Scout Controller

(Yes another of those threads...)

Regardless of your opinions of scanning, it’s an optional feature that has two, pretty awesome, badges up for grabs.

I’d go as far as saying that “Scout” and “Scout Controller” have some of the coolest artwork of any tiered badges in Ingress.

Scout Controller is basically the uniques version of Scout, yes you have to “out-scan” the current controller, but for argument’s sake, let’s just treat it as “unique portals scanned”

We have a few other actions that have a badge for the action itself, and actions on unique portals. Liberator is the badge for capturing any portal and Pioneer is the badge for capturing unique portals. Onyx Liberator is 40,000 portals, while Onyx Pioneer is 20,000 portals. That makes sense, the badge for the action on unique portals should be less as most agents will have areas they play frequently rather than always playing somewhere else.

the same is for Hacker and Explorer. IIRC other actions on a portal can count for Explorer e.g. deploying / modding, but for ease, we’ll just look at hacks.

Onyx Hacker is for 200,000 hacks on portals, while Onyx Explorer is 30,000. The action on unique portals is significantly lower.

With Scout and Scout Controller, the opposite is true. Onyx Scout asks for 6,000 scans on any portal, while Scout Controller asks for scans on 12,000 unique portals, and possibly more than one scan per portal to become controller. This means that Agents would have to have Onyx Scout twice over at a minimum before attaining Scout Controller.

The Maths doesn’t add up.

I’d also like to acknowledge and thank Niantic for lowering the requirement of Onyx Scout Controller from 15,000 to 12,000. It’s not great, but is at least a willingness to compromise.

I’ve made suggestions on retiering Scout Controller to something significantly more realistic, but these have fallen on deaf ears.

My suggestion: Swap the numbers for the medals. Scout Onyx ~ 12,000 total scans. Scout Controller ~ 6,000 unique portals of being controller.

This does seem like the perfect compromise. Scout is significantly easier to work on, and being able to earn more scans helps even more. Agents are still encouraged to branch out and scan different places, but their main areas are likely to have portals with a tonne of scans, enabling the build of high quality 3D POI constructions, with the badge requirements more realistic, more people may see the work as worth the reward and join the scanning community. It really is a win for all.

@NianticBrian you appear to be the face of scanning, what do you think of this?

I certainly would start scanning and would probably make an effort to visit new places, just to scan.

It would be great to hear other agents opinions and suggestions. Niantic can’t respond to community feedback, if there isn’t any...

Comments

  • PkmnTrainerJPkmnTrainerJ ✭✭✭✭✭

    Swapping it around makes sense. However another option (maybe a separate medal) would be to have instead of unique scans, the time spent scanning?

    So maybe a “Scan for 100 hours total” gets you a bronze badge. That would encourage people to use more than the 15 seconds. It could be abused with scanning the same portal for hours and hours I guess but I doubt many would do that.

  • GoblinGranateGoblinGranate ✭✭✭✭✭

    You could keep the unique constraint. Count the time spent in each unique scan.

  • KhatreKhatre ✭✭✭✭✭

    still lacking a unique marker.... after 1k controller remembering which are done is difficult

  • ZeroHecksGivenZeroHecksGiven ✭✭✭✭✭

    This would be super helpful, though, there really need to be two "markers." One for uniques in general and another for scanned uniques.

  • kiloecholimakiloecholima ✭✭✭✭✭

    I agree, I'll add my voice to the choir that it doesn't make sense for Scout Controller to have higher tiers than Scout, much less double the amount. Scout should have higher tiers than Scout Controller, in the same way that Hacker has higher tiers than Explorer and Liberator does over Pioneer. Having higher tiers for the non-unique badge over the unique badge is what brings some level of equity between the badges. Doing the opposite, as Niantic has done here, makes Scout a far inferior badge to Scout Controller. Swapping the numbers would make sense; as it is, the tiers for Scout Controller are stupid high. I haven't been able to muster much interest in going for these badges. I do like the Wolves, which is the only thing that has me considering unlocking them, but I'd probably stop at silver.

  • KhatreKhatre ✭✭✭✭✭

    indeed, this post was abotu scout controller but yes the game is badly missing uniques markers for explorer / pionner / scout controler / drone explorer

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