Feature request: Turn off and/or limit the nearby portal tiles

HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

I've been traveling a bit recently, and I've found myself in situations where I was 100+ or 1000+ km away from the tiles that showed up on my screen. That information is not helpful and is rarely interesting, and on the rare occasions when I want to know I can just look at the key. Not only is the information not helpful, though, but it sometimes obscures things on the screen that I want to see.

A friend posted a screenshot in a chat today with the same issue... his tiles were for things 5K and 10K km away. There are three things that I would love to have happen:

  1. Stop showing me tiles for things that aren't nearby
  2. Let me turn off "helpful" tiles completely
  3. Bring back the old navigate-to-portal functionality for times when info about a specific portal is useful

The first two would get rid of the annoyance of having unhelpful things obscuring the screen. The third would give us a useful feature that got lost with Redacted.

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Comments

  • ToxoplasmollyToxoplasmolly ✭✭✭✭✭

    By "tiles", do you mean the on-screen UI elements, towards the edges of the screen, that are displaying "nearby" portals? Where "nearby" seems to be defined as whatever the app happens to have cached at that moment.

  • MoogModularMoogModular ✭✭✭✭✭

    The tiles barely update. What if those tiles only displayed when near new portals you haven't discovered? Like not for portals on your screen but x km from you?

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited April 2022

    @MoogModular I think the best way to assess this is to think about the possible use cases. Some of them:

    I'm looking for portals I haven't discovered: I'm probably only interested if there's a significant number of them... I'm not going to go further than what I can see in the scanner for a single unique because that's not time-efficient.

    I'm aiming for a specific portal: In this case I really want navigate-to-portal. Having Niantic-selected ones pop up on my screen wouldn't be helpful unless they managed a really lucky guess.

    I'm curious about what's in the area: In this case, "Hey, there's a portal over here" might be a useful tile regardless of whether I've been there before or not.

    I'm doing a mission: The only tiles I want to see are for the next portal in the mission.

    On the flip side, the problem that I've been encountering is that tiles pop up and obscure the things I actually want to see. Look at @Engrish's screenshot above-- it's entirely possible that there's a portal hiding under the McMurdo Station Sign tile. I was struggling with similar cases recently when I was exploring areas that were new to me-- tiles kept popping up and blocking my view of portals.

    Basically, unless I've specifically selected a portal or I'm doing a mission I don't find much value in those popups, and they get in the way of gameplay. Random tiles for things that are nowhere nearby have no value that I've been able to identify.

  • oscarc1oscarc1 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Agreed, will add to that when I was doing missions for Second Sunday, the tile took over the area where the next portal was and until I got close enough the target mission portal was not visible at all. Though this may be of greater negative effect in a portal dense area.

    Don't think I've ever used that tile, would prefer to see it go or have an option for it to be switched off.

  • I see this happen briefly many times when I start up the app at home, because it takes a few seconds for it to refresh nearby portals, so it ends up showing me whatever is nearest in the cache until the refresh completes and there are portals onscreen again.

    I like the feature of auto-navving to the nearest offscreen portals WHEN THERE ARE NO ONSCREEN PORTALS. The problem is the refresh process is SLOW and is not being taken into account when these things are displayed. More to your situation however, when you are miles from any portals, it would make sense to have a settable radius that controls how far away is too far to be important.

    Hear hear for bringing back the explicit navigate to portal feature, I used that often before Prime and I rather miss it.

    While reading the above I thought that the issue was finding nearest portal that is decorated according to the current layer settings (or not decorated, which is how most people will probably use it). It basically becomes an open-world mission to visit/capture/etc new portals.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @oscarc1 I too have had mission portals obscured by those tiles. I think there are two problems right now-- one is that they current ones are buggy, and the other is that the concept doesn't really address any concrete use cases but it does make some legitimate ones more difficult. I'm thinking back over 8+ years at how many times I've found them valuable, and I'm not finding much.

    Part of the problem could be solved by limiting the distance at which those can appear. They should be no closer than scanner range and no farther than, say, 1-2 km.

  • Yes. This happens often and is annoying.

  • Most of the time for me, these only appear and point to random keys in my inventory, until my local area appears. I assumed they were still broken as ever.

  • ZeroHecksGivenZeroHecksGiven ✭✭✭✭✭

    I actually like these for one specific reason. Usually when I’m in a other app for a bit and then flip back to Ingress, these pop up first. If you click on one to see that portal, as soon as the XM appears at that portal, tap back to your main screen and now everything has loaded there as well.

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited April 2022

    Fix em or at least allow us to turn them off. Agree with most of above ^

  • starwortstarwort ✭✭✭✭✭

    it's entirely possible that there's a portal hiding under the McMurdo Station Sign tile.

    There certainly should not be a portal hiding under one of the tiles, because the tiles disappear if there is any portal on screen. I'm not saying there aren't bugs in the scanner (!) but this has been pretty reliable for me that as soon as a portal appears the tiles disappear.

    Now there could be a situation where there should be a portal there but it hasn't loaded yet. In this case the tiles do appear and I have seen this happen. But still, the problem there is that the portal hasn't appeared, not that the tile is hiding it - the portal still wouldn't be there even if the tile were not.

    All that having been said... I'm certainly not against having an option to turn the tiles off. In addition, if the tiles are there then they should show the actual nearest portals and not the random ones that are being selected at the moment.

  • DSktrDSktr ✭✭✭✭

    This is another perfect reason to have "Additional settings" sub-menu.

  • I used to be against this, because too many options is an indication of bad UI and a crutch instead of fixing them.

    I'm starting to think that's never going to happen, so they may as well option us up like the switches on the space shuttle.


  • I use them for @Hosette 's use cases:

    I'm looking for portals I haven't discovered

    and

    I'm curious about what's in the area

    For example, on a long trip, my husband drives, and I bide my time. When the tags are working, I can explore portals are along the route. I might find a park where we could stop on our way back. Or a nice town where we might have lunch next trip. I learn about the history of places we're passing. Admire art. Learn about their culture. I can look at different pictures on a portal, and give a thumbs up to get a clear one over a blurry one.

    Most times, however, the tags just point to the last keys I had out for charging.

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