Request: a more dynamic gameplay environment
Disclaimer: I've posted this suggestion on the Ingress Prime Feedback subreddit previously, but only as a comment on other posts. I'm making this post as a way to consolidate my thoughts on this idea in one place. I'm interested to hear what people think about this idea, if you can bear to read the entire novel. :)
This is a proposal for a new gameplay mechanic which will address a legitimate complaint that many agents have about the way Ingress currently works. The TL;DR is:
* Accelerate reso decay for portals which are anchoring long links.
Although this sounds simple at first blush, there are several details to this proposal. Multiple times on the Ingress subreddits, people have suggested different ways that the game could help agents who are stuck under fields which persistently cover entire cities or regions, preventing creation of new links and fields. Hence the problem statement:
* Large persistent fields covering entire cities or regions inhibit gameplay for agents who live/work/play in the affected area.
Background:
Look, I'm a fan of megafields. It's an aspect of this game which is really special and unique IMO. Getting a bunch of people, many of whom don't know each other, to work together to create something for the good of the faction, with most of them receiving no personal benefit, is just fun to see. With so many possible things lurking out there to prevent an op from succeeding, actually seeing that mega go up means that you struck a nice combination of being lucky and being good.
I'm also a fan of the counterfielding metagame. Predicting probable lanes that your opponent may use, and making an effort to prevent them from being used. Also known as employing strategic blocking links.
What do these concepts both have in common? Several things... Strategic play, remote portals, long links, and unfortunately, gameplay stagnation. In some places, megafields are practically a permanent feature of the game board, inhibiting play since they prevent linking. In other places, the counterfielding strategists are so good and dedicated to their craft that it's nearly impossible to pull off a megafield. While it's easy for the folks in control of these scenarios to sit back and say, "tough luck, get good," such stagnant situations are not good for the health of the game and its player community, especially when attempting to keep new players engaged in the game.
Proposed solution:
1) Borrowing from Pokemon Go, when a resonator decays fully, instead of going to 0% and completely dying, it bottoms out at 1% and stays there until someone visits it and kills/flips it (or recharges).
2) Resos on unlinked portals decay at the same rate as they do today.
3) Resos on linked portals decay at a rate which increases with the length of the longest link secured by that portal. A portal securing only a 20m link will decay at pretty much the same rate as if it was unlinked. A portal securing a 6000km link will decay very quickly. What is "very quickly?" See below for one idea of how to calculate the decay rate. The intel map should show the current decay rate/interval. We shouldn't have to guess at this.
4) For the purposes of supporting links, a 1% reso acts the same as an empty reso slot. So no incoming links unless the portal has 8 resos above 1% health, and existing links disappear if the portal does not have at least 3 resos above 1% health.
Other proposed solutions that I've read, and why I don't think they're complete:
1) Allow linking under fields. I really don't like this idea, just because making an area unlinkable is a really cool aspect of game strategy IMO. Want to clear an area of links? Field over it and blast away. Please don't change this key game mechanic.
2) Accelerate decay of portals based on the MU or area that their fields are covering. This is a partial solution, as it doesn't address the issue of permablockers. Also, decaying anchoring portals to **** will result in the loss of ownership of durable portals just because someone dared to use them one time. More on this later.
Benefits of this proposed solution:
1) Longstanding megafields will be much more difficult to maintain, encouraging more dynamic gameplay.
2) Longstanding blocking links will be much more difficult to maintain, encouraging more dynamic gameplay.
3) Those expensive / difficult to reach portals that are prized by the small percentage of the playerbase who value them will not be wasted. Using one for an op will not run the penalty risk of it quickly going to neutral.
Side effects of this proposed solution:
1) No longer need to perpetually keep those hard portals charged. Just charge them up when you're ready to use them.
2) Creating megafields probably gets a whole lot easier since there will be fewer static hard blocking links. But it still requires precise teamwork since that long base link isn't going to last forever! This hopefully encourages the creation of megafields and more participation opportunities.
3) Existing players in the megafielding game will gripe because no one likes it when someone moves your cheese.
4) Agents who live in areas of very low activity will have the opportunity to gain AP faster by refielding their own area more frequently. (Details on this are spelled out below.)
5) Agents who live in areas of very low activity who want to work on their deploy and capture stats will not be able to pad those stats without some interaction with the opposite faction. They will no longer be able to rely on decay alone to help get more deploys/captures.
Details:
The decay rate itself
The easiest way to convey the decay rate is in terms of how long a reso will take to go lose 100% of its energy. So instead of using the rate as a measure, I'll refer to time (T) instead. The normal decay time is 1 week. In order for this to be a meaningful and impactful change, I think that a max-distance link (currently 6881km) should result in a decay time of 5 hours. Let's refer to the distance parameter as D: the length of the longest link secured by that portal. So I have 2 fixed points: D(0) = 1 week, and D(6881) = 5 hours. Linear interpolation between those two points doesn't work very well because even a 1000km link still takes 6 days to decay using that method. Using a log function works quite well though:
T(D) = 168-(ln(D+1)*163/ln(6881+1))
A 2km link doesn't hurt much, dropping the decay time to 6.2 days.
A 5 day decay time happens around 12km.
At 100km, your decay time is cut in half.
~650km will drop you to 2 days.
~2500km -> 1 day.
And a max length link of 6881km? 5 hours. Use it or lose it. :)
Information display
I mentioned earlier that "The intel map should show the current decay rate/interval. We shouldn't have to guess at this." In order for this idea to work, the decay would need to happen at much more frequent intervals than the current interval of 24 hours. In Pokemon Go, you can sit and watch the "motivation" of a high-CP pokemon drop in real time. Even if real time is not a realistic option for updating the energy levels of all the resos in the game, a minimum interval of something like 10-15 minutes would be needed in order for this to work. Or maybe drop it in real time in 2% (5%?) increments? I have no clue about what would be a realistic way to implement this once the game is switched over to the new back-end platform.
Why the 1% floor is important
I think that simply accelerating decay without having a floor is a bad idea because, typically, portals of high strategic value are very difficult to get to. The difficulty can be due to it being physically challenging to reach the portal (hiking/camping/climbing), or due to rule-based access limitations (escort required, restricted hours, etc.), or due to monetary cost (remote islands, etc.). Seeing those portals decay very rapidly and then go neutral just because someone dared to use (i.e., link to) them would be a shame. The reward for the effort expended to capture such a portal should be that your team gets to keep control of it until someone from the other faction answers the challenge, not just until someone in your faction decides to use that portal one time.
The refielding paradigm
This change would provide a windfall of AP and links/fields created for agents who live in areas of very low activity. Consider the following sequence:
1) Field your area. I'm assuming the links are short, so the decay is not noticeably accelerated.
2) After 7 days, the resos are all at 1%, and all links are gone.
3) Give each portal a tiny "recharge all" so that all resos are bumped up from that 1% floor. Now they are all linkable again.
4) Link and field.
5) After <1 day, the resos will all be back at 1%, and all links are gone.
6) Goto 3).
What about unique caps?
Now, what about agents who love getting unique captures? Under this proposal, instead of grey portals, you'd likely come across lots of "1%" portals, half of which you can't capture because they're already owned by your faction. Really old 1% portals might even be at level 8 with no empty mod slots, which would make it hard to complete missions. To solve this problem, a new gameplay mechanic would be needed. I think that a hackable item that allows you to "steal ownership" of a friendly portal would be fun. :) Using it would give you credit for a unique cap and would count as a capture when doing a mission that requires a portal capture. Agents who prioritize either unique caps or missions would need to save up these inventory items, but agents who don't care about them would in all likelihood be happy to donate theirs to the agents who want them. If the notion of character skills were implemented as described here (https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/comment/5499#Comment_5499), then skills could be provided to increase the chance of hacking such items and to store them without taking up inventory space. Or maybe a skill which allows you to use it a finite number of times before it's consumed, instead of just once.
Anyway, thanks for reading. I'm hoping for great things in this new universe. :)
-batteryAClD

Comments
"A hackable item that allows you to steal ownership of a friendly portal" exists and is called a virus.
There is a very simple way to prevent a remote portal that was hard to capture from becoming neutral from decay: Recharge using a key.
A portal that no one cares for (i,e, that is not recharged regularly) should go neutral. The XM of that portal will not be aligned with either faction if no faction cares for it actively.
I liked this one, not because I necessarily agree with the solution, but because I think there are issues here (long-standing large fields and their effects on gameplay and cell score, and the use of extreme PITA portals in general) that need looking at, and Ingress' game designers could benefit from reading said post then bickering about it over beer.
By "steal ownership" I mean that it would change just the "owner". The virus has more varied uses, and is not a scalable solution for someone who wants to get, say, 50 unique caps in an area where everything is same-faction owned and at 1%. As soon as you flip a portal, it's at 100% health, so you've got to use a virus and a bunch of weapons on each portal. The idea is to mitigate the downside of having portals that stay alive at 1% in areas where no one plays. The item I'm proposing ought to be "rare" and not "very rare".
I would argue that it's not really fair to the player base though if the accelerated decay idea would be implemented on its own. If I have a remote portal that I care about and I've been keeping charged a couple times a week, and then someone hangs a very long link off it, it might go from 100 to dead before I check in on it to recharge... This is with no one attacking it.
I'm seeking an approach which helps with a big problem in the game (stagnation), but does not throw things out of balance too much.
For those who don't like the idea, let's discuss what exactly you don't like about it. Personally, I'm looking at this as a way to increase player engagement. :)
I wouldn't mind increasing portal decay speed for portals that have links or fields based on field size or number of links etc. Portals with links and fields are valuable. Firstly, the fields mu counts for your team. Secondly, links and fields make a portal more difficult to attack because of the bonus they give to shields.
So, in my opinion it would be okay to require players who want to keep those portals alive to spend more XM on recharging.
I don't see the need to prevent portals from decaying. If no one is interested in spending XM to keep the portal alive, it will go neutral. That's the expected outcome.
Whilst not a full solution, I personally would love to see the scoring system changed from the current Mu-only setup to one which encompasses as much of the other 99% of game play as possible as well.
As it stands, there are very few players who're able to do anything meaningful to the cell score on a regular basis. You've got to be in the right area, with the right transport, and have sufficient free time to be able to play that particular game. with many otherwise very active players effectively ruled out of it completely due to life circumstances. Locally, we've got some amazing non-driving players on both sides who do some awesome stuff but none of it's scored in any meaningful way, and their weekly efforts can be eclipsed by one of the local drivers (such as myself) hopping in the car for 30 minutes and lobbing a few links. IMHO, this is daft and renders the scoring system irrelevant for anything other than the bragging rights around having a BAF in a contested area make a check point (or otherwise).
For my money, moving the scoring goalposts away from "chuck a couple of layers over a town" and towards "capture, link, and field the portals within the town" would give a much more achievable target for players to aim at, and would reward activity by those who simply cannot play the Mu game.
Okay, so that's not going to deal with long standing large fields. To handle that, it's going to take a combination of measures.
First off, I very much think that decay rates should be linked to some aspect of field size. For technical simplicity and server load reasons, the chances are it'd have to be a case of linking portal decay to the amount of Mu hanging off the portal. However, in an ideal world I'd like to see it linked to the number of neutral and enemy portals fielded over, combined with the Mu - in other words, it's easier to field over yourself than it is to field over the enemy.
Second, as much as it pains me to say it, I think key duplication in Quantums needs to end. By all means go to a remote portal and hack a ton of keys, but when they're gone they're gone and you've gotta go back. It's just too easy otherwise.
Lastly, I personally think Niantic need to take a look at what level of public access is fair when it comes to portal locations. IMHO there's a very definite line between "difficult to get to, takes some planning, but it's fair" access and "haha, you and your team just can't get this in any reasonable timeframe, if at all", and the latter really has no place in Ingress because the potential for abuse* is too great.
* Yeah, I know a lot of us use such portals responsibly and in a manner that doesn't damage the game ... but there are those who don't, and it's
I agree that additional cell-level scoring metrics and leaderboards would be a great addition. IIRC, this request has been brought up in previous AMA(s) and received a favorable response.
That's certainly an interesting wrinkle - in essence, to have fields destabilize faster if they are covering enemy territory. Sounds like fun. :) It does sound computationally expensive too, but that's not our problem. hah
I also agree that key duping is OP. I always believed that the original dupe rates for viruses and AXAs (and VRLAs) was way too high, and that it threw the "item economy" out of ****. But hey, everyone had the same rule book, so I made hay while the sun was shining! Same for keys now. From a game balance perspective, the key dupe rate is OP. Doesn't mean that I'm not happy to leverage it though. :D
On your last point, I disagree. I think the current rules for portal eligibility are about as black-and-white as we could expect, assuming that all clarifications issued by Niantic are accounted for. Once you start trying to define how "hard" is too hard, then there are just too many arguments to be made in a huge variety of specific situations.
How does making people recharge anchor keys several times a day solve the problem of people trying to play under permafields?
A few crazy thoughts:
boost XP for actions taken under a friendly field.
Score fields based on percent of portals underneath the same color -- make septicycle scoring a game the whole family can play.
A badge for MU smashed to encourage people to take out the big fields.
I'd love it if there was a cell vs cell score.
Number of resistance dominated cells vs number of enlightened dominated cells vs neutral cells with no fields.
That’s the whole point. It would make permafields less permanent. It would certainly be possible to keep them alive, but doing so would require more time/resources/coordination than it does today. Some percentage of those permafields/blockers would drop, either by choice or accidentally, allowing more people to fully participate in the game.
I've just ranted about it, but essentially proposed the same. Here.
TL;DR
"The more valuable an entity is, the more effort should be made to keep it."
It translates to:
For example, if a field is multi-million-MU, with multi-thousand-km long links, with ends protected by 4xAegis, it would decay in mere minutes, requiring coordinated teams with constant attention to keep it recharged and up.
Hundreds-MU, hundreds-of-meters-long links/fields with C/R shields from mid-level portals would see little to no change.
The beauty of it is that there is no need to favour any faction, no need to buff/nerf any mod, glyph hacking or frackers, does not block any construct and is finely and self tunable.
@Flyingfenix I disagree. Megafieds should not punish those making them. Intead they should reward their effort. There's no point in building a megafield if its anchors will decay "in mere minutes" what the hell.
People spend money and time to throw BAFs and keep them. And to lift those, other people should also spend money and time to get to the anchors, instead of hoping that the game rules will help. And it should stay this way.
Some of your proposals sound good, but not those punishing BAF creators.
i like the idea of more mu more decay.
But not the 1% floor.
Everyone involved in creating a megafield was already rewarded... The illuminator medal, the AP and the other stats already granted. If you invested effort, time and even money in coordinating the creation of a megafield, you can surely coordinate more effort towards keeping it charged.
Letting a megafield stand the natural rate of decay is backwards, it only spoils gameplay for everyone else not fortunate enough to travel, spend a lot of time, or simply haven't levelled up to the point that can make any difference. Both factions included. Or do you think that living under illuminated skies only affects the opposite faction? Most players just want to play in their areas and aren't interested in the grand scheme of things. But they can't, because there is a permafield with unreachable anchors over them for weeks or months on end.
What do they do? They stop playing. This is what you want?
Surely, my proposition is not meant to be perfect, not even by far, but it is a fair try at suggesting something that could address many issues lingering since the first days of Ingress. What is your take on these issues?
In the end, I reiterate. The more valuable an entity is, the more effort should be required to keep it.
@Flyingfenix
Everyone involved in creating a megafield was already rewarded... The illuminator medal, the AP and the other stats already granted.
Creating a megafield for Illuminator medal is a one-time thing. You can pick up all those newbies without the medals yet, create a plan for couple dozen layers 1M+ MU each, and let them cover. There's no point to create next megafield if we talk about getting the medal.
Creating a megafield for AP? Why even? In our city we have parks containing like 50+ portals each which you can link in some cool multilayer field and get couple hundred thousands AP in two hours. So that's not an option.
I will say what we're creating megafields for, over and over again. It's because of control, showing off and asserting dominance. If the other faction has found a way to take our field down, we try to make our anchors even less reachable. That's what for people keep coming to the least accessible places, and not for AP or another million to their Illuminator which already counts hundreds of millions. We teach our newbies that those coverings are prestigious, so there's no problem with people saying "lift the fields because I wanna play", at least in our faction :D
It will be really hard to propose a change that will not make people like us eventually say "ok now there's no point to continue creating BAFs because the game itself is against me, bye".
If you have the time, money, and will to cover, you naturally should be more effective and the game should reward you more. It's like skill in shooters: you have aim and gamesense which came from time and effort spent - you dominate. What some of your propositions are now trying to do is to blur the border between hardcore players and those playing only on busses or after work by altering the game rules. That's the problem.
I believe that instead of only making covering pointless and not rewarding, you should consider altering multiple parameters to achieve both things:
The problem is when the dominance is so strong as to make the game unplayable for everyone else including the same faction. While some players can be reasoned with ("please don't field over the entire city, you've already proven your point"), sometimes people just don't care about anything else besides themselves.
And reasoning like "get good, organize and take the fields down" fails in many cases because the opposing faction never existed in any meaningful level because of said dominance and will never exist until somehow the field (environment) is playable again. Oh, and since it is so easy to maintain the megafield, especially in areas strongly stacked against one faction, any meaningful damage is repaired easily.
Total dominance over an area without any credible challenge is simply boring and adds nothing to the game.
Yes, we are on the same page here. I remember when I first started playing: 1) being disappointed by how quickly "all my hard work" of fielding a 7-portal area could be undone by a higher-level agent, and 2) how quickly a well-equipped higher-level agent could wipe out a fielded area in which I could barely make a dent!
The early realization that nothing lasts very long in this game was part of the appeal of the game. As I kept playing, my strategy evolved, as did many other veteran agents'. IMO, the advanced (winning) strategy has become too simple to implement, leading to the stagnation / tilted playing field that you're talking about.
The underlying premise of my proposal is that the game is more fun when it's more dynamic. These proposals probably don't make sense if you don't agree with that underlying premise. :)
Although I think decay in "mere minutes" is too extreme. :) Give those agents to celebrate their accomplishment! Personally, 5 hours seemed right to me, at the very extreme end of the spectrum.
I would take it one step further and remove the recharge mechanic entirely.
I definitely agree with the bit about "durables" - some are just obscenely inaccessible, to the point that they're detrimental to the quality of the game. Whoever happens to have access benefits dramatically, and if only one side can do it, the other is up a creek without a paddle.