New layer for drone features
BlackReapers
✭✭
in General
Dear niantic,
im goin straight to the point, according to in-game features ( drone ), i wish there's another layer for drone visited portal, so we can easily track which portal have been visited by drone. i played ingress last time on 2019 and just back a month ago and im impressed with qol that have been improved on my scanner ( current 3 layer are so helpful on tracking my progress). i wish there an update for new layer in scanner to track down visited portal with drone.
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For what it's worth, Niantic (or more specifically, the Vanguards) discussed additional layers, like a drone layer, for the future already. Discussing it doesn't mean it'll be added 100%, but Niantic is at least aware of the suggestion.
ah .. its helpful.. thanks
Will be helpful if they add a drone medal or two eventually. No idea what they're waiting for on that...
They have said that they are working on Drones Mark 2 and Mark 3 I believe. Though there was nothing definitive as to what they would want those drones to be able to accomplish.
Would you prefer the drone medal for all hacks and unique visits since the drone was introduced, or only for drone actions done after the introduction of the medal?
Currently we have 3 drone statistics in profile :
If someday Niantic introduces a new medal specifically for drones, maybe, there will be many who ask for medal calculations since the drone was introduced, because we just need to continue our acquisition so far
As far as I remember they said they would in the future, rather than "working on". Still, it depends on how many interns that will be dispatched to Ingress project in the future.
yeah, there are drones made by apprentices 😂
I definitely think a drone medal for unique visits/longest journey should include everything since the drone was introduced.
If it only counted things achieved after the medal was introduced, it would invalidate any use of the drone that people have managed to make up to this point.
e.g. I have made a safe and legal trip specifically to leave my drone in a new area to increase my unique counts.... should the time I spent taking my drone there be totally written off? Another safe and legal trip to launch my drone to get an 86km journey - why should I lose credit for that effort if a badge is added.
What about the current stats.... if a badge only counted things achieved after the badge was introduced, would all counters be reset, or would any portals my drone has already been to before a new badge never be able to be included in after badge counts?
I would perhaps feel differently if badges were introduced for metrics that have not been visibly measured in our stats, but unique visits/journey length have both been visible since the start.
Personally, I do not think drone hacks merits a badge - it already credits the overall hack count and the glyph points. I also find drone recalls a bit of an odd one to be measured, let alone badge worthy. But if badges were introduced for these, despite the fact I have chosen not to work on these metrics, I do not believe that agents should start from 0 again if a badge were introduced.
I would love to be able to see which portals my drone has visited. I am currently trying to take screenshots when I move it, but wow that is hard to sort...
If no medal for it not really interesting
I think there are plenty of people who find things that have recorded stats interesting, even if they don't have a medal.
Unique drone visits are certainly interesting to lots of people who have expressed desire for this to be part of the drone layer.
Thank you for the feedback! I've made a note...
It should always be retroactive wherever possible. It's extremely irritating when agents do a lot of gameplay or **** in a particular direction, and then a badge comes out and it's not retroactive. This was the problem with the incrementing NL badge, for example; people have been going to visit the van for literally years at anomalies, and yet the badge started everyone at 0 for no good reason.
Recruiter started everyone at 0, regardless of whether or not they had the Eve badge, which was for recruitment.
I personally would argue that Epoch should have been retroactive as well; if you have an active sojourner streak, epoch should have been filled in by it. But Niantic needed another method to try to get people to keep hacking, so they ignored it and now we have 2 for some reason.
Okay, so how does all of this tie back to this particular thread?
The drone layer, as well as the maverick badge, should have always been for uniques, not just for drone hacks. Explored, Pioneered, and Scouted are all unique portal states...and then DroneNet just shows drones on the map and that's literally it. It doesn't work like any of the other layers. And Maverick as a badge can literally be done with just using 1 or 2 portals; it doesn't foster exploration with the drone, it doesn't tick up for visiting new portals, it doesn't care how long of a jump you make or total distance traveled, even though these are stats on our profile.
Niantic needs to start making things consistent. Everything is an exception case right now and it's infuriating.
I may be wrong, but I believe that all of the badges that were not retroactive had nothing on the profile before the badge was introduced. I certainly do not recall one for NL-1331 before the badge, Eve was before my time - but wasn't that specifically for introducing iPhone users rather than general recruitment? Epoch measures hacks in a different way to Sojo, so the stat was not directly transferable. e.g. it is almost certain that the Sojo streak will be maintaintaned by a hack at 23:55 on a Tuesday, followed by the next have at 00:05 on the Thursday - but this would not be Epoch eligible. Not to mention drone hacks maintaining Sojo, and drone hacks have never been considered eligible for Epoch.
I agree that drone hacks was an odd choice for a drone badge - we have so many stats related to hacking one way or another just now (Maverick, Hacker itself, Translator, Epoch, Sojourner). I'm going to guess that it was done that way so that opposite faction could not block progress - as a percentage of the player base, I doubt there are many people who cannot at least see a portal from home so if there are players who target drones for return you can still just hop to the nearest portal and hack it, return the drone, repeat hourly. But I do not think this was a good or necessary choice - the metrics of "unique portals drone visited" and "furthest drone distance" are more in keeping with Niantic's aims of exploration. For example I pay far more attention to portal names/pictures/descriptions when my drone is spending an hour there compared to my real life visit to a new place when I am just looking for anything without a red circle I can capture for Pioneer credit.
Please, Niantic: let's have a badge for drone exploration. Use the stats already accumulated (like you did when you introduced Maverick). Show us the portals our drone has already visited as part of the Dronenet layer. And add drone visit information to intel along with the visited/uniques/scout controlled.
Trekker, Illuminator, Spec Ops were retroactive with stats counting from a few months to over a year before implementation. Engineer had stats for a month before the badge.
I think OPR and Maverick were the only 2 badges introduced with a pre-existing stat since I started. And both of those were retroactive.
But was I right that all the new badges starting from 0 did not have a visible stat before they were launched?
Mission day was retroactive too when it switched from the orange medal to the tiers one
It is very hard to keep up with what portals my drone has visited. I take screenshots on my phone and on the intel map. I have a document for each area I've visited. It's cumbersome and takes some fun out of it.
Even so, when I go back somewhere, I don't know if I missed any the first time, or if any have been added since my drone was there. So, I experience frustration from not knowing, instead of happiness from finding one.