Didn't realize ingress was about staying at home and how many phones you got
(This is just my experience and might be different in other regions but it's still quite frustrating)
I began playing ingress earlier this year to go outside more often and finally get myself some exercise every now and then. Like riding a bike not just for the sake of biking and this game seemed perfect at first. There are always more portals to visit and larger fields to build.
However I soon noticed that hardly anyone around here plays this way. Take a walk to gather items? Nah I'll just farm my 3 house portals. Building up a home zone, keeping important portals recharged? Nah why bother, got my trusted house portals. Building fields? Let's just connect our house portals, no one has to move an inch for that ****. And this goes for both factions, although my opposing faction happens to be worse offender.
Obviously there is some movement (albeit by car mostly) but it all boils down to the same handful of portals every time despite the surprisingly high portal density in my area. The worst ones even use slave accounts for upgrading and continued farming. Slave account as in: a "new" player gets boosted to level 8 as fast as possible only to have its existence immediately reduced to upgrading the same house portals at any time without ever appearing in COMM again.
I actually tried to keep this kind of farming down since it appeared so easy at first to just destroy the same few easy accessible portals whenever I pass them but it turned out to be impossible. All it takes is a few days absence or an event with increased deploy limit for permanent level 7 portals with just one slave account. Then they fill up their backpack accounts for weeks to come.
Of these backpack accounts I learned after asking one of them how he could keep on farming all day for my inventory simply can't hold that many items. "Can't do anything about backpack accounts, so might as well use them" as he put it.
Unsurprisingly, reporting for using multiple accounts didn't do anything.
I don't see how this game is supposed to keep new players if cheating is so damn easy and core aspects of the game like inventory management, resource gathering and creating fields can be trivialized by submitting every stick figure on a rock as a house portal. Ironically, the most annoying players are the ones staying at home all day. Just takes some guy with a car to bring them keys and put their items to use every once in a while.
I assume there would at least be something other than house portals to destroy if more people cared for AP... too bad the majority of remaining players in my area has little to no interest in that since they are long at lvl 16( need more incentive for recursion maybe?).
Now I understand that you can't prevent having portals within reach from player's homes or people using multiple phones for multiple accounts but there should at least be a diminishing return upon farming the same (few) portals over and over and over and over and over again.
Comments
Do you actually play under the name ForumAccount?
I created many rules for my own gameplay for preventing my scanner for thoses toxic players.
* Block the players who offended you in the comm
* don't give a **** for cargress, busgress and homeplayers who doesn't walk or biking on regular time (period event like IFS, anomaly doesn't count). It's such a pretty reductive gameplay.
* Report all those players if you suspect they are manipulating so many capsules to "gift" high items to other players who doesn't farm except when they received those capsules for just fire XMP or whatever. Yes, the last ban wave drowned so many profiles like those suspected for selling items.
* Focus on your gameplay, even when you play in group. If you play fair don't expect for others do the same way.
* Unfortunately, spoofers will always exist, don't give to them some attention in comm, except in the page report.
And some "my own rules" that I don't remember now...
If you look for cheating, you're going to see it everywhere (even where it doesn't exist). While a few bad apples can harm the experience for others, my advice is to play your own game, and team up with (or recruit) more players who don't cheat. It's actually pretty surprising how fast a small number of players working together can help turn the tide in an area. Over the course of 5 years of playing this game, I've seen strongholds shift factions numerous times. I've seen areas that were once very active go grey, while I've seen other areas that were once grey get active.
If you don't have others to work with, one of the amazing things about this game is that there are so many different ways to play it. If you're finding one part of the game tedious or you're getting worn down, do something different. At various times I've spent more or less time building/smashing, fielding, exploring/doing missions, and (*)working on individual stats.
If you see cheating, by all means report it, and try to communicate the value and importance of fair play to your community. But don't let others' cheating ruin your enjoyment of your game.
*Edited because apparently a word that starts with gr and rhymes with finding is censored on this forum?
I don’t see why you care if other players are lazy, or if they farm off the same portals all the time. If it bugs you so much, just smash the portals. If it’s super easy for the player to rebuild, smash it again and again just to diminish their hackmod supply. Furthermore, lazy players are precisely the easiest players to beat. Even an idiot can dominate an area if they’re will to put in the time and effort. Why not field over the player? They won’t be able to link anywhere, and will have to get off their **** if they want the field down. Multi-accounts can be annoying, absolutely, but I promise you that player isn’t having remotely as much fun as he would be if he was getting that help from another player. Adventuring out into the world, and community are the two very best things about this game. If someone chooses not to embrace them, they themselves are losing out. Let him sit in his corner with his three portals, and rot. Who cares?
No of course not. Just shows how easy it is to create multiple accounts.
I see some questionable activities here and there and you are right, not all people are cheater and there is always the benefit of the doubt. However, I simply refuse to believe that it is normal behavior for a new player to rush to level 8 in a few days just to immediately stop all actions that would generate COMM messages, yet continuously upgrades and does glyph hacks on the same few portals for months to come.
Glyph hacking is in my experience the first thing regular people avoid to do, yet these specific players seem to be enjoying it quite a bit despite not ever using any of the acquired items. I kept an eye on one of them and "she" (alleged girlfriend, if you ask the house portal's owner) went from 1.2m AP to no 3.4m life time AP without capturing a single portal. Funny thing is, if they enjoy glyph hacking so much, how come they won't recapture those house portals if the owner is not home? Always waiting for him to return, so they can upgrade and continue farming. At best there really is a girlfriend that created the account but it's clearly the owner who uses it, making it account sharing which is also considered cheating according to the Niantic player guidelines.
I found these slave accounts on both factions near me but sadly, reporting these accounts simply had no effect whatsoever. Seeing this **** on both sides is also what makes it hard for me to find others to work with. Most people seem to have accepted that farming around here is done via house portals and there is little one can do about it.
At first I didn't care really but this excessive usage of house portals in my area has produced some stupid effects:
First, there is little to destroy for AP. I walk around with 100 burster tops because hardly anyone builds (let alone maintains) stuff, occasionally a portal rich town center for ap but with little to no shielding or even high level resonators. Neither those or lone house portals require much firepower. There are towns with hundreds of portals (seem to have a very active OPR community at least) but the only fully deployed portals are a bunch House portals spread around. Not much fun for new players, the biggest value in bursters for me is the xm I get for recycling. Not to mention ultra strikes, these I use like once a month.
Furthermore, this causes cubes to lose a lot of their value. Not much to keep recharged + easy supply trivializes xm management. I actually don't have to look around on the intel very long to find regular homezones with people frequently going outside to gather xm and sometimes struggling to farm enough cubes on their own just like me. Not in my immediate vicinity though, no high level portal clusters or anything to maintain. Just house portals. This also reduces the value of turrets/force amps if cubes are abundant and seldom used.
Any permanent field in my cell is the product of connecting house portals. Rebuilding fields while sitting on the can 👌
Also, diminishing hack mod supply doesn't seem to work either. Been on it for months now and this week alone ( increased deploy event = easier high level HPs = I get to smash more often) I destroyed 18 HS/MHs of one guy simply by passing his two HPs when going to work and back home. For some reason, It's already a step up to not see very rare mods in both portals but usually not for long. I don't want so see cheating everywhere but I must wonder: How is it possible to regain these mods so fast, why are they even required. There was no big clearing operation or event or anything in those few days that would have drained a lot of items and yet there is more farming to be done.
Maybe that one guy grinds the anomaly gear for all other nearby agents or something. Made possible by house portals and a lot of additional accounts. Realy grinds my gears :S
Well, you said it’s lvl7 gear, so it’s not anomaly gear. But let get to the real matter at hand. You’ve openly admitted to having multiple accounts, now. Sure it’s easy to open additional accounts. Anyone would be stupid to think otherwise. I think you don’t like how the other players play. If your town is so empty, why aren’t you building it up? Why aren’t you covering these fools? Why are you complaining while using an alt account to do it. Hopefully you just got this second account banned by using it here.
No of course not. Just shows how easy it is to create multiple accounts.
So you literally just admitted you're cheating... On the Niantic forums. Where people like @NianticCasey can see it.
He won’t lose much. I just pinged it. It’s a lvl1 account with 0 AP. It still kind of ruins whatever argument he was trying to make.
That said, why is he hiding?
That account may not have much, but every other account ever used on the same phone, or same WiFI may be suspect.
True, but I don’t think Niantic ever really takes it that far. Primary accounts of multi account users never seem to get touched. Maybe they don’t investigate multiple accounts on single devices, or maybe they leave primary accounts alone under these circumstances, and just try to keep the cheating to a minimum without eliminating a fair portion of their player base. I suspect our numbers would drop too low if they banned every player that has ever had a backpack account. I don’t know the reasoning, but primary accounts do tend to weather the storm.
True, but I don’t think Niantic ever really takes it that far.
@AnimaIControI We had a number of people banned erroneously at one point because they were intermittent players who had borrowed a phone that a spoofer eventually got hold of and was using. Some got their accounts back, some chose to quit the game.
I'm glad someone said it. I'm warning level 2 and didn't want to take chances.
We did have a ban wave that appeared to have heavily effected intermittent players. In my area we had a home bound player with a couch portal we all tried to keep at lvl8 for him, a portal he could reach when at dialysis, and got to play lightly from the car in between, get caught up in that ban wave. I think whatever crazy coincidence caused a NUMBER of intermittent players to all use the same phone, and that same phone then found its way over to a spoofer... I seem to be at a loss of words. I think maybe you’re too close to this situation. Please know I assume you are a super nice person that anticipates the best out of people, so I’m going to tell you, I think someone is pulling your leg.