Proposal for a better Machina strategy
This is a rewrite of something that is buried in comments.
I've been thinking about how I would implement Machina in a way that makes it valuable and interesting without being a nuisance, and I have the nucleus of a proposal. I am quite certain that there are some holes in the details but the principles feel pretty sound to me, at least for an initial draft.
My goals with this strategy:
- Give players who are alone in an area an opponent
- Minimize the risk of Machina becoming an annoyance in areas with active players
- Allow players in active areas the ability to fight against Machina if they want to
Let's start with some concepts. Machina strategies would be defined for an area on a per-septicycle basis. I'm not sure what S2 cell size I would use to define "an area" but probably something around L12. An area is active if a player of each faction has made at least one in-person change to the playfield in the area during a septicycle, or more than N players of a single faction have done so. I'm not sure what N would be because I don't have access to Niantic's data but it's probably countable on the fingers of one hand.
Concept #1: Machina may always capture grey portals. This should be done at a leisurely rather than an aggressive pace.
Concept #2: Machina may only link in an area that has no active players. This is the rule that reduces the annoyance of Machina linking randomly and blocking the ability of players to link and field. Like captures, Machina links should be done at a leisurely pace. As soon as a player becomes active in that area Machina is prohibited from linking during the rest of the septicycle and the one following it.
Concept #2a: Machina may link across area boundaries, but only into another inactive area.
Concept #3: In an area with only one active player, or a small number of players of a single faction, Machina can destroy any portal that is more than 50% decayed. For players in an otherwise inactive area this would allow them to have Machina become the opposing faction and give them something to do, but it would allow players to protect their portals by keeping them recharged.
That's the core of my proposal. In writing this up I think it could be improved by using the eight adjacent cells as a modifier for defining active. If there are a small number of Enlightened players in one cell but no Resistance players, and a neighboring cell has a small number of Resistance players but no Enlightened then both cells could be considered active because competition is available a short distance away.
To me this seems better than what we had before and it feels like it is more likely to address the concerns and needs of people who enjoy Machina as an opponent and also those who are frustrated by its aggressive linking. What do you think?
Comments
I have some concerns with that proposal:
#2: Linking in inactive areas is also a problem, not sure why you would make that distinction. For example, Namibia. No active players in Namibia, but several strategic portals that are being maintained. These have been blocked off with Machina links with no way of clearing them, rendering those portals useless.
#2a: Define "area boundaries"
#3: Machina should never be able to destroy portals. The risk of it destroying secure anchors is too great.
Your point about anchors in inactive areas is a good one.
Area boundaries: I was using the word area to mean S2 cell of a certain size, with the actual cell size TBD. Thus an area boundary would be an S2 cell boundary of size X.
The reason I suggested it should only be able to destroy portals that are more than 50% decayed is to allow teams to keep strategic anchors, but still allow that one person playing in a town to have an interesting experience. It would mean slightly more diligence for recharging strategic anchors but my experience is that it's rare for them to decay more than two days.
I can get behind #1 (captures only), although this was one that annoyed me most recently as a passenger unable to capture uniques because it's impossible to destroy and capture while on the move.
#2 immediately runs into the issue that even if machina only links in areas with inactive agents, it will be active agents who will use those areas to pass links through so it will still annoy active agents.
For #3, destroys are an absolute no-go in my book...
I like the agent activity of an "area" helping determine Machina activity.
What if we say the very earliest Machina reproduction rate is a "1", and it's most recent, most aggressive, is a "10".
Then, where agents are very sparce, Machina is 10. Where agents are very concentrated, Machina is a 1. With shades in between.
Still linking, and showing up randomly, but more concentrated / less concentrated based on the activity of live agents.
i would prefer the other way, very aggressive where there are a lot of agent, slow hippie in dead area.
so anyone can get some reclaimer
yes if alot activity then machina can be aggressive on spawn since it shouldnt be problem for the agents take care of it
Right, I said it backwards.
Niantic already has the code to make Machina go slow, or make it go fast. They'd just need code to:
(1) assign a level to agent activity an area / cell.
(2) Vary Machina's fast/slow setting based on agent activity level.
If Niantic is using S2 cells, that's definitely a big range where cell activity can be busy in one part and dead in another part. I think it's more on portal activity (which I don't know how they program it during Kureze and Kythera anomalies) for seeding machina portals. The spread might be similar to shard jumps if Niantic is using reliable coding as that hasn't changed for years.
Some areas with only one active team just cover areas with large fields so machina can never spawn. And with no competition the fields never get taken down so they never get in the way. Granted there's nothing to do but they've managed to keep the red portals out. Boring with no competition but it works for them.
I disagree on all these points
1)Machina can always capture gray portals, but they must then unload themselves if noone destroyed or a regular cleaning of the intel, say once a month.
Limit a maximum number for red portal per cell, no more than 10%.
Do not implement it in dead zones or with few players, the free zones are "used" by both factions as "corridors" for the fields
Making it easier to destroy, no L1 player could compete with dozens of L8 red portals.
The main activity of the game is fielding, several times I was crossed by Machina while I was fielding, and I felt like deleting accounts.
Spawn max one time a day, possible 0:00
Limit Machina to portals that have been captured by at least two different players in the previous year, in order to avoid portals that are difficult to reach
Absolutely no to portals or red links in isolated or peripheral areas, can you imagine a red link between two mountain or two islands? no one would take him down again
Absolute NO to the attack, many dormant players, available only for OP, do nothing but recharge their guardians once or twice a week, with the result that they too would unistall.
regular cleaning of the intel from red links, say once a month
They should be limited to high urban areas such as city centers or city parks, being careful that they do not leave those areas, usually both factions avoid covering city centers on purpose to give everyone a chance to play (there are some exceptions to this thing but luckily they are few).
IMPORTANT THINKS: Nia contact the most active players in a small area, perhaps a single cell, in order to test the machine before applying it everywhere
@MoogModular Ingress absolutely uses S2 cells-- the scoring regions are S2 cells. I know that it uses them internally for other things as well.
S2 cells have a range of sizes. A L30 cell is less than one square centimeter, and a L0 cell is 1/6 of the planet. I specified something in the ballpark of an L12 cell, which is roughly 2km on a side although cell sizes vary depending upon where they are on the planet. Something in that ballpark feels like a reasonably good size for determining whether an area is active or not.
Concept #1: Machina may always capture grey portals.
This isn't a new concept and it's what it does.
Concept #2: Machina may only link in an area that has no active players.
This is horrible because it sets up the precise issue for a lot of more strategic players. The links would always be in places where no-one else is, thus requiring distance travel.
Machina should only play in areas with players, not dead zones.
Concept #3: In an area with only one active player, or a small number of players of a single faction, Machina can destroy any portal that is more than 50% decayed.
Now I'm really lost as to how this would be considered an improvement by anyone?
The problem with Machina is it's one set of settings, for two apparent goals.
Goal 1: Give people with no opposition something to destroy.
Goal 2: Make it harder for people who do nothing but build big fields, because they have to clear the area.
If those aren't the goals, then whatever Niantic implemented isn't what they intended. Areas with lots of players don't need Machina. Areas with no players at all do not need Machina. Machina should begin to spawn in previously dead areas, when someone plays in them, then die off if that person stops.
Filling dead zones with links does nothing besides force someone unhappily to travel to an area that otherwise they wouldn't have to think about. That shouldn't be part of their goals.
This sort of set up meets a handful of goals:
Unless Niantic introduces strategic gameplay to manage Machina, it will continue to feel like an insurmountable and brute force task, trying to control it. It's find to "dial it to 11" every so often, for a cycle or two, but it should not be the norm for 3 months at a time. The fact that they have to choose to clear all Machina from the board, because players can't, should be an indication that their methodology is wrong.
Another alternative: give individual players the possibility of infecting portals with specific item: in this case the machine links could cross but:
1) they would originate links ONLY from the infected portal, and not from the "child" portals
2) limited possibility per player, let's assume a maximum of 3 active red portals in his name, and minimum level L12 per player (to prevent people from creating X accounts to cross-reference other people's files; the problem of shared accounts would remain but, in the long term, it would also be easy to discover and ban them).
3) the infected red "mother" portal would have the same decay rules as all the others, and after 7 days it should decay on its own (being red and non-rechargeable).
4) once the portals "mother" , registered to a player, has been destroyed, the portals "child", without links, should die in a few hours and return to neutral.
5) short links (max 500 meters).
IMPORTANT THINKS: Nia contact the most active players in a small area, perhaps a single cell, in order to test the machine before applying it everywhere.
In this case we will have a red portal assigned to a player who links (crossing) on "machina" portals that receive links without generating a forest of red links from which control is then lost and we would have a strategic use of the red links, those who like to break the red can create a potentially infinite farm of red portals near home and the chances of portal "mother" will be unreachable are few (and also if it is unreachable the natural decay solve the problem).
(sorry I wrote it twice but I can't delete old comments)
I'm talking about with regard to machina