How can we get better and prompter help from NIA with regards to large fields being spoofed?
Disturbinator
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For some months our cell NR02-HOTEL-02 has been infested with spoofers, and it pays off to spoof. As fields that have been taken down, don't count for the score anymore, and often it takes more then a week to restore portals and links.
A few times already I have asked for support of NIA for a more prompter reaction to this kind of spoofing. Both ENL and RES suffer from these just before checkpoint spoofs. We (ENL) are in close contact with RES about this subject, but there is little we can do, but wait it out until volunteers that do TR and VG duty to help us out.
And I must say, it greatly impacts our pleasure in playing the game. What are the possibilities to improve the reaction time of Niantic OPS so that spoofing does not pay off anymore?
It is highly frustrating that it still does, and a lot of it has to do with response time. Both factions in our cell suffer from this, and I can imagine we are not the only cell in the world where this kind of behaviour of spoofers takes place.
Your advice is welcome in this matter. The TR's and VG's are doing their best to help us out, but restoring strategic portals for ENL and RES should IMHO be a speedier process, so that spoofing does not pay of anymore.
Comments
Speeding up the proces also helps in the complexity that has to do with restores. In the end I think it will be less work when action is fast.
Keeping spoof lanes open is difficult and frustrating for the players.
If no improvement is foreseen, please mention the main arguments not to, so we can think and suggest solutions that fullfill the requirements.
I think the main thing to improve is cheat detection. Right now, everything is reactive. An account is leveled sufficiently to attack portals and they are then used to attack anchors to take down fields. The it gets banned (never through normal reports, I feel like those are placebo placeholders) and we start feeding NIA information about the situation before the spoof.
The information required to restore links should be extracted from the game, how hard can it be to determine the playfield before portals get taken down? (Sure, we have comms and intel and it's quite bad with information displayed, but surely NIA has access to raw data to help them with this?)
I feel like a lot of the actions a spoofer takes can be detected. And right now it feels like no detection is in the game at all. Once we start detecting cheaters and banning them actively; they might not even get to the point they can take down fields at all?
this is a big problems in those areas and cells if not much help only will make legit players stop play and only spoofers left.. is this what niantic wants??
I,m wondering how niantic would feel if both communities would come up with some sort of an ethical spoof team to counteract spoofing.. Because i,m starting to get the feeling niantic is incapable of offering a solution to this problem. I mean, they cant even fix the comm issues and proper distance linking seems pretty shitty aswell and for a while allready.. While im writing this im even wondering what they are doing at all. 🤷🏻♂️
There is no such thing as ethical spoofing.
I think this is not a good idea, though it crossed my mind a few times. I think by creating more revenue for the ingress game, for instance put all items for sale in the shop, then NIA gets more revenue to better support the game, and the income for shops that offer these items will decline. A reason for spoof accounts is, is to farm items. And I know people will say this then makes it a pay to win game, which I understand, but with items being sold outside of the game it is already pay to win. So would be better if NIA would get this revenue.
Creating a team to do ethical spoofing is imho a bad idea.
We just need better communication between players and Niantic. Spoofing is a problem, the game is full of gamebreaking bugs. We report them but the only reply we get is an autoreply with thanks. please pick up your game Niantic and give us the game (back) that we all love(d).
What he means is players taking on the NIAGameMaster role. I mean we've had instances where players just linked through the spoofed lane, and then restore is impossible. We've also had instances where spoofers took down portals (heavily linked and shielded) and then a freshly recruited L1 agent goes and capture them; making the spoof "legit".
It's loopholes and wait time for restore that makes this problem so annoying. It pays off to spoof in this game, because even when the player is banned relatively quick, restoring the playing field just takes way too long. Either way, spoofing to undo spoofing will start something we don't want.
I'm aware of what he meant. But spoofing to "fix" a prior spoof is not the answer.
we clearly need a global community manager.
I haven,t seen any other solutions either.
Nope. There is no such thing, and no way to do this.
Even the first barrier of deciding what is or isn't spoofing, is not something players can be tasked with.
Sadly, this topic underlines the major weaknesses in Niantic's approach to their games:
I support the call for speedier action as well as improvement in communication.
I just wanted to state my support for this message towards niantic.
Selling high level gear might be an answer against some of the spoofing (especially the 3rd party shops and their fatmbots) but it will give other problems, like making it pay to win.
A (much) faster response is desired, like within minutes, also pausing the cycle or refund a faction their lost MU.
I understand things like this are easier said than done, but for me it seems niantic is both incompetent and unwilling to take on the problems which spoil our gameplay.
The TR's and VG's are doing their best to help us out, but restoring strategic portals for ENL and RES should IMHO be a speedier process, so that spoofing does not pay off anymore.
The fact that portal resets are an option now is a substantial improvement over the situation several years ago. Still, I agree that there remains room for improvement.
When a spoofer destroys a portal and the links anchored there, the game board now has empty space where there used to be none. What are agents to do?
I can put in a chat, "please don't link across these voids," but I can't ever be certain that the message makes it out to everyone in time, or that someone won't accidentally (or "accidentally") YOLO a link. This is a problem because portal resets obey the normal rules of Ingress (e.g., no crossed links) and will not destroy links created by legitimate agents in order to clear space for links that need resetting. The more time passes, the more likely it is that newly created links will get in the way of the reset.
The "obvious" solution is to make the portal resets proceed far more quickly than they do currently.
I believe it is also worth seriously considering whether portal resets should ignore or destroy links created by legitimate agents in order to restore links. When Faction A sees their links spoofed down, and then Faction B takes advantage of the situation, inadvertently or not, to make strategic links that impede the reset… well, it's easy to feel that this makes a mockery of the entire purpose of portal resets, and that it's a waste of everyone's time who put together the information for the reset in the first place.
N.B. This is all based on recent, personal experience.
@NianticBrian @NianticCasey I have not seen a response yet to described problem. Would be nice to see a comment from Niantic on this issue. I was advised by NIA employees to write on this forum, regarding this problem, and it hurts to see that it has not yet caught your attention.
Thanks in advance for a response.
@NianticBrian @NianticCasey, or anybody else within Niantic
At this moment we heave the feeling that TR is not working how it should. This makes the gameplay more and more frustrating.
Again several spoofs in our cell NR02-HOTEL-02.
It looks as spoofing is paying of like this and I don't have the feeling that Niantic wants the spoofers to rule the game.
Please respond to the topic.
This can also in pm to @Disturbinator or me
Thanks in advance
Seeing all other issue topics, and the NIA operatives shining in absence, I think it's wise to communicate with Niantic through ways other than this forum. I've had the best results on Twitter, tweeting at @NianticBrian; at least that was the one time he actually replied; the promised reply on the forums never came through.
This forum is a place where you can post your stories and frustrations, but Niantic themselves really don't interact with us through it. It's a shame, because I don't really see other possibilities other than Twitter or Telegram.
if TR does not work as intended we need a new system to deal with this kind of behaviour that only destroys for all legit players? Who want a game that mostly considers of bots and spoofers? not fun at all.....