should 90 second portal cooldown become the new standard?

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  • ToxoplasmollyToxoplasmolly ✭✭✭✭✭

    https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/comment/124841#Comment_124841In six years, I don't think I've ever inhabited the Ingress reality described here.

    Thirty minute response times to flash farms meant that people hopped into cars and drove around a loop of portals — the better to get all those hacks in before the farm came crashing down. Some socializing happened, but the affairs were mostly focused on getting the Ingress thing done quickly and efficiently.

    The advent of glyphing and fracking made for a better social experience. People could choose a spot with a few portals, get gear quickly, and then just hang out, not separated by cars, and perhaps sharing in food and drink. People started bringing their non-playing spouses and kids. Farming became a social occasion with a small bit of Ingress on the side.

    As for gear denial… done successfully, this seems to just cause players quit, especially the "casual" or "unconnected" folk who just want to do their thing. With the loss of those players, other players start quitting because the game board begins to feel more and more dead. This might be fine for the "hardcore" folk who want to "win," but is that the only audience the game should cater towards?

  • d0gboyd0gboy ✭✭✭

    I'm (perhaps oddly) undecided on this change. It certainly does make things more fast paced; but it also advantages people who available portals to hack more.

    But I wanted to point out something here:

    I think time is one of the most critical elements of Ingress' economy, but it is not the only resources.

    If I had to make a list, I'd put them this way:

    = Time - How many player hours you have.

    = "Acumen" -- a generalized variable for your ability to understand game mechanics at the micro and macro scale. How good are you at portal combat? Do you know where the hardest portals to use are? Do you know how to farm efficiently? etc.

    = Mobility: How far can you go and where? It's tempting to think this is the same as time, but there are some places agents simply can't go. Some agents are great on bikes (and might have amazing range in a city). Some can ski across a mountain pass in the winter. Others love road trips, etc.

    = "Social Quotient" - a measure for your own and your surrounding agents' ability to function as a team. An area full of lone wolves who never farms will do poorly when faced with a coordinated adversary. Similar logic holds for fields, anomalies, etc.

    = "Portal potential" - a metric for proximity to useful portals. Useful is an abstract term here, but imagine someone who lives on top of a mountain with a portal there. Or someone in a city, and what they can do. Someone with no portals, or portals with bad topology or the wrong kind of density suffers.

    = Active agents - discrete counts of active agents is a resource. It is related to time, but not quite. One agent with infinite time is not equal to one hundred with ten minutes a day. Also plays into quorom at farms, and so forth.

    = Finances - how much money do you want to spend on your hobby? Perhaps shockingly, this is the least important of the game's economy, since most of the ways you can apply money are countered. Or it can be helped by having more agents to split with, or tighter social bonds, and so forth.

    There are probably some other resources, but I just wanted to call out these are not the same thing as time, and in some (if not many) cases can overcome the time advantage.

    ====

    As for the topic, I'm undecided because higher hack times encourages people to go to more places. It's not quite exploration, but if I encourage people to move around the world they do see new things and are forced to face different obstacles.

    Your argument is at its strongest when you point out that if your end goal is just getting gear, then reducing time between hacks is good. But maybe as a game you don't want people to get what they want when they want it; maybe they need to work for it. The correct response to longer time cost is to figure out a smarter way to do it. Build more P8s. Get your team together more often. Etc.

    ===

    The strongest argument for it is that with fewer people/pandemic, the cost of doing any of those things is much higher. So at least for right now, you unfortunately need to make agents more self sufficient or efficient.

  • hiryuhiryu ✭✭✭

    The cooldown change doesn't affect organized farms (fracking) at all. Either way you're going to heat sink the cluster enough that you can glyph continuously. You do save on VRHS, but I have yet to see lack of mods be a factor for any farm. I suppose over the long term it means there's less investment in farms, so there can be more of them... that doesn't seem like a bad thing.

    The cooldown change doesn't affect couch/desk portals because you don't care how long it is between hacks if you're going to be there anyways.

    The really big impact is on microfielding, where you can double back and get keys you missed more easily, and in medium-to-big fielding where you want to get a bunch of anchor portals without spending forever in one place. Both of those are fun parts of the game, so I'm happy to see them involve less toil.

  • DSktrDSktr ✭✭✭✭

    OFC no,stop making pvp server from Ingress.ITOEN- and shield nerf was worst decisions before. Now this cooldown.Okay,lets also let double L8 deploy and increase decay to **** any point in keeping fields and doing anything excepting purify. Yes,five minutes are long enough,but also ninety seconds are short enough

  • Here in Dortmund, with half a million inhabitants, I have never seen a flash farm. I don't even destroy the other faction's P8, I flip them because otherwise there won't be any more P8 in this city until the next double P8 event. You are lucky to live in a different world.

  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭

    but dont u want to destroy the enemies p8 portals, why let them have?

  • EvilSuperHerosEvilSuperHeros ✭✭✭✭✭

    It speeds it up and I still use the same amount of HS when out playing, if anything, I've used more recently, even with the 90 second cool down in place. Because some days some portals just don't wanna give you those darn keys.

    VR hacking gear appears to be dropping more frequently than it has in the past, which seems odd, but is still consumed. I still use VRHS. Go figure.

  • The cooldown change doesn't affect organized farms (fracking) at all. Either way you're going to heat sink the cluster enough that you can glyph continuously. 

    Actually, it significantly changes it, because people are less eager to get out and destroy it quickly because it's easy to rebuild it (no VRHS burnt), so you don't actually need to frack because you'll likely get two full resets of the portals, and therefore no point in paying for frackers.

    Anyone who can get 8 people to pass by the same place, can have a high output farm without the risk of losing VRHS, one of the lowest drop rate items in the game. Couple that with the fact that VRHS can now be crafted, and a permanently lowered hack rate would all but eliminate the gear denial strategy.

  • This is a completely separate problem of a lack of players. No-one is attempting to claim that the lowered cooldown is a fix for that, (which it isn't) so it's not relevant in that respect. The fact that you flip instead of destroying P8s, is unaffected by the cooldown.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @Perringaiden That may be true where you are, but around here the standard farming tactic is to build a cluster of 4-6 P8s, flip them, frack them to burnout, and then destroy the farm. It's that whole gear denial thing... if we leave them standing then the other faction will show up soon to take advantage. If we don't flip them there's a decent chance someone will show up to destroy the farm before we're done.

    Getting eight people to pass by the same place is harder these days since the number of people playing has dropped significantly.

  • edited December 2020

    We call that Fear Farming. It's considered a weakness ;-)

  • oscarc1oscarc1 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Personally, I don't care. It's a game and it's meant to be played, I let P8's live so people can actually play, so the map can be fluid, fields are created, fields are destroyed. Gear denial is a stupidly blind tactic and more often than not only hurts your own team who use those same portals to farm (sometimes more than the opposition). But this is entirely dependant on the area. If the opposition has enough players to rebuild the P8 constantly, then it doesn't matter. But if there are very few players or very few farms (with no flash farms), then letting the P8's live only encourages gameplay from both factions. Without gear, nobdoy can do much.

  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭

    ah ok, well in my town the enl has killed more or less all p8 portals we used to have, and now neither res or enl builds p8 normal... i guess covid and other reasons ppl work home more but still i find it odd why u would want let other team have portals... iguess this works different depending where u live.. ifind it funny when other team kills all blue p8 portals but i dont see a single green p8 build... xd

  • I'm using heatsinks a lot more. and getting better game play out of it.


    a common heat sink is now actually more valuable now. instead of using it to just get another key quickly, I feel quite happy finding a random bench with 3 portals in range, 3 common hs and spend 20 mins just rebuilding my low level kit to go around and field again.

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