Visited Portals Viewer.....or something like that
Roses are red, violets are blue, and it's almost 2021, but this rumored feature since 2019 hasn't come out yet... I know Niantic made many improvements this passing year, but still, we are looking forward to seeing more new features coming out. Gj, everyone! Have a great holiday and happy new year!!!
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This is the one feature I was 100% sure would be introduced with Prime. And I think it is the one feature which would have totally changed the attitude of players over the forced switch to Prime. If the feature had existed, more players would have moved to Prime willingly, and possibly fewer would have quit.
Its bizarre that there's no way to visually see if you e been to a portal to hackcapture it there must be some indication in the programming as the badges track you, so it can't be that hard to have a bit of programming to say "if hacked, make white, if not hacked, make hack buttons green " or something g like that
Niantic: Best I can do is Volatile Scout Controller
Requires the backend upgrade to be complete, delayed indefinitely :(
That sounds like a fake excuse. Data on portals visited exists, it only needs to be displayed.
Definitely hoping for this.
I've got an idea, make all unvisited portals have that volatile marker that everyone seems to love (that's sarcasm). Think how fast agents will go out to visit/hack/scan portals if they knew it would clean up the map from big yellow blocks.
Volatile Scout Controller - Yellow Block, as-is. Though I'd love maybe a yellow circle that appears to be on the ground, something a little less "in your face." The yellow circle could potentially be different colors depending on if it's been scanned, if you're scout and if it's volatile...
Unique Portal Captures - Red Flame vs White Flame. This would only show on neutral portals since you can't gain a unique on an already captured portal, right? Once captured, it would then show as a normal neutral portal moving forward. Though, I suppose there should be a way to know if it's a potential unique, even if you have to destroy it, so maybe neutral flames wouldn't work... There is a bit of yellow flame when I look at captured portals, so maybe switching that yellow to a tinge of red?
Unique Portal Hacks - Some sort of floating ring, similar to pokestops in PoGo. Once hacked, the ring is gone moving forward.
I'm sure people have talked about this over and over. Kinda just rambling ideas of what it might actually look like.
Oh, nice, someone thought about it as well. I have made another similar thread, with a proposal how to visualize it (s all squares with medal miniatures in Portal detail screen).
Hope it will happen (sooner than later)
Not a fake excuse.
@NianticBrian posted about not moving to the same platform at PoGo a year ago, and as has been mentioned by @ofer2 repeatedly, the data they have is not in a form that provides easy retrieval in a geographic cell. Since they're not using the PoGo server platform, they have to write the changes themselves which takes development time.
You're right that the data is there, but it's not in a read-friendly format, since it's designed for high speed writes.
Personally, I think this should be a top development priority and would revitalize a good chunk of the gameplay as people expand their horizons, but the Ingress dev team doesn't agree with that judging by development. We'll get it one day, but a small development team only has so many hands on keyboards, and they've chosen to focus in other aspects of the game.
It's a fake excuse in the sense that it is basically "We can't do it because we're not going to do the thing we need to do to do it". Like if I said, "I can't take out the trash because I have decided not to bother to find the key to unlock the door and it's impossible to take out the trash without unlocking the door. So it's impossible for me to take out the trash."
My point was that they could do it if they wanted to, and as you say focus some development time on the problem rather than on features that nobody wants and nobody needs.
Its not like they can't, but that they can do it easier (probable is already done) with the new servers, and won't waste time rebuilding the whole system.
Not trying to argue, just genuinely curious: when are these servers supposed to be done? They've been blaming the servers for over 2 years now. I'm fairly (extremely) ignorant about these things, but in the tech world 2 years seems like it might as well be 2 decades.
It was supposed to be changed last year, but they decided to attend other priorities, so I believe there's no specific date anymore. It's probably on hold until more money came in (after subscription) and other changes.
Read this: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/9267/about-the-ingress-server-history-and-plans
I remember reading that a while ago, thanks for the refresher :)
I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm just very ignorant and seeking knowledge/clarity. Sounds like the new servers aren't coming until the Ingress team is "financially sustainable" and players are more "engaged". The subscription and updating the old servers (which was finished being updated over the summer) should solve the first issue (at least mostly). The main problem I see lies with getting players more "engaged". Is integrating new features more difficult on the old updated servers vs the mystical new servers? If so, why wait? We won't gain many new players, or bring back retirees until more features are added (mostly different metrics for individuals and factions to chase, or making existing metrics easier to track like unique markers) and the infamous cheating issues are partially dealt with. If new server implementation would make these updates/fixes/new features easier, Niantic is unnecessarily delaying the increase in "player engagement", thus resulting in a dog chasing its tail.
Basically, the "dead time" (from the POV of the community) and the cost of moving the server base code, was less worthwhile than actually giving us new features like Kinetic Capsules and Battle Beacons. They'll do the server movement when it's convenient or they have enough revenue to split development and keep new features and bug fixes coming in while building a new server.
Ah, this helps a lot. Many thanks!
This is pretty much it. The data is currently stored in a reduced size format (i.e. instead of portal ids, it stores hashes of the combined portal and player id) in a log entry style. I.e. we append a "event happened" on this hash to a log record. In order to determine if you've been to a portal, we'd have to go through every portal, concatenate it with the user id, hash all of them, then go through every log entry and do a reverse lookup on the has to see if it matches the portal. Again, nothing is impossible; its just work.
Ouch. That actually explains a lot. GG 2012 Google foresight.
I know they weren't writing expecting the thing to last 10 years but still...
For what it’s worth to Naintic. I’d consider a true uniques tracker for visits, caps and scout controlled a better “feature” than anything new. Battle Beacons, the Drone and Kinetic Capsules have been great - in ascending order.
I think a proper uniques tracker would bring a lot of retired / semi retired players back.
Stick some legacy character medals in the shop and that’s some income, even better add a few bundles to the store and there’s some change in Niantic’s pocket.
Could resource usage limiting be done by implementing this via the intel map? My usage case (post lockdown of course) is 'once every few weeks I want to know which uniques I could get in nearby town X', so implementing this as an intel map feature limited to portals visible on screen with a 'this has burnt out' style cooldown of a few hours would work for me.
My concern, is gameplay, as my experience with the Catan, Pokémon GO and Wizard's Unite shows that they are very, very laggy when compared to Ingress Prime.
So when Ingress does show uniques, it would have to be much faster than Catan, Pokémon and Wizard's Unite, as Ingress is a fast paced game
..... it is? I've generally found that ingress is a slower paced game since its mostly a lot of waiting around for the likes of hacking or waiting to clear a portal etc.
Combat is generally where lag is more than annoyance.