should 90 second portal cooldown become the new standard?
saarstahl
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Among the temporary changes, I am quite happy with the 90 second cooldown.
Sure, I have fond memories of the 5 minute cooldown. Standing in the freezing rain amid rush-hour traffic for half an hour to hack keys for a multi-layer field is kinda heroic, but does not benefit the gameplay, IMHO.
Together with the possibility to obtain VRHS, VRMH and SBUL from the kinetic capsule, this change makes it so much easier to create beautiful fields.
All other changes (like 65 AP for recharging and double R7 deploy) can go.
Are there any good reasons for returning to 5 minute cooldown?
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Scarcity.
Pure and simple. Time is the greatest commodity of Ingress.
Also, once it flips back to 5 minutes, you can use those VRMH.
You meant VRHS?
The 5 minute cooldown does not create scarcity, the 4-hour cooldown does. With the 5-minute cooldown (possibly shortened by HS), you hack, check your email, hack, check the news, hack, capture pokémon, hack, deploy nearby portals, hack, recharge keys, hack, wait for the rain to stop, hack ... and so on until the portal is burned out.
Heatsinks are totally useless now.
Sorry yes VRHS.
And no, the 5 minute timer is the primary scarcity. Because sitting around waiting is time consuming. People rarely wait 15 minutes to hack a portal 4 times.
It makes things too easy imo... Want more hacks? Use heatsinks thats what they are for.
If less is better then why not 1 second?
If anything, a 3Mims cooldown would be sweet that suits all
I find them very useful: 17 hacks in less than 8 minutes with a VRHS and a VRMH.
Standing in front of some stranger's house for half an hour, waiting for the cooldown, can lead to awkward situations.
Not if you save up a bunch for microfielding. Take 100 commons to put as mods while you grind AP. The AP gain from Glyph-->HS-->Glyph-->HS-Glyph add up fast, not to mention key counts and allowing you to keep your resonator counts low in inventory. 55-4444-33 all day, you can start with 10/10/10 level 3/4/5 pins and play almost indefinitely.
Yes, I think it should. I don't think the longer cooldown time improves the game in any way.
And that is why it's breaking scarcity. You're justifying the opposition to your own argument.
@Perringaiden What it's actually doing is shifting the line between "percentage of boring time spent farming gear" and "percentage of time doing interesting stuff that uses gear." For me the expedited cooldown is akin to the "Boost Charge All" button for recharging... it just speeds up the process a little bit.
Yes. That is LITERALLY what scarcity means in Ingress.
Everything is time. Time to farm, time to travel, time to play.
So yes, you're right, reducing cooldowns would reduce the farming time. I'm not debating that.
I'm disagreeing that that's a good thing.
@Perringaiden Do you also rail against frackers, heat sinks, multi-hacks, load-all/unload-all on capsules, and not having to drop/pick up 300 items one at a time? If not, what's the difference?
I agree that the shorter cooldown vastly improves the game. Getting gear/keys is an important part of the game, but it doesn't need to be so time-consuming. I play the game for exercise, not sitting around.
I still use quite a few VRHS, because 90 seconds is still too long.
To an extent, the reduced cooldown helps offset the ludicrous advantage that having a couch/desk portal has.
Heat Sinks and Multi-Hacks - No. They're a specific and limited injunction that is visible to others, providing insight at the cost of exposure. The reset upon application, of a heat sink, is silly though.
Loading and unloading capsules has nothing to do with game mechanics. That's absurd.
As for Frackers and Glyphing? Yes. Make frackers more expensive, and take Glyphing back to the old "slight advantage over tap hacking", then reduce shields back to 10/20/40 and remove Aegis (or maybe make it 50 at best).
The game played far more communally when people had an incentive to build multi portal permanent farms and tap-hack them as they walked in groups chatting. Farming was not "boring and time consuming" because you did it with people, or listened to an audio book etc. 4 walking laps of a 20 portal farm with 10 minute laps, tap hacking while you talked to others was a great era for the game.
The addition of frackers, glyphing and massive over-defense removed so many of the things that made the early game great, and dramatically changed the dynamic of the game. No-one cares about link mitigation any more, and I'm sure there's plenty of people who don't even realize links increase defense, let alone what the diminishing returns scale for multiple links is.
But back then, you also didn't need to carry 800 bursters, because the VRS was only 40 mitigation with no stickiness. 300 bursters was enough to take down one farm, then you still had plenty of resonators to get on and rebuild the whole thing yourself.
Keeping the cooldown at 90s, is moving further in the wrong direction.
Maybe not 90 but maybe 120 or 130, but also making changes on how the HS works and in their rarity.
@Perringaiden What makes Ingress fun for you? What elements of the game are most compelling?
Not Perringaiden, but it's not just fun fun fun for Ingress. It evolved to more than just a game to me. It has become a part of life for some. That's why most of us are still here, having this kind of discussion.
As for what Niantic should or shouldn't do, I gave up suggesting any. They don't really listen, or they look that they do but nah they really don't. 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 second...it's all up to them.
If I can achieve some what of normal activities (glyphing, recharging, deploying), within 5 minutes, cool..I stay longer. If not, I would still open my scanner, just a bit less.
I've only started playing since the 90 second cool down starters and I already think that's too long lol, who wants to sit in the rain hacking a portal 12 times for keys for 20 minutes let alone a blooming hour lol. I get the reason for cool downs, but I cant see any real reason for 5 minute cool downs or even 3 minute cool downs, it just arbitrarily drags put gameplay.
Imagine what these people would say if Niantic also returns 0-1 keys drop from a few years ago (not 0-4 like now) 🤣
Making things easier is not equal to making things better.
Making things easier isn't necessarily making things better. However, I think shifting the balance of play away from boring repetitive tasks and toward things that are more engaging and creative is a net win. It's why I like Boost Charge All-- tapping recharge over and over again is dreadfully dull. It's why I begged for bulk load/unload of capsules, and why I promised Hanke I wouldn't blow up any of his portals for a month (or maybe it was two weeks, I forget now) if they released it. It's why I really want the ability to just dump a pile of power cubes into a capsule or into my open inventory to recharge keys... there's no strategic advantage to doing it one at a time, and it's just busywork.
I also wish for complex/simple and more keys/no keys to be able to be set as a default. Almost every single glyph hack I do is prefixed with complex/less, and at 13X translator that's a lot of repetition.
In short, I think it's a net win to shift play time from boring stuff to fun stuff.
I like the new cooldown time, less burning eyes in my back when wandering around while waiting for a portal that refuses to give me 1 keys 2 hacks in a row 😂 But if they make it longer again, than that's just what it is.
i prefer something the current cooldown IF the burnout stays like it was before covid.
i must say the current cooldown saved me using a lot of heatsinks, certainly now when i have to farm lots of portal keys and i'm glad i can take profit during this event. But the old cooldown time may return, so with only 2 MODs a solo player can deploy, u have to think a bit more tactically.
Or a 100-200 piece inventory reload without having to do crazy things is why you use sink + hack.
Until the Covid19 bug is minimized, probably.
After that let's see hacking go back to 5 minutes again. So after July 1 2021 I think N. America will be back to something resembling " normal " enough that 5 mins between becomes ok again.
Primary? The community. Both coming together to make big things, work together, friendly back and forth with the other team etc.
Gameplay wise, building, destroying, competing. Managing the other team's capabilities through my own strategy.
And I know you're going to say "So farming is boring?" but that's not the point. Your argument's ultimate end point is "Unlimited gear". Unlimited gear that takes away the 'boring farming' completely, might be fun, but it takes a large strategic part of the game away. Gear denial, or even restriction is a strategy to make your own life easier because if the other team is putting more work into farming, they aren't destroying your stuff. Faster gear, easier gear, unlimited gear, takes away one of the supports of what gives the game long term legs. I've got no problem with "More P8s" as long as destroying them has an effect.
Another key element that would be removed is flash farm response times. Originally if you could be at a farm build in 30 minutes, you could stop them from getting a second lap in. It was a true competition to react in time to deny your opponent an easy casual farm. With frackers and glyphing, that time is down to about 5 minutes, because they can deploy, build and start fracking in that time, but if you can get there fast enough, you can deny them gear by destroying the limited supply VRHS and VRMH. Keeping the 90s cooldown means they don't need to use the VRHS to maintain that same benefit, and if they use them, the time goes down to even less before they're getting more benefit etc.
The game's 'height' for communities was in 2014 and early 2015. It's not a coincidence that glyphing became 3x more beneficial and frackers were released, in early 2015, around the time that communities generally started to decline.
and today most ppl living in cities have a portal or more they reach from home meaning they dont even need heatsinks just a shield and rest multihacks and hack away.. dont even need to go out... i guess things has changed since 2015.... i miss the old days.
Only been playing about two years and yes community is critical to this game. Flying solo means play is very different than as a group.
Glyph hacking is broken, but no one is going to change that. ( I didn't learn the full secret until lvl 14-15).
I agree that it is far easier to farm stuff nowadays.
4 years ago, people were sharing gear way more often, one could take an hour-long ride for a couple hundred L8 bursters, and this helped strengthen communities.
Couch portals were pretty rare and I clearly remember how a dozen Res agents from different parts of my city were upgrading 3 couch portals every day for a single agent who could continuously farm them and share L8 gear.
Now those 3 portals are mostly L5 or grey.
People often have couch portals, and there are generally more portals around; double L7 deploy requires just 2 people instead of 3 to get an L7 portal; reduced cooldown allows for more gear to be farmed; drones being put on high-level farms give a hundred or so L7-L8 items daily without you needing to leave your couch.
People have loads of gear and don't know what to burn to farm further. This is bad. :/