Deactivate all old passcodes!

TunkelTunkel ✭✭
edited January 2021 in General

Niantic, please deactivate all old passcodes, ie. the big ones with dozens of bursters.

There is a big issue in Berlin, new agents appear literally every 3 days, leveling up to L8 in order to farm the passcodes. Then they move the gear to the main account, or just use it few times to take down specific areas. Obviously, we never see the trash accounts again.

Overall, the whole concept of passcodes is broken and exploited by a few **** destroying the game.

Post edited by blueeeeeee on

Comments

  • ZeroHecksGivenZeroHecksGiven ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited January 2021

    words like **** (sh00t) are hidden, but the word retards is good to go?

    Post edited by ZeroHecksGiven on
  • Yeah, @Hosette 's idea is a lot better. It does require some coding changes, so who knows if / when Niantic would do it.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @theimmc Who knows if Niantic even has release dates on the passcode database.

  • 1valdis1valdis ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited January 2021

    "createdAt" is usually a pretty basic thingy :) But yeah, it depends if they have it added or not.

    On the first glance I do like the idea of passcodes allowed to be redeemed only if they were created after the account's creation date. There may be caveats with giveaways though, if we take old character badges and stuff into consideration. If I won a character badge during some giveaway, I don't want to then find out that my account is too new... Possibly apply this only to some passcodes? Like new year or other holiday ones, but NOT character/one-time loadout ones? This would require a lot of manual work to be done thought, to go through everything that was released up to now and mark the correct passcodes as non-redeemable by newer accounts.

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    They could look up forever codes and assign an arbitrary date to em.

  • GoblinGranateGoblinGranate ✭✭✭✭✭

    Honestly, getting L8 gear is so easy these days that referring to the passcodes sounds lke a joke. But passcodes are even easier I guess.

    I don't think this would solve nothing at all. Clearly, the problem is that fake agent income.

  • I like the idea.

    The spoofers around my area level up to 4 then go jarvis and ADA difficult portals. The possibility of a level 4 account having 10 or so flip cards is so low, but gaining them through the passcodes makes it a non brainer.

  • 1valdis1valdis ✭✭✭✭✭

    I explained above why this doesn't work for loadout, character badge, and other non-holiday types of codes.

  • Single redeem codes, like loadout cards and character badges, should be exempt from this. I don't think anyone is particularly concerned about alt accounts redeeming character badges.

    The original concern is with alt accounts redeeming codes, then transferring the gear to someone's main account. Obviously, if they have single use loadout cards, they don't need to use an alt account to redeem. So the proposal is for codes with # of redeems > 1.

  • 1valdis1valdis ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited January 2021

    Again, not quite ">1". There are loadout codes, for example Tessellation live drop ones, which can be redeemed more than once. It's all is not as simple as you'd like it to be...

  • Are any of them still live?

    I truly don't see the issue. I also don't know why we're debating this. But I'm curious. Let's look at all the possibilities.

    1. Single redeem codes. No need to add a date check.
    2. Code that are fully redeemed : no need to perform a date check.
    3. New puzzle codes : add a creation date some time in the future for when it's supposed to go live.
    4. Anything else : set the creation date to whenever the feature goes live.

    Did I miss any other types of code? If so, have the player contact support and take care of them on a case by case basis. We the players have been testing Ingress for Niantic all these years, why stop now?

    The only other solution is to remove the ability to drop gear on the ground for another player to pick up. That would be an unpopular solution.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    You know, maybe we don't need to engineer the mechanics of this without knowing anything about the internal data structures?

    Hey Niantic, I think the takeaway from this discussion is this:

    There's a problem right now with people spinning up multiple accounts, redeeming big piles of old passcodes, and then dropping gear to existing players. It's essentially perpetual farming by burner accounts and passcodes. Players suggest that it would be wonderful if new users could not redeem passcodes from before their account was created except in special cases such as one-use codes (e.g. character badges, loadout cards, old Hint codes if they're still live) and rare cases where a new user could later have a legitimate reason for redemption (someone suggested Tesselation codes). Please close this abuse loophole.

  • 1valdis1valdis ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited January 2021

    @theimmc

    Are any of them still live?

    I have one right there on my shelf.

    I'd like to use it for some contests among, including, novice players of my city; it also contains a couple of VRLA, which could be useful when performing a huge BAF and someone (could be a new agent too) happens to desperately need some for the operation to succeed. The four cases you listed wouldn't let me do this since this is not a single redeem code, and still has a few redeems left.

  • gazzas89gazzas89 ✭✭✭✭✭

    If those passcodes were removed, id have been screwed, I couldn't get l8 gear and had to clear so much green in my area, all well shielded with several players charging them. Using passcodes I could finally take those down. If I didn't have them I'd have probably enver got to free up areas. Yes, fake accounts use them to give to their main account, that sucks, but punishing all new players for a few bad ones is massively unfair

  • edited January 2021

    Counterpoint: using passcodes for gear for regular play is not sustainable. What do you do after passcodes run out?

  • gazzas89gazzas89 ✭✭✭✭✭

    By that time I'd made an area I could play, older players had came back to start helping and ad saved some of.the l8 busters, enough that I could throw them into quantum capsules and let them replicate.

  • Good idea. Mainly because i'm clustering my loadout codes for long trips when i have limited access to farms. Moreover - i'm not using yearly passcodes otherwise. Just during trips. And removing them just like that would ruin my perfect plan ;)

    On other hand i won some old passcodes from anomalies during some events. Passcodes that are surely older that my account (well not so simple as G account was used with I from beginning, but as i wasnt playing it was deleted during transition to NIA, i came back 20 months ago and had to start from beginning - but still got access to redacted when others couldn't). So it could hurt me too. But not so much as disabling all old passcodes.

    I have another idea - simply track passcodes gear and check if it's transfered massively to some accounts. If so - suspend/ban both of them.


  • I am sorry I am not getting your point. Right now with shorter cool down times I can get 300-500 items in one hour with just farming. Using frackers will get you even more. With frackers getting 20-30 items per hack is pretty normal.

    So I fail to see why an agent will go to all the trouble of building an account to L8 just to redeem some pass-codes to get gear for the main account.

  • Did you quote the wrong post to comment on? We don't disagree. Although I'd have to say that some passcodes give VR items, and those are a lot harder to get through hacking. While VR shields are somewhat common despite their name, VR hack mods and viruses are a lot less common.

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