converted to a basic credit, until the entire credit store is basic credits up to the cap. This allows agents to take a break from Wayfarer (and even Ingress) but still be able to submit portals when they come back.

Spending Credits

Credits are spent at 1 credit per submission. Quality credits are used first, before basic credits. (With restrictions below)

To encourage players to use Wayfarer, Quality Credits can only be used if the following conditions are met:

  1. The Agent has reviewed 100 portals in the last month.
  2. The Agent has a rating of Good (Yellow) or Great (Green).

If these conditions are not met, the Agent can still use their Basic Credits to submit portals.

Purpose:

The credit system should encourage people to be more careful with their submissions. By rewarding good submissions and not reward bad submissions, Agents will value their credits more and be less willing to waste them.

By tying requirements to Wayfarer, this will also add a purpose to the Wayfarer system, both in providing extra submission credits for those who desire to bank a large number for bulk submission trips, and also ensuring that the system continues to generate sufficient usage to keep throughput high.

@NianticBrian

Comments

  • It is a great idea.

    I live in a rural area of Central Europe and I plan Ingress since Year 1. I realized at the early stage that Ingress (That was the only Niantic game back then) is exclusive to big cities because at the rural areas and in the villages in general there are no portals to interact with.

    For the last 3 years my mission in the game is to enable the village players get into the game by submitting portals from the countryside. (Due to my work I am on the road 40 hours a week). Any portal I submit is usually review and accepted / denied within 2 weeks thru Wayfarer. The review is fair, from time to time I get submitted portals rejected due to valid reasons.

    I have 750+ accepted portals so far and I could submit several hundred mores from villages with 0 (zero) portals I travel thru day by day. These portals are quality ones like churches, statues, war memorials, city halls, community buildings, playgrounds, shrines.

    I love the game and would like to contribute and enable the "play anywhere" experience. This enhancement would help me to enable the rural area to play.

  • oscarc1oscarc1 ✭✭✭✭✭

    It's a neat idea and would definitely be beneficial for those of us that travel to regional areas to improve gameplay there by creating waypoints. It was so much fun when Prime and Redacted were both available, giving us 28 nominations. I would travel with my partner and we would use up all 56 of our submissions and still need more to be able to submit everything!

    My feedback on the idea is regarding these sentences:

    Additionally whenever a player gains 50 agreements in Wayfarer, they are also awarded 1 Quality Credit.

    50 is too low. We receive an upgrade at 100 agreements. An additional credit should be at every 500 or 1000 agreements. That way it isn't too easy to attain without putting in at least some form of minimal effort. I usually gain 40-90 agreements per day (I have tracked my Wayfarer stats since April so can attest to statistics).

    I would suggest that a cap of 100 total credits would be sufficient.

    100 seems like overkill. As much as I would love it personally, it's just way too much. A maximum of 14 additional credits would suffice. Then it would be on par with when we had Redacted and Prime submissions.

    Both of these points would also drastically unbalance nominations vs reviews even further than what they already are. One of the biggest issues we have now is that there simply aren't enough reviewers due to: the PoGo hype died off, many people dropped to red, many others are sick of the utter garbage nominations, "no nominations to review" bug, etc.

    Flooding the system with more potential for nominations completely disbalances the effort of reviewers. More reviewers need to be encouraged or incentivised to ensure that the current and any future flood of nominations can be quickly processed. Adding hundreds of potential nominations overnight onto a struggling reviewer-base is going to see approval/rejection times skyrocket, to the point where it won't even be worth nominating anything because a decision is not able to achieved in our lifetimes.

  • edited September 2020

    @oscarc1

     As much as I would love it personally, it's just way too much. A maximum of 14 additional credits would suffice.

    An additional 14 wouldn't be worth implementing this. I say that as someone who pre-2015, has gone to places with no portals and at times submitted 45 portals, before I ran out of time. To do that twice in a weekend would be impossible even with 28 submissions.

    50 is too low. We receive an upgrade at 100 agreements.

    At a rate of 50 to 1, it doesn't seem like a huge amount of reward. The purpose of the system is to encourage everyone to do at least 50-100 reviews a month, where currently most do none.

    I usually gain 40-90 agreements per day (I have tracked my Wayfarer stats since April so can attest to statistics).

    And your efforts and others like you are the only reason we're still seeing queues of less than months for some portals. I know around when I hit the 10,000 mark of reviews, my enthusiasm waned. The purpose of OPR then Wayfarer is to spread the load such that we have results down to the sub one week level. Someone who is tracking their Wayfarer stats and getting your rate of agreements, is shouldering a burden without any tangible reward, but doing it for the intangible benefits of a better game. For that you should be applauded, but you are the minority. The reason for the cap is to prevent your daily credit gains from being unlimited.

    At the other end of the spectrum, someone sitting down to review 200 portals can seem like a hard slog. Upgrades were provided as a way to 'prioritize' reviewers portals, yet they don't work if no-one is reviewing.

    Flooding the system with more potential for nominations completely disbalances the effort of reviewers. 

    I agree. Which is why the purpose of this system is the opposite. It is more about incentivizing reviews, and limiting submissions to quality instead of just a bulk firehose. The key component of all of this is that in order to submit more than 1 per week, you also need to be reviewing regularly and not submitting bad portals. Someone who right now is submitting 1 blank photo portal per day, every day, would be restricted to 1 blank photo per week. That's a reduction in rejected portals. If they want to do more, they would be required to review many other submissions and would gain an understanding of what good portals are.

    The results of this system would be a reduction in bad portals, with an increase in reviewers. Completely the opposite of flooding the system with submissions that reviewers can't handle. That's the goal. People like you who are putting the effort in right now, should be rewarded far more than they are. People who are currently flooding the system and not reviewing, are the ones who need to be reined in and either encouraged 'get with the program' or restricted in their submissions.

    Anyone who can actually get to 100 banked credits, is already doing their part.

  • HopeaKotkaHopeaKotka ✭✭✭✭
    edited September 2020


    Post edited by HopeaKotka on
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