Changing AP incentives around building/destroying

KonnTowerKonnTower ✭✭✭✭✭
edited June 2021 in General

How would we feel about changing incentives for building and destruction in the game? Currently, the time taken to build something versus destroying it and the time-to-AP ratio feels a little skewed towards easy AP for destruction.

How about we change things so destruction enables a timed bonus (like the apex timer) which gives agents a multiplier (1.5xAP bonus?) for linking/fielding. So say, for every portal destroyed, they get a minute linking/fielding AP bonus multiplier. We could also nerf raw AP reward for destuction so the net AP gain is a wash if the agent sticks around to build, but agents who only destroy and leave fields blank take a heavy penality versus current play.

Note: The idea here isn't to increase overall AP gain, it would be to remain net zero, incentivize building post-destruction, and penalize lazy agent behaviors.

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  • No.

  • This seems like a way to punish people for playing differently than you do.

    People find joy in Ingress in many different ways and I would not say that one is better than the other.


    However, I would be intrigued by a "spree multiplier". Ie. You make x links in x minutes -> links award 5% more AP for some time

  • KonnTowerKonnTower ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited June 2021

    Really more of a way of bringing efficiency into more of a balance. I can spend multiple hours **** out microfielding at 200-400k/AP per hour, someone can come through with bursters and earn approximately half my total AP gained in less than 10 minutes. it pushes their AP per hour numbers through the roof. Then they walk away, don't build, and ride my coattails up easily. I guess I could also just not build, I technically don't need the AP. Encouraging less play is better, right?

  • I can see that the balance between creation and destruction needs to be addressed. But forcing someone to perform certain actions (they might not want to do) isn't the way to go.

  • KonnTowerKonnTower ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited June 2021

    I'm open to suggestions. I think we already have a bit of a problem with AP being very easy to obtain which is a separate issue, but in particular, I feel the incentive to drive by and not actually get out and microfield is pretty high. Like I said, the thought is to allow destruction to still offer AP, but at a toned down rate if the person isn't sticking around to build up things. Like the government, it's not possible to force actions, just to create the incentives in which the actions would logically be taken by people when looking at the economics of their decisions. I'd be fine if people tearing my stuff down were earning 1/4 or 1/5 of what i earned building it up... But nearly half? Oof.

  • XQlusioNXQlusioN ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited June 2021

    Balance isn't an easy thing to do.

    I feel that effort and reward should match.

    Standing in 1 spot and firing bursters is less effort than going to 1 portal, hacking a key, going to a second portal and making the link.

    But if those 2 portals are 40m apart or 20km also affects the effort required. But longer doesn't necessarily mean more effort. I can create a 20km yolo link "because I can" vs a 40m link that was carefully though out as part of a bigger plan.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    I would hate this with the fury of a million white-hot suns. It really sounds to me like you're saying, "I don't like the way some people play the game and I want them to play it the way I like to play."

    I generally both build and destroy strategically, and microfielding for the sole purpose of building is a huge turn-off for me. Several years ago I looked at an area of my city that had been entrenched opposing-faction P7/P8s for months. "That's enough!", I said to myself. "I'm going to make it my mission to change control of that area." I focused on doing two things-- farming like a fiend and smashing an area of about 200 portals every single night. After a while it got to the point where I could skip a night and occasionally two, but I did this for a good solid six months before I'd fully achieved my goal. During this time I generally carried no more resos that 20 R8 and 20 R7 because I needed the inventory space for weapons, and there was no way I was going to waste good smashing time deploying.

    While I was doing this I decided it would be fun to get onyx purifier before platinum builder, and I did. I later decided that double onyx purifier should come before onyx builder and I achieved that too.

    The thing that I enjoy most about this game is making a long-term change to the playing field, and I do that by taking on areas that are solidly controlled by the opposing faction and are mostly stagnant. If you put impediments to smashing in place then those stagnant areas would get worse rather than better.

    On the other hand, I have a quarter million AP and intend to recurse once every five years so AP isn't a motivating factor for me.



  • KonnTowerKonnTower ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited June 2021

    Mainly I'm saying "The AP per hour reward for being down dense areas needs to be in line with the AP reward per hour of building, or vice versa. "

    I can push 150-200k AP in an hour which is 2500-3333 AP per minute. Someone that comes by and clears it in 10 minutes gets 75k-100k AP for that hour of work, but the payoff is at a quicker rate. So their time adjusted rate for this play is 7500-10000 AP per minute.

    Build: 2500-3333 AP per minute

    Destroy: 7500-10000 AP per minute

    So destroying earns approximately 3x the amount of AP per minute, albeit you must wait for the opportunity of someone like myself to come build. What I'm asking for is this to be more of a 1:1 payoff instead of 3:1. I don't think that's unreasonable. Or make it 2:1, with a bonus multiplier for rebuild? The economics/incentives are out of w-hack(banned word???).

    Post edited by KonnTower on
  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @KonnTower There's a cost that you're overlooking, and that is acquiring gear. The gear needs for mowing down big areas are more specialized than those for building.

    If I microfield I can pretty much acquire the gear I need as I go, plus what I get from moving through the world. If I'm mowing down a large area, especially a fortified one, I'm going to need to pile of high-level weapons and it takes time and effort to find sources and get gear. When I mow down large areas I spend significantly more time farming weapons than I do using them.

  • KonnTowerKonnTower ✭✭✭✭✭

    With drones, earning 200 busters a day plus quantums on top of that, it's child's play. Level 8 xmps are a dime a dozen

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @KonnTower Let's check the math on that. You can drone hack once per hour under normal circumstances, and a perfect glyph hack has an EV of 4-5 X8s unless things have changed recently. If you do 16 drone hacks per day perfectly that would be 80-100 X8s, but who has time to hack every single hour while they're awake? 40-50 per day is a reasonable upper bound, and don't forget that this has a non-zero time cost.

    If you have 1000 X8s in quantum capsules you can expect to average maybe 10-12 X8s per day in interest.

    There's an assumption built into this, which is that there are friendly P8s available to you to drone hack, and that certainly isn't true for everyone.

  • KonnTowerKonnTower ✭✭✭✭✭

    They recently added this new mod called an ito-.....


    150-200 is very doable per day.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @KonnTower You're assuming a set of play conditions that don't exist for most people.

    Lots of people live in areas where there are no P8s to be had, and plenty of others live in areas where a modded P8 is going to be mowed down as soon as it's discovered. Drone hunting is a thing, and I know someone who has returned more than 100 drones at this point. I'm only at 20 and I'm not trying... I just have a taste for mowing down standing P8s and drone returns are collateral damage.

    A few years ago I was visiting a large city in Europe for work and I happened to be a few blocks away when my opponents started fracking. Being the hardcore bay-area trained player that I am I immediately went over and busted it up since that's exactly what I would expect from my opponents if I was at a frack farm. It turns out that was their monthly (!) frack. Just for fun I looked at this city's current state-- in the whole of the city there are 9 RP8s and one EP8. Of those none has an ITO of any type and only one has an open mod slot.

  • InerasIneras ✭✭✭

    Then they walk away, don't build, and ride my coattails up easily. I guess I could also just not build, I technically don't need the AP. Encouraging less play is better, right?


    Dedicated fielding can take place at any location and at one's leisure with a few exceptions. Dedicated destruction requires travel, and range is limited by inventory capacity. If you make micro fields in a small area, you get punished accordingly.


    You present an argument that is one-sided and overly simplified. I think your claim would have been more persuasive had you mentioned how mitigation works and how multiple defenders can foil attacks, but you left them out. You could have proposed a fairer scaling system to balance the numbers instead of penalizing a critical component of gameplay and belittling your opponents of being lazy and riding your coattails. Would you like your gameboard to become so static that you have to wait an entire week for the portals to decay before fielding again?


    You only mentioned micro-fielding, but let's talk about other forms of fielding to get the full picture. Building was and still is the best way to gain AP: destroying couldn't compete in that regard and now we have Battle Beacons. AP generators force opposing agents to go out of their way to remove the spines or risk giving the other team even more AP and MU. There are multiple threads about agents going from level 1 to 16 within hours. SITREPs by agents Jomocinho, Jepakazol, Maniac15, UigionBahamut are easily searchable. What you don't find is agents going from 1 to 16 in a day by blowing up portals. Then there are BAFs that costs more for the destroyer because the attacker is reacting to someone's else's terms.


    Coordinated defense deters attackers and completely removes lower level agents from the board. Shielding from links alone provide decent mitigation for a team of rechargers to fend off uncommitted aggression. Your suggested timed bonus will expire when an attacker is stymied. Building is impossible when the opposition responds within 10 minutes and sends one of their own after you. Niantic's protocol states that you should remove yourself from the field when this happens. Hence rebuilding is not an option in this case, and forcing players to do so is wrong.


    In AS16-ROMEO-14, ENL has never won a septicycle in 2021 and most of 2020⁠—I say most because I can't load results prior to 2020.43. This matter deserves a thread of its own, but my point is that when one faction gains dominance, advantages snowball. When one portal goes down, it rises up again to level 8 with Aegis Shields. Which brings me to my next point: Aegis Shields were nerfed for a good reason, but it devalued an item too much. Tweaks are often accompanied by unforeseen consequences. I think reviewing mod stickiness should take precedence over adjusting AP. I would also suggest extending the zap range of portals.

  • KonnTowerKonnTower ✭✭✭✭✭

    Well, I can share my reality. This is common in the northeast. Large P8 farms for lazy tap-hacking cargressers. No shortage.


    Still, I'd like to see the ratios of rewards be balanced. I'm also open to increasing build AP and leaving destruction as-is. Or as someone mentioned, give a multiplier for X amount of links/fields made in a short time. There are both carrot and stick options available.

  • A daily quest system with rewards specifically for deploying resonators, adding mods, etc, seems like a simple way to incentivize building.

  • edited June 2021

    I don't hate the idea of cross-purpose bonuses, but this sounds too easily like a "Nerf Destroyers" thing.

    If you took away the nerfing of Destroy AP, it'd be a good 'incentivize' idea, but the nerfing to do net-zero AP change feels more like a punishment change.

    Not everyone has to play both sides of the game, and destroy-only players serve a good purpose, because they clear the field for other players to build.

    AP is largely irrelevant after level 8, and is just a score card for activity, but the mindset of nerfing damage AP doesn't seem like it's designed to generate more activity, but rather punish people who choose to play differently.

    So

    +1 for AP bonuses to doing the opposite activity

    -1 for nerfing AP.

    There's no need to keep 'net-zero AP' and attempting to do so creates a negative impression.

    Yep, on another post about daily tasks and their bonuses, I pointed out that daily tasks that reward 'something else' like destroying rewards resonators, and deploying rewards XMPs, would give people gear to perform the other action and encourage them to do both.

    Positive-positive ideas are far better than "punish the style I don't like".

  • ToxoplasmollyToxoplasmolly ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited June 2021

    There's an adage where I play: Farm, field, and smash. Pick 2.

    Most folk simply don't have the time to do all three in one Ingress outing.

    Smash & field doesn't happen as often as one might like because with a small player base, the game board tends toward an equilibrium state where there are RES parts of town vs. ENL parts of town — only RES live and work in some areas, and only ENL live and work in other areas. There's little incentive* for, say, RES to field in an ENL area because it'll all revert back in short order, sometimes before the "smash" phase is even finished.

    *Edit: By "incentive", I mean that people want to feel like they're making a worthwhile change to the game board. Fielding an area just for it to be destroyed moments later tends to feel like worthless cannon fodder.

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