Monthly Apex screed / Ingress playing cards?

HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭
edited January 2022 in General

This is my monthly rant for @NianticThia. I'd hate to disappoint her.

I'm now officially playing with a full deck... of Apex boosts. I have 52 of these useless-to-me things clogging up valuable inventory space that I could instead fill with tasty tasty bursters. The only way to stop getting more of them is to cancel my C.O.R.E. subscription, and while I gleefully give money to Niantic for Ingress I desperately wish I wasn't paying to have my inventory space slowly consumed by cruft... they've now exceeded 10% of the extra space that I'm paying for. SUCH A BARGAIN!

[Please pretend I've included my standard recommendation here that things which consume inventory space should be easy to recycle, or things that can't be recycled shouldn't consume inventory space.]

[Please pretend I've acknowledged that I can use them and then do nothing, but I can't do that without getting AP for them, and that there's an unintended quirk that I could probably use to recycle them.]

BUT! I have a new idea. Niantic should make a deck of Ingress-themed playing cards that are available in the store, actual physical playing cards that can be used to extract money from your friends at the poker table. They can't be purchased with CMU, though, only with Apex boosts. 52 Apex boosts = one deck of cards, available with either blue backs or green ones. No red, sorry.

Hrmm, perhaps one deck should require 54 Apex boosts so that we can have jokers? Who would the jokers be? I nominate ADA and whatever joker made the decision that purchased items couldn't be recycled.

Actually, I have a semi-serious proposal. I will print some Ingress-themed playing cards myself. I will send a deck to Thia and to whoever at Niantic makes these things stop sucking up my inventory space. In the After Times when it's safe to do so I'll also volunteer my time as dealer if Niantic wants to have a poker game some evening. I used to play professionally and I have the skills to run a game.

Stay tuned for next month's rant wherein I desperately try to make something interesting out of the number 56.





Comments

  • InvestigateXMInvestigateXM ✭✭✭✭✭

    Having the first Joker be ADA but the second Joker not Jarvis seems like a missed opportunity. Faction bias smh my head /s

  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭

    Shame u cant gift away Apex i would gladly take them 🤤

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @mortuus I would gleefully give them away if I could.

    Really, I just want control over my inventory. I've recycled a hundred premium raid passes at a time in PoGo and all it did was give me an additional popup that said, "Are you sure you want to delete these premium items? This cannot be undone." I don't understand why Ingress doesn't give me the same functionality.

  • You are probably the only one in the universe with this Apex problem, lol.

    But I think we all agree that "things which consume inventory space should be easy to recycle, or things that can't be recycled shouldn't consume inventory space."

    I'll forget to use power-ups when I'm out playing. Then, sometimes I go days without leaving the house, working from home, pandemic etc. I hack cool things with my drone, but I don't have complete control of my inventory. So, I delete resos or bursters when I'd rather delete fireworks or beacons.

    An Ingress card game could be cool. Maybe a changeable gameboard of portals, that you capture, modify, etc by playing your card on it?

  • DrHydrosaurDrHydrosaur ✭✭✭✭

    13 archetypes x 4 suits?

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited January 2022

    @MargariteDVille I think someone made an Ingress-themed card game and made it available. Search the archives here? I was specifically thinking of a standard card deck, 13 ranks, four suits, let's play some poker. (Or bridge, or spades, or whatever.)

    And yes, what I'm really asking for is only slightly about Apex boosts. What I want is the ability to control my inventory, or to have it not matter that I can't control part of it. The overload of Apex boosts is only the visible symptom. I'm not the only one, though... I know one person who cancelled CORE because it was consuming inventory.

  • I don’t think it would be a good idea to introduce recycling premium items unless there’s a way to earn CMU to replace those items.

    If you recycle some premium items in Pokémon Go, you just have to keep Pokémon in gyms for a few days and you’ll have enough coins if you want to replace those items. I can imagine a lot of less experienced agents recycling premium items to make room, regretting it, realizing the only to get more is to pay, and then complaining.

    I would guess they’re hesitant to make anything in the boosts category not count against inventory because of the possibility for stockpiling massive amounts of items that could give easy AP during double AP events. Or perhaps larger inventories would cause server strain?

    I have no idea how much work would be involved, but it seems like the simplest solution is allowing the CORE load out to be customized (extra hyper cubes if no Apex or something) and then take deletion requests for existing Apex stockpiles.

  • NysyrNysyr ✭✭✭✭

    Problems would all be solved if there was a premium item locker to put the premium items in so they don't take up space, since it seems there's probably technical reasons they can't make them all not count towards cap.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    The options I see:

    • Allow purchased items to be recycled, with an extra "Are you sure?" (Note: You can already recycle some things you purchase.)
    • Make purchased items not consume inventory space.
    • Create boost lockers. Even if they were purchased items I'd pay good money to have boosts not take up inventory space. (I've proposed this before.)
    • Allow CORE loadouts to be customized. (I've proposed this before too.)
    • Allow purchased items to be sold back to the store, for maybe 1/3-1/2 of their lowest bulk purchase price. e.g. an Apex sells for 1875-2500 CMU depending on quantity. Let me sell it back to the store for 600-900 CMU. (Yeah, there's a loophole whereby something that's free in the store can be traded in.)
    • Let me petition support once every three months or so to delete items I don't want. (This seems like a bad idea because human effort is expensive.)
    • Make only C.O.R.E.-granted items not consume inventory space, or create an elastic C.O.R.E. locker that they go into when they're granted.

    As for server strain, somewhere in a discussion I grabbed an envelope, scribbled on the back, and analyzed the cost of storing additional inventory items. I'd have to go find the discussion but I think I estimated that $5 would cover the inventory storage costs for something like 800 players for one year. I didn't factor in compute resources and data charges but I massively overestimated the size of an item in inventory so it probably roughly balances out.

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