Maybe they're trying to go by facts. Niantic has stats we don't. Like, average number of L7 portals in each cell... how many people hang around for a 4th hack of a portal... what percent of agents get a lot of their AP from recharging...
How do you figure? Then again I am nearing power user status, and prefer going out to sit home and charge because it cannibalizes inventory in the end.
The nightmare is if drones are taken away. Would force even more activity.
65 AP down to 10 AP - I will not go down on recharging but I will definitely lose less time on recharging - now for recharging one protal with for example 30k XM it takes me 1-2 minutes (common charge 1000 XM) and gain is about 1800 AP - it was worth time/AP while I was in front of TV
with change it will take me about 15 seconds (boost charge) and 30-50 AP gain
Will I miss it? Yeah, I got 100-150k AP extra per week
I've spent the last 2 years maximising recharge AP but it takes an awful long time to go through all the keys I'm recharging knowing the exact time each key decays. It will be nice to not have to worry about it and just hit boost charge once a day on whatever portal has not been charged by another local.
Have I benefited from it? 100% Yes.
In March 2020 I was level 13 with approx 14m AP at the time i wrote a post to the local community saying my aim was to reach level 14 during the pandemic, that comment has aged well 😂, 2 years later I've now recursed 3 times and I would estimate about half of my AP has come from recharging.
25ap would be an optimal number, u arent supposed to get that much ap sitting home tappin screen, its about time they revert it, i hope double r7 removal comes after not too long thats also way too long active and the final hack cooldown they can do it end of year since thats least harmful.
Considering we can get AP from glyphing, fireworks, battle beacons, beacons, activating an apex, and using a drone ever since recharging became a thing - I think using the argument of being inactive is a bit of a thought terminating cliché at best.
It wouldn't hurt to have the AP looked at - for shits and giggles it could alternate between 13 and 31 AP.
I’ve never been a fan of recharging fixed AP/charge (no matter if it’s 1 XM or 10,000 XM).
10 AP/charge always felt negligible. But 65AP/charge was too easily exploitable (I had my own army of L1 portals in rarely visited areas for much of the pandemic).
not that it will happen, but I’d be happy with 65AP/1000 XM recharged (rounded down to next integer) instead of 65/charge.
Your own argument defeats any calls to keep the AP for recharging high though. All those things you described, besides Drones, require you to be near a portal.
So I'm all on board with your S-Tier suggestion of removing the Glyphing AP from Drone hacks. 😜
I think reducing it to 10AP undervalues the strategic importance of recharging. Also, not all of us have a work or home portal and, with limited time to play after work and family commitments, reducing recharge AP removes a valid progression path for a number of users. Sure, you can interact with portals when you go for a walk with your family, but how many spouses / kids really want to hang around while you do that?
I don't see a need to reduce recharge AP at all but, if they're dead set on doing it, it should have been done in gradual amounts over time so a better idea could be obtained on how it impacts the current user base.
This is the 'mindset shift' that COVID caused, which I think Niantic is aiming to reverse.
Ingress is not a game designed to be played from home. Recharging wasn't even a core mechanic when the game first came out. 10AP is a nice little bonus for doing the maintenance work, but they want you to go outside and play. Recharging twice should not be worth the same as deploying a resonator, because deploying resonators is one of the core purposes of the game.
As John Hanke (@ace) oft repeated, the purpose of making the game was to "get his kids off the couch".
Yes, except Covid is still here and all over the world, and not everything that was decided in Ingress over half a decade ago should still be kept true today.
Simply put, Niantic not changing any of the rules up until Covid made Ingress exceptionally stale, especially with a dwindling player base.
I look at these changes a lot like covid work-from-home policies; you can't put the genie back into the bottle no matter how much people try. The world is not going back to how it was in the summer of 2019. Niantic needs to accept that fact and reshape the game accordingly based on how the world is now, not how it was back then.
"It's time to move" or "the game implying you're always moving" is like trying to cease all discussion about improving the gameplay. It's really bad to not put some critical thought into the AP scoring. 10 AP was ok in 2013 but I'm not so sure with today. As I stated earlier, there are several actions you can do without moving that give you more AP than recharging altogether.
It was quite annoying before I FC'd watching the areas I microfielded and wanted to decay after a week get recharged by some rube who wanted to grind AP from the couch.
Why do you assume their primary goal was AP? I've recharged every key in my inventory simply to burn excess power cubes and in the name of maintaining "control".
My two cents: Recharging is junk for accumulating AP, even at 65 AP per tap, with an Apex running, and charging resonators one at a time, 1k XM at a time (no boost charging). It's mind-numbingly boring, and if someone prefers that recharge AP to everything else Ingress has to offer, well… I'm not really going to worry about them.
Maintaining control is great if we're talking about farms, BAFs or other heavily fortified areas. Not so much on junk modded portals with low level resos that for months I was letting decay repeatedly so I could rebuild it again. When the recharging started, I put out messages asking nicely to let the area decay but it continued. It wasn't a strategically important area to keep recharged; certainly not more than, say, the farm 5 minutes away from it, but I was all on my own recharging that....
Also, while I agree with you on it being a mind-numbingly boring way to accumulate AP, it can actually be pretty lucrative. I've done 200k per Apex on First Saturday. That could add up if it's done on a regular basis.
It surprises me that agents treat recharging portals as if they were a violation of the TOS to the point that there are others who have to assume gatekeeping and monitoring activities. Yet, the same agents and Niantic just turn their blind eyes when it comes to spoofing and does not even address those spoofing reports efficiently. Poor allocation of resources.
Comments
Maybe they're trying to go by facts. Niantic has stats we don't. Like, average number of L7 portals in each cell... how many people hang around for a 4th hack of a portal... what percent of agents get a lot of their AP from recharging...
Haha, if Niantic used the stats they have. there wouldn't be heavy discussion about it for months
To be fair, the only people discussing it are players.
Niantic's probably defined the conditions that they remove it at, and are just waiting to see if/when each one is met.
How do you figure? Then again I am nearing power user status, and prefer going out to sit home and charge because it cannibalizes inventory in the end.
The nightmare is if drones are taken away. Would force even more activity.
This thread has gone silent, so just my 2cents:
65 AP down to 10 AP - I will not go down on recharging but I will definitely lose less time on recharging - now for recharging one protal with for example 30k XM it takes me 1-2 minutes (common charge 1000 XM) and gain is about 1800 AP - it was worth time/AP while I was in front of TV
with change it will take me about 15 seconds (boost charge) and 30-50 AP gain
Will I miss it? Yeah, I got 100-150k AP extra per week
What would be fair number? 50 AP?
Will I miss the recharge AP? Yes and No.
I've spent the last 2 years maximising recharge AP but it takes an awful long time to go through all the keys I'm recharging knowing the exact time each key decays. It will be nice to not have to worry about it and just hit boost charge once a day on whatever portal has not been charged by another local.
Have I benefited from it? 100% Yes.
In March 2020 I was level 13 with approx 14m AP at the time i wrote a post to the local community saying my aim was to reach level 14 during the pandemic, that comment has aged well 😂, 2 years later I've now recursed 3 times and I would estimate about half of my AP has come from recharging.
25ap would be an optimal number, u arent supposed to get that much ap sitting home tappin screen, its about time they revert it, i hope double r7 removal comes after not too long thats also way too long active and the final hack cooldown they can do it end of year since thats least harmful.
A fair number would be 10AP. Remember the slogan for Ingress is not "It's time to charge from the couch." 😉
Considering we can get AP from glyphing, fireworks, battle beacons, beacons, activating an apex, and using a drone ever since recharging became a thing - I think using the argument of being inactive is a bit of a thought terminating cliché at best.
It wouldn't hurt to have the AP looked at - for shits and giggles it could alternate between 13 and 31 AP.
If you want to build on that idea… What about making AP proportional to "resources" put in?
For example:
I can imagine developing this concept into something workable.
I’ve never been a fan of recharging fixed AP/charge (no matter if it’s 1 XM or 10,000 XM).
10 AP/charge always felt negligible. But 65AP/charge was too easily exploitable (I had my own army of L1 portals in rarely visited areas for much of the pandemic).
not that it will happen, but I’d be happy with 65AP/1000 XM recharged (rounded down to next integer) instead of 65/charge.
Your own argument defeats any calls to keep the AP for recharging high though. All those things you described, besides Drones, require you to be near a portal.
So I'm all on board with your S-Tier suggestion of removing the Glyphing AP from Drone hacks. 😜
An apex doesn't require you to be anywhere. Just activate and you have 1000 AP.
If someone wants to hit 16 that way I'm glad to hear they're paying a developers salary.
No one is going to do that in the real world.
Don't question the will of Ingress players
I think reducing it to 10AP undervalues the strategic importance of recharging. Also, not all of us have a work or home portal and, with limited time to play after work and family commitments, reducing recharge AP removes a valid progression path for a number of users. Sure, you can interact with portals when you go for a walk with your family, but how many spouses / kids really want to hang around while you do that?
I don't see a need to reduce recharge AP at all but, if they're dead set on doing it, it should have been done in gradual amounts over time so a better idea could be obtained on how it impacts the current user base.
This is the 'mindset shift' that COVID caused, which I think Niantic is aiming to reverse.
Ingress is not a game designed to be played from home. Recharging wasn't even a core mechanic when the game first came out. 10AP is a nice little bonus for doing the maintenance work, but they want you to go outside and play. Recharging twice should not be worth the same as deploying a resonator, because deploying resonators is one of the core purposes of the game.
As John Hanke (@ace) oft repeated, the purpose of making the game was to "get his kids off the couch".
Recharging is the opposite of that goal.
Having kids volunteer is a better way of getting the kids off the couch.
Good, let the world decay, and people go back to actually MOVING....
10 AP was always too low and never aligned well with other actions in game. 65 AP was too high and made recharging the same as upgrading a resonator.
A good solution would be to move recharging to 25 - 35 AP. This brings it much closer in line with other AP-generating events.
Yes, except Covid is still here and all over the world, and not everything that was decided in Ingress over half a decade ago should still be kept true today.
Simply put, Niantic not changing any of the rules up until Covid made Ingress exceptionally stale, especially with a dwindling player base.
I look at these changes a lot like covid work-from-home policies; you can't put the genie back into the bottle no matter how much people try. The world is not going back to how it was in the summer of 2019. Niantic needs to accept that fact and reshape the game accordingly based on how the world is now, not how it was back then.
"It's time to move" or "the game implying you're always moving" is like trying to cease all discussion about improving the gameplay. It's really bad to not put some critical thought into the AP scoring. 10 AP was ok in 2013 but I'm not so sure with today. As I stated earlier, there are several actions you can do without moving that give you more AP than recharging altogether.
I look at these changes a lot like covid work-from-home policies; you can't put the genie back into the bottle no matter how much people try.
Encouraging people to sit on the couch is the antithesis of Ingress. 10AP is far more than is necessary to encourage people to recharge.
yolo links finally decaying out, thank goodness.
It was quite annoying before I FC'd watching the areas I microfielded and wanted to decay after a week get recharged by some rube who wanted to grind AP from the couch.
Why do you assume their primary goal was AP? I've recharged every key in my inventory simply to burn excess power cubes and in the name of maintaining "control".
My two cents: Recharging is junk for accumulating AP, even at 65 AP per tap, with an Apex running, and charging resonators one at a time, 1k XM at a time (no boost charging). It's mind-numbingly boring, and if someone prefers that recharge AP to everything else Ingress has to offer, well… I'm not really going to worry about them.
Maintaining control is great if we're talking about farms, BAFs or other heavily fortified areas. Not so much on junk modded portals with low level resos that for months I was letting decay repeatedly so I could rebuild it again. When the recharging started, I put out messages asking nicely to let the area decay but it continued. It wasn't a strategically important area to keep recharged; certainly not more than, say, the farm 5 minutes away from it, but I was all on my own recharging that....
Also, while I agree with you on it being a mind-numbingly boring way to accumulate AP, it can actually be pretty lucrative. I've done 200k per Apex on First Saturday. That could add up if it's done on a regular basis.
how many hypercubes do people carry now?
Want to, or can't get rid of? 😁
I usually have about 150-300 depending on chance and activity.
It surprises me that agents treat recharging portals as if they were a violation of the TOS to the point that there are others who have to assume gatekeeping and monitoring activities. Yet, the same agents and Niantic just turn their blind eyes when it comes to spoofing and does not even address those spoofing reports efficiently. Poor allocation of resources.