As a long standing player, I've agreed with the reversal of all the other temporary changes brought in during 2020.
However, I don't agree with the increase in hack times. It was bad enough before, having to wait five minutes between hacks. Not all players have the luxury of large numbers of heat sinks.
I suspect this decision will make more people stop playing.
Look, cooldown time impact depends a lot on HOW you play.
Above comment on inventory limit being the primary issue are spot on. I'm constantly recycling gear to keep hacking.
Faster cooldowns mean I burn portals out faster which means less play time.
Agree if key farming, it can be frustrating. Large microfields were an issue even with short cooldown.
Farming an anchor, you can mod it and even Frack it if needed.
My primary complaint is the uneven cooldown time depending on faction. Our opposition already has to resort enemy portals with less output and now it takes them longer as well. This reduces competition. Which also, reduces play time.
I'm an extremely time poor agent. Single mum with multiple family challenges. I shouldn't even be playing this game but I'm in love with ingress. So I fit it in where I can. And that is hard to do. If I pull over and park the car to hack something I don't have 90secs I have 3 seconds "mum not ingress again" so it may as well be 5 mins.
My thing is throwing complex microfielding. I spin battle beacon rethrow; homogeneous layers, max fields. Recently farmed 480 keys so I could throw 6 battle beacon 16 link rethrow for the double 2hr window ... You just don't need a 90sec cool down. You need a plan, you need inventory space, and you need to be able to glyph. If you have done any sort of hardcore farming like this you know inventory management is the bottle neck.
Farming is a big concern for me I love fielding.
Yet the return to cool down is not as problematic as people are making out. It's really not.
I'm ok with this change. And I know people will think "well that's fine for you and your play style " but I'm really very time poor, don't own a car, have old foot injuries, limited access to babysitting , and serious responsibilities. I love being able to sit in one place and burn it out. Yet even then the bottle neck is the inventory limit. 16 hacks at 10 items minimum that's 160 gear making room for that sort of gear can take some time.
Strictly depends on box portal density. My box I don't have that problem. Does not change my game much at all. Niantic has been wanting people to move for a long time. If current trends hold and we don't have a big problem between now and mid-January maybe we get F2F FS back for March I April. That would be awesome.
I don't see the big deal with cool down times going back to normal. It worked fine when there were players and lots of activity. Should be fine now with less players and less activity. At this point I think everyone that got frustrated and quit are already gone. Everyone still playing have endured some of the worst bugs Niantic has thrown at them and are still at it. Longer times between hacks are not going to deter them.
Doubt it, they have the pokegotubers on a partnership program and don't even interact with them much based on how some of them have been reacting to the boxes. A pogo forum would be looked after for likena week then be completely ignored
It’s kinda sad because 7 pages of comments against Eos was okay to get it cancelled the first time around. It made it seem like they were listening to the concerns of a significantly smaller, but loud group of people.
Here, we have 7 pages of comments pleading Niantic not to revert the portal cooldown and it all seems to be falling on deaf ears.
Waiting for the occasional post “We hear you, we read all your feedback”… Oh wait… They just did that. It was just part of the recent Q4 announcement and not on this abandoned forum.
This is on all of you @NianticBrian@NianticThia@ace ! Work on your communication. Listen to your players. It’s been 10 freaking years that this game has been running. It wouldn’t be the case if it wasn’t for the community. Don’t take the community for granted!
i don't get how people enjoy more standing on portal for farming than actually walking and fielding . Less CD more fields ! (unless your unemplyed and have no time restriction)
I started the game years ago for health reasons. As a fun motivation to move. Standing around in front of portals for 5 minutes rather demotivates me. If Niantic wants to discontinue the game, they should announce that and not decimate the players with meaningless game requirements.
At no point am I standing still on a portal farming. I am walking and fielding. If you honestly can't figure out how to do this with a 3 minute cooldown, I don't know how to help besides saying "git gud".
Have you ever played in rural regions or the mountains? Where you want keys of fully deployed and shielded portals? What would you do then instead of waiting?
The argument for short cool downs are false. You are basically saying ANY cool down time is bad.
Getting gear and keys is why we have: Heatsinks, multihacks, frackers and to a degree, viruses. A significant portion of the games items are all about improving hack output.
You may as well argue zero cool down and unlimited hacks and throw out a fair few items from the game. To me it smacks of laziness.
How about plan how you play a little, keep some HS in reserve, park and get out of your car.
Everyone is time limited to some point, (yes some more than others). We all adapt our play style accordingly.
You also have to remember there are bots and multiaccounting players out there who WILL FULLY ABUSE low cool downs.
So, what does one have to do the hack and walking stuff without being followed, stalked, and harassed? Go to that coveted portal around 1-4 am to gather those keys? Why would one place a HS when a rival agent can easily use a flip card to make it easier for him to hack keys unless one wants to wintrade...
I think the four-hour cool down after burn-out is good because it encourages good planning and ensures you cannot get unlimited keys.
However, it would be nice to have a challenging alternative to waiting (or walking around) between hacks. For example, a random 10-glyph sequence: if you succeed, you may skip the wait and hack immediately, but if you fail, you lose the hack.
Comments
I'm asking for YOUR OPINION.
As a long standing player, I've agreed with the reversal of all the other temporary changes brought in during 2020.
However, I don't agree with the increase in hack times. It was bad enough before, having to wait five minutes between hacks. Not all players have the luxury of large numbers of heat sinks.
I suspect this decision will make more people stop playing.
Look, cooldown time impact depends a lot on HOW you play.
Above comment on inventory limit being the primary issue are spot on. I'm constantly recycling gear to keep hacking.
Faster cooldowns mean I burn portals out faster which means less play time.
Agree if key farming, it can be frustrating. Large microfields were an issue even with short cooldown.
Farming an anchor, you can mod it and even Frack it if needed.
My primary complaint is the uneven cooldown time depending on faction. Our opposition already has to resort enemy portals with less output and now it takes them longer as well. This reduces competition. Which also, reduces play time.
I'm an extremely time poor agent. Single mum with multiple family challenges. I shouldn't even be playing this game but I'm in love with ingress. So I fit it in where I can. And that is hard to do. If I pull over and park the car to hack something I don't have 90secs I have 3 seconds "mum not ingress again" so it may as well be 5 mins.
My thing is throwing complex microfielding. I spin battle beacon rethrow; homogeneous layers, max fields. Recently farmed 480 keys so I could throw 6 battle beacon 16 link rethrow for the double 2hr window ... You just don't need a 90sec cool down. You need a plan, you need inventory space, and you need to be able to glyph. If you have done any sort of hardcore farming like this you know inventory management is the bottle neck.
Farming is a big concern for me I love fielding.
Yet the return to cool down is not as problematic as people are making out. It's really not.
I'm ok with this change. And I know people will think "well that's fine for you and your play style " but I'm really very time poor, don't own a car, have old foot injuries, limited access to babysitting , and serious responsibilities. I love being able to sit in one place and burn it out. Yet even then the bottle neck is the inventory limit. 16 hacks at 10 items minimum that's 160 gear making room for that sort of gear can take some time.
not sure why u got 3 disagree for that ☹️
Cheers for the support. I'll have more than 3 disagrees by the end of it. Lol.
Well now its time to cancel my CoRE subscribtion.. I dont like to wait 5 minutes for a new hack.. thats a waste of time.
I started playing in 2019. I dont even remember that the cooldown was like 5 mins before.
Incraising the cooldown makes this game less interessting for playing.
okey HS exist but if you dont have this..
7 pages of comments and no response from Niantic.
Forums very much abandoned. Imagine how quickly the Pokémon GO team would have responded about changes.
Probably why niantic never set up a pogo forum, didnt want 10 times this amount of comments when they do stupidly bad things
I kinda want to see one, just to see the chaos and complaints. 😆
The difference would be: niantic would have the resources to properly manage a forum like that for pogo.
But I don't blame them; just like in customer service, people don't usually call/post just to say everything is hunky dory.
Strictly depends on box portal density. My box I don't have that problem. Does not change my game much at all. Niantic has been wanting people to move for a long time. If current trends hold and we don't have a big problem between now and mid-January maybe we get F2F FS back for March I April. That would be awesome.
I don't see the big deal with cool down times going back to normal. It worked fine when there were players and lots of activity. Should be fine now with less players and less activity. At this point I think everyone that got frustrated and quit are already gone. Everyone still playing have endured some of the worst bugs Niantic has thrown at them and are still at it. Longer times between hacks are not going to deter them.
Doubt it, they have the pokegotubers on a partnership program and don't even interact with them much based on how some of them have been reacting to the boxes. A pogo forum would be looked after for likena week then be completely ignored
Since a lot of people apparently can't read, the changes are as follows:
Friendly portal hacking: 3 minute cooldown, up from 90 seconds.
Enemy portal hacking: 5 minute cooldown, up from 90 seconds.
Not sure why everyone is saying "5 minutes" everywhere.
And if 3 minutes is too much, use a heatsink!
Otherwise you are complaining about not having absurd hack timers of 30 seconds or something silly, and that is a much bigger issue.
It’s kinda sad because 7 pages of comments against Eos was okay to get it cancelled the first time around. It made it seem like they were listening to the concerns of a significantly smaller, but loud group of people.
Here, we have 7 pages of comments pleading Niantic not to revert the portal cooldown and it all seems to be falling on deaf ears.
Waiting for the occasional post “We hear you, we read all your feedback”… Oh wait… They just did that. It was just part of the recent Q4 announcement and not on this abandoned forum.
This is on all of you @NianticBrian @NianticThia @ace ! Work on your communication. Listen to your players. It’s been 10 freaking years that this game has been running. It wouldn’t be the case if it wasn’t for the community. Don’t take the community for granted!
That was 2 years ago with a pandemic where vaccines weren't even starting to roll out for everyone.
A better comparison would have been the linking under fields topic.
27sec cd with vrhs is not silly.
i don't get how people enjoy more standing on portal for farming than actually walking and fielding . Less CD more fields ! (unless your unemplyed and have no time restriction)
Agreed. And the stupid thing is, there is absolutely no valid reason to extend the cooldown.
Ah well, in q4 they are going to mess up more core mechanics, so I really don’t care anymore.
I started the game years ago for health reasons. As a fun motivation to move. Standing around in front of portals for 5 minutes rather demotivates me. If Niantic wants to discontinue the game, they should announce that and not decimate the players with meaningless game requirements.
but who says u must stand ? that is a choice you make yourself, not the game that says stand here and dont move!
At no point am I standing still on a portal farming. I am walking and fielding. If you honestly can't figure out how to do this with a 3 minute cooldown, I don't know how to help besides saying "git gud".
Then walk to the next portal, don't hack and stay still, MOVE!
Have you ever played in rural regions or the mountains? Where you want keys of fully deployed and shielded portals? What would you do then instead of waiting?
Stretch my legs and go for walk.
The argument for short cool downs are false. You are basically saying ANY cool down time is bad.
Getting gear and keys is why we have: Heatsinks, multihacks, frackers and to a degree, viruses. A significant portion of the games items are all about improving hack output.
You may as well argue zero cool down and unlimited hacks and throw out a fair few items from the game. To me it smacks of laziness.
How about plan how you play a little, keep some HS in reserve, park and get out of your car.
Everyone is time limited to some point, (yes some more than others). We all adapt our play style accordingly.
You also have to remember there are bots and multiaccounting players out there who WILL FULLY ABUSE low cool downs.
So, what does one have to do the hack and walking stuff without being followed, stalked, and harassed? Go to that coveted portal around 1-4 am to gather those keys? Why would one place a HS when a rival agent can easily use a flip card to make it easier for him to hack keys unless one wants to wintrade...
I think the four-hour cool down after burn-out is good because it encourages good planning and ensures you cannot get unlimited keys.
However, it would be nice to have a challenging alternative to waiting (or walking around) between hacks. For example, a random 10-glyph sequence: if you succeed, you may skip the wait and hack immediately, but if you fail, you lose the hack.
Niantic balancing gameplay around illegal behaviour is dumb. Report it to the police.
The alternative to waiting is walking, which is the point of the game.