Sweepers every 24 hours

phthoruthphthoruth ✭✭✭✭

Sweepers remove capsules from the ground every 12 hours currently.

Can that be changed to 24 hours?


I keep inventory on the ground at times.

During the pandemic I work from home and cant get out as much, and finding a time that I can refresh the items every 12 hours is hard. It would be substantially easy to find a single time of day to pickup the capsules.

As a temporary pandemic measure, could you slow down the sweepers to 24 hours?

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Comments

  • The once-a-day period is in keeping with other aspects of ingress such as the Sojourner badge which encourages us to have a minimum of once-a-day pattern for Ingress. So I agree with @phthoruth's idea.

  • Wouldn’t increasing the amount of time between sweeps decrease server load? Or do you mean it would increase because there would be more to sweep each time it happened?

  • grsmhikergrsmhiker ✭✭✭

    Having a lot of dropped items is resource intensive on the servers. That's why the sweepers interval used to be reduced to a few hours during some anomalies.

  • 30 minutes usually.

    Primarily for the Mission Day rather than the Anomaly itself, because before Hack No Key, and before keys were 500XM, people would fill the streets with them making the game slow dramatically, especially in Asian primaries.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    I'm fairly certain that the streetsweepers exist because without them things would persist on the ground and make the game unplayable, and also due to resource consumption on the server side. It's hard for me to believe that Niantic was thinking about tactical/strategic gameplay aspects in 2013.

    I'm also not certain about held in memory vs physical storage. Probably only things in high traffic areas remain cached.

    Nonetheless, I think it would be useful to have streetsweepers to have a 25-hour timer right now. I don't deposit things in the Road Bank very often but I occasionally drop a capsule or two in an out-of-the-way location.

  • MirthmakerMirthmaker ✭✭✭✭

    I would be for 30 minutes at most and if tech limitations aren't an Issue a timer goes on the cap. Currently I personally know agents who drop reallocate, use with impunity with a bust rate of less than 1% on a twelve hour drop. Make this thirty minutes and drop will be what it is designed to be. Get swaps done.

  • WikiBlueWikiBlue ✭✭✭

    Sometimes items are dropped (for an op keyswap) but the other agent can only go and pick them up after workhours. With a 30 minutes time frame it wouldn't be possible anymore to drop a capsule in a forest at tree z so that agent y can pick it up x time later.

    I do get your point, but 30 minutes seems to short. 12 hours is ok, 25 would be fine.

  • MirthmakerMirthmaker ✭✭✭✭

    Fair enough. I get that in a non-urban setting it might be more important that twelve hours be used. Tech limitations and one size fits most rears its ugly head again.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    One way to think about this question is to consider the reasons for having streetsweepers. What problem or problems was Niantic trying to solve by creating them? Wrapping your brain around that question provides a foundation for analyzing the current status of the game and whether current conditions argue for the same or different behavior. Obviously we can't know about server load but we can observe the conditions around us.

    I personally can't remember the last time I saw a dropped item that I wasn't somehow involved with. Dropped keys from links being killed show up from time to time but I doubt there are enough of them to make a difference between 12 and 24/25 hour sweepers. I live in a dense urban area, though not as dense as somewhere like Manhattan or Tokyo.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @Perringaiden I haven't attended any Tokyo mission days so I've never had the opportunity to forget. Has there even been a mission day in the last year?

  • The street sweeper change to be 30 minutes after an anomaly was instituted because the Tokyo Mission Day back in 2014 (?) almost ground the game to a halt because so many keys were on the ground at once.

    Since then, we've also had the bump to 500XM, Recyclable Capsules, Hack No Key and a better management interface all aid in reducing the number of dropped items, but that doesn't mean the game can handle plenty of items dropped on the ground.

    The OP is literally asking for somewhat weakly-limited storage maximums, in a game where they've said time and again that inventory management is a key game element.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @Perringaiden Anomalies/events are a different kettle o'fish.

    I'm definitely not advocating for sweepers to be completely removed. I'm just proposing a framework for considering the question, and suggesting that in current game conditions 24/25 hours would be no more problematic than 12 hours.

    From a technical perspective I can draw a graph in my head of sweetsweeper timings and server load and know that there's a sweet spot somewhere. Running the sweepers every 60 seconds is probably expensive as is running them never. I'd imagine the trough in that graph is pretty wide right now.

  • Please provide a justification for why someone 'deserves' more inventory then? You're telling everyone to prove why it shouldn't happen, but no-one has provided a reason why it should in the first place.

    Want doesn't count.

  • caderouxcaderoux ✭✭✭

    Amen. Mute is a wonderful thing, but it only goes so far.

  • EvilSuperHerosEvilSuperHeros ✭✭✭✭✭

    It comes in really handy when you Recurse. I usually drop a bunch of L8 gear near where I'm getting ready to play when I Recurse. Then after I'm back to L8, I go and pick it up, because now that I've used up all those keys and hundreds of L1 resonators, I can use the high level stuffs.

    Actually this last time around (Recursion #5) I actually just dumped the L8 gear in the area I was playing in. if someone came thru while I was playing, they would of gotten lucky and scored a bunch of L8 gear to then use on all my little L1 portals and all my little tiny triangles.

  • thesolothesolo ✭✭✭✭✭

    12h is a perfectly reasonable timeframe, and I've used this trick before as well. Or just drop all the stuff you get from level-up kits and then come get it later on after you've burned through some gear.

  • phthoruthphthoruth ✭✭✭✭

    This request is not for more gear; It is to allow us to pick 1 time of day to go out to pick up our capsules.

    During the ongoing pandemic, where we work from home, it is best to limit the number of times and places we go.

  • This request is not for more gear; 

    This is literally to make it easier to have more gear. "Storing" stuff on the ground is one of those "Unintended consequences" that Niantic is so bad at.

    You want to make it easier to give yourself a larger inventory. Pure and simply that's the request.

    As you said:

    I keep inventory on the ground at times.

  • phthoruthphthoruth ✭✭✭✭

    My request has no impact on the amount of gear I store on the ground.

    The amount of gear I have depends only on how much I can farm, and how quickly I use it.

    I can use my inventory in a couple hours, but it may be weeks between farms, (due to the pandemic) so I ration it.



    I dont work for Niantic, but I have an educated guess on why inventory was capped in the early days: People didnt recycle keys; They would have over 10,000 keys. So when you went to link, the server had to work how to check all possible links.

    When they added key lockers, it worked around that technical limitation by allowing more keys in inventory, but they arent used for links, so not impact on server load.


    I can also guess that the reason sweepers were added was to prevent keys from being weaponized, hurting events and making the game hard to play when they were maliciously dropped on enemy portals. People also dropped other things such as cubes and media to annoy their opponents. The multi selector helped a bit, but to prevent long term damage to the game play, sweepers were added.

    Sweepers were not intentionally trying to steal agents' valuable gear, which includes purchased gear.

    But the assistance of capsules at all, and 12 hour sweeper, is to make it easier to drop and pick up many items.

    If it were meant strictly as a away to directly transfer items from one player to another, the sweepers would have been set for a few minutes, not 12 hours.

  • thesolothesolo ✭✭✭✭✭

    IMHO, 12h is a reasonable window and makes dead-drops possible, while still enabling the necessary server garbage collection.

  • MoogModularMoogModular ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited May 2021

    Huh? I remember Niantic specifically making announcements of the street sweepers being carried out faster due to anomalies up to the Prime series. It wasn't just due to lack of capsules.


    EDIT: Here's an announcement from Darsana Prime back in March 2019:

    One from Nemesis Umbra, October 2019:


  • edited May 2021

    The amount of gear I have depends only on how much I can farm, and how quickly I use it.

    And you drop some of that gear on the ground, because you're farming faster than you can use it.

    You haven't once mentioned that the primary purpose is to give it to other people so it's clearly you pick it up again and use it. Therefore you're asking for more inventory. I'm fairly sure you're not dropping gear on the ground when you only have 1000 items in your inventory.

    I can also guess that the reason sweepers were added was to prevent keys from being weaponized, hurting events and making the game hard to play when they were maliciously dropped on enemy portals. People also dropped other things such as cubes and media to annoy their opponents. The multi selector helped a bit, but to prevent long term damage to the game play, sweepers were added.

    Originally, the street sweeper was because there was no recycling. But when capsules came out, people started using the ground as storage, and at that point, Niantic wasn't going to make the sweeper less because they do care about inventory size.

    • Niantic staff have always pushed back against requests for more storage space by saying that inventory management was a key part of the game.
    • Paying for a subscription gives you more storage. Reducing the sweeper rate would reduce the impact of those 500 slots.
    • More items just sitting in the game unused means more server storage. That adds up, and Niantic has to pay Google for their storage used in DBs etc.

    You are 100% asking to make your life easier when using your "additional storage space". Being able to use the ground as storage is an unintended consequence of capsules. If Niantic's smart, they should assess how much gear is being dropped and picked up by the same agents each day, and perhaps increase the rate to discourage this.

    I dont work for Niantic, but I have an educated guess on why inventory was capped in the early days:

    Just as a historical note:

    • Inventory wasn't capped initially, but they soon put it in when they realized how much gear people were getting (like days after). Not just keys but everything.
    • Key Search Timeouts weren't added until after VRLA were, and they added the "Yellow Boxes".

    It's not about key searching. It's about storage space on the server.

  • thesolothesolo ✭✭✭✭✭

    Yes, when anomalies approach the sweeper gets sped up even faster. But rewind back to the early days of the game and items stuck around for a REALLY long time. Such that at events, dropped items made the game unplayable.

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