[Feature Request] Mission groups

GorillaSapiensGorillaSapiens ✭✭✭✭✭

resurrecting something i posted in Oct 2019. i'll put a link to the original post at the bottom. here's what i posted way back then.

=== from 2019-OCT

I had some problems related to Mission Day in Sacramento this weekend that led me to start thinking it would be a good idea to create "groups" of missions. I'll explain the problems I had, then what I mean by mission groups, and use cases for mission groups.

In May of this year, there was a Mission Day in Sacramento. These missions had names like "MD 2019: Sacramento, Sutters Fort", and a black bottom border on the mission image. The mission day this past weekend had a DIFFERENT set of missions. These missions had names like "MD OCT 2019: SAC, Riverfront Promenade", and a white bottom border on the mission image. Also, Sacramento has at least 37 mission banners, the largest of which is 72 missions long. Opening up "missions" in app was useless; I was drowning in "part N of M" of various banners. Sorting by name and "More Missions" multiple times only brought up a few, so when I found a "MD 2019" mission, AND NO OTHER "MD" missions, I thought I was good to go, although I only saw one, so I definately needed a map. A google search for 'mission day Sacramento October 2019' gives https://events.ingress.com/MissionDay/Sacramento19 as the first hit, which has, under map link, "TBD". The google results do NOT include https://ingress.com/eventdescription/missionday/md-2019-10-sacramentocausa_4bcac203-498b-55b7-97ac-1246c7d362c6 , (what a url! Plus, has anyone heard of SEO?) which is the official page with a proper map link. In the field and on the ground, not all decisions made are perfect. I grabbed a map from somewhere (I do not recall if I did more googling, or if (more likely) i got it from a slack or telegram message), and as luck would have it, it was the May map, not the October map. I happily and speedily did 6, and went to checkout early so I could be done and get in my car for the 5 hour car ride home. You can imagine my disappointment when they refused to check me out because I had done the "wrong" missions. (This whole interaction stank; at other mission days I've seen POCs check out newbs who didn't understand the whole thing and did 6 missions, just not all 6 from the sanctioned set. It also stank for other reasons; a POC telling someone in a wheelchair to "just cargress them" shows a deep lack of understanding and empathy.) So I sucked it up and did 6 more off the "correct" map, making a total of 7 miles of moving about for the day, 25 miles total for the weekend, and delaying my trip home by 4 hours.

Also, mission distance in the missions list in app is determined as distance from the START/FIRST portal, EVEN IF THE MISSION IS HACK IN ANY ORDER. At one point I wanted to start at the #6 portal working backwards, had to sit down and juggle scanner, intel maps, and a google map for way too long to figure out which of many dozen "nearby" missions I actually wanted to start.

Ok, so what do I think might help?

The "Missions" page needs two tabs; one for individual missions, and one for groups of missions. An individual mission may be part of a "group". These can be assigned via the Mission Authoring Tool. (It's important to allow multiple agents to submit missions to the same group; not all missions in all banners are submitted by the same agent, sometimes we split them up. Perhaps a group should have a "group captain" in charge of allowing other agents to add missions to a group). The groups tab would show nearby groups. "MD 2019: Sacramento" might be a group, "MD OCT 2019: Sacramento" might be another group. The 24 mission banner "Girl With a Link Amp Earing" might be yet another group. Tapping on a group in the group list would bring up a list of missions that belong to the group.

How would this help?

If this were a feature, I would have gone to the group list and seen both "MD 2019: Sacramento" and "MD OCT 2019: Sacramento", and quickly figured out which one I wanted, or at lest known enough to ask which one was correct.

If this were a feature, doing banners would be much easier. Where to start, and what order to do them in, would be much more clear.

I also did "Intel Ops" on Friday. This event had a set of missions. We had similar problems finding all of the missions related to this op. A Mission Group feature would have made this way more playable.

=== update today

i realize that the newer "NIA" filter on the in-app mission page might have "fixed" some of the problems i was posting about with respect to mission day events, but it still would not help in areas clogged with missions, nor would it help people working on mission banners, which is likely to come up a lot in the newer second sunday events.

=== a link to my original post (now archived) because comments there are good.

https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/5600/enhancement-mission-groups

Comments

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    My use case is that I don't do banner missions, just singles. Trying to sort through banner components to find interesting single missions can be excruciating... it would be so much better if each banner only had a single entry on that screen. In other words, I support your concept but would suggest it be implemented slightly differently in order to accommodate both people who want to do banners and those who want to do non-banners.

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