Better way to do Hexathlon
First, thanks for Hexathlon. While it's not an anomaly, it's an event, and a new one. It's something new that was brought to the game, and that is a Good Thing.
But, IMO y'all really missed the opportunity with Hexathlon. Instead of 15 global locations all on the same day (for free), this is the kind of thing that you should make into a "pay on demand" event.
Buy the event for $100 (for Niantic to set up the scoreboard) in your local area. Limit of 1 per cell per month (per cycle?). It isn't dependent on faction, so there's no issue of crying that one side or the other is too dominant. It's not a faction-vs-faction event, so there's no harm in having one side or the other "own" the event.
You want revenue? Done. People will do them for the sake of having "official" events wherever they can get enough people together to justify the price tag. For those who are far from any kind of anomaly site, this allows the "event in a box" that so many players have asked for in the past.
I worry that by having the first Field Test, and now 2 series of free, badge-associated events, you may have shot your chance at monetizing this by setting the wrong expectations with the player base. But if the backend infrastructure can support this kind of thing AT ALL, here's a good path to recurring, significant revenue.
Comments
Very insightful
This would be an awesome opportunity for smaller cities and towns especially. I started ingressing when I lived in a town of 100k people surrounded by tiny towns and farmland. We got to be a connected cell once. We managed ONE visit by the van as it went between two bigger cities on the same highway we were on and it was a big hit. If we could have ponied up to sponsor a hexathlon, we would have drawn from all around the region for it, which would have helped locals network with other players from outside their immediate play areas. That's always seemed to make the difference for folks in wanting to be more involved with Ingress. Once it's more than making your neighborhood green or blue, it's so much more fun!
I'd have said "Pay $10 each month to buy into the scoreboard, must have at least 10 agents paid in advance for the next month to set it up" so that larger regions will generate more revenue, but less cost per person. With an option to pay more if you can't get 10 people, to bring it up to $100, but only people who buy in will show up.
That said, every time there's been a Hexathlon in Europe or Asia, the game has died hard. Running the event in thousands of cells worldwide at the same time, for a month, would not survive.
Great idea. Impossible to implement on the current servers, IMO.
@Perringaiden
Running the event in thousands of cells worldwide at the same time, for a month, would not survive.
But it seems to work for First Saturdays, in general.
The difference between First Saturday and Hexathlons is a constant leaderboard. Scores are done pre and post by hand by organizers for First Saturday. The only thing that Niantic does is check scores increased by more than 5k at the end of the event.
When the leaderboard tracking all 10 stats is run in a dozen places, the game suffers. Doing it worldwide would **** it under the current performance.
You're assuming it was the leaderboard that was causing the problem and not just some random server fault. There were also problems during the Umbra Anomaly where there wasn't a constant leaderboard. We will of course find out in less than 24 hours whether it's still an issue.
Time for the devs to get some extra experience in fixing some of those issues then.
The lag problems during events in the fall of last year were seen during the hexathlons and during the first Saturdays for some months and during the Umbra anomaly. The situation improved in first Saturdays since the Umbra anomaly. So the problems were general problems of increased activity and not specifically associated with hexathlon.
Sure, but staging more events at the same time causes it. We don't see it as bad during Anomalies right now, because they're so thin on the ground you never have more than one site at a time almost, and the Hexathlon issues were far far worse than any First Saturday ever was.
More traffic than FS, concentrated over very small area. Not good. Any kind of snarled traffic = problem.