Diary of a quick trip for scanning

Hulk32Hulk32 ✭✭✭
edited August 2020 in General

@NianticBrian

I've been playing Ingress for years and as an open-minded Enlightened, I embrace the change and evolution. This is just my opinion.

I decided to have a quick trip to scan a village. Easy, 80 portals in a not-so-big village, I should be able to make it in an hour or so. The idea was simple: capturing to get uniques with a single reso, install a pair of mods to improve the Engineer, quick glyph hack the L1 portal and scan it.

Not so easy, I barely did 3X, less than the half.

The main problems I found:

  • Scanning takes time, quite more than you would expect. If you are focusing on scanning you won't play Ingress smoothly. You can even spend up to 10 minutes trying to scan a portal getting errors. In Android, when you get an error, you have to reboot the game and start again. You can even loose a scan uploading in background and have to do it again going backwards.
  • Now with Controller medal, it also takes data. You can't risk sending scans with WiFi because anyone can scan the same portal and steal your point.
  • Comparing it with Portal Nominations, something that has an impact on your gameplay directly, scanning right now have no attractive reward apart from the medal.
  • Furthermore, the tiers for Scout Controller are wildly high. Taking into consideration previous arguments, those numbers just unincentivate people to rush for the medal. 


Reducing Onyx to 1-3k would make scanning more attractive, even stealing time to work on the other medals and play Ingress, since it would make it affordable.


In addition, a reward in the form of AP or CMU would increase interest in scanning.


Said this, I'll keep scanning since I want to keep the game alive and it's a way of helping NIA, but I think most people won't unless smart changes are done.

Post edited by Hulk32 on

Comments

  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited August 2020

    scanning takes time, too much and it doesnt feel like u play ingress also network data can be a problem for many.... rest doesnt matter when its feels boring to do something that doesnt give any ap or anything else...

  • GoblinGranateGoblinGranate ✭✭✭✭✭

    As if Wayfarer wasn't ungrateful enough...

    I wonder when are we suposed to actually play the game.

    Would also like to see how many hours would be required to reach the scan limit, is it 200 every two weeks still?

  • So my WiFi at home is not super fast. It usually takes 15-20 mins for uploading two scans. So I usually scan when heading to work. Nonetheless after doing so for sometime I realised that for me its just better if I keep one day of my play time just for scanning (and maybe deploying) and nothing else due to how much time is consumed. If I also field (or go for key hacking for anchors) then it takes me forever to do everything. So now if I play ingress 5 times a week, 1 time is dedicated purely for scanning (i.e. if I have the motivation), We have a lot of local players fighting for scout controller so I have already given up on that because scanning multiple times is just not time efficient. I will accept that getting the controller badge is gonna take years and not bother investing more time in aiming for high numbers in it.

  • PangarbanPangarban ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited August 2020

    Yeah, there's no such thing as a "quick trip" for scanning.

    Last week I went to a village with 48 portals. I went to capture and link up all the portals while getting scout controller on them. I did succeed in linking and scanning all the portals, but it took me about a third longer than it would have taken without scanning.

    In my experience so far, for every 3 hours you spend playing Ingress: capturing, deploying, glyphing/hacking, modding, linking and fielding (9 badges if you count explorer/pioneer), I expect to spend an additional hour if I want to work on scanning (2 badges).

  • I started scanning because I don't like the blind medals in my profile. As it has been mentioned already there are quite some issues that make it not enjoyable. Some additional points:

    I want to reach silver as fast as possible, also on Scan controller. Having only a limited amount of scans I do not scan portals that already are controlled by someone else. This only occured to me in one town but I'm not sure whether this is Niantics intention.

    Due to the long time it takes, scanning, encoding, uploading, I always stop after 5 seconds. Not sure how useful the data are for Niantic, but I take the ridiculous high numbers needed for the batches as excuse. For this reason I also scan portals where I do not see the benefit, e.g. murals. I do not see the benefit of 3D data there. But how should we reach the higher medal tears otherwise??

    On my Galaxy S8 the scanning is not really stable, I get stuck and sometimes the scanner even crashes.

    I do not see how the data are used, there are just a few rumour.

    So after silver Scout controller I'm going to stop and only significant changes could motivate me to go for the higher tiers of the medals.

  • GoblinGranateGoblinGranate ✭✭✭✭✭

    Oh, boy, you skip Street Art? That's like 40% of all portals :D

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