Machina experiment has turned ingress into "Petrol vs Bots"
schatchaos
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While I welcome experiments to the Ingress game mechanics, keeping the game alive and kicking, some changes are killing the soul of ingress.
Current machina installation is one of these failed experiments.
Personally I see ingress as a "explore, build, field" GPS game. And a field is the finest outcome of your ingame work, no matter the size. And before machina, the opponent you were fighting in your quest for fields, was other players. Sometimes yourself doing a bad link, sometimes players from own faction, blocking a field you planned, but primarily the other faction, blocking, ****, fielding. But alway other people, which led to the social game ingress evolved to.
The only "score" in ingress has alway been MU score in your cell, where you could measure your faction against the other faction
Now came machina. First experiment rendered cities, even countries unplayable, and Niantic wisely rebooted, invented new mechanics (no crosslinks etc) and this is the machina we are facing at the moment.
In my area of play (Which is Copenhagen, capital area of Denmark) and my spheres of interest (Denmark, southern Sweden) fielding have becom almost impossible. Machina i taking over. Casual fielding, small MU and big MU... has become a "petrol vs bot" game, where you need hours of repeated travel to clean machina, and it is now virtual impossible to do clearing longer than 10km before machina has re-blocked. And fighting local faction is now a game of leaving portale grey, so machina can do crazy blocking 24/7 (normal agents work, eat, sleep, machina doesnt).
I have lost the ingress feeling of playing against other players. I do my ingress on bike, and I cannot keep up against machina and do casual fielding on my daily commute any more. We also stopped doing big coordinated MU OPS that brought faction together, because machina kills hours of preparation with crazy linking 24/7.
Please Niantic. Lets try a new iteration on machina. Machina in its current version is overpowered, and agents are tired playing against bots.
Kind regards
Agent schatchaos, RES L16, Denmark
Comments
Listen here and I'll tell you a secret. There is no need to fight the machine, it is necessary to systematically grab territories from it and defend them. The machine can't get through the triangle's links, which means what? This means that you must first capture one residential area, then another, then a third and hold them. You cleared a piece of territory and covered it from above with one triangle (preferably green, not blue))))). Then I attached another triangle to this triangle, then covered it all with an even larger triangle. What is the cause of your problem, I can not understand.
And as it is written in one wise book - according to your faith it will come to you! With faith in your soul, with a scanner in your hand, and with enlightenment in your head, you can cleanse this world of the red plague.
One sollution could be to let Machina able to capture but NOT link.
My point being I prefer to play against humans. I can (try to) guess their motives, their patterns of work, their dedication, their geography ... etc.
With machina its pure Lotto, and /dev/random is my enemy. Then I might as well play some couch-potato PC singleplayer game instead of this wonderful location-based multiplayer game.
So what about the machine? It is also predictable to the point of being impossible, it is easy to understand. By the way, it will not destroy your portals in the same way as the opponent does.
The machina is not subject to location obstacles (islands, closed amusementpark, poor phone reception ...) nor time constraints (work, sleep, real-life obligations ...) and that mixes poorly with us human oponents.
I guess Niantic needs to look at the numbers, and determine if the machina experiment is sucessful or not. You and I both expressed our thoughts, and hopefully it gave Niantic some insights.
By the way: I like when opponents destroy "my" portals (they are not mine, I just used them last). Thats the base dynamics in the game. Explore. Build. Field.
Perhaps our community manager will weigh in on this.
Game enhancement idea: Allow drones to remove machina from portals. After your drone has been on a machina portal for one hour you have the option to release a virus that severs machina's connection and neutralizes the portal without removing your drone.
Machina is just a spoofer that cannot be banned.
So I say, a truly brilliant and flawless opponent. Our battle will be epic and will go down in history!
I don't understand why you are so enlightened about the red faction. I think you live in a area that's easy to control, with the lack of opposition or even portals. I play in a area with a lot of trialmarkers and bike route markers (I declare them as coal but whatever) and had to do a big effort to get some areas total clean.
Or you dont care about the colours on the map.
How you feel about Machina is also influenced by how much time you have for the game. I'm retired and can devote hours a day to the game if I so desire. Having the time allows me to churn something like four hundred portals every week so there are no nearby red portals. So, for me, Machina is something I have to go out of my way to interact with. Though I have been blocked on a long link by it. On the other hand people with busier schedules are impacted far more because they can't maintain a large area and Machina overruns them.
I live in a city which has 200.000 population. We have many portals. Machine breeding is now good. But it's still not enough for everyone to get a medal of red portals.
You have to train Machina
Well spoken!
The goal is more activity from agents, more players, and more fun Ingress game against opposing faction, right?
Not exploding Machina, red cities, red links targeting and blocking human gameplay, hence tired/less agents? 🤷