Agent Profiles are a complete and utter mess.
Hi all,
It's almost March of 2021. The game has been around for over 8 years. And during that time, agent profiles have devolved into complete and utter disarray, with no semblance of consistency. It's high time that Niantic put a little bit of effort into fixing these items.
- The Persepolis badge is still too small compared to all other anomaly badges. No, it is not a dark colored ring around it that makes it look too small, it really is smaller. I laid the Persepolis badge on top of both Magnus and Myriad just to prove a point; note the color of the other badges showing up, because it's too small (see attachments following this post).
- There is still no way to rearrange badges or otherwise sort badges by player preference. Right now everything is just Anomalies (most recent to least recent) followed by ALL other badges, most recent to least recent. There’s no way to segment game badges from year end badges, or to group special events or characters together. Give players the options to do exactly that.
- Niantic knows the date each badge was awarded to an agent, but those dates aren’t shared with the individual players. If I click on one of my badges, I should see the date it was awarded to me.
- There are several badges which are now “stuck” on player profiles and cannot be leveled or otherwise adjusted. I’ll go into each one of these below.
- Prime Challenge was never properly tiered, allowing for only 4 total tiers. This badge is also retired as it was a lead up to Ko Lan and will never return. AFAIK, not a single agent globally was able to attend all 4 Prime Challenge events, so the highest anyone earned was 3. This should be flattened to a single special participation badge (henceforth, SSPB).
- OPR Live is effectively a dead badge right now, but there’s no reason for it to be. Implement a once-a-month, pay review system where Niantic reviews the items you have in the Wayfarer queue. Just like the anomaly add-on, but without the anomaly. This way agents can still level it. If Niantic is unwilling to do that, then this badge should be retired and untiered, moving into a SSPB. Also, it needs to be renamed, because OPR isn’t called OPR anymore. Long Live Wayfarer Live.
- Operation Clear Field is effectively dead right now too, but it also need not be. Convert OCF into a participation event like IFS, which can be run monthly and done independently without cadres, to allow the badge to scale. The point is to clean up and detrash spaces, and it can be done right now, while still keeping safe and socially distancing. Put in photo submission rules and other items, but this is a beneficial event to society and turns our energy and free time into cleaner green spaces! If Niantic cannot/will not do this, then retire this badge and replace it with the original Operation Clear Field badge, which was utterly gorgeous.
- Intel Ops and Stealth Ops aren’t coming back. Let’s just be honest about this and retire these badges and flatten them into SSPBs.
- Relatedly, it appears that NL-1331 also won’t be coming back post-covid, because to the best of my knowledge, there’s no one to drive the vans. The tiers for this badge never made sense, and it wasn’t retroactive despite long-time agents having been to over a dozen events with NL-1331 prior to this badge, complete with photo evidence! Furthermore, agents like the one-off NL badges more. Retire this badge and replace it with an SSPB.
- Recruiter is locked and retired, and Prime has no method for recruiting agents built into it. This is a good thing, as the original badge was poorly conceived and executed. That said, agents are now stuck with this monstrosity on our profiles, and the overwhelming majority of people with onyx badges are people who used self-created or botnet multi accounts to gain their recruits, undermining the purpose of the badge. This badge should be permanently removed from all profiles, or at least give agents the ability to remove it from their own profiles if they don’t want it.
- Mission Day has a badge that is wildly inconsistent from all other gameplay badges and needs to be returned to its original, far superior design, or something different but still better keeping in line with other gameplay badges. This was changed without feedback from agents and generated a huge amount of negative backlash when it was changed (including the awesome “it looks like mansplaining as a badge!” conversation), but was never reverted. Please fix it.
- Seer was retired and “replaced” by Recon, but then for some reason older submissions were retroactively counted, which ticked badges and sometimes unlocked badges for people who didn’t want them unlocked. Niantic is still keeping track of submissions on our profiles, just as “Portals Discovered” instead of “Seer Points”. This is simple, bring back Seer, fix platinum and onyx tiers, and merge the two stats. If Wayfarer is the trusted arbiter of new portal submissions, then there’s no reason to not award badges for both discovering portals as well as reviewing portal submissions.
- All Year End badges have a consistent design, which is a good thing, except for Year 2 (Innovator) and Year 7 (Resurgence). For platinum and onyx badges, badges were given a set of 6 decorative quoins at the edges of the badge hexagon, but for some reason Year 7 has only 3 quoins, and Year 2 has none (the quoins were introduced after year 2, but the badge was never retroactively fixed). Please correct both badges to be consistent.
- Both Cassandra Neutralizer and Dark XM have color schemes that still bother agents; for some reason these events used a bronze/silver/gold scheme that upset many agents. Whereas Via Lux Odyssey and Magnus Builder have their own bespoke 2-tier scheme, and all subsequent events use a multi-color scheme that is based around purples, greens, blues, and coppers, these two events stand out as unwelcome anomalies (pun intended). Correct their colors to be more in line with the Myriad/Aurora/Umbra/Didact color schemes.
That’s it. Let me know if I missed one or you disagree with the suggestions.
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Comments
Here's Persepolis on top of Magnus (top) and Myriad (bottom). See how there's orange and purple sticking out? Yeah, it's too small.
Remember how nice this badge looked?! Bring back original mission day.
@Perringaiden Here use this thread instead.
My biggest desired change for Agent Profiles, is to move the non-core badges into their own separate section, like Missions, that can be expanded or collapsed.
It would definitely help address point #2. Since Niantic took away the built in screenshot, I haven't been able to display my entire badge section without cutting and pasting images.
On point 12, the reasons for the retroactive ticks were pretty clear, but impossible to determine on a portal-by-portal basis at the time.
Portals that had been submitted by December 31st 2014, if they went live, added a tick to Seer. Many of those portals weren't addressed until 2016 in the early OPR work, and only some of them actually went live. Portals submitted in 2015 between January and the complete submission halt in September, did not count for Seer.
I am definitely not a fan of the "Mansplaining Directions Badge".
The coloring on newer badges is also inconsistent with the older badges - the Year 8 onyx looks closer in color to the Sage Platinum than other Onyx badges. Many newer badges (including the Mansplaining Mission Day) have silver tiers that look blue and gold tiers that look nothing like any of the older gold badges.
A consistent recolor would be nice, especially if it was done with the Prime color scheme in mind. It's always been a little jarring to see badges clearly colored for Redacted now living in Prime, especially as newer ones are different.
I'm totally with you on wishing we had the ability to rearrange badges. I would love nothing more than to be able to move my character badges and other store badges to the bottom or to a different spot. I do like having the event badges and yearly badges mixed in with the achievement badges since it tells a chronological story of when you got your badges. For instance, my onyx engineer is right in between the Myriad Hack Challenge (July 2019) and Aurora Glyph Challenge badge (August 2019) which makes it easier to remember when exactly I got that badge. But it's the character/store badges that really make it seem cluttered and messy imo.
Also totally with you on the Mission Day badge. The old badge was better looking, the new one was a stupid change nobody asked for.
Your point about seer is incorrect. That was what was advertised, but when they introduced recon in 2017, they changed the rules retroactively. I submitted only 3 portals in 2014, but have 12 seer points, based almost entirely on submissions between January and September 2015. This means I am stuck with an unearned and unwanted bronze on my profile.
Regarding OCF, OPR Live and Spec Ops, I'm totally down with making them a simple Bronze Participation medal. Attempting to recreate them in some 'virtual form' would likely be more trouble than it's worth.
I love this badge. It was in keeping with the core badges. I hate that they changed it. Ugh!
My biggest desired change for Agent Profiles is to add a public scoreboard, on both global and local scale.
I seem to remember around the time that Niantic rolled out the NL-1331 badge, they scheduled a ton of events in Europe but pretty much no where else. Agents in other parts of the world asked how they could expect to go for the onyx van badge if there were no events. Niantic accounts posted flippant comments on social media in response with words to the effect of "hey, you don't need to earn onyx with every badge!" This is just one badge along with the several others you listed (OPR Live, Clear Field, etc.) where Niantic has rolled out a new badge and in many cases has never given agents a chance to even get past bronze, much less onyx. I often think about the "you don't need all onyx badges" comments when I'm reminded of the strange bronze/silver/gold color schemes of Cassandra Neutralizer and Dark XM.
Man, this post is exactly something I have wanted to post myself, except I would have split it up into separate topics. I feel because it is grouped together, none of it will get the attention it warrants.
Anyway, If they are unable or unwilling to give us sortable profiles, I would love for face and other collector badges to be on another page, and just have Anomaly and Earned badges as they are. I would buy and redeem all the face badges if I could do this. As it is, I regret having them/redeeming them.
I could certainly live with that for all of those, but I think Niantic could spin up OCF and Wayfarer "Live" without much effort, and introduce another revenue stream for themselves at the same time.
But if that's too much work...yeah, give us a new prettier participation badge and ditch the tiers.
I was thinking about that too, the characters badge profiles shouldn't mess with the in game ones. I would love the idea of an extra space you suggest
I feel like "Wayfarer Live" would be all PoGo, no Ingress. And OCF isn't OCF without some guy yelling at you to to push up harder.
I agree with most of your points. Regarding 5-8, I would LOVE to see GORUCK events return and to keep these badges tiered. I don't see a reason to retire any of these badges if the events will return somewhat consistently. Has Niantic said they are discontinuing their partnership with GORUCK? IIRC, BannerRuck happened again in October 2020, but wasn't advertised super well.
I also don't like the idea of "untiering" Mission Day and NL-1331 badges (though the designs aren't the best). Has Niantic said they're discontinuing NL-1331? I really liked when these were made tiered as it gave me something to word towards, as opposed to a "one and done" mindset.
One could argue that having OCF tied to cadres made it both unscalable and also unwelcoming to a lot of agents who otherwise would have participated in a fun scavenger hunt/volunteer event.
I could envision it being reimagined as a total departure from GoRuck. And if not, because of contractual obligations or some such, retire it and make it a participation badge. Simple.
A digital scavenger hunt, performed remotely with Niantic delivering media as "clues" via hacking certain portals in order, would be an awesome event, but it wouldn't be OCF.
And anything that requires in person human organizers (outside of IFS style) is not really scaleable.
The scavenger hunt media portal thing would be EPIC!
Actually, an IFS-style OCF event could work. Local organisers arrange the activities, people show up at the beginning, participate, get validated by the organisers, and voila.
Why not have a tabbed section for the badges and have different tabs for different types of badges? Then you could have the default one show core badges, one for yearly, one for special events and one for all of the dang characters. Not sure which one would win the current holiday type badges or just create another tab for them.
This way you could show your ign, level, current and all time AP above each badger section to show off your badgers.
Would still be nice to have an api that would export at least some of your profile info to the forums (ie Faction, Level, # of Recursions, total AP, ect.) I remember having some cool gamer cards setup with Xbox live a long time ago on another forums software that could be shown on each post of yours. (it was a hack / mod)
I think it wouldnbe good to have separate, collapsible bits for badges. Maybe set up as
1. Active badges that can still be gained for (so non onyx ones) with the option of closest to completing or latest earned
2. Active badges that are complete (onyx badges bacially)
3. Retired badges (so like, seer would go here), this one obviously wouldn't exist if you have no retired badges
4. Face/event badges, for showing off
subscribers should be able to re-arrange their badges.
Stealth Ops only took place at anomaly primaries and those were basically completely dying; pre Covid we only had one scheduled for all of 2020, which was Munich. Numerous other anomalies had no GR events. So having these as tiered makes them impossible when anomalies are basically going away in favor of Hexathon-style events.
Intel Ops is run by a separate company (Foxhound Urban Adventures in San Fran) and they're awesome events, but again, primary anomaly only, and they conflict in time with Stealth Ops, so you can't do both as they take place at the exact same time.
As for NL-1331, to the best of my knowledge there are no van drivers; Ethan was no longer in that position even pre-Covid. And unless they're going to run a LOT of van events in the future, no one will ever get onyx because it's freaking 50 events.
I would be less harsh about NL-1331 if they had given us a way to get credit for past events. They know agents attended certain anomalies where there was a van, so why don't those agents get retroactive credit for it? I strongly dislike when Niantic introduces a new badge for items with a history, but starts them at 0. IMHO it should have never been tiered in the first place.
Hopefully Brian is willing to comment on the status of these items. But if they're not coming back, let's just be honest and set expectations for agents properly.
I'd like to see it for all agents but if they want to make it a subscriber perk, I won't be mad. 😁
Like Mission Days, the issue would still be scale. IFS works because Niantic has little to no involvement in the actual work, and simply "participating" is the only requirement for a point.
I have hopes that we'll see NL-1331 some more.
That could totally work for Clearfield though. Want a tiered badge available to agents all over the world, it has to be done outside of Niantic. It's the only way to make it scale!
I'd like to see NL kept tiered. Niantic has given or can do other things to keep this badge ticking.
Stealth Ops and Goruck, happy for these to remain frozen for now.
Much prefer the original Mission Day badge.
Breaking badges up into tabs would be nice, but, would likely make Agent Stats difficult.
(Unsure why Niantic doesn't just have a web site with Agent Stats for people with open profiles).
Sorting badges would be nice but not critical.
Placing date earned on badge, I am unsure about the positives and negatives of that.
Overall I like a lot of the ideas here.
Since you can now export your stats with one tap, there's no need for OCR on agent stats. Therefore, not a blocker in my mind for rearranging the profile.