Ingress in small towns, or red portals as the only way to continue the gameplay.
Greetings to all. Regularly lately I hear talk about machine. Many players complain that all their cities have turned red. Someone says that the machine eliminates the main essence of the game, the war of the blue against the green. As a rule, I hear this information from players living in large cities. But I'm not one of those players. In my city, ingress is more dead than alive. 2-3 active players per 200,000 population do not allow active and, most importantly, interesting play. If, the game is abandoned by the last smurf, then we will no longer have rivals. Sometimes our players come to other similar cities where there are no players at all. There is nothing to do at all, because there are no rivals. You can of course start capturing each individual portal, but there is no main component in the form of a battle between the two factions.
In my town we thought that machine games would be our salvation from boredom and at least somehow enliven the gameplay. But the speed of the red portals spread was such that no more than 5-6 new red portals appeared in a week. Naturally, in this situation, the machine could not become an adequate and strong opponent for us. Any cluster in our city after standing for two weeks or more was destroyed in an hour and a half.
And yet I know people who couldn't clear even a "small island" in their city, because the machine recaptured the portals in less than a day.
Friends, please, please understand that small towns need red portals. Without them, the game and the remnants of agents of a particular faction will completely die out here. If there are no red portals then local agents will not be able to meet the requirements for events like this one this Saturday.
Please understand that Ingress is not only London or Paris where there are always rivals, Ingress is also a lot of small provincial towns where 1-3 active agents live. And they simply need machine ones to continue the game.
Yes, I agree that the algorithm for the appearance of red portals is broken, and it needs to be further developed. But do not push the machine into the background or demand that it be removed altogether, since in small towns it is the only means to continue the gameplay.
Comments
Yeah, I get that some don’t like how rampant they’ve been but it gives new players or areas where there is little to no Portal turnover something to do, rather than making fields and then just waiting for them all to decay because nobody from the other faction is around.
Machina is currently the only way for me to work on my purifier medal, unless I travel hundreds of miles away to the nearest city where there are people still playing. Please, don't remove them out of the game altogether. Just make them so they can't cross already existing link.
There are many areas that have no competition at all. Either one team dominates entire areas or there's no activity at all. This is where machina is helpful to give players some sort of competition. If only Niantic would promote their game we would maybe see some new players coming online.
Yeah i can see how that is helpful, but i really dont want ingress to evolve to PvE game where u hunt non human portals to take down because no real players but its an issue in many cities nobody plays
Ah yes you again, the one that thinks it's reasonable for other agents to drive 8 hours taking down Machina but you won't go out of your small town to the dozen of infections because you want them to spawn on your 15 home portals that are already captured. There are currently 13 infections within 200km, that's 3.5 hours one way. It takes me about six hours of walking/driving to clear not even 50% of my area. I'm sure you will say its unreasonable for you to have to drive 6 hours just to get to Machina but I don't think you realize it takes just as long to clear a huge red cluster. Also it would help if you didn't have most of your portals captured since they only spawn on neutral portals.
Can you read carefully? The portal propagation algorithm does not work as it should. And I'm all for fixing it. If in one city more than a hundred red portals appear per night, then in another city no more than 25 of them appear in two weeks. Understand, it's not about the red portals, but about an inadequate algorithm that does too much and too fast in one city, and doesn't do it at all in another city.
And besides about infections. You do not understand that in other places everything is played differently. We don't have infections. AT ALL! All we have is 2-3 miserable red portals lvl 5-6. And it's all. EVERY NEW PORTAL IS A BIG RARE JEWEL!!!
Incidentally have you infection on how many kilometers in diameter? We have a maximum of 1-3 kilometers. Therefore, we can always lay a detour if we are going to cover the territory. Separately, I will say that our scale is more modest, 40-60 kilometers per link length. We are not going to cover "half of Africa".
I will also say one more thing. I have a chess program on my smartphone. It is interesting to play with it, because it calculates the strategy and tries to win against me.
The machine doesn't try to win at all, it doesn't have a strategy, it doesn't have a plan, it doesn't have an algorithm that would try to beat the players. it simply and aimlessly breeds, and this is its greatest shortcoming. The machine does not have an analysis of favorite user cover schemes and counteraction to them. We both covered the region with the same scheme and continue to do so, but with slight amendments to the left and right. The machine does not try to establish links between settlements, it does not try to make obstacles on the way, it breeds randomly and this is bad and boring.
I would be very happy if a neural network was connected to the machine, like some kind of self-learning algorithm, but it only needs to be done smartly, of course.
Definitely needs some fine tuning. I’m okay with a “reasonable” amount of machina taking over portals in an area with low to no agents. I actually was looking forward to going over to a large community that had probably 50 machina portals, but, now it’s mostly gone and not worth the drive.
I’m okay with machina, but there does need to be some balance. I’m not smart enough to know what that balance looks like, especially for areas that are either more active than mine or not active at all. I would think if agents clear an area of machina portals, machina should understand not to rebuild over night or maybe it does rebuild, but it doesn’t start sending links for a little longer. Instead of turning into level 8 in a couple of days, it would take a few weeks. Another idea, maybe if an agent kills off a portal that has a link, the portal connected to that starts to decay, so on and so forth. It may take a week or three for it to die out, but maybe something like that.
Spitballing ideas. I hope Niantic can figure out the balance.
Yeah, I see a town (60+ miles away) that was 150+ red portals, now is down to like 45 red portals. I see another that was 250+ red portals, down to 65. Guess we will wait and see what it does.
Kind of sad to see the Machina disappearing so fast. I'm thinking Niantic went too far taming it. Not going to be any fun to go after a portal or two here and there.
We still have tons of it.
This is an attempted rightsizing.
I don't know if it went too far. We will see if for April FS we get a fools trick called a LOT of red.
I’m among very few RES players in my area, so having machina appearing gives me something to do. Although, I do agree the algorithm needs tweaking.
The thing is, back in the peaks of the playerbase, microfields would be everywhere, they wouldn't cross links, but with how many of them there was, there was no need for that and they would be even harder to take down, as folks in their home regions would constantly repair/rebuild them, they would reappear faster than machina. Machina doesn't even defend itself, recharge, it can respawn and spread in intervals, but it doesn't retaliate against the players that attack it, by going after their portals or whatever, other than it capturing inaccessible areas(that shouldn't even be portals to begin with, but that's a wayfarer coal issue, not a machina one), equiating it to a "spoofer bot" is extremely ridiculous.
Not all, but a lot of the folks who are outright against it, wanting it gone completely, in my view, have been the ones who got accustomed to the low player numbers, accustomed to dominating their own areas, to a point that their enemies, whether freshly new or regulars, won't be given a chance. They're used to doing massive permanent fields, capturing a ton of stuff and if someone dares touch those, they go and hunt for those players, destroying every single of their portals, including HPs, but with a bot, they can't do that, there's no emotion, so they're probably angry that they can't **** with that either. It doesn't matter to them, because a bot won't get frustrated, or sad, or ragequit, it's just a bot that pretty much mindlessly spreads around its extremely low health, weak appendages.
Compared to the glory days, it's basically a bandaid fix for the low numbers, something to get people moving around a bit more and stop them from constantly repeating the same route, same actions over and over again, and to fill up empty areas, it's nothing compared to, if the game still had a ton of numbers, a single player wouldn't be able to dominate whole areas to fill their ego and those same perma fields wouldn't be perma either.
And I can bet those very same players will again fail at some self-reflection and I'll get about 5-7 of them pilling up on me with "disagrees", as they do on almost every single thread, on anyone who might even slightly defend machina.
Machina, while maybe needing more development, as I do understand the OP, there's a lot of areas that don't get infected at all, despite the low to none player numbers. But ultimately, it's a good edition to the game, much better than to let the game become an empty void.
Seems like they are almost gone now. Very very few remain. Yes the lack of players opened up areas for fields. Machina deterred that. We use to clear for fields and then most everyone quit and then fields became exponentially easier. The short amount of time we had machina really made those players mad. They want Ingress back to easy mode. I guess they will get what they want now. I really enjoyed them too.
I drove 30 miles to find red portals, I was trying to leave a big enough group of unclaimed portals to get an infection started closer, I read others complaining about too much red and wished they were within reach. I did what I could hoping to get some stats in case a badge was forthcoming. But with the nerfing of Machina we don't need badges for red, only the people complaining about them previously have had enough activity to earn them.