Portal battles seem to be affected by lag
I have really enjoyed the recent mini-anomalies, and it has been great to get back to group events. I managed to go to one player organized Kureze event, one Niantic deployed Kureze event, and the Kythera event in London, and had a blast at all three events.
However, while battling over portals it began to dawn on me that on evenly pitched battles, the attacking team found it almost impossible to actually capture a portal. On defense we found that several times our portal would go neutral, but our players deploying instantly had possession, whereas for the attacking team the scanner would not update the portal status in time. I'm beginning to suspect that the issues of lag that have been plaguing the game in the past year or so are also having a direct impact on portal battles.
I know that in a large-scale anomaly situation this sort of thing has always been an issue. Obviously when there's a battle of 20-40 players against 20-40 players our scanners are going to have a hard time keeping up with what's going on. But now even in 1:1 portal battles I find that defending is much easier than attacking because of the delay in the scanner updating portal status changes.
Is it just me, or is there an issue which needs to be looked into?
Comments
the lag issue is still unsolved last i checked sadly. its frustrating yes even daily play this happens.
This has been the case for as long as I can remember, and I think it's a fundamental flaw in the architecture. It's also one of the reasons I think Niantic should find an anomaly/competition format that doesn't focus on intense portal combat.
The bad lag is only a thing since about the middle of last year.
I think when they went to cheaper servers.
When it was moved from AppEngine native, to AppEngine running inside a Google Cloud container using an emulator.
Intense portal combat is great fun! There was always a problem in settings with large groups of players, of course, but in smaller evenly matched groups the portal ownership would change faction regularly. My issue is that this is no longer the case.
find an anomaly/competition format that doesn't focus on intense portal combat.
Hexathlons literally black-screened the app when they first rolled out.
they would be fun but with the current lag its kinda not going to happen sadly. maybe thats why they didnt promote ingress this weekend cause of that, i mean grow new players when there is lag over 1 year isnt exactly easy task and other problems..
Still not fixed or even acknowledged that it's a problem. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They did? I don't remember having issues but then again America wasn't the first ones time wise
The lag using Redacted at large anomalies was awful in some cities. Osaka was worst I experienced.
However, it worked differently.
The scanner wasn't so laggy, the backend was. (You could be tapping away firing and walking and you could get up to like a block away and finally see your bursters going off like almost a minute later).
Eventually fire queue would fill and you had to wait.
However, please keep intense portal control battles. They are awesome fun.
A mix of competition type is always preferred. Even non scanner or partial scanner event would be good.
(Screenshot of location and find hidden clues to a puzzle etc).
I was in Mountain View late in the evening before the Santa Clara Hexathlon, getting uniques and some farming in. The moment the Asian hexathlons started, the game stopped. No hacks, black-screen restarting, no way to even get the game to launch, for the next few hours.
I see it happen with same-faction scanners too. My husband and I play together a lot. Usually one uses bursters, the other uses resonators. But one person will see the portal go grey before the other does. We have to communicate the whole time. Like: "It's grey - cap it". The capturer goes into the portal (which seems from the outside to still be opposite faction), and lo and behold - it's grey. Or "It's grey - stop burstng." So the offensive player can move to the next portal, and not waste bursters on something already their faction.
Lag was especially bad today.