Scout Controller Badge tier requirements ridiculously high
The new badge for Scout Controller has been announced, with the following tiers
Bronze: Scout Controller on 100 unique Portal
Silver: 500 unique Portals
Gold: 1,000 unique Portals
Platinum: 5,000 unique Portals
Onyx: 15,000 unique Portals
These numbers are ridiculously high for two reasons:
- We only get 200 scans per two weeks. That's a maximum of around 5200 per year (if we manage to use all of them).
- There is no guarantee that if you scan a portal you will be the scout controller of it. So if you are going for this badge, you will need to make several scans on each portal in the hopes that you have made enough scans. I suggest that in a reasonably busy area you may need to scan each portal 3 or 4 times to be sure.
Given those two facts, a player who does manage to get out and scan 15,000 unique portals would probably need 10 years to get this medal to onyx.
Part of the problem is that @NianticBrian believes the Pioneer onyx is 30,000 portals, but in fact it is only 20.000. May I humbly suggest that he looks again at these numbers and reduces them to something attainable?
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it must be 1 onyx badge / country.... lol
Way we have limit for portal scanning when we dont have no limit for catch unique portals? Please remove the limit for portal scanning @NianticBrian
@Pangarban I don't actually believe Pioneer Onyx is 30K, I made an unfortunate typo transposing the Explorer medal tiers that I corrected within minutes of posting, but my typo is being recirculated. That's my fault, but here's what I posted in the release notes thread:
One more locked badge in my scanner until Covid measurements stop. And after it one more bronze stuck.
Another unrealistic fact about this is that probably 75% of the portals are interacted as a passerby, passively playing while going somewhere. To scan it you need to have free time, day time and no people wandering arround, plus the fact that you are completely vulnerable while doing it.
Thanks for the clarification. Nevertheless, thinking about the maths of this is crazy. Especially if we have no indication on a portal of whether we've controlled it before or not.
In order to make this medal feasible, I would suggest two pieces of information to be available when we click on the option to scan a portal:
Without this information, we would be scanning in the dark. Let's say I go to a big city to get my Scan Controller numbers up. For each portal I will have to take a shot in the dark and make a guess how many scans I would need to make. If the required number is shown to me, at least I would have a chance of scanning the right number.
EDIT: thinking more about this, the comparison to Pioneer just doesn't work. The places we go to improve our Pioneer and Explorer badges tend to have a lot of players and a lot of turnover. So it's easy enough to get Pioneer. For example, when I go to an anomaly or mission day, I can be pretty sure due to turnover that I will manage to capture almost as many unique portals as I visit. But in a big city or at an Ingress event it will we frankly nearly impossible to get many Scout Controller portals, even if we didn't have a limit to the number of scans we could make.
Also: please don't try to fix this by increasing the number of scans we can do per fortnight. As it is, uploads are still flaky, and I often have to resort to using my data allowance because uploads on my wifi fail.
EDIT 2: Now that I've looked at the release notes thread, it looks like it is possible to see how many scans are needed to gain controller of a portal (bullet point three). However, when I was out scanning earlier this evening I didn't notice anything like this.
Agreed. This is ridiculous. A goal needs to be realistic, after nearly 2 years of playing my Explorer is only 5829, and a hack is significantly easier to do than a scan, and there are plenty of portals that aren’t particularly appropriate for a scan, like a sports field.
I appreciate that Niantic wants to encourage scanning, the scout badge and pushing this to Pokémon is obvious, but I fear that such ridiculous numbers will have the opposite effect.
I personally feel less inclined to scan with this, I’d rather not bother with a badge if getting Onyx is so unattainable, let’s not forget about wings...
Rather than highlighting an issue, this is been my constructive criticism, and I would suggest the following:
Bronze: 50
Silver: 200
Gold: 500
Platinum: 1,000
Onyx: 2,000
For example, the requirements for Onyx Hacker and Onyx Explorer (Hacks and Unique Hacks) as well as Liberator and Pioneer (Caps and Unique Caps) are both actions and the respective action on unique portals, both of the unique medals have a lower requirement than the medal for the action. Explorer Onyx is 1/6 of Hacker Onyx and Pioneer Onyx is 1/2 of Liberator Onyx.
Since Scout Onyx requires 6,000 total scans, my suggestion of this new badge being 1/3 of this is logical, to me anyway.
This I feel is attainable enough to encourage more portal scanning, but doesn’t make it too easy that network will go without.
These are my thoughts and a suggestion, it might not be the same as others, but I’d love to hear your opinions!
In comments so far I had forgotten about the fact that most scans must be done during the day! Most of my explorer/pioneer numbers probably come from playing at night.
Hi @NianticBrian, first of all thanks for being open minded to our feedback, it really goes a long way.
Out of curiosity, the comment you quoted where you said you would look at the stats and may consider a change, is it possible to do this to an existing medal, or would you have to remove the badge and re-push it, like what happened with the visual glitch of the standard medal showing as locked to those who earned the ‘elite’ on Hexathalon Field Test medal?
I only noticed as I earned two medals after it was initially pushed and when the badge was fixed, it was added to the top left of my scanner.
I've been playing 6 years and have a little over 12,200 portals I have captured or hacked. These are portals all across central Florida, South Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Washington DC, San Francisco and San Jose, the Nassau Bahamas, Yucatan Mexico, Roatan Honduras. A lot are just tap hacks or tap captures while just passing through a place. So many portals are inside buildings or too large or too close to the road and simply unscannable. How do I portal scan a soccer field? How about a **** mall church? A "trail marker" that just a purple square painted on a sidewalk?
You want to reward players, give us the "Wander or Travellers" Badge that scores a point for each individual scoring cell we've played in. It can't be hard to backdate considering all the info that is saved for each player. Why not bring back a recruiting mechanism while you're at it. I have friends I've purposely not introduced the game to because I'm still waiting to be able to get credit bringing them in.
When the scout controller stat went live the other day, I went out and raised it to 50. It took me more than 5 hours of solid gameplay (naturally, I was doing other actions such as capture and field along the way). My goal was to get 100, but after a while I realized that wasn't going to happen. Here are a few things I noticed, and why I think these tiers are completely unobtainable:
In conclusion, I want to say that the biggest problem is that scanning just wasn't fun. If I notice that I need to make an edit, or post a better photo, during the course of normal gameplay, I do so and move on, it's just a brief pause. Scanning just feels like a chore that I am doing for a stat, it doesn't have the same feel as an edit... like I'm fixing something that makes the portal network better for others. In normal gameplay I can do everything I want at a portal in a minute or so and move on - deploy, glyph hack, link, maybe fix a typo in the name - but scanning and uploading takes about another 2 minutes... maybe longer if the signal is weak.
The tiers remind me of the ridiculous of the onyx Seer versus platinum Seer (500 to 5000!, 10x difference).
I have a little bit over 12000 uniques and I've been to several anomalies - Philadelphia, DC, St. Louis, KCMO, Atlanta, and a big chunk of cities in Florida since 2013. There's a difference between a chore and setting an accomplishment. Portal scanning is something we have yet to see the potential and it's going to be limited by design automatically.
These tiers would have been ok for a drone badge travel or hack Portals imo instead, one portal scan badge was enough, whats next a third scan badge??
Thanks Niantic to Setup another carbon dioxide generating badge, like Illuminator, Explorer, Pioneer, Mission Day (which is a really nice Event) and some more.
Only to get some unique capture in the last month, I went out on a road trip on some weekends. My best score was 473 unique portal captured in 1 day. But I discovered that I need at least one day to scan all the 200 possible Scans per 13days.
With this unbelievably high value of 15000 / 200 another 75 carbon dioxide generating drives would be needed to complete it. Maybe 1 less as my town has 200 portals.
As Ingress is a really nice game which enforce the community, creativity and health and I want give you a new idea.
My idea would be a Portal Scan Guardian. Black Level After 1331 days which can be gained by either holding 1 portal scan for 1331days or a combination of different portals with each 1 week or month.
Or delete this unique holding of the current Scout Controller definition.
The point about the amount of travel needed for Explorer is important. As an example from my work on Explorer/Pioneer, back in February I drove 2 and a bit hours north to Lincoln (England), and criss-crossed the city from 9am to 6pm. I had sandwiches in my bag, so during that time I didn't stop for more than two minutes. Walking 35 km, I managed to visit 516 new portals, and capture 406. If I was also trying to get Scout Controller, I would have only had time to visit half the city (at best) and it would have taken two trips.
Also I'll be honest as someone who (after more than 4 years of gameplay) is very close to onyx pioneer and explorer, and who has traveled to multiple states/countries/continents in pursuit of that goal: both of those badges all but require cargressing. I know we're not supposed to play and drive, and there are alternative methods like bus/train or even walking, but we all know that many (if not most) players in pursuit of these badges do so by car.
To scan a portal, I have to park the car, walk over to the portal, scan, and get back in the car. In the time it takes to do that for one, I could have kept driving and hack/claimed 20 uniques. Maybe I could walk up the street and scan all 20 portals, that realistically (assuming they are all scannable) would take 20-25 minutes minimum.
Those numbers are nuts. Do you remember the problem that you had with Seer being stupid high back in the day? Well this is just a **** to agents as it's capped. Either uncap the amount of scans agents can do or lower the actual numbers for the badges. You are just going to **** people off and they won't even bother to do it with those numbers.
I won't be doing it though. It's not Ingress game play. No AP is gained. It doesn't help the overall portal network at all. It doesn't help my faction at all. I see zero reason to participate in scanning anything.
Scout and Scout Controller we be just like the Recruiter Badger #ForeverLocked
*Edit - The forums censorship is still most annoying. It's like it's being filtered for an elementry school, but worse.
I think this just continues to show how out of touch Niantic is with not only the player base, but the world at large. We’re going through a crazy pandemic, people are traveling less and playing less in general. PoGo seems to have a new event every other week, yet, Ingress, a somewhat boring IFS event once a month and then, to make the game even more exciting, you offer a medal that is seemingly impossible to get.
I'm completely mystified how you guys thought this would make sense, right now. You’ve been given a hundred ideas about fun drone medals or competitions, but nope, we’re going to offer a new medal that REQUIRES you to leave your house and not only here and there, but often, daily, for a long time.
i know Niantic is getting beat right now from all angles on this, but this one really threw me for a loop. I’m struggling to find reasons to continue playing this game honestly. Please, give us something to do besides be your labor...
Another badge i will not put effort in, any chance i would get Scout and Scout controller badge locks hidden from my profile
honestly the profile page needs a makeover and make it controllable as it ruined my OCD so bad for so long
They should get rid of this fake battle controller thing (battle to see who does more free labor) and change it to just scans on unique portal and make the goal at least half of what currently is.
I really like the Scout Controller concept. It's nice that they've done something a little more creative than "do the same thing on x unique portals". However, the badge tiers need to be set to attainable numbers.
yes i rather have a visit unique portals with the drone badge, atleast thats gameplay and more fun...
I feel a bit interested to see who has been recharging the most on separate portals. If we're going to provide stats on portal scans within a 30 day period - you might as well see who has been recharging where.
This badge just show how disconnected from the game Niantic is. Also, counting OPR badge, this is 3 badges for "Niantic Workforce" now, so it's not just that they are disconnected, they don't even care about it, we are just free workforce.
Next feature: pay to refill scans so you don't wait up 2 weeks.
#GetReal
And we need more and more indicators for unique portals...
Unique hack, capture, drone hack, scout controller - how to remember all those??
impossible until we get any indicator :/
The Scout Controller can be an indicator
Just you're limited to the past 30 days
#JustNianticThings
This is why I feel the Scout Controller needs to be adjust down, or have it's tiers swapped with Scout
A lot of portals just can't be scanned properly due to size or proximities to roads or walls so you can't stand far back from them.
A lot of portals are indoors in spaces where you will look like a jackelope going inside and attempting to scan.
A lot of portals are just large painted murals on walls. Can you even get a 3d scan of a wall? Some are even multiple images against the same wall.
A lot of portals are in very crowded tourist places where it is impossible to scan without getting other people in the photo or bumping into people while moving around an object.
A lot of portals have been removed permanently from the portal network because cemeteries were trespassed in.
Gaining scout controller in high density tourist areas means having to use more scans of which there are a limited number of, which brings down the number of new things you can attempt to control. Imagine 100 agents in one place for an anomaly all trying for scout controller on a popular portal.
So I just found something else. There's a portal I submitted for removal because it no longer exists but now denied the request. How am I going to scan a portal for a building that's been torn down?
either don't scan it or scan what's there instead....
You know you will already have double onyx in scout before you're even close to onyx in scout controller?