Improving Ingress: Cell competitions based on changes from the last cycle
Ingress competitions for me always feel like they're mis-calibrated for motivating and rewarding players. There are periodic global events where the goals are so large that it's hard to feel like you've contributed much to the goal. There are local cell score competitions but those are often dominated by player count and/or lucky geographic advantages so in many places the winner of the cell score tends to be fairly predictable.
I would like to see cell competitions that are driven by the delta of some statistic from the previous cycle rather than by absolute score. If you're outnumbered 2:1 in your cell you're not likely to come out on top very often, but maybe you can take a few fields down and throw a few of your own and do better than you did last cycle. Standing fields would lose their advantage. I think this would make the game more dynamic because neither faction would ever become complacent or feel like the situation was hopeless.
I also would like to see special cell-based competitions from time to to time like portals captured or links created, again driven not by absolute scores but by deltas from the previous cycle.
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On my cell for the last 4 years it was dominated by the ENL, with almost no effort. The RES had the ammount of agent on their advantage, but lack of will and teamwork, resulting in the same small patterns with almost zero impact on the score. And the ENL had geographical advantage and constant planing and team working, and the most imporant: willingness to rebuild the big fields and destroy the threat ones. But for the majority of the time, nobody do nothing, agents single minding their own schemes, because doesn't matter what you do, it wont impact the score. And the score itselt have zero impact to the game.
I thing it would work better if it have smaller scorecells, something like the new catan game use (aparently the size of the zones are based on the number of wayspot), focusing the players to fight for their neighborhoods, not the entire country, having to travel 100km for meaningless score that spoofer easily break.
We didn't see the neighbour cell competition from part 3 of Eos Protocol
What Niantic should do (IMO):
- Take 3 random stats each septicycle
- Each agent starts at 0 at the start of the cycle.
- The average of the top 10 players of each faction (or top N if there are less than 10 in a region) determines the winners of each stat.
- Win atleast 2 of the 3 stats for your faction to be the winner of your region for that septicycle.
- Count all regions and declare a winning faction
- The winning faction of the previous cycle gets 1.2x AP
- The losing faction gets 1.5x hack output
________
This way, each cycle is different and changes how it can be won.
You either get a boost in AP as a reward or easier item gathering to win the next
Steps for the game to improve:
-Get rid of cheaters.
-See what community would like to play next.
-Get rid of cheaters.
-Think and implement some meta-game changes.
-Get rid of cheaters.
-Don't know what this step should be about, but the next one should be...
-Get rid of cheaters.
@XQlusioN When you say random stats do you mean player stats or cell stats?
My personal preference would be for cell stats, because personal stats are likely to be dominated by a few heavy hitters. I used to be one of those heavy hitters but I have no shot around here these days because there are several agents in my cell who are consistently among the top players in the world.
What's the problem in being good and/or having a lot of free time?
Could Maybe do a mixture of both? 1 cycle have it be 2 individual stats (say mu gained and resos destroyed) and 1 team stat (most resos deployed, so make there be a reason do destroy resos) then the next cycle have mu gained overall, most links (team for both of these), then the single stat be links thrown by a single player, might be one team wins on mu and links but one person threw more links in the other team?
@Hydracyan There's no problem with being good and/or having a lot of free time. I've been that person before... I suspect I held the world record for 1-16 at one point.
My goal in proposing this was to find a way to encourage more people to play. In order to do that I thought about competitions where faction nose count wouldn't be the deciding factor and even the contributions of a casual player can make a clear difference and help the faction win their cell. A competition that rewards the heavy hitters doesn't accomplish that goal. In my proposal an agent who goes out of their way to take down a field anchor contributes in a way that's easy for them to see and understand, and so does the agent who spends an hour or two making layered fields in their neighborhood.
@Hosette if you are looking for ways to improve personal gratification, the cell scores aren't where you should be looking.
Regardless of which stats or whatever way of calculating the result, hardcore players will ALWAYS have the upper hand over casual players.
My proposal would change which stats are important for a cycle, thus increasing the chance one of them fits you better (and hopefully provide a bigger incentive to go all out)
@XQlusioN What stat would you recommend that would give casual players a way to contribute in a meaningful way?
There is none. (As viewed from the cell score perspective)
I like the idea of shrinking the size of the cells. Right now 90 miles across is a crazy large size. Breaking it down into a quarter of that would be more realistic. It should encourage local gameplay and be a more realistic score for the area. Layered fields 75 miles away shouldn't effect the local score.
Shrinking the cells just means large fields will dominate more cells.
Heavily urban areas become even crazy.
I play in one of the ten most active cells in America, quartering the size of the cell would only silo the ingress community which we don't need especially when and if Covid19 compromises are resolved.
My cell has a population of over 600k. And our player base is single digits for each side. Unless something changes the numbers will eventually fall to zero.
Starting the septicycle at zero is a great idea for so many reasons. Starting from the delta of the previous score would be better IMO, but I can see why people wouldn't like it because to keep winning you would have to score higher and higher every week.
Either one would reduce the number of perma-bafs that frankly reduce the amount of playing people can do and provide no benefit other than cell score. It would mean that players would have to be active every week to win every week.
I would recommend that they play less casually if they want to contribute more.