[Gameplay Feedback] Decay should neither look nor sound like attacks (long overdue)

thesolo

This is an extension of this report from last year:

https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/12844/sound-used-for-decay-is-the-same-as-attacks

Decay animation both looks and sounds like an attack, to the point that it has confused numerous agents who think their farm or other area is under attack, only to realize that it is merely portal decay. Especially given that comm is still beyond buggy and attack notifications are unreliable, this generates a lot of confusion.

The decay animation should be different, or use different colors. The sound should not be the same as an attack from agents.

starwort

Yes, it can be confusing.

My wild speculation about why it does this is because the scanner doesn't know why the XM changed, only that it did change; so there's only one animation and one sound that it could play. I think one of the confusing bits is that it sometimes plays the animation even if the decay happened quite some time ago.

(I think Ingress 1.x didn't suffer from this only because it didn't do an animation at all.)

Khatre

https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/16425/gameplay-feedback-decay-should-neither-look-nor-sound-like-attacks-long-overdue

OMG yes !

so many time i though i was under attack and it was just decay ...

NianticVK

Thanks for sharing, @thesolo! I'm sharing this with the team to look into it. I'll circle back when we have an update/more information.