Increased interaction radius
For those who don’t know, Pokémon GO doubled the interaction radius as a temporary measure during the worst of the pandemic to allow players a better experience.
Naturally as this was a temporary thing, it was retracted when the situation improved in some areas but the players weren’t happy about that and wrote an “Open Letter” under #NianticHearUs.
Niantic responded to this below;
There’s now been a further response to say that all the complaining worked and the extra interaction distance is staying.
Why so much Pokémon GO stuff? We have had (and still have) some temporary bonuses in Ingress;
But to make things fair, should we also receive an increase in interaction distance, or do we need to come up with our own “open letter” and relevant hashtag first?


Comments
No, absolutely not. Do not increase the range in Ingress. Even if it would be temporary, it's way too late for that now. If Niantic really wanted to (and they really shouldn't), they should have done this when the first bonuses were introduced.
Would be nice if niantic give update on the temp bonus in effect for over a year now and what to expect.
At 80m away, the only POIs people are "interacting" with are large buildings. At 80m away, all you're really doing is tapping buttons in an app because it says you can. (And I might argue that's all true even at 40m away.)
There's no point in having POIs correspond to objects in the real world if you don't actually have to be near those real world objects in order to "interact" with them in-game.
Would resonators also have a maximum deploy distance of 160m apart as a result?
What would then happen with bursters? Only a L8 would be able to hit every reso by standing on top of the portal.
PoGo players don't care what the POI is, they just want their items and go, hence all the crying to keep the distance because it makes the game even more convenient for them.
Just unfortunate that Niantic is demonstrating that they listen and fold to those players, but they couldn't care less about Ingress agents.
Ingress benefited from some major and permanent infrastructure in the drone. That allowed us to keep our Sojourner streak going and has evolved into a fun mini game.
80m range in Ingress could be interesting, If Niantic was seriously considering it, we could have an event to trial it. The main concern would be resonator deployment, could you deploy at 80m, if so able to deploy resonators at 160m (80m of the opposite side of the portal).
I would certainly make hacking a lot easier, you could be in range of 10 portals easy in some denser areas.
I’d love to try it, just as a proof of concept, but don’t think it’s a good fit for Ingress, just walk 40m closer to the POI.
I’d much rather 90 second cooldown be permanent than 80m interaction radius.
You have to hack specific portals for their keys, in PoGo, each PokéStop is as good as the next.
What is the zap range of a portal? At 80 m we would be further negating that mechanic
I'd settle for 60m interaction radius and the reduced cooldowns being kept. Actually, scrap that. Just the reduced cooldowns stay is good enough for me.
#HearMeNiantic or whatever it was that was trending on twitter with the PoGo peoples.
I know everyone may not be able to view this, but someone also raised this on the Transformers: Heavy Metal forums too;
No, don't need it. As others have said before Pokemon Go players don't care for the POI's they just want items, spins, gifts and able to touch a gym without having to leave their house or walk an extra 20m. Farther away agents are from a portal makes it less likely for the portal to attack back and zap xm. Would ruin that mechanic.
We still have the ability to deploy 2 R7s as well as the reduced cooldown time, which were introduced near the beginning of the pandemic to make the game easier without gathering. Others mentioned the introduction of the drone, making it easier to farm and maintain sojourner without going outside. A bigger radius would severely imbalance the strategic game.
I feel like this would be disorienting. I mostly drivegress, and I generally know the spots I need to pull over in order to get a portal in range, and ideally at max deploy range. I'm thinking of two portals in particular that I can reach simultaneously from a parking spot to deploy at max range to spread out the resonators. But with a bigger circle, if I pull into that spot, the resonators would no longer be fully spread. It'll make me have to find new spots to pull over for basically every portal.
Also, it seems like this would make portals incredibly more difficult to k1ll if they are defended by rechargers.
I don’t think there is any reason to change the interaction radius. But it would be nice if we’d get that sorta feedback from the ingress team when agents are continually asking for feedback on a certain issue or idea. Instead, just the continued silent treatment… Don’t wanna leak any informations about fixing anything related to missions, don’t wanna leak any info about drone updates or scanning updates, omg…
There are too many unintended side-effects of changing the interaction distance to make it seem like a good idea to me. Other people have already spoken of the reso deploy distance - this not only has an effect on how an XMP affects the furthest resos, but also changes the attack/defence balance hugely if one of the reso positions is inaccessible. Attacking from out of range of turrets etc, but also how many portals could have resos tactically placed where US'ing mods triggers other portals to zap. I am sure there are other game mechanics that I have not brought to mind, and that ignores Niantic's own motivations for wanting to keep a 40m interaction distance.
I'd like to see Niantic fix things that are broken (Comms, among many others), make it possible to see which portals your drone has previously visited, and I have seen interesting ideas for new features around these forums. But increased interaction distances? It's a NO from me.
The interaction radius is fine.
The Pokémon GO community whinged and cried because so many of them are lazy.
The wayspots have no significance to them, no real reason to move much beyond the couch.
I'd like to see it put to 45m so deploying resos at max distance isn't as atrociously annoying as it is currently with GPS drift
You'd have the same problem then as well. Increasing the distance doesn't fix that.
If pogo gets permanent increased radius, Ingress should keep the reduced cool down time permanently.
Like the Apex, I’d like to see a boost item that temporarily expands radius solely for interaction and without affecting or changing the deployment of resonators if at all possible.
Unless the reso max distance remains 40m - so if you are 40-45m away resos will always be at 40m.
Less impactful on gameplay than doubling/everything increasing, and I'm too lazy to do the calculations to figure how what level portals being able to hack from 45m would affect the "zap range". Personally - still not in favour though..
I really want to know how this would look because it would be pretty bad. Perhaps, it just defaults to the maximum possible deploy length?
The reso range doesn't need to change, just everything greater than 40m should put the reso at 40m. There's been cases of lag where the resos are hundreds of meters away from the portal so this would stop that as well.
No. Let lazy and casual pogo players stay in pogo only.
I'd rather have the hack cooldown not go up to whole 5 minutes. Of course making it 90s permanent is a thing many people wouldn't agree to - specifically because of being unable to prevent flash farms - so I'd suggest putting it to ~3 minutes. Less pointless waiting, more action.