Battle Beacons concerns (in particular, alignment reversal)
As Battle Beacons are coming to their release and some leaks from apparent live tests of them appear, I'd like to share some concerns. It's good if Niantic has already thought of them; if they haven't then here they are.
In particular there's a rule which says "After each checkpoint, the Portal will reverse alignment to the opposing Faction".
If handled improperly, this rule creates a problem of portals being flipped by a faction A with no possibility to prevent it somehow by faction B, especially if the portals have important fields or links on them.
This creates such situations:
- Faction A covers a city. Agent of faction B comes to the anchor portal and deploys Battle Beacon. The portal gets realigned on first checkpoint and all the fields go down.
- Faction A covers a city. Faction B creates a one-time account of L1, spoofs to the anchor location, and sets a Battle Beacon on it. The portal gets realigned without the need of using a virus (and thus being, say, L7 agent to flip a P8).
One of proper ways of handling this in my opinion would be to start the battle only if at least one agent of an opposing faction has agreed to it, and show the nick name of such agent (or all participants) publicly to detect possible backpack accounts. The battles should start (and the alignment should change via Battle Beacon rules) only if there are agents of opposing faction who have agreed and are ready to battle.
If you, the readers, have some other concerns about the recent leaks/live tests, please share them there as well.
Comments
Another proper way to handle this.... remove the flip-feature from the Battle Beacon function.
I think it would be nice to see first the official description of the battle beacon's work in help, and only then speculate about possible abuse actions and how to prevent them
As I already said to such comments in Drone Net concerns topic, it is easier to prevent some features of being implemented the wrong way, than to change the existing implementation after its release.
We all understand that there are three ways to do something: the right one, the wrong one, and the one Niantic chooses, but I think we need to let them calmly test all the possibilities
I have nothing against them testing and checking different possibilities and ways for stuff to function. I just want to make sure that the concerns above (and probably below) are addressed and heard. The existence of this topic won't hurt if the concerns are already addressed without the help of the topic, right?
lets just wait for the final details.
Alternatively: Faction A covers a city. An agent of faction A deploys Battle Beacon at the anchor before anyone from faction B wakes up. The portal gets realigned on first checkpoint and all the fields go down. Faction A re-throws the fields without using viruses and their associated cool down. Rinse and repeat.
Result: Faction A wins the Battle Beacon match and gains more field MU than they would otherwise have had.
If they’re testing it in the wild, it’s way past the point in development where fundamental aspects can be changed and still be released soon.
If you go look at the portal on desktop Intel and scroll back far enough in COMMS, you’ll see ADA and JARVIS actions on the portal: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=33.703052,-118.003705&z=20&pll=33.703052,-118.003705
It looks like it does change actual alignment through the Battle Beacon process. I’m assuming it needs agents from both factions present to start, so hopefully your fellow agents won’t participate if it’s a strategic portal.
@Ellimist713
If they’re testing it in the wild, it’s way past the point in development where fundamental aspects can be changed and still be released soon.
I understand that... too bad we knew about this part of the rules just now. If I knew about this earlier, I would've created the topic earlier as well.
I’m assuming it needs agents from both factions present to start, so hopefully your fellow agents won’t participate if it’s a strategic portal.
I hope it does somehow, yes. I also saw a proposal for Battle Beacons to be able to be deployed on neutral portals only. It's pretty easy to make a portal neutral if you have agents of both factions on it willing to participate.
You're assuming that battle beacons will became more common and cheaper than an ADA/Jarvis?
And they can generate functional "fake" portals, like the tutorial ones, over the ones used. I think this is the best choice, remaining all links and fields actives during the battle.
@Hydraulinski
You're assuming that battle beacons will became more common and cheaper than an ADA/Jarvis?
Whether it is cheaper/more common or not, it might create an opportunity to make such plays, and this opportunity is the main point. ADA/Jarvis at least have cooldowns and level requirements.
You beat me to a post, so I'll add onto yours. It gets worse. The beacons don't respect the inoculation window, so you can deploy one after a portal has been strategically flipped for inoculation and still get the fields to drop.
Additionally, there appears to be no agent level requirement to use this feature, so a brand new account can drop fields from a P8. It's griefer paradise.
Furthermore, since the flips are being done by ADA and Jarvis, a single agent can now make any portal they want a P8 by themselves. They can also quad mod any portal. Their resonators and mods become owned by their faction virus, and you can keep upgrading on top of them.
This also means it's a massive AP engine creator without the need for any flip cards at all. You can keep deploying battle beacons and just keep throwing fields over and over, with links being automatically taken down and keys dropped for the agent.
One way to prevent some of this abuse is to only allow beacons to be used on neutral portals. Then at least you can't use them to drop fields or otherwise grief ops.
Often they don't post this until after the new feature has already been released. And by that time it's going to cause loads of problems.
We know stuff because Brian tested it on the Production server yesterday. If he didn't want agents to see and comment on it, he would of tested it on their test or dev or pre-production environment(s).
You test in prod, it's out there and we are going to talk about it.
It should require a minimum number of participants from both faction to start (like 3 each), to prevent those abuses and wintrade to get a easy restock portal to farm.
And list the name of all agents who joined the battle.
We know stuff because Brian tested it on the Production server yesterday
And also because .APK file is parsed on fevgames, don't you look at?
If it only requires one agent from each side, what's to prevent an agent with an opposite faction backpack from triggering it?
I said it right there:
and show the nick name of such agent (or all participants) publicly to detect possible backpack accounts.
Doesn't matter when both agents are brand new accounts made solely for that purpose.
I based my post and information on what was tested in production by Brian yesterday. It shows some of the details about how it works and its raises issues in multiple chats. It's something that agents will want to discuss and come up with ways to fix something that if released as is, is going to cause a lot of problems and likely cause more agents to get upset and quit the game.
Personally, I haven't seen ADA / JARVIS used in under an hour since the old Minitaur anomaly back in 2013/2014 or whenever it was. Let's just say a very long time ago when they realized that flip cards for volatile portals being used multiple times a minute might not be the best way for them to work.. But apparently now they are...
I would support limiting this functionality to neutral portals.
OK, yeah, I sincerely hope that Niantic thinks this one through a bit more, because this is definitely going to be abused.
I mean, definitely.
But also, what does this actually give to Ingress players' gameplay? We aren't Pogo -- I realize that this sort of tactic works well for rallying Pogo players, but we play a fundamentally different game. We have communities of people who work very long term on fields and operations and such ... having some random person declare a battle because they can? That's absolutely going to break everything we do, and frustrate the long-time players out of playing. And it is in no way shape or form going to attract new ones.
Please, please, PLEASE rethink this one with the actual Ingress community in mind. Not a "Well it works in Pogo" mentality.
In my opinion, I think this was designed as a low effort way to allow players to create xf events with anomaly styled play without requiring players to submit a list of portals to become "volitile portals," requiring event holders to scrape or make screen shots, or requiring Niantic to make an event wysiwyg interface/app that could be used to generate player ran events.
That said, I did immediately see ways it will be exploited or abused (for AP, Portal Leveling, and MU) but I don't think it's a game changer that will destroy ops or the community.
Perhaps they should start by making it initially only available to recursed agents. This would limit the scope and also eliminate most spoofing issues.
After all, recursed agents were promised some benefit from that 2 years ago, and nothing has ever materialized.
Yeah recursed agents were said to "in future, perform sophisticated actions not currently understood", and yet there's absolutely NOTHING exclusive for recursed agents right now. That is one of the reasons why I won't recurse despite being L16 at the moment.
This won't solve the possible abuse of battle beacons for taking down fields or fielding though.
terrible idea imo, would u want same for real anomalies only for recursed ? i guess the train passed for where recursed will get benefits except the badge and vr gear on lvlup.
@NianticBrian The suggestion that the battle beacon ONLY goes live on a portal is if both a Resistance, and Enlightened player both hack the portal within 60s, is a good one.
In that, you use a Battle Beacon on a portal, but the Battle Beacon will not be activated until there is at least one Enlightened and One Resistance member who hack the Battle Beacon portal.
Where this comes unstuck is during Hexathlons and Anomalies, where portal inoculation is a valid tactic.
I do not believe a battle beacon (BB) would be useful during an anomaly if Niantic makes it so you can not (re)apply battle beacons on a portal that already has a beacon on it.
The important question that we need to know the answer to is if a BB's self flipping inoculates it from Jarvises/ADAs. If it does, than I foresee it being used strategically prior to an annomaly's start.
Maybe the best way to use these is in areas under mega BAFs as you can’t throw links under fields and any flipping won’t cause issues with any links. Maybe this shouldn’t be used on link anchors however
this ^^^