How to fix the cell score game
The cell score game currently has some significant problems:
- A cell is often dominated by one faction either because they have significantly more players or they have one or two players who have essentially unlimited time.
- A couple of portals with limited access can effectively shut out the faction that doesn't have access.
- The extreme example of the previous point: An unkillable BAF over a cell or portion of it completely shuts out the faction that doesn't have access to those portals.
- The scoring mechanism rewards both new and stagnant MU-- cells are often won with fields that stand for weeks or months.
- The dominated faction has no incentive to compete for score if they can't overcome the structural deficiencies.
- Both creating and destroying MU affect the final score but only creation is recognized with a leaderboard.
How I propose to fix this:
- Score septicycles based on the change from the last cycle rather than raw MU.
- Create a leaderboard for MU destroyed that parallels the current MU created.
Example of scoring:
Septicycle #1: Purple has 250K MU average, Orange has 150K MU average. Purple wins the cycle by 100K.
Septicycle #2: Purple has 250K MU average, Orange has 200K MU average. Orange leads by only 50K so Purple wins the cycle because they have improved the difference by 50K.
Septicycle #3: Purple has 350K MU average, Orange has 250K MU average. Orange leads by 100K so they win the cycle because they have increased the difference by 50K.
Why do I believe this mechanism is superior? It rewards activity, not stagnancy, and gives a dominated faction the opportunity to win. It gives every single player an incentive to compete-- throwing or taking down one field just before a checkpoint can be the thing that tilts the score. It negates or at least significantly reduces the effect of That One Player Who Has Unlimited Time. It recognizes that both creation and destruction of fields contributes to the cycle. I think this would wake up the septicycle game in many areas where it has been stagnant.
Comments
I'll repeat this like a broken record but the overall scoring system needs an overhaul. The mechanics of scoring has not changed since 2014.
This. This is the kind of post you just write "this" and walk away.
Everything you said is perfect and simple. I often worry about the same problem you're addressing but the ways in which I was conceptually trying to address it were by implementing completely new game play... But your approach is infinitely better... It's simply just fixing the structural problem itself. I do think new gameplay is needed but this is something that could actually implement fairly easily as opposed to juggling the balancing issues of new gameplay... And figuring out something compelling.
Your idea just simply fixes the goddamn problem. And somewhat eloquently I might add.
I am especially enamored with the idea of a destruction leaderboard... At first I was fully on board with niantic's idea that destruction should be supported marginally... It's why we don't have as many destruction badges as we do building badges... But when it comes to having things taken down, as I look across all the stagnant cells this is entirely the problem.
A parallel leaderboard of destruction... Genius.
Concordo apoiado,e que venha mais uma medalha 🏅
yeah the whole mu system need re-designed its really not that fun today vs 2014..... would be fun to have mu destroyed leaderboards and not only mu created... onesided way...
We need al kind of new scoreboards,
resonators deployer,
resonators destroyed,
mods deployed,
fields created,
fields destroyed
and a long more stats
I know this advice won't help everyone, but I helped turn a losing cell into a winning cell. Stop thinking like a loser crying that you can't win your cell, be bothered that you are losing while knowing that you are good enough and make a plan to turn it around. Find advantages you have in the cell. Make new fields. Chip away at the other faction's fields as you gain these advantages. It will take teamwork. There doesn't need to be a "prize" for winning your cell, just pride in your own team and a focus on the same goal.
problem is mainly the lack of players, there nothing that help faction to get even agent .
good luck doing anything on 1 vs 10 while keeping a job.
@kiloecholima Your advice is good for some areas, but different cells can have very different textures.
Population density matters a lot, but what matters just as much is the distribution of agents in high- and low-density areas. If one faction dominates in a high-density population area then low-density areas will have a hard time overcoming that natural advantage because fields of the same physical size will have dramatically more MU. In essence, the faction in the high-density area is playing on easy mode and the one other is playing on hard mode. If you have one agent against ten as @Khatre mentioned, or five against ten and three of those ten are retired and play Ingress full time, you don't have many outs.
Imagine being Enlightened in AM01-ECHO-09. https://am01-echo-09.com/
I think it makes sense to build a scoring mechanism that gives either faction a chance to win their cell rather than making it primarily a nose count game.
This is actually quite a good idea.
I like it, would be good to implement.
Won't help Enl here though. We can BAF at will. Not an ideal situation.
Overall, though the ideas excellent.
@Hosette I think you messed up the "Purple" and "Orange" labelling in the scoring example
It would also help if NIA would update the population counts in-game. There are still areas that have been built on years ago adding population but in-game it still shows rural counts. This is from the population information being imported back in the beta version of the game.
Teamplay prevails👍
This scoring system would make it (to a first approximation) a zero sum game, and so most cells would end up averaging roughly 50% of all septicycles to each faction. Which I think could be seen by some people as a big advantage over the current system and by others to make it boring and pointless.
The other thing is that it would incentivise factions to keep those perma-BAFs up rather than allowing them to go down every so often, because as soon as it comes down that faction suffers a big loss in that septicycle.
There may exist a slightly more satisfying middle-ground but with more difficult maths. Something where standing fields aren't completely ignored but count less and less over time. The problem with that would be that in some cells people will game it by flipping and rebuilding their perma-BAFs.
Personally I think MU cycle game works just fine!
Just wanted to air that opinion also.
In my experience there is always people to complain on all sorts of rules instead of putting in the effort needed to master a game.
There could be a badge for cycle top 3 list placements that an agent each checkpoint gets score if on the list 1st 2nd or 3rd place 10, 4, 1 ticks respectively -one year on 1st place all checkpoints gives the Onyx
but we are already drowning in badges...
@starwort Your point about big BAFs is well-taken but there would be no scoring advantage to keeping them up over the long term... they would only earn points in their first stepticycle.
@Hosette so in essence, the dominant faction with a BAF will just slowly manipulate the layers over cycles to adjust?
I'd rather see a mu burnout heat map, add a layer to the Intel map of red triangles. Burnout increases based on time the field stays up over a cycle, leaving red triangles that have to decay like fields do. MU in burnout zones is worth less and less, approaching zero. More layers over an area burns out the MU quicker. Force factions to move around and get new triangles up. Perhaps make burnout last long enough that a max burnout lasts a couple septicycles. Also, being worth more MU could also affect burnout speed, granting a way to balance city vs rural scoring.
Side benefit, you'd see on the map where old fields were for a while. Also, burnout would be across both factions. No being able to yolo a single layer over a metro from the other faction and have guaranteed victory.
Put it in the lore that the minds you're controlling are tired of being controlled. Maybe say chaotic XM is taking over from overmanipulation of the portal network over time?
I like the MU burnout idea. And when it gets down to 0 MU, the fields fall. Then people can play again in that area, and get the AP for fielding, but no more than 1 MU per field (which is already the minimum).
This post is so confusing, I have no idea if OP made mistakes determining who would be the winner in the scenarios.
By basing a cycle win on previous cycle MU, it would obviously take out the BAF part of the game. It forces you to always look to increase the MU from previous checkpoint, otherwise opponent team could win by just increasing their MU score by 1 point.
I feel like this is the scenario OP is suggesting? I hope not, because that suggestion is ridiculous. Why would a team do a BAF to win a cycle if it almost guarantees them losing the next one.
Still not enough incentive for the opposition to go out and take down fields.
- There has to be a reward for collective MU for the Septicycle
- There has to be a reward for taking down the number of fields, not their size.
Obviously the former requires more incentives for either faction to make fields.
Taking down fields is easy, however with portals with limited access, or limited or no cell coverage, Niantic devs need to incentivise the extremes to deny the other faction of score.
We have talked at lengths before about a system for daily and weekly challenges, aka a bounty board.
These bounty boards are common place in every other ARG.
The fact of the matter is, that in the Ingress main menu, stuff was rearranged and a significant amount of empty space was created, your guess is as good as mine. Am guessing that this dead space would be for a bounty board.
/bBounties//
Including the Septicycle/weekly challenge to
- Make MU
- Drop n Control Fields
Generally agree. New players are the only ones with any incentive to actually build. Seasoned players who don't need AP know that building provides targets for the opposite faction, and super fast AP compared to the time it takes to build. What earns you 100k building in an hour, earns someone else 40k in a matter of minutes or seconds. So, don't build unless it's for MU.
Medalla para link/campo destruido insentiva muchos a los jugadores a romper
As long as I don't have wings on my mind controller medal, I consider myself a new player.
Another way would be to count minds only one time as it makes no sense to capture minds several times at once.
(Yes multilayering is fun but makes absolutely no sense as mind control by fields 😅)
Nobody plays for the scoreboard anymore. It's pointless. It's a solo game now and I'd rather see an ap scoreboard for the region instead.
I actually have to agree with this point instead; I personally would prefer the septicycle to just go away entirely, rather than some kind of mutated "percentage changed" or other scoring mechanism that will very quickly become just as stagnant and outdated as the existing cell scoring.
People complain about standing fields, not being able to play under them, etc., but any form of scoring just continues to promote that. If you want to fix turnover, standing fields, stale scoring, etc., just remove all of it.
A field can go up, a field can come down. It doesn't have to hit a certain timetable or be thrown by Y time to count for a score. Throw fields for the sake of throwing the field. If you want leaderboards, have them by MU, AP, No. of Fields, etc.
See, we've done this before, many times, with connected cells or anomaly challenges. Niantic put in rules that the biggest DELTA was what won, not the biggest score. So the obvious way to win that simply became to drop all of your fields before the challenge started, and then put them all right back up after, which gives you a multi-million MU advantage.
It doesn't actually fix the problem, it just time-shifts the problem. A dominant faction can continue to remain dominant simply by rotating fields, or strategically letting some decay, in order to continue to game the cycle. That replaces an actually good, consistent, and concise metric, i.e. MU on the board, with a not-at-all good metric that is difficult to understand and hard to score, but yet easy to game by just flipping your own fields.
It doesn't work. We have years of data showing that.
Disagree, with both.
As that is short foresight, and pushes Ingress further into a pointless and utterly boring game.
If it did, I'd probably stop.
The problem is, that you aren't chasing the scoreboard.
Arguably, the reason not to for newer players, is there is no direct reward for winning.
Honestly, when you start to chase the scoreboard, Ingress becomes so much more enjoyable. Interacting with the local community, strategising, key transportation, figuring out how to get and use specific comms gear, that is fun.
By the same token, needs the opposition to also chase the scoreboard.
The beauty of this idea is that it is already possible without any changes to the system. All you need is to set up a google sheet to calculate the MU difference between cycles, and agree with the opposing faction in your cell what counts as victory.
I really enjoy strategic play, but I also really enjoy battling in CBD areas with the opposition.
The problem with strategic play is instead of time, fuel and money become the deciding factor. (Or access to restricted portals, but these can eventually be fielded over).
I personally follow the MU per player local scoreboard. The total is boring, but getting name in top 3 or so is always nice.