[idea] Guardian Scout
Lots of players liked the guardian portal hunting sub game.
Random thought the other day, to te imagine it with portal scans.
Ie longest portal scan period
Don't know if this idea is good or bad. Just throwing it out there.
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Please no. Removing guardian from the game was one of the best decisions Niantic has made in recent years - it drastically decreased the toxicity and frustration in the game. Brining it back in this form would be at least as bad if not worse than the original guardian. In addition to people going out to deliberately hunt other agents, you'd be creating even more opportunity for same-faction agents to inadvertently cause pain to each other. You'd also create a bit of a disincentive to scan portals for fear or accidentally taking someone's guardian. And for people engaged in the hunt, they wouldn't necessarily be making quality scans (or even actual scans at all) in the interest of unseating others - so it would just pollute the database with more bad scans.
The only way I can maybe see this making sense is to allow scout controller streaks to be cumulative - so agents could go back and re-scan to re-take controller and continue their guardian march. That might actually create an incentive to do more scans, as opposed to merely bringing back toxicity for toxicity sake.
Guardian was bad for two reasons:
1) Like Sojourner, when something happened, you lost all progress and had to return completely to the start. This meant that a loss was crushing and would cause people to consider whether they wanted to restart or just stop playing. Quite a few people decided to stop.
2) Unlike Sojourner, Guardian was largely dependent on your opposition not being malicious trolls. And sadly, there were far more malicious trolls than not, when it came to guardian hunting. Similarly to how war pushes technology forward, guardian hunting encouraged people to push further and further into the illegitimate styles of play and information gathering. Spoofing down guardians made the effort pointless, and now we have to live with the spoofing and no guardian badge.
Never bring back a badge like this again.
Even more players HATED the guardian portal hunting sub game.
End of story.
Lifetime streaks that can reset to 0 and undo a year (or more) worth of work are just a bad idea. This is why we got the guardian sunset, and this is why sojourner has been replaced by epoch.
Sojourner and Epoch are fine as they are.
These types of achievements are quite typical across many games.
The Scout Guardian idea, is just that, an idea.
If it isn't a good idea, then that's fine.
This is one of those things that, many people actually enjoyed.
From a certain point of view, that toxicity made the game incredibly dynamic.
The problem with the guardian portal was spoofers, which is still an ongoing problem.
On the other hand scanning a wayspot proves that you are there.
Where this idea would differ more than Guardian Portal, is that you can build up a significant "defense" by way of a lot of scans.
And repeating again, this is only an idea. And like to hear more from others before retiring the idea completely.
I'd also argue that Sojourner is bad. Maybe it was when you had to walk down to the road, or, as one of my friends had to do, drive 50km to the nearest portal, twice a day. Now with the Drone it is quite easy, and the only difficulty is setting up a routine to use the Drone twice a day.
Guardian hunting created huge cheating rings whose sole purpose was to stop players from getting the guardian badge by scraping data and sharing it with anyone and everyone. No reason to ever let anything like that into the game again. It was wrong then and people can't be trusted to not do it again.
lot of cheaters* like the guardian.
most of them used scrapping tools and bots.
Please nothing of guardian. It was never fun to get messages from your own faction mates requesting to take down random portals and replying with "do it yourself"
So over denying people of a badge that just creates tension and drama for everyone involved.
Right....
@NianticThia please close this thread, as it is apparent that some players here want Ingress to continue to stagnate in gameplay options.
This suggestion would make the one sided play of Ingress actually playable again, when you are in a major city with virtually no opposition to play against.
@NianticThia please close this thread
As much as I don't like the idea either, do you really want Niantic to get into the practice of closing threads just because an idea is bad?
This suggestion would make the one sided play of Ingress actually playable again
No, it really wouldn't.
"Close this thread because people won't agree to my ideas!"