Sort Portal Keys By Decay %
Hello all and welcome to my discussion/suggestion.
I am not aware of if its been suggested before, but I have been playing now for 3 years and I believe this simple update would help so many people to keep track of their "Recharge Game"
As we all know keeping portals recharge can be strategic aswell as just for the sake of it, you and myself can probably all recall a time when we accidentally let an important portal decay by mistake, many agents including myself often have over 1000 portal keys, and scrolling through the entire list can be quite laboreous.
Many agents adopt methods of keeping track of particular portals they would like to charge, often involving searching through the whole list.
My suggestion is to include on the drop down menu that says "name, distance" a selection of "Health" which lists the portals by their energy % in relation to the full energy of the portal. Listing the ones most closely to decay at the top. This way you could never miss those important charges.
If this is possible I believe this quality of life update would be one of those updates that people said really helped them, rather than just superficial changes to fonts or screens within the game. Let's have something that really changes things.
Thankyou for your time please upvote if you agree this would work for you 👍
Shottix

Comments
Cracking idea! Yes please, Niantic.
Health is always changing. It would be a huge burden on the servers.
This is one of those ideas that keeps coming up over and over again. For example, a week ago:
This is a regularly requested feature, but from a data transmission POV and a 'reduced contact with active tables' POV is not optional for Niantic.
There's two sets of data about a key:
Static data:
And dynamic data:
Static data is loaded when you retrieve your inventory. It's easily sortable, because all values are known. Dynamic data however, changes regularly, so it can't be cached in the same way as static data. Ingress uses a process called lazy-loading, to gather the dynamic data for Ingress portals as you view them. That's why you see the loading as you scroll through the keys. If you never look at a key, Ingress never needs to load that key's data.
If Ingress were to sort by things like resonator health, it would definitely cause far more server load and transmission of unnecessary data, and probably a delay when you open up your inventory, as the client would need to update all the data on all keys for the sorts to work.
Now that the intel map is able to display our inventory, hopefully it can get them closer to it
If you look at the Intel Map's inventory data, you'll note that it only delivers static data.
(Original post Link)
Awesome thanks for the reply 👍 as I put if it were possible I was kinda hoping a smarter person would be able to tell me... So what if it just showed you the ones that were on 10% or below rather than all of them. Would this be less of a server burden. Cheers
The "server burden" talk is a red herring. If you're scrolling through all your keys, you're causing all that health data to be loaded anyway. And it's trivial to not load that health data until it's actually needed for sorting purposes (see also: what the scanner does today).
The issue is that loading that data is time consuming, which means you can't plop it in that drop-down menu and expect it to behave like the name and distance sorts. You'd need a new UI for "slow loads/sorts," or something like that.
If it's going to get anything, there's no significant difference in getting all of them. Interacting with the active data is the bigger performance concern. So if they decided the data was worth the transfer costs and performance was ok, they'd simply give you back the whole thing. It's not so much a technical 'impossibility' but a cost and performance trade off.
If they were going to add greater sorting, they'd probably be implementing a whole approach with things like sorting by faction ownership, and personal ownership as well. Sort of, once the dam breaks everything is possible.
Couldn't the cost trade off be offset by CORE subscriptions? After all, we are paying customers of the game now, expectations of what can be done and how the game is run should be higher.
For the longest time we were under the impression that showing uniques was impossible, then we were pleasently surprised when Niantic introduced that functionality. It's Niantic's game after all, they can make it do whatever they need it to do.
In terms of performance, I don't know how feasible it is, but what if when selecting "Health" as a sorting option, it takes a 30 seconds (or however long) to get all the portal data and caches it locally to your device, this allows you to quickly sort everything by health and view all the data without constant loading. Perhaps when a key is opened it might do an update to that cached table for that key and when the keys view is closed and returned to the map, that cache is cleared (so that it can be performed again when "Health" is selected again).
The trade off there is obviously that the information won't be presented in a real-time list, but other than anomaly recharge rooms or when defending portals, how often do you actually need that information to be presented in real-time anyway? Just open the key and get real-time updates anyway (like how it currently works when viewing a key)
If this is implemented, I imagine a cool down would be important. One hour? Maybe four? Maybe once a day? Also, right now, I have 600+ keys that ARENT in lockers. That’s a ton of data to move. I’d be okay with having a locker specific to that data pull, as long as I could charge from that locker. But it could be a way to pull that data, but have a cap on it. 100 vs 600 is a big difference. A “recharge” locker. I’d pay $5 for a special locker like that, even if that 100 counted towards my overall inventory.
That being said, I go through all 600 of those once every day or two, just to see if there is anything super close to complete decay.
@oscarc1
Couldn't the cost trade off be offset by CORE subscriptions?
I'm not sure the simple act of paying for the Ingress team salaries are yet offset by CORE. There's been a lot of disgruntled cancellations due to the iOS issues, based on what people have said in threads.
Before we start adding sort options I'd like sort by name to work properly, please.
Yes +1, and of course being able to charge keys within the locker would be a great time/effort saver.
I shudder at the though of how hard this feature would hammer the games database.