@NianticBrian Since you are deciding to wait and see how things turn out over the next 2 weeks, I decided to do Niantic's job (for free as usual) and this is what I found...
(30 second per portal scan + 7 second per encode) x 200 scans = 7400 seconds
7400 seconds equates to roughly about 123 minutes which is basically 2 hours and 3 minutes. Of course when I talk about my initial numbers, I am talking about someone who works like a machine doing these scans. The actual time to do about 200 scans would be roughly about 2 hours and 30 minutes to about 3 hours (with short intervals in between the scans to rest up from this tremendously labor intensive task). Now of course I haven't taken into account the upload time, which I am going to leave out in this scenario for now.
So if you were to do 200 unique portal scans every 13 days for Scout Controller, based on the following tier requirements:
The Scout Controller medal tiers are:
Bronze: Scout Controller on 100 unique Portals
Silver: 500 unique Portals
Gold: 1,000 unique Portals
Platinum: 5,000 unique Portals
Onyx: 15,000 unique Portals
It would take you about 1 day to get the Bronze medal, 39 days for the Silver medal, 78 days for the Gold medal, 390 days for the Platinum medal, and finally 780 days for the Onyx medal.
If you just look at these numbers, and I believe that is what you probably did, things may seem reasonable to you given how long it usually takes to g r i n d Onyx tier badges in Ingress.
But what you seem to either overlook or fail to understand here is that these are the numbers of days required to get the said tier badges for scans completed on unique portalsAND you need to be a scout controller on the said portal to actually get credit.
Lets assume there were about a 100 active agents in my area and there are about a 100 portals. Every agent has claimed a portal as their own. They have all been going after the Onyx Scout badge so all their efforts have been focused on doing 6000 scans on the same portal every 13 days. This means they have at least 400-600 Scout Controller points on the said portal. This is where things get complicated. Assuming I am 1 of those 100 agents who would like to get the Scout Controller medal, that means I would require to claim Scout Controller status on all those portals. This is NOT going to be possible due to me being limited by 200 scans every 13 days and the fact that the Scout Controller status already belongs to a different agent. So what could have been achieved in 1 day (the Bronze tier medal), may not even be possible to achieve for at least a year now, maybe more. This is just one of the issues with the requirements.
Another issue is that not all cities around the world has 15,000 portals. This basically says that you expect agents to travel around and gather extremely labor intensive data for your research purposes. Practically speaking, no one is really going to travel just to do portal scans. If I am traveling I might as well focus my time on capturing and/or hacking unique portals AND doing mission banners. Plus even the cities that do have 15,000 portals, how on earth do you expect agents to keep track of which portals they scanned on day 1 when they are getting close to day 390? Additionally, @HeterTheMoth has already covered some of the other issues with this.
If you do expect Agents to claim Scout Controller status on a said portal then I fully support what @TheAuraStorm suggested in terms of what the tier requirements should look like:
Bronze: 50
Silver: 200
Gold: 500
Platinum: 1000
Onyx: 2000
Keep in mind, getting to the Onyx tier with these requirements is still going to take about a year - which is about the same time as Scout Onyx would take - and would still be equally hard to achieve. Requesting anything more than this is you being greedy because we (Ingress players) have been doing your dirty labor intensive work (example: Wayfarer/OPR) for years now. Not because we love Niantic but because we love Ingress as a game and the wonderful community that it has built up into over the years.
Again, I thank you at Niantic for constantly trying to bring newer features to the game, but I would wholeheartedly appreciate if you actually listened to the player base and take our suggestions seriously when it comes to making certain goals achievable in a realistic way. I sincerely hope that you ponder over all the suggestions provided in this thread and use them to revise the badge tier requirements when you get to it in about 2 week. Thank you!
Please consider fixing Dronenet to have the same field of view (or larger) than the regular Scanner View. First, it IS a Drone, and is higher up in the air than your Scanner, thus should be able to "see" further. Second, trying to fly a Drone in a suburban or rural area is next to impossible because the Portals are more widely spaced, and you get " stuck" frequently when the next Portal on the horizon is not in view, and you can't fly very far.
An excellent post, and I totally agree with the sentiment. However, I understand the idea of making this a much harder badge than the Scout badge. With that in mind I would suggest doubling the suggestion of @TheAuraStorm , making the tiers:
Bronze: 100
Silver: 400
Gold: 1000
Platinum: 2000
Onyx: 4000
As a result, this would be a difficult badge which would take a dedicated agent several years to achieve. But it would not be so difficult as to make us give up trying..
@NianticBrian if you are so desperate for this kind of data, instead of wasting your time proposing an unachievable free labor task, why don't you add it up into pokemon go and allow a random encounter appear from each unique pokestop scan? Put a rare pokemon with a special move in the mix and enjoy literally millions of players doing scans. It a good fit to finally release the Pokemon Kekleon (who can turn invisible as camouflage). Change the other available pokemon in a couple of weeks like the eggs, so people won't get bored.
The same kind of approach can be added to Harry Potter wizards unite, merging the job with gameplay feature. I'm ingress however, it just free labor in change for a badge (something that most people don't care this much).
You wish. They need that kind of data to improve the AR in all games, is even more useful there than in ingress right now.
You was the first one to complain when scanning was release and said it was useless and that would only help Catan so you won't do it. How's the tables turned, huh?
@NianticBrian Only write about portal scanning are for new AI map in Ingress Prime Niantic work on. I dont read nothing about Pokémon GO and Harry Potter.
I'll add to this with my most recent experience. I went for a 10km walk this morning and managed to scan a total of 21 unique portals (21 scans in total) - before my battery pack and phone both ran out of power. 1 day for bronze if you have good density, but it'll take me a few days to get to bronze, especially as I've spaced out my scans to 15-20 per day just so I don't have to burdened doing 200 in a single session.
Power and time is not limitless unfortunately, neither is performing tasks that yield absolutely no reward (when every other action does).
This is a perfect suggestion. Let the Pokemon Go players do all the scans and reward them with rare Pokemon encounters, the implementation of the scans are going to benefit them instead of Ingress agents anyway, plus the userbase is so much more massive that you'll end up getting all the data you desire. This is called 'knowing your audience', Ingress agents are not the target market for this.
However, of all the dedicated Pokemon Go players I know, none have bothered with scanning. Even from the dedicated group of Pokemon Go Wayfarers (of those that remain), none care about scanning either. Pushing this functionality is just beating a dead horse.
Getting to 15,000 unique portal scans would require Ingress Tourism. The problem is traveling to popular spots that have a lot of portals means a lot of those portals will already have Scout Controllers. It could take 2, 3, 4, or even more scans just to gain Controller on a particular portal, but the more scans you need to become controller the less portals you can become scout controller on because you have less available scans. Also having to scan one portal multiple times to become controller starts becoming time consuming. If you're like me and play on the down low while touring or sightseeing with your family, trying to stop and scan multiple portals starts to inconvenience my wife and she starts giving me dirty looks because I'm paying more attention to my game than my family.
On top of this suggestion, removing the cap from the number of scans you can do in two weeks, would help. Also reducing the 30 days to 3 cycles for expiration purposes. Alao Also maybe awarding CMU to agents who are scout controller on a portal, kind of like how pogo trainers earn coins on gyms.
The fixes in this upcoming update are very nice indeed.
However, I agree with the fact that the decision to make getting Onyx for these badges is unattainable for many, especially when the world is in a pandemic.
Not all portals can be scanned, which needs to be taken into consideration
Also, many devices have limited storage, thus even doing 50 scans a day is asking a heck of a lot.
The Onyx Explorer badge is one badge that is completely unattainable for the majority of players, before the pandemic. Myself, I've got 12,600 unique visits, from visiting most major cities in New Zealand.
Plus Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane in Australia
Singapore and Kuala Lumpur
Barcelona in Spain
As well as the few hours I had free in London, England.
So I have done a fair bit of travelling with Ingress around the world.
Which makes the Onyx Scout Controller, a literal impossibility.
Please consider changing the amount,
Because even with travelling, which was specifically (except in 1 case) for Anomalies, we need big Anomaly events to return once this pandemic eases, but won't be enough for this badge.
Removing the cap would be a dreadful idea. Scanning is time consuming. Uploading is even more time consuming as well as data consuming. The cap is the one thing that keeps portal scanning sane: "Sure it's a pain and uses a lot of data, but it's not so bad because you can only do 15 per day".
Also, the cap makes the competition interesting. Currently I'm 5th smurf in the world for Scout Controller. I could go out and make the 50 unique scans to take the top spot, but I'm limited by the number of scans I have remaining. This adds an interesting dimension for those of us who like a good competition.
Even at anomalies there will be so many players competing against each other for scout controller on a portal, you will have to settle for less points because it will take up more scans to be the controller. Who wants to scan a portal 30 times to score one point when they can go out to some secluded area and score 30 points using 30 scans.
There's a ton of newer portals in my area where pogo players have taken photos over privacy fences just to get stops and gyms at private pools and other amenities at apartments and condominiums. How are we supposed to realistically scan those?
What about the hundred+ portals I visited but are impossible to scan because pogo players trespassed in a cemetery overnight and got everything removed?
I'm afraid that 15k for Onyx is a bad idea because of overall scan quality will fall. For me i've done 60 scans and dropped,it took away almost three hours, 8+ gb of memory (a bit too much in my case,i got only 32 built well 22 are free for user if i delete any apps and media),and taken a lot of time to upload them. Who will record every 30 sec carefully if trying to do maximum scans before will get extremely tired and bored.
How close do you have to be to the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower to trigger the scan option? How far away do you have to be to get even a piece of a viable scan?
@NianticBrian honestly I like scout Controller and the idea behind it. I just feel like it tiers so high that most agents will ignore it and those that don't will still have a difficult time.
What it really needs is some kind of real game impact. Like seriously, what if holding Scout Controller on Field Anchor Portals had a multiplier effect on fields for the controlling team? Or a leaderboard that affected cell score?
Oh and now ghost image of a Portal was chasing me xD i think that was a ghost of my "homeportal", because i put there beacon just before goin' out this night. Restart solved that artifact,but - new minor bug.
If two players are playing together. Player A can do one scan of each portal, then player B do two scans of each portal. Then player one uploads all her scans and gets scout controller credit, then player one uploads all his and takes controller from her .
Hey Brian, can you consider putting the upload scans button on this page instead of in the settings and give it a notification like the drone when there's impending scans, so players are less likely to forget to upload scans
The only or best Niantic can do to speed up portal scanning are we get screenshot and video what we can get if we work with portal scanning. Most agents dont like spend time on portal scanning when no agents dont no what we get with the new AI map @NianticBrian talk about. Please relese screenshot and very early video we see the new AI map and how it looks after that i think more agents are interesting about use portal scanning.
Comments
@NianticBrian Since you are deciding to wait and see how things turn out over the next 2 weeks, I decided to do Niantic's job (for free as usual) and this is what I found...
(30 second per portal scan + 7 second per encode) x 200 scans = 7400 seconds
7400 seconds equates to roughly about 123 minutes which is basically 2 hours and 3 minutes. Of course when I talk about my initial numbers, I am talking about someone who works like a machine doing these scans. The actual time to do about 200 scans would be roughly about 2 hours and 30 minutes to about 3 hours (with short intervals in between the scans to rest up from this tremendously labor intensive task). Now of course I haven't taken into account the upload time, which I am going to leave out in this scenario for now.
So if you were to do 200 unique portal scans every 13 days for Scout Controller, based on the following tier requirements:
The Scout Controller medal tiers are:
Bronze: Scout Controller on 100 unique Portals
Silver: 500 unique Portals
Gold: 1,000 unique Portals
Platinum: 5,000 unique Portals
Onyx: 15,000 unique Portals
It would take you about 1 day to get the Bronze medal, 39 days for the Silver medal, 78 days for the Gold medal, 390 days for the Platinum medal, and finally 780 days for the Onyx medal.
If you just look at these numbers, and I believe that is what you probably did, things may seem reasonable to you given how long it usually takes to g r i n d Onyx tier badges in Ingress.
But what you seem to either overlook or fail to understand here is that these are the numbers of days required to get the said tier badges for scans completed on unique portals AND you need to be a scout controller on the said portal to actually get credit.
Lets assume there were about a 100 active agents in my area and there are about a 100 portals. Every agent has claimed a portal as their own. They have all been going after the Onyx Scout badge so all their efforts have been focused on doing 6000 scans on the same portal every 13 days. This means they have at least 400-600 Scout Controller points on the said portal. This is where things get complicated. Assuming I am 1 of those 100 agents who would like to get the Scout Controller medal, that means I would require to claim Scout Controller status on all those portals. This is NOT going to be possible due to me being limited by 200 scans every 13 days and the fact that the Scout Controller status already belongs to a different agent. So what could have been achieved in 1 day (the Bronze tier medal), may not even be possible to achieve for at least a year now, maybe more. This is just one of the issues with the requirements.
Another issue is that not all cities around the world has 15,000 portals. This basically says that you expect agents to travel around and gather extremely labor intensive data for your research purposes. Practically speaking, no one is really going to travel just to do portal scans. If I am traveling I might as well focus my time on capturing and/or hacking unique portals AND doing mission banners. Plus even the cities that do have 15,000 portals, how on earth do you expect agents to keep track of which portals they scanned on day 1 when they are getting close to day 390? Additionally, @HeterTheMoth has already covered some of the other issues with this.
If you do expect Agents to claim Scout Controller status on a said portal then I fully support what @TheAuraStorm suggested in terms of what the tier requirements should look like:
Bronze: 50
Silver: 200
Gold: 500
Platinum: 1000
Onyx: 2000
Keep in mind, getting to the Onyx tier with these requirements is still going to take about a year - which is about the same time as Scout Onyx would take - and would still be equally hard to achieve. Requesting anything more than this is you being greedy because we (Ingress players) have been doing your dirty labor intensive work (example: Wayfarer/OPR) for years now. Not because we love Niantic but because we love Ingress as a game and the wonderful community that it has built up into over the years.
Again, I thank you at Niantic for constantly trying to bring newer features to the game, but I would wholeheartedly appreciate if you actually listened to the player base and take our suggestions seriously when it comes to making certain goals achievable in a realistic way. I sincerely hope that you ponder over all the suggestions provided in this thread and use them to revise the badge tier requirements when you get to it in about 2 week. Thank you!
Please consider fixing Dronenet to have the same field of view (or larger) than the regular Scanner View. First, it IS a Drone, and is higher up in the air than your Scanner, thus should be able to "see" further. Second, trying to fly a Drone in a suburban or rural area is next to impossible because the Portals are more widely spaced, and you get " stuck" frequently when the next Portal on the horizon is not in view, and you can't fly very far.
An excellent post, and I totally agree with the sentiment. However, I understand the idea of making this a much harder badge than the Scout badge. With that in mind I would suggest doubling the suggestion of @TheAuraStorm , making the tiers:
Bronze: 100
Silver: 400
Gold: 1000
Platinum: 2000
Onyx: 4000
As a result, this would be a difficult badge which would take a dedicated agent several years to achieve. But it would not be so difficult as to make us give up trying..
@NianticBrian if you are so desperate for this kind of data, instead of wasting your time proposing an unachievable free labor task, why don't you add it up into pokemon go and allow a random encounter appear from each unique pokestop scan? Put a rare pokemon with a special move in the mix and enjoy literally millions of players doing scans. It a good fit to finally release the Pokemon Kekleon (who can turn invisible as camouflage). Change the other available pokemon in a couple of weeks like the eggs, so people won't get bored.
The same kind of approach can be added to Harry Potter wizards unite, merging the job with gameplay feature. I'm ingress however, it just free labor in change for a badge (something that most people don't care this much).
It is only for new AI map for Ingress Prime not Pokémon GO and Harry Potter. Niantic only plan use it the new AI map only for Ingress Prime.
You wish. They need that kind of data to improve the AR in all games, is even more useful there than in ingress right now.
You was the first one to complain when scanning was release and said it was useless and that would only help Catan so you won't do it. How's the tables turned, huh?
@NianticBrian
I like to have the medals in ONIX but this is extremely difficult, good luck in this challenge for those who have super powers.
"Less is more"
@NianticBrian Only write about portal scanning are for new AI map in Ingress Prime Niantic work on. I dont read nothing about Pokémon GO and Harry Potter.
Well put and thought out!
I'll add to this with my most recent experience. I went for a 10km walk this morning and managed to scan a total of 21 unique portals (21 scans in total) - before my battery pack and phone both ran out of power. 1 day for bronze if you have good density, but it'll take me a few days to get to bronze, especially as I've spaced out my scans to 15-20 per day just so I don't have to burdened doing 200 in a single session.
Power and time is not limitless unfortunately, neither is performing tasks that yield absolutely no reward (when every other action does).
This is a perfect suggestion. Let the Pokemon Go players do all the scans and reward them with rare Pokemon encounters, the implementation of the scans are going to benefit them instead of Ingress agents anyway, plus the userbase is so much more massive that you'll end up getting all the data you desire. This is called 'knowing your audience', Ingress agents are not the target market for this.
However, of all the dedicated Pokemon Go players I know, none have bothered with scanning. Even from the dedicated group of Pokemon Go Wayfarers (of those that remain), none care about scanning either. Pushing this functionality is just beating a dead horse.
Getting to 15,000 unique portal scans would require Ingress Tourism. The problem is traveling to popular spots that have a lot of portals means a lot of those portals will already have Scout Controllers. It could take 2, 3, 4, or even more scans just to gain Controller on a particular portal, but the more scans you need to become controller the less portals you can become scout controller on because you have less available scans. Also having to scan one portal multiple times to become controller starts becoming time consuming. If you're like me and play on the down low while touring or sightseeing with your family, trying to stop and scan multiple portals starts to inconvenience my wife and she starts giving me dirty looks because I'm paying more attention to my game than my family.
On top of this suggestion, removing the cap from the number of scans you can do in two weeks, would help. Also reducing the 30 days to 3 cycles for expiration purposes. Alao Also maybe awarding CMU to agents who are scout controller on a portal, kind of like how pogo trainers earn coins on gyms.
2 medals dedicated to portal scan and nothing for portal discovery? Please bring back seer or consider an alternative.
Imagine a super popular tourist portal. How many portal scans do you need to control it before players give up on it
Gotta be fast.
The fixes in this upcoming update are very nice indeed.
However, I agree with the fact that the decision to make getting Onyx for these badges is unattainable for many, especially when the world is in a pandemic.
Not all portals can be scanned, which needs to be taken into consideration
Also, many devices have limited storage, thus even doing 50 scans a day is asking a heck of a lot.
The Onyx Explorer badge is one badge that is completely unattainable for the majority of players, before the pandemic. Myself, I've got 12,600 unique visits, from visiting most major cities in New Zealand.
Plus Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane in Australia
Singapore and Kuala Lumpur
Barcelona in Spain
As well as the few hours I had free in London, England.
So I have done a fair bit of travelling with Ingress around the world.
Which makes the Onyx Scout Controller, a literal impossibility.
Please consider changing the amount,
Because even with travelling, which was specifically (except in 1 case) for Anomalies, we need big Anomaly events to return once this pandemic eases, but won't be enough for this badge.
Removing the cap would be a dreadful idea. Scanning is time consuming. Uploading is even more time consuming as well as data consuming. The cap is the one thing that keeps portal scanning sane: "Sure it's a pain and uses a lot of data, but it's not so bad because you can only do 15 per day".
Also, the cap makes the competition interesting. Currently I'm 5th smurf in the world for Scout Controller. I could go out and make the 50 unique scans to take the top spot, but I'm limited by the number of scans I have remaining. This adds an interesting dimension for those of us who like a good competition.
Even at anomalies there will be so many players competing against each other for scout controller on a portal, you will have to settle for less points because it will take up more scans to be the controller. Who wants to scan a portal 30 times to score one point when they can go out to some secluded area and score 30 points using 30 scans.
There's a ton of newer portals in my area where pogo players have taken photos over privacy fences just to get stops and gyms at private pools and other amenities at apartments and condominiums. How are we supposed to realistically scan those?
What about the hundred+ portals I visited but are impossible to scan because pogo players trespassed in a cemetery overnight and got everything removed?
I'm afraid that 15k for Onyx is a bad idea because of overall scan quality will fall. For me i've done 60 scans and dropped,it took away almost three hours, 8+ gb of memory (a bit too much in my case,i got only 32 built well 22 are free for user if i delete any apps and media),and taken a lot of time to upload them. Who will record every 30 sec carefully if trying to do maximum scans before will get extremely tired and bored.
How close do you have to be to the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower to trigger the scan option? How far away do you have to be to get even a piece of a viable scan?
@NianticBrian honestly I like scout Controller and the idea behind it. I just feel like it tiers so high that most agents will ignore it and those that don't will still have a difficult time.
What it really needs is some kind of real game impact. Like seriously, what if holding Scout Controller on Field Anchor Portals had a multiplier effect on fields for the controlling team? Or a leaderboard that affected cell score?
I think the scan option becomes available when you can interact with the portal, 40 meters.
You won't be able to scan it entirely.
Just the bottom view 🤣
I guess you could scan a scale model
Oh and now ghost image of a Portal was chasing me xD i think that was a ghost of my "homeportal", because i put there beacon just before goin' out this night. Restart solved that artifact,but - new minor bug.
If two players are playing together. Player A can do one scan of each portal, then player B do two scans of each portal. Then player one uploads all her scans and gets scout controller credit, then player one uploads all his and takes controller from her .
Hey Brian, can you consider putting the upload scans button on this page instead of in the settings and give it a notification like the drone when there's impending scans, so players are less likely to forget to upload scans
Or give an AP reward or gear equivalent of one hack on lv8 portal everytime we became the controller.
This is a brilliant suggestion
The only or best Niantic can do to speed up portal scanning are we get screenshot and video what we can get if we work with portal scanning. Most agents dont like spend time on portal scanning when no agents dont no what we get with the new AI map @NianticBrian talk about. Please relese screenshot and very early video we see the new AI map and how it looks after that i think more agents are interesting about use portal scanning.