Sharing is required for Prime parity
rediguana
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We need the various forms of sharing added to Prime before parity can be considered. In particular:
- Profile sharing for community and tools (e.g. many communities like their agents to promote acheivements and share them with others). Tools such as Agent Stats benefit from profile sharing.
- Portal sharing is essential for the tracking of portal configuration for reinstatement after spoofing.
Please upvote for these important capabilities to be given increased priority :)
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Yes, not enough upvotes can ever express how essential profile sharing is for community organizers to keep promoting interest in the game. This has also come up as a key way to improve the agent checkin experience for large First Saturdays.
I agree. For event days it’s a must to be able to share with the FS leaders and move along. I can’t even take snapshots of my [REDACTED] screen. It won’t allow it. I’d add a photo right now or a video clip to show what I mean and what lengths I have to go through just to get the snapshot
Thanks @mattyFRAICHE and @caderoux many internal Niantic Agents have also been asking for this. What format do you think would be best to share stats in? Screenshot, text, CSV, etc.?
@NianticScot I think just how the old one did it would be great. It’s gotta show all the stats because you never know what the FS leaders might use as their mystery stat...
I don't think it matters how it is shared as long as it is consistent. Obviously, things in screenshots are more susceptible to OCR issues. I know Prime itself has had display overlap defects, so if it's new development and not just using whatever the classic client did, perhaps best to stick to something more robust and future-proof like a text-based representation like JSON or whatever. Also, perhaps this would not have the recurring errors that agents report that seem to come and go on iOS (and Android further in the past).
@NianticScot I'd actually say "all of the above". Expanding further...
For parity: we just need a working image, a la Redacted. That is enough for parity.
Improvement/new feature: For user experience/community/tools etc, it would be great to have additional options added, and plaintext, CSV, and even JSON would have their uses. Once one of the textual forms is implemented, implementing a couple of variants should be easy to do. E.g. FS organisers could email JSON/CSV to the FS account at checkin, and use either Sheet or custom tools/websites to manage FS competitions rather than the slow and very manual approaches currently in use.
Thanks all for the feedback so far. These things make sense. The initial look we did showed a screenshot as being more complex than one would hope. We're still looking into the options...
To Niantic guys: Have you ever considered about open official API?
I'm sure if you skipped screenshots and went directly to csv or json the player base would recover from our grief fairly quickly.
I completely agree with @resigauna on this point. We have been using agent-stats.com for a year or more. Screenshots has issues and agent-stats.com itself can get level wrong completely (strangely enough).
Having a json or even CSV would help immensely. We can't stress enough how much it would improve the lives of FS POC's and organisers.
Thank you for keeping it on the to-do list at least.
Yes! Agent stat sharing is indeed needed in prime. And in a text format would be even better. YAML for readability by humans as well as computers would be awesome. But anything will do
Ideal feature is (in addition to the screenshot share for a profile) it should also offer a "share as json" option as well. The solution doesn't have to be any more complex than that. More interesting stats sharing mechanisms should be worked on later imo.
The share to screenshot option is known to not function on some devices. A plain text file would work in all situations.
Just a single JSON dump from the profile page would be enough. Of course a screenshot would be nice as well. But those are different use cases.
An api for it would be great
Cryptographically signed JSON or XML with embedded timestamp.
Let's hope some of the features land on this platform as well. I'd like to brag with my stats/badges :)
Hi,
I've given this a bit of thought; Assuming Niantic isn't going to go all Eve/CCP Games on us and presents us with a nice API... what if Ingress Prime could generate QR tags? I've seen Pokemon Go do it for the friendship making process so the engine has the possibility. What if that QR contained the agent name, (some or all) stats and the last 32 (or so) completed missions (or their unique identifiers which I'm sure they must have). MD and FS registration and check in would be much easier, no spelling out your agentname, no waiting for crappy 4G reception for all your MD missions to slowly load. Just scan the locally generated QR with the relevant data and possibly check for the spinning Ingress logo to make sure someone isn't just showing you an edited screenshot.
PoGo quite quickly manages to send you feedback after your friend scanned your QR, why can't we have this for Anomaly and/or MD check-ins? What would we do with all our spare time saved from claiming unreceived Anomaly/MD medals ;)
I haven't done the math for the amount of data that would be needed and if it would fit in a reasonably easily decipherable QR, but it seems easier than OCR trying to faultlessly interpret JSON?
@xE3Nx QR codes can store about about 3k binary - more for restricted alphanumeric data. Not sure that's enough to get all the stats, would have to see with a sample representation of the stats. I'd think it probably could in a very lightweight markup like JSON or YAML since the old rule of thumb is 2k per screen (of 80x25 characters). (not necessarily including all medals or mission badges)
@xE3Nx what does OCR have to do with JSON?
QR codes have a limit to the amount of data in it.
JSON does not have any restrictions.
I set up this from my last stats at Agent-Stats.com - it's only 645 bytes and includes all the major medal stats, so I expect that QR is completely doable for including even more non-medal stats/future stats.
Generation of QR is straightforward at e.g. qr-code-generator.com or with any number of libraries or utilities
caderoux:
{
date : '2019-05-31 20:10:41'
, ap : 257144547
, explorer : 14975
, seer : 484
, recon : 3118
, trekker : 8001
, builder : 470817
, connector : 63240
, mind-controller : 26940
, illuminator : 8214796
, recharger : 814945134
, pioneer : 7410
, engineer : 59874
, purifier : 458892
, guardian : 786
, specops : 589
, missionday : 10
, nl-1331-meetups : 1
, hacker : 443975
, translator : 317801
, sojourner : 1184
, recruiter : 0
, recursions : 0
, prime_challenge : 0
, stealth_ops : 0
, opr_live : 0
, ocf : 0
, intel_ops : 1
, ifs : 1
}
The benefit of screen shots are that they are harder to manipulate. Anything text based can be fiddled. A JSON file, I can easily knock a few hundred thousand off my ap for an FS start check in, I can insert the codes for MD mission days, etc etc.
Whilst I'd like a text based data dump via CSV/ JSON I think an app generated image would still be my first preference, plus they are far more user friendly, and human readable.
That said, I really want to be able to upload to agent stats from prime and if adding a text output is a far more realisable target then go for it, but I wouldn't want it to prevent a screen shot like option coming later.
Oh man at CSV.
I don't know how limited you would be with a share feature as the profile grows. I think CSV should be a fallback if somehow a picture fails or crashes.
How about digitally signed text? 📝
I'm also missing desperately the function to share my profile in Prime. IMHO I would prefer a screenshot version for all things human (FS, stat competition etc.) and from the point of view of more difficult manipulation. However, a text/character based export would be gold for the community tools!
3K is easily enough to get all the stats and probably a bunch more besides. You need to store 40 or so numbers, plus the agent name and a version identifier for the QR format. You don't need to store the names of the stats in the QR - the data format can be documented externally, and maybe the QR actually sends you to a website that can decode the binary blob and generate a pretty profile.
Of course, one step beyond that would be to make the QR option generate a URL containing a passcode, and Niantic's web server just validates the passcode and then pulls the stats out of their own database.
Machine readable files would be great for events, but not everyone will be able to read them, so having something available directly as an image would be very helpful. It wouldn't need to look just like the in-game display though, just have the same information. Another problem with machine readable files is they're very easy to manipulate, so having the data sent by the user to the event organisers is a bit problematic. Obviously images can be manipulated too, but it's a lot harder to do quickly from a mobile device.
As far as events are concerned possibly the best option would be a link to a niantic website (a URL that can be copied or shown in a QR code as suggested would work nicely, probably valid for a couple of hours) giving access to authentic stats on screen, plus have a way to download the data.
Another place shared data (both agent and portal information) are often used is when discussing suspected spoofers. Those really need to be directly human readable, including mission badges, maybe the mobile device's own screenshot facilities are just about usable for this but they're not very convenient.
The issue with a link back to niantic is that they would serve real time stats and often you want stats captured at a point in time. Granted there are exceptions, but say to validate/backup an FS entry or community comp then you want the stats at a specific time or point of activity, not necessarily when the receiver opens it.
Like everything there are pros and cons, and timeliness factors into the use cases.
@NianticScot What about do both?
An agent can select one of the options when doing profile share:
Would a screen shot option without badges be an easier thing to achieve in the short term? Just the agent header and the stats data?
Wrong Place to post this.. sorry.