Defense against Drones Returned
I like the idea of keeping score of Drones Returned.
I would like a defense against being hunted. What if your drone is hidden as long as the timer is counting down. You only become visible if you have not moved your drone in the last hour.
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In another thread I proposed that your drone should only be visible after you have hacked the portal. That would allow people to move stealthily but not take stealthy actions. Some people like to use their drones for gear acquisition, and others use them for tourism. This would allow tourists to continue exploring an area uninterrupted but allow disruption of farming.
There's a second reason: I think it's possible to identify and st-alk an individual's drone under some circumstances. If you know where someone is and you see their drone launched from near their home you could follow its movements and then target it. I haven't proven that this is possible but it certainly seems that way. If so, allowing drones to move stealthily would provide a tool for avoiding drone stalking.
If anything I think drones should be more vulnerable, not less. I'd like to see defensive mods on portals have a chance of returning opposite faction drones.
How about if you are scout controller your drone is invisible on that portal to other players?
@grendelwulf Connecting it to scout controller would break the use case of using your drone to explore new areas, and also make planning a long-distance run far less appealing. I'm at 71km right now and I think I have a 100km route but with my drone visible I'm not feeling particularly motivated to try.
This would exclude those players whose phones are not capable of scanning.
I'm surprised with the negativity from the guardian portal days, that this is even a thing. Being able to see other agents drones. Soon enough people will start complaining about being hunted for their drone and then NIA will get rid of it.
You can't 'target' in the same way because a) the drones aren't labelled, and b) the drones aren't on Intel.
Move your drone and don't hack. Wait for cooldown. Hack and immediately move to next portal. Repeat.
Change it then to "become visible for an hour after you hack", regardless of portal.
You are very blessed, if you have never known the guardian stalkers. They built and shared giant databases about people they bullied.
Now all they have to do is get keys to "choke points" / junctures around neighborhoods and work places. When they see a drone coming through a park, they can guess someone lives near there. Maybe get other keys, send the drone home, and see where it first appears. They can guess whose it is by looking at other activity in the area. They spent many full days hunting down guardians - this method is much quicker. Why give them one more tool?
Now their bullying can include making sure all portals around their home and work are strongly shielded. Their taunts can include where their target lives and works. They can intimidate people into stopping playing Ingress.
Stealth mode would help. So would travel along inventory keys. Then agents could launch near home and work without being seen - once they're savvy enough to do it.
But I think a better solution is to not see drones through keys.
Agreed, not from that time period of Ingress, but the quickest way to mess with people who think like that is play a very diversified game playing as many different portals as possible and stretch those that might want to be annoying thin trying to find you.
My variation might be (maybe this is what @Hosette had in mind with her first comment?): The drone starts its trip invisible. The drone then becomes and stays visible as soon as it makes a hack, until it's either recalled or sent back home.
If you're a tourist, you can travel in relative peace. If you're after gear, you can have some measure of privacy to leave home, but you become fair game for sharp-eyed Agents once you start hacking.
@Toxoplasmolly My original thought was that you would be visible while you're at the portal you hacked, but being visible for an hour after a hack is a better suggestion. I can even imagine how some lore-ish reason could be made up to justify it-- hacking causes the drone to heat up and glow or something.
Even then, you can still see the drones continue to attack those portals constantly and "bully" them.
So a smart player will place them on enemy P8s.
@Perringaiden And another smart player will employ two flipcards, one to boot the opposing faction's drone(s), and a second to revert the portal to its original faction.
At that point, "bully" becomes a bit hard tot realistically do without self-owns.
If someone wants to use keys to spot drones and bully people closest to their homes, the level of the portal has no relevance. Their point is to upset people, deprive them of enjoying the game, and get them to quit Ingress. If that means capturing greys, or flipping their own faction's L1s, they're fine with it.
Turrets should be anti-aircraft too?
I think the drone should have some advantage for a unique portal streaks. It can either get bonus defense, like staying airbone even if the portal change alignation, or receiving attackpower to attack other drones. So agent who are just collecting gear on their farms will be on disavantage compared to the one who take risk exploring the area.
Actually,NIA removed guardian because of the almost same "hunting"(bullying), so why now we have drones visible and even line in stats?
So,i agree,this new mechanics should be improved.
@DSkatauri Do you have any thoughts on improving the mechanism to avoid bullying? My current half-formed ideas:
The enemy P8s in my area are created by a multiaccounter, so I have misgivings.
So I have to drive pretty far to deploy the drone on legit enemy portals, but drone hunting is clearly a thing because I have 3 returns since the feature was added.
Farming enemy portals is not ideal anyway; You get less gear, and its an admission of failure.
Exactly. Not sure why your comment has insightful and mine is just all disagrees. 😂
First, lay off the hyperbole.
Second, you can literally just turn the drone layer off and you'll never seen a single drone in the game. And Maverick isn't affected by drone returns, because you can drone-hack any portal for credit.
Agreed. Unlike the Guardian badge, the Maverick badge isn't subject to interference from others.
Does switching off the layer turn you drone invisible to others? Because that is the whole point of the topic...
No it does not others can still see yours
Marverick Badge is not about how far you can send your drone, or how many hops you can make.
As long as you can deploy your drone, no-one can stop you incrementing the badge.
(Which is part of why I'm a big fan of "Deploy by Key")
What you mean by "deploy by key"?
You don't have a portal within 600m home/work and want new rules for it? If is that, you can already expand this to 1,2km by having the key and using the capsule trick to make the scanner load it.