Machina analyzed as a species population

DrHydrosaurDrHydrosaur ✭✭✭✭
edited March 2023 in General

I am starting to look at Machina as like a species. A population of a certain animal is a continuous balance between various forces that can in unread or decrease the population, especially:

  • birth/growth
  • deat(h)
  • predation
  • food/resource availability

Depending on how these forces balance a population may flourish until it takes all the local resources, reach an equilibrium balance or cycle between births and deaths, or collapse to a population too small to sustain itself and then go extinct.

For Machina, birth/growth is a combination of the initial appearance of a first red portal in an area and expansion by linking to a neutral portal. Predation is when we attack and destroy a red portal, and food/resources are the local neutral portals.

When Machina first emerged, portals would decay to 0%. This meant that in the absence of agents, the population of red portals could reach an equilibrium where it would not capture every neutral portal in an area.

But lately it appears to me that decays to zero have become so rare that I expect they just don’t happen at all. With no agents in an area that means it becomes inevitable for Machina to grow almost exponentially and eventually capture every last neutral portal in an area. With unblockable links, that then makes a web of red links also inevitable. And with near exponential growth, even a single red portal left alone will inevitably recover to total domination unless agents are there to control them.

This dynamic resembles a cancer to me. It’s certainly not killing the game in my local area but it certainly looks like it has become a problem in some.

I don’t know why Machina portals have stopped dying by “aging”. Perhaps this is related to the upcoming MZFPK anomaly with Niantic trying to get Machina up to a large enough size and threat that we can then be called to defeat it, after which it becomes a less aggressive.

If that’s not the case though, and Machina portals are intended to stop dying as a permanent “feature”, it seems inevitable to me that areas with high portal to agent ratios/densities will succumb to Machina. In those areas, the main gameplay will be agents v Machina. Some will enjoy that. I expect most will not.

Machina portals need to have a mechanism for self deat(h) to avoid this.

Wildlife population management is a scientific field for a reason. It’s hard. Hopefully Niantic is up to the challenge of making Machina be balanced in a variety of local portal and agent conditions.

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