What is going on with Mission Day at Sea and Sojourner/Special Badges/Paid Fees?
This morning I heard that participants of next month's Mission Day at Sea will be able to pay Niantic a $5 USD fee for a special event badge and to keep their sojourner badge ticking throughout the event, despite the fact that participants will not be hacking a portal once a day. (There was some early talk of having a portal on the boat, but apparently that cannot happen due to technological reasons.)
First and foremost, there should not be a badge for this event; the badge is the Mission Day itself. Badges that are going to be associated with events need to be announced up front, not after the event is already booked and closed.
Secondly, did Niantic learn nothing from the players after their recent decision to start charging for anomalies after people already signed up? Fees need to be assessed up front, not after people have already spent hundreds of dollars on air travel, the cruise ship room fees, etc. It may only be $5, but it's not okay to keep doing this to your players.
And finally and perhaps most importantly...putting aside how insulting this is to players who have gone out in horrible weather conditions to keep their Sojourner going, or lost theirs from going on vacations that don't have portals, it also raises another point in my mind...if Niantic can extend Sojourner for these participants, why aren't they offering to do it for the agents that have been erroneously banned and then reinstated?
During the most recent ban wave, several people I know including a few local agents were banned for about 36-48 hours, and then had their bans overturned; Niantic made a mistake and hit a false positive for these agents. Yet, none of them have had the option to have their sojourner extended. They lost 1000+ day hack streaks.
Can they pay Niantic $5 and get it back? If not, why not? Were they not also unable to hack a portal due to a technological issue that they had no control over?
This is all wildly inconsistent and in my mind, hypocritical. We've been asking for consistency from Niantic in terms of how events are run, how exceptions are handled, for years now, and we continue to not get it.
Comments
I want to add my vote to your complaint about something that doesn't affect you at all and is optional to the game.
My friends who were erroneously banned and lost their Sojourner affects me.
The best I can do is 90 days to going on non-Niantic cruises frequently, so I just gave up. I cruise 3-4x a year so it's just not possible to get the medal.
OP has many valid points - it needs to be offered to everyone for other reasons as well.... even though it's basically paying to get around the spirit of the badge in the first place.
SMH
I really doubt everyone there will be paying the $5 for the sojourner part of it. Several of those attending are badge fiends or are wanting to do something new. I want to attend, but I’m not as [avoiding more appropriate terms] upset by this by not having the chance as you seem to be.
You have one sole valid point about allowing others to have the option to pay to keep sojourner going, but obviously this is a unique event they’ll potentially look at sanctioning again in the future.
Has Niantic ever announced additional badges during anomaly date announcements, particularly character badges or the recent Osiris victory badge, up front often? I recall many of those were only announced around a month before the events. I feel this is *consistent* with their previous event handling.
Eh, I don’t feel this is as big of an issue as you want it to be. It’s in addition to the mission day itself that people will be already doing. It’s more like a character card “upgrade” with one additional perk. Now if it was a requirement to get the normal Mission day badge upticked or unlocked? Then you would have a better argument. The way it sounds that $5 isn’t a required payment to attend the Mission Day at Sea, rather completing the required number number of missions.
They just announced the badges yesterday, so it's not like badge collectors could have known that was coming. That's not the crux of what I'm upset about anyway. Simply put, I want my friends & fellow agents who had their sojourners interrupted by Niantic's false positives to have them reinstated. Obviously Niantic can do it if they want to, as evinced by the fact that they're offering that to the agents on this cruise. The fact that they don't offer it to erroneously banned agents is seriously insulting.
It's a Niantic sanctioned event so there has to be a way to keep Sojourner working for days when they are at sea. Making it a paid option and giving a medal as an incentive for that is an incredible idea and will encourage more participation if the event happened again in the future. Personally I would be all over this if I didn't have school-aged children to take care of.
I fundamentally disagree with that. There were people who attended Navarro, which was another sanctioned Niantic event, but had phone/signal issues and couldn't hack. They didn't get squat with regards to their Sojourner.
The rule is one hack every 24 hours. If you're willingly choosing to go on vacation on a place that doesn't have a portal, that's on you. And again, if Niantic is willingly overriding this for these agents, then they should be willing to override it for folks who lose their Sojourner based on Niantic's false positives.
@NianticBrian @NianticAkshay Hi Brian / Shay, hope I'm in the right forum. My question most of my RES friend in other location got Osiris badge. I'm very active in my location/cell. In fact I'm always top in my cell. Any reason why I did'nt get the osiris badge? Thank you.
Did you participate in any of the Prime series anomalies (Cassandra Prime, Recursion Prime, Darsana Prime, Abaddon Prime) and gained that anomaly badge? Were you RES at the time the Osiris badge was awarded? Those were the qualifying criteria to be awarded the badge.