Why Niantic is failing miserably to promote Portal Scans

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  • By design, Scout Controller status is kept after the 30 days. From my point of view, it's a huge flaw since you cannot know how many scans are required to harvest the point.

    I would say this is less "by design" and more a by product of a write once process. Removing that status after 30 days would require them to run yet another regular 'whole of data' scan to identify any that have passed the 30 days and remove the flag.

    Also, having no way to check Scout Controller status of a portal by Intel discourages traveling to scan. It's a waste spending resources moving to different areas to discover you'll need more than 1 scan per portal.

    Totally agree here, but I suspect the process of developing the data into a form that can be used would also be the same development work to develop Uniques into a usable form for display on Intel. Something that I hope is happening, but has been listed as "difficult work".

    The VSCP effort seems to have been a "throw out a bone" low development 'high-hopes' feature. It reuses existing Anomaly markers already implemented on the client and Intel. It offers no information specific to the player, just a global value. And it uses the same set of portals that PoGo already has listed as scan candidates.

    One of the more interesting possibilities was to do some "virtual dead drops" where the intel you had to find was hidden somewhere in the 3d space around the portal - like virtually putting an envelope under a bench or behind the statue.

    As much as I love Brian's eagerness for new ideas, this can't even be implemented in reality. We haven't had those dead drops for years, because Niantic chose not to continue doing them. And we're constantly told 'in person' by Niantic employees that an idea is great, and then never see any follow through. They simply don't have the development resources to pursue the 'minor use' aspects of the game. Everything has to be focused on the pure "This will affect every player" features, because to do otherwise would waste those precious development resources.

  • vidiconvidicon ✭✭✭✭✭

    You may be right that they never end up following through on this idea - I'd put the odds higher than 50/50 that you are, but I don't think it's as impossible as you are implying. Given that they put pretty substantial resources behind the tessellation, which in part involved actual people going to places to meet up with players, I suspect they would love to find a way to replicate the excitement of an in-person chase for clues without the expense of sending people to places. Sure, development can be a lot more expensive than paying actors (or certainly than using "vessels," aka Niantic employees on vacation), but if they could develop this feature once they could do a lot more of those kinds of events much more cheaply/easily and include agents in more locations, especially locations outside of the US and Japan in these kinds of exciting and invigorating challenges.

    But even if it doesn't happen, just hearing Brian bring up the potential for using the feature in Ingress is enough to make me interested in contributing to the database in this way.

  • Brian said after Umbra that one of the biggest things lacking from the Anomaly was Niantic organization and presence. AFAIK that's why we only got 'one' worldwide anomaly planned for the first half of 2020 (pre-Covid). Making more "Niantic free" events seems counter productive to that.

    Personally, I'd prefer to see 12 events a quarter, relying heavily on player presence, than one globally inaccessible event because Niantic wants players to "experience meeting Niantic", but I doubt that that's the direction they'll go.

    But even if it doesn't happen, just hearing Brian bring up the potential for using the feature in Ingress is enough to make me interested in contributing to the database in this way.

    So you don't think his reason for giving this idea merit, was to encourage you to do the scanning, with or without the implementation of such an idea?

  • MirthmakerMirthmaker ✭✭✭✭

    You have to go combo of the two. There should be plot ties that weave both local and global. What would be the implications if individual agents as well as factions getting "something" plot related at the end of each weekend leading up to big events every three months?

  • phthoruthphthoruth ✭✭✭✭

    Portal scanning takes too long - 15 seconds. Plus a cumbersome menu to get to it, unlike hacking, linking etc. It should be quicker/easier.

    It has no game mechanic advantage. Scanning should do something

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