Considering they are having a Lightship summit today, we might finally see something about them. Their AR Voyage app updated yesterday with what seems to be what will be showcased.
Too bad I'm not in a city that can look at Visual Positioning System (VPS) Wayspots
Can only agree about the scanning thing adding nothing of interest to ingress gameplay. Because the cycle ended nicely for that recent event I went and scanned 12 portals 7 times each to get the battle Beacons ..... my gods was it the most boring half hour I've ever spent playing any game
Wish I had done that instead, but i was awake at like 5am and it was 9am the cycle ended, so figured I would go do it for free. At keast I got myself 8000 steps 🤣🤣🤣
As far as I know, portal scans count when they are uploaded. So if you scan now, and upload after the event starts, they should count towards the medal. I would advise to upload only one scan initially, and see if the counter goes up, because some recent Niantic events have started with a delay, and you risk getting zero points for all your collected portal scans if that should happen again.
Regarding the concern that we only have 400 scans, they refresh at a rate of 40 per day now. So over the course of 10 days you will be able to make another 400 scans. More than enough to get the gold by scanning alone, but actually most players would be best served by doing a combination of activities.
A further thought about scanning. I'm always a bit surprised by the number of players who say things like, "Scanning does nothing Ingressy", etc. Considering that we are supposed to be XM researchers, if you think about it, portal scanning is much more of a "portal research" oriented task than many other game actions. The difference is that players are used to the other actions and scanning is relatively new and rather different from other gameplay actions. However, I agree the game could definitely do a better job of integrating scanning into the story, e.g. make it more explicit that scanning is involved in XM research.
@Pangarban I see Ingress in terms of tactical and strategic control of the playfield, acquiring gear to support that, and exploration. Storyline and lore don't drive my play. If I go into an area and build it, throw a field over it, or smash up a bunch of portals I can look at the map when I'm done and see exactly what I've accomplished. If I go into an area and scan a hundred portals I leave the playfield exactly the same as it did before I got there. I haven't captured, upgraded, modded, or destroyed a single portal and I haven't acquired gear to do those things.
Admittedly the same can be true of missions, but they are basically guided exploration.
Ingress is the only one of Niantic's games that I've played that's primarily about competing for control of the playfield. Everything else is about collection of stuff and checking tasks off of lists for loose storyline purposes and because there's a little nugget of a reward at the end of each one. Sure, you control gyms in PoGo, you could plant gardens in HPWU, and you can decorate the board with flowers and hatch big flowers in PB but so much of those games are about "brew five potions", "catch ten water pokemon", "plant 14K flowers", etc. I'll never get past L43 in PoGo because it would require doing something that I find uninteresting over a hundred times.
The occasional tasks lists in Ingress are mostly also about the playfield, gear acquisition, or exploration.
I totally understand your point of view, and I get that I'm in the minority when it comes to scanning. In fact, I also don't like to go somewhere and only scan without conquering that zone as well! However, at the times I am properly scanning I also really take a lot more notice of the portals themselves. Like this afternoon, I noticed details I had never seen before on a church I had used as a portal hundreds of times before.
What would certainly improve scanning as an element of gameplay would be if portal scans had some temporary affect on portals. Even a small popup telling you that new information has been discovered? I don't know, really.
Agree with your play style. Visit, explore, control.
Scanning to me, as stated previously holds no interest to me - I do not want 3D models of portals in the game. Scanning chews time better spent doing the above. I've done some missions, usually I do a few for every country/city I visit, but certainly not regularly because they detract from doing the above.
Scanning when visiting an area DETRACTS from gaining other medals. Cuts the time down for UPV/UPC medals at least!
It would be the perfect time to test new quality detection tools. Make an event for scanning, then isolate all scans received, test them for quality in a new tool, and evaluate the results. They'd actually want bad scans in that sort of situation.
Scanning when visiting an area DETRACTS from gaining other medals. Cuts the time down for UPV/UPC medals at least!
Yeah scanning is the last on the list. If I were on a tropical island for a week, had captured every portal, and there was no opposition to remove them... then I'd start scanning.
Though more likely, I'd go for a swim or scuba dive...
Brothers, in game chats I often meet players who don't need these scans but need a medal. And then one of these players gave me bad advice. He said if you want a medal but you don't want to walk around portals, buildings and so on... You can always scan your backpack, or your sock, or your cigarette pack, for example. And be sure, some schoolchildren and other irresponsible older citizens will certainly scan all sorts of filth so as not to bother. And some kind of flying deformity, purely for fun, 100% can upload scans of its "jade wand" all over the city, without even leaving the house.
For this reason, I do not understand how the quality of the scanned material is controlled ???
They're not, at least in terms of the points. I'm sure someone at Niantic is constantly complaining about it, a few steps removed from the users. My point was that they could use such an event to test new quality controls.
I suspect the increase in time we have to complete it, after we complained that single weekends were too short and broke the old event paradigm, are to blame for making the requirement far higher than usual.
"Well if we're going to double the amount of time, we're going to make it three times harder."
I was being hyperbolic with the 'double', but the key complaint was only one weekend. Having two weekends greatly increases the amount of time most people have to complete the event, but this event is also far more effort than previous ones.
Also Aurora was in early 2020 late 2019 when Andrew was still organizing them.
#HardmodeBadger Oh noes! Either you can succumb to scanning, or you can step up and play hard and grab that gold badger! Holiday Weekend in the US. 3 or 4 day weekend for many.
Hey wake up! Most people do not live in big cities, but in places where 300 portals are already a luxury. And in these places, such requirements for this event are simply unrealistic, especially in the presence of superhumans with modified versions of scanners and all kinds of cheaters.
I was able to queue up 500 scans for upload, by having ~75 scans done before the event announcement, then scanning a lot after the event announcement, and scanning a bit more today after the event started. Uploading them from home wifi took about 26 minutes, enough to get in under one Apex, for 500k and the Gold Imprint badge. Six uploads errored out but were successful on a single retry each.
The actual scanning took a few hours across a few towns. During this time, I was mostly scanning and not doing many other Ingress actions. It wasn't that exciting, and doesn't really add much to the actual game, so I'm not going to focus much on scanning going forward. I do want to get Gold on the Scout and Scout Controller badges eventually.
@Tr1gg3rH4ppy Yes, you can see your points on your profile under events.
Gold is going to be easy for me, I think. I racked up almost 1600 points today with not much more than my normal play... no scans, no links, no fields.
Comments
Considering they are having a Lightship summit today, we might finally see something about them. Their AR Voyage app updated yesterday with what seems to be what will be showcased.
Too bad I'm not in a city that can look at Visual Positioning System (VPS) Wayspots
Can only agree about the scanning thing adding nothing of interest to ingress gameplay. Because the cycle ended nicely for that recent event I went and scanned 12 portals 7 times each to get the battle Beacons ..... my gods was it the most boring half hour I've ever spent playing any game
@gazzas89 Battle beacons are what... a buck each? I'd gleefully spend that rather than doing almost a hundred portal scans.
Wish I had done that instead, but i was awake at like 5am and it was 9am the cycle ended, so figured I would go do it for free. At keast I got myself 8000 steps 🤣🤣🤣
As far as I know, portal scans count when they are uploaded. So if you scan now, and upload after the event starts, they should count towards the medal. I would advise to upload only one scan initially, and see if the counter goes up, because some recent Niantic events have started with a delay, and you risk getting zero points for all your collected portal scans if that should happen again.
Regarding the concern that we only have 400 scans, they refresh at a rate of 40 per day now. So over the course of 10 days you will be able to make another 400 scans. More than enough to get the gold by scanning alone, but actually most players would be best served by doing a combination of activities.
A further thought about scanning. I'm always a bit surprised by the number of players who say things like, "Scanning does nothing Ingressy", etc. Considering that we are supposed to be XM researchers, if you think about it, portal scanning is much more of a "portal research" oriented task than many other game actions. The difference is that players are used to the other actions and scanning is relatively new and rather different from other gameplay actions. However, I agree the game could definitely do a better job of integrating scanning into the story, e.g. make it more explicit that scanning is involved in XM research.
I didn't realize that scans increment 40 per day. Then again, I don't think I have scanned and stored that many to be near the 400 limit.
@Pangarban I see Ingress in terms of tactical and strategic control of the playfield, acquiring gear to support that, and exploration. Storyline and lore don't drive my play. If I go into an area and build it, throw a field over it, or smash up a bunch of portals I can look at the map when I'm done and see exactly what I've accomplished. If I go into an area and scan a hundred portals I leave the playfield exactly the same as it did before I got there. I haven't captured, upgraded, modded, or destroyed a single portal and I haven't acquired gear to do those things.
Admittedly the same can be true of missions, but they are basically guided exploration.
Ingress is the only one of Niantic's games that I've played that's primarily about competing for control of the playfield. Everything else is about collection of stuff and checking tasks off of lists for loose storyline purposes and because there's a little nugget of a reward at the end of each one. Sure, you control gyms in PoGo, you could plant gardens in HPWU, and you can decorate the board with flowers and hatch big flowers in PB but so much of those games are about "brew five potions", "catch ten water pokemon", "plant 14K flowers", etc. I'll never get past L43 in PoGo because it would require doing something that I find uninteresting over a hundred times.
The occasional tasks lists in Ingress are mostly also about the playfield, gear acquisition, or exploration.
I totally understand your point of view, and I get that I'm in the minority when it comes to scanning. In fact, I also don't like to go somewhere and only scan without conquering that zone as well! However, at the times I am properly scanning I also really take a lot more notice of the portals themselves. Like this afternoon, I noticed details I had never seen before on a church I had used as a portal hundreds of times before.
What would certainly improve scanning as an element of gameplay would be if portal scans had some temporary affect on portals. Even a small popup telling you that new information has been discovered? I don't know, really.
Agree with your play style. Visit, explore, control.
Scanning to me, as stated previously holds no interest to me - I do not want 3D models of portals in the game. Scanning chews time better spent doing the above. I've done some missions, usually I do a few for every country/city I visit, but certainly not regularly because they detract from doing the above.
Scanning when visiting an area DETRACTS from gaining other medals. Cuts the time down for UPV/UPC medals at least!
Unless NIA will control the quality of scan, for example removing irrelevant scan counts, NIA world receive tons of rubbish scans in the event.
It would be the perfect time to test new quality detection tools. Make an event for scanning, then isolate all scans received, test them for quality in a new tool, and evaluate the results. They'd actually want bad scans in that sort of situation.
yes i wonder how many invalid abuse scans they get each week... somehow they need filter out the bad ones
Scanning when visiting an area DETRACTS from gaining other medals. Cuts the time down for UPV/UPC medals at least!
Yeah scanning is the last on the list. If I were on a tropical island for a week, had captured every portal, and there was no opposition to remove them... then I'd start scanning.
Though more likely, I'd go for a swim or scuba dive...
Brothers, in game chats I often meet players who don't need these scans but need a medal. And then one of these players gave me bad advice. He said if you want a medal but you don't want to walk around portals, buildings and so on... You can always scan your backpack, or your sock, or your cigarette pack, for example. And be sure, some schoolchildren and other irresponsible older citizens will certainly scan all sorts of filth so as not to bother. And some kind of flying deformity, purely for fun, 100% can upload scans of its "jade wand" all over the city, without even leaving the house.
For this reason, I do not understand how the quality of the scanned material is controlled ???
scans are not quality controlled.. not yet atleast i dont think ? but maybe in the future hopefully.
They're not, at least in terms of the points. I'm sure someone at Niantic is constantly complaining about it, a few steps removed from the users. My point was that they could use such an event to test new quality controls.
Time to math with core badges and Nemesis challenges.
1 point for each Glyph correctly drawn
8000 points earned by glyphing are comparable to:
4 points for each Portal captured
8000 points earned by capturing portals are comparable to Silver Liberator, half way to Gold
9 points for each link of 1km+ in length created
8000 points earned by linking portals are comparable to:
16 points for each Portal Scan successfully uploaded
8000 points earned by scanning portals are comparable to:
25 points for each field of 50k+ MU created
8000 points earned by (large) fielding are comparable to 4x Onyx Illuminator.
A portal scan is worth:
Given the numbers and the hardness of each task, how will the majority of the agents achieve the badge? And why it's via Portal Scan?
Also, will Niantic show some love for speedrunners?
Enjoy OnlyScans.
I suspect the increase in time we have to complete it, after we complained that single weekends were too short and broke the old event paradigm, are to blame for making the requirement far higher than usual.
"Well if we're going to double the amount of time, we're going to make it three times harder."
Proportions are not there, and I'm ignoring preparation time.
I was being hyperbolic with the 'double', but the key complaint was only one weekend. Having two weekends greatly increases the amount of time most people have to complete the event, but this event is also far more effort than previous ones.
Also Aurora was in
early 2020late 2019 when Andrew was still organizing them.Guessing a lot of cheats will get badge. Set tonl farmbot mode... 😞
#HardmodeBadger Oh noes! Either you can succumb to scanning, or you can step up and play hard and grab that gold badger! Holiday Weekend in the US. 3 or 4 day weekend for many.
Hey wake up! Most people do not live in big cities, but in places where 300 portals are already a luxury. And in these places, such requirements for this event are simply unrealistic, especially in the presence of superhumans with modified versions of scanners and all kinds of cheaters.
Now add EXO5 in there which was getting the bronze, silver, and gold field badges in the span of under 2 weeks.
You could achieved EXO5 Gold with 1080 links, with more event time and preparation time (IIRC) than EOS Imprint.
I was able to queue up 500 scans for upload, by having ~75 scans done before the event announcement, then scanning a lot after the event announcement, and scanning a bit more today after the event started. Uploading them from home wifi took about 26 minutes, enough to get in under one Apex, for 500k and the Gold Imprint badge. Six uploads errored out but were successful on a single retry each.
The actual scanning took a few hours across a few towns. During this time, I was mostly scanning and not doing many other Ingress actions. It wasn't that exciting, and doesn't really add much to the actual game, so I'm not going to focus much on scanning going forward. I do want to get Gold on the Scout and Scout Controller badges eventually.
Is there any way to keep track, how many points I already collected?
Regs,
T
@Tr1gg3rH4ppy Yes, you can see your points on your profile under events.
Gold is going to be easy for me, I think. I racked up almost 1600 points today with not much more than my normal play... no scans, no links, no fields.
Just glyphing and capture?