Portal Scanning Volatiles almost gone?
With the fix of new portals not appearing in game, volatile portals for scanning have almost disappeared. They have become so rare that on our UK chats we thought they were gone altogether, but we have found a few volatile portals here and there.
For me this has meant that I've stopped scanning for now, since the volatile portals were one of the factors which made the very high requirements for Scout Controller at least bearable. Was this cut intentional? Or was it a bug that needs to be fixed?
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Might have something to do with the new changes that they haven't turned on yet, mentioned in 2.90. We'll have to see what happens when it's switched on for Frackers and Beacons after X scans.
I switched to the scanner layer, and I see it too, in the U.S. (I'll bet most people keep scanner and intel on the capture layer - so haven't noticed.)
Obviously some communication would be much too difficult…
I seem to have zero locally. I usually have 4. If it is to do with the scanning meter update, I wish they’d just force the update already.
Seeing that they switched around the AR spots in Pokémon Go, I'm not really surprised to see them changed.
This is my region today. There's still plenty of volatiles, but they aren't the hyper dense "one per S2 cell" that they were previously.
Perhaps they just reduced the number of volatiles to see whether this new method would help.
Not knowing how many portals are non-volatile in that image, I have no idea whether there are "plenty" or not, but the relative number of volatile portals to regular portals has dropped dramatically in my region. The small boost to Scout Controller given by some volatile portals made it worthwhile visiting small villages to scan the 2-3 portals they have, but now I'm not bothering to go out of my way.
It would be great to hear from Niantic about what's happening. Speculation is great, but it's nothing more than guesswork.
Roughly 21,000 portals in view.
It's fixed
Here's the area with them fixed.