@sogNinjaman That wasn't the only problem with the whole Guardian badge that ended up cropping up. People were starting to get a bit more creepy, tracking data and basically finding a assured method to keep tabs on a portal. The incident had gained some drama when it was brought to light, but I believe that we are to forget it ever even happened, because Niantic Knew about it and did nothing. At least for a little while.
Anyone else remember that, where some players were found to be part of a group of people hacking and obtaining information, up to and including stuff that enabled them to nearly track a player to their home based on their hacking patterns (Portals they always hacked, ect) ?
Yes! Sure, I've had spoofer assholes **** my long time Guardians in remote places. (An L6 account with a random name that's never captured a single portal kills my Guardian out in the sea where you can't go without a private boat, and then don't even bother to capture the portal. Right...)
Still, it's a fun challenge to try to find really remote portals. And though I've learned I can never get 150 days where I live, there are a lot of other places in the world. I have four that's 300+ days at the moment, in different countries.
Mostly I suppose I'm really annoyed that when the badge was removed (April 2, 2018) I was just a few days from the onyx limit Niantic set. ☹️
No. It has been proven that it leads to unfair techniques like COMM scraping and warning agents when to take down which portal before it reaches guardian status which makes this a useless thing.
I personally loved guardians and the quest to find one that could stay up. At one point I had 4 in town that were over 500 days each, which was crazy. Accidental Guardians were a lot of fun too. Trying to figure out where you had been to find it.
But the problems that came with it and the toxic relations that came a out in both factions makes me happy it is gone. It should not come back. The game is in a better place because it is gone.
Even without the use of shady tools, easily one of the harshest and most Azad-like aspects of any game I've ever seen. You could probably write a book on it, but probably the book would be why it shouldn't be a badge anymore.
But the Guardian badge did do something right, which is that really encouraged exploration of the hidden corners of the world. Fielding still satisfies some of that drive to explore, but even that is constrained by the diktat of lanes and distances. Exploring for Guardian was an everywhere, anytime thing. Find the portals in the obscure and commonplace; visit as many as you can. Driving down the I-5 in California and the desert southwest, I'd see them flit on the edges of my scanner. You'd know them when you saw them... A Nowhereville library with one resonator. An abandoned church fully with two common shields in a dusty Arizona town. Quad AXA, little cross on a .bluff near Mendocino.
Everybody loves an optimist.
Two things that I've thought of that might help feel this void for push for seeing more of the world.
I. "The Portal Warden"
Measure Portal-Days: The value of total number of portals you're holding, crossed with the days held. Portal Warden is a stat that slowly ticks up as this stat increases. It's monotone increasing, so you lock in gains. But the best way to juice the badge is either to own a *lot* of portals, or to own a few portals that tick up for a long time. Tricky bit is deciding how hard to make it, but it fixes a lot of the problems with Guardian while still incentivizing finding those obscure places.
II. "The Big Score"
There will always be portals which are seldom visited. Sometimes it's raw difficulty; other times it's that they are nowhere and seemingly important to no one. Why not make it special when you find one of these? The longer a portal goes with few visits, the greater the yield when hacking it. Go long enough, start to get really rare things -- VRLA, items which can be truly limited in game and that you can only hold a few of. Players are incentivized to constantly find new places for the shot at the big score. If you want to apply this logic a little more creatively, de-power hacking commonplace portals just a bit, so that nobody fracks the same portals for lunch every day.
Personally I'd like to see the Guardian badge back. It was one of the more challenging of the badges and as mentioned previously promoted travels and exploration. Yes it did result in some negative behaviours, but I don't believe removing the badge was necessarily the best solution, the offenders just found other more subtle and underhanded ways to continue the griefing.
In my opinion, NIA would be better served investing its efforts in the real scourge of its games, spoofers, bots and scrapers. I'd be surprised if they aren't already at least looking at or using machine learning to improve the effectiveness their detection of cheats. Solving that problem will pull the rug out from under the bad actors, and make for a far more enjoyable experience for the majority.
I was so pleased when guardian medal was gone, because new players wanted to leave the game when all their guardians fell. I just saw hate and anger between the two factions about guardians.
But no one recharge portals in lost locations any more. And I miss guardians 😅
Every so often a 'Guardian' beacon drops. It needs to be relatively scarce, can't be duped, can't be dropped.
Go out, capture a portal, deploy your beacon. If it gets neutralised, the beacon dies. If the beacon survives <some amount of time> and expires (and maybe there's a timer, PoGo raid style) then you get a 'Guardian Point', which contributes toward a tiered 'Guardian' badge.
See an enemy-faction beacon out in the wild? Make a detour and **** it. You get a 'Hunter Point', which contributes toward a tiered 'Guardian Hunter' badge.
Don't like the combative, adversarial dynamic of the minigame? Recycle the beacon and ignore it. Don't put the badges as locked on the profile. Maybe there could be a setting to switch the whole mode off entirely (beacons don't drop, you don't see the beacons, you don't earn points, you can't see the badges through your scanner).
@sanshine yeah ... when that comms blackout looked like it was going to drag on for a few hours, first of all I was annoyed I couldn't leave work and drive an hour or two into the country. And of course comms came back online before I left work. Second, I commented in one of my local faction's chats "If they take away the guardian medal in (counts on fingers) first week or two of April, I'm really gonna be suspicious...".
Although I like the concept, the guardian hunters/spoofers made sure it was spiteful.
If my oldest portal gets taken out because an agent happens to be there playing the game then awesome good on them. But when an agent knows where the portal and and its exact age it's like going hunting in the woods with all the deer marked and tranquilized for you - theres no skill involved.
Over 50 portals at 138 days by the same agent over a year. I managed to knock out one of his fields just before CP and he drove 2 hours at 3am to take out my oldest portal in retaliation. That's not skill or fair play.
I had managed to get one to 149 early on, so clicked onyx
So much heart ache and contempt between factions is a direct result this badge. Sadly I fear that as long as the players who lived through the endless scraping and old age guardian hits, will never properly reconcile.
That said, I would likely be in favor of a version of it where it counts differently. For example, simply making it so you control a portal for 150 cumulative days. (Which is honestly pretty easy, so you could make it 300/500.) This way the portal couldn't be permanently denied. you get 130 days on a portal it gets taken down. you come back and capture it 3 days later. On that forth day the counter ticks up to 131. Yes the opponent could slow you down and return an element of competitiveness but ultimately if you wanted the badge you would get it given enough time.
as the agent that put joe philley out of the game - no, its done. we didnt see eye to eye but agreed to disagree on the subject. i promised i would get his, and did.
he got his wish, as did i. time for guardian has long passed. let it rest.
As it was Guardian was not the best & is rightly ended. However, if they were to revive or create a new badge which was for holding portals (total, all portals) that would promote the similar aspect of the game without the drama.
That badge is best retired. It promoted animosity on both sides and led to all kinds of cheating game-play. I don't see much evidence of that style of game-play anymore, most of the guardian-killers have quit and cross-faction events have picked up and are much more amicable.
Even without the use of illicit tools, easily one of the harshest and most Azad-like aspects of any game I've ever seen. You could probably write a book on it, but probably the book would be why it shouldn't be a badge anymore.
But the Guardian badge did do something right, which is that really encouraged exploration of the hidden corners of the world. Fielding still satisfies some of that drive to explore, but even that is constrained by the diktat of lanes and distances. Exploring for Guardian was an everywhere, anytime thing. Find the portals in the obscure and commonplace; visit as many as you can. Driving down the I-5 in California and the desert southwest, I'd see them flit on the edges of my scanner. You'd know them when you saw them... A Nowhereville library with one resonator. An abandoned church fully with two common shields in a dusty Arizona town. Quad AXA, little cross on a .bluff near Mendocino.
Everybody loves an optimist.
Two things that I've thought of that might help feel this void for push for seeing more of the world.
I. "The Portal Warden"
Measure Portal-Days: The value of total number of portals you're holding, crossed with the days held. Portal Warden is a stat that slowly ticks up as this stat increases. It's monotone increasing, so you lock in gains. But the best way to juice the badge is either to own a *lot* of portals, or to own a few portals that tick up for a long time. Tricky bit is deciding how hard to make it, but it fixes a lot of the problems with Guardian while still incentivizing finding those obscure places.
II. "The Big Score"
There will always be portals which are seldom visited. Sometimes it's raw difficulty; other times it's that they are nowhere and seemingly important to no one. Why not make it special when you find one of these? The longer a portal goes with few visits, the greater the yield when hacking it. Go long enough, start to get really rare things -- VRLA, items which can be truly limited in game and that you can only hold a few of. Players are incentivized to constantly find new places for the shot at the big score. If you want to apply this logic a little more creatively, de-power hacking commonplace portals just a bit, so that nobody fracks the same portals for lunch every day.
I worked my tail off to get a Guardian badge, I'm damn proud of outlasting the cheaters, but I think the badge going away was one of the best things to happen in the game for a long time. The source of organized systematic cheating, interfaction tension and hatred, and people getting a coveted badge by the sheer luck of capturing a portal on a day the scraper network was temporarily down? No thanks.
However, I do think Ingress needs a badge to incentivize people to go on adventures to remote portals. Maybe something cumulative like Translator points, where you get progressively more points for owning older portals that are fully deployed and distant from roads. Yup, points for owning potential field anchors.
50-80 days old, 1/3/8 points per day for portals 0/1/10 km from the nearest road.
people have moved on from Guardian hunting to OPR hunting. They have a new focus to disrupt areas and agents they know who do OPR to gain badges, so they focus on particular subs coming through for areas under strong control by a faction and then reject reject reject. Yet, Nia do not enforce TOS violiations in this area as they outlined they would do when OPR was roled out.
Guardian should remain a dead stat/medal. Leave it gone. I've heard all the horror stories from local agents in my area regarding this medal, I don't want to hear or see people getting mad at each other over a virtual item in a mobile video game, it's super ridiculous and immature.
R.I.P Guardian, and may you never return for the aforementioned reasons.
Guardian should remain a dead stat/medal. Leave it gone. I've heard all the horror stories from local agents in my area regarding this medal, I don't want to hear or see people getting mad at each other over a virtual item in a mobile video game, it's super ridiculous and immature.
In my area, this is not at all accurate. We have a fantastic cross-fac chat room where the only thing discussed is how to improve the portal network via OPR. We don't just accept/deny portals in our local area either, it's worldwide. Hopefully other areas have something similar.
Comments
@sogNinjaman That wasn't the only problem with the whole Guardian badge that ended up cropping up. People were starting to get a bit more creepy, tracking data and basically finding a assured method to keep tabs on a portal. The incident had gained some drama when it was brought to light, but I believe that we are to forget it ever even happened, because Niantic Knew about it and did nothing. At least for a little while.
Anyone else remember that, where some players were found to be part of a group of people hacking and obtaining information, up to and including stuff that enabled them to nearly track a player to their home based on their hacking patterns (Portals they always hacked, ect) ?
Yes! Sure, I've had spoofer assholes **** my long time Guardians in remote places. (An L6 account with a random name that's never captured a single portal kills my Guardian out in the sea where you can't go without a private boat, and then don't even bother to capture the portal. Right...)
Still, it's a fun challenge to try to find really remote portals. And though I've learned I can never get 150 days where I live, there are a lot of other places in the world. I have four that's 300+ days at the moment, in different countries.
Mostly I suppose I'm really annoyed that when the badge was removed (April 2, 2018) I was just a few days from the onyx limit Niantic set. ☹️
Yes. New players need to experience it as well.
@PhaseolusV ooo, a conspiracy theory, I love it XD
No. It has been proven that it leads to unfair techniques like COMM scraping and warning agents when to take down which portal before it reaches guardian status which makes this a useless thing.
I personally loved guardians and the quest to find one that could stay up. At one point I had 4 in town that were over 500 days each, which was crazy. Accidental Guardians were a lot of fun too. Trying to figure out where you had been to find it.
But the problems that came with it and the toxic relations that came a out in both factions makes me happy it is gone. It should not come back. The game is in a better place because it is gone.
Even without the use of shady tools, easily one of the harshest and most Azad-like aspects of any game I've ever seen. You could probably write a book on it, but probably the book would be why it shouldn't be a badge anymore.
But the Guardian badge did do something right, which is that really encouraged exploration of the hidden corners of the world. Fielding still satisfies some of that drive to explore, but even that is constrained by the diktat of lanes and distances. Exploring for Guardian was an everywhere, anytime thing. Find the portals in the obscure and commonplace; visit as many as you can. Driving down the I-5 in California and the desert southwest, I'd see them flit on the edges of my scanner. You'd know them when you saw them... A Nowhereville library with one resonator. An abandoned church fully with two common shields in a dusty Arizona town. Quad AXA, little cross on a .bluff near Mendocino.
Everybody loves an optimist.
Two things that I've thought of that might help feel this void for push for seeing more of the world.
I. "The Portal Warden"
Measure Portal-Days: The value of total number of portals you're holding, crossed with the days held. Portal Warden is a stat that slowly ticks up as this stat increases. It's monotone increasing, so you lock in gains. But the best way to juice the badge is either to own a *lot* of portals, or to own a few portals that tick up for a long time. Tricky bit is deciding how hard to make it, but it fixes a lot of the problems with Guardian while still incentivizing finding those obscure places.
II. "The Big Score"
There will always be portals which are seldom visited. Sometimes it's raw difficulty; other times it's that they are nowhere and seemingly important to no one. Why not make it special when you find one of these? The longer a portal goes with few visits, the greater the yield when hacking it. Go long enough, start to get really rare things -- VRLA, items which can be truly limited in game and that you can only hold a few of. Players are incentivized to constantly find new places for the shot at the big score. If you want to apply this logic a little more creatively, de-power hacking commonplace portals just a bit, so that nobody fracks the same portals for lunch every day.
Personally I'd like to see the Guardian badge back. It was one of the more challenging of the badges and as mentioned previously promoted travels and exploration. Yes it did result in some negative behaviours, but I don't believe removing the badge was necessarily the best solution, the offenders just found other more subtle and underhanded ways to continue the griefing.
In my opinion, NIA would be better served investing its efforts in the real scourge of its games, spoofers, bots and scrapers. I'd be surprised if they aren't already at least looking at or using machine learning to improve the effectiveness their detection of cheats. Solving that problem will pull the rug out from under the bad actors, and make for a far more enjoyable experience for the majority.
Make It cumulative like Gold badge in Pokémon. Each portal having a countown of days held, not mattering If It was destroyed.
Instead of 150, made It 360 and most people would still struggle to get It over 2 years.
I was so pleased when guardian medal was gone, because new players wanted to leave the game when all their guardians fell. I just saw hate and anger between the two factions about guardians.
But no one recharge portals in lost locations any more. And I miss guardians 😅
It could be an opt-in game...
Every so often a 'Guardian' beacon drops. It needs to be relatively scarce, can't be duped, can't be dropped.
Go out, capture a portal, deploy your beacon. If it gets neutralised, the beacon dies. If the beacon survives <some amount of time> and expires (and maybe there's a timer, PoGo raid style) then you get a 'Guardian Point', which contributes toward a tiered 'Guardian' badge.
See an enemy-faction beacon out in the wild? Make a detour and **** it. You get a 'Hunter Point', which contributes toward a tiered 'Guardian Hunter' badge.
Don't like the combative, adversarial dynamic of the minigame? Recycle the beacon and ignore it. Don't put the badges as locked on the profile. Maybe there could be a setting to switch the whole mode off entirely (beacons don't drop, you don't see the beacons, you don't earn points, you can't see the badges through your scanner).
Everyone is happy. Everyone wins.
Absolutely not. The badge has caused so much trouble and strife for agents.
@sanshine yeah ... when that comms blackout looked like it was going to drag on for a few hours, first of all I was annoyed I couldn't leave work and drive an hour or two into the country. And of course comms came back online before I left work. Second, I commented in one of my local faction's chats "If they take away the guardian medal in (counts on fingers) first week or two of April, I'm really gonna be suspicious...".
And then that's exactly when it happened.
Although I like the concept, the guardian hunters/spoofers made sure it was spiteful.
If my oldest portal gets taken out because an agent happens to be there playing the game then awesome good on them. But when an agent knows where the portal and and its exact age it's like going hunting in the woods with all the deer marked and tranquilized for you - theres no skill involved.
Over 50 portals at 138 days by the same agent over a year. I managed to knock out one of his fields just before CP and he drove 2 hours at 3am to take out my oldest portal in retaliation. That's not skill or fair play.
I had managed to get one to 149 early on, so clicked onyx
As it was, no.
So much heart ache and contempt between factions is a direct result this badge. Sadly I fear that as long as the players who lived through the endless scraping and old age guardian hits, will never properly reconcile.
That said, I would likely be in favor of a version of it where it counts differently. For example, simply making it so you control a portal for 150 cumulative days. (Which is honestly pretty easy, so you could make it 300/500.) This way the portal couldn't be permanently denied. you get 130 days on a portal it gets taken down. you come back and capture it 3 days later. On that forth day the counter ticks up to 131. Yes the opponent could slow you down and return an element of competitiveness but ultimately if you wanted the badge you would get it given enough time.
as the agent that put joe philley out of the game - no, its done. we didnt see eye to eye but agreed to disagree on the subject. i promised i would get his, and did.
he got his wish, as did i. time for guardian has long passed. let it rest.
As it was Guardian was not the best & is rightly ended. However, if they were to revive or create a new badge which was for holding portals (total, all portals) that would promote the similar aspect of the game without the drama.
That badge is best retired. It promoted animosity on both sides and led to all kinds of cheating game-play. I don't see much evidence of that style of game-play anymore, most of the guardian-killers have quit and cross-faction events have picked up and are much more amicable.
Yes, the badge makes for me the difference between ingress and games Pokémon go.
Even without the use of illicit tools, easily one of the harshest and most Azad-like aspects of any game I've ever seen. You could probably write a book on it, but probably the book would be why it shouldn't be a badge anymore.
But the Guardian badge did do something right, which is that really encouraged exploration of the hidden corners of the world. Fielding still satisfies some of that drive to explore, but even that is constrained by the diktat of lanes and distances. Exploring for Guardian was an everywhere, anytime thing. Find the portals in the obscure and commonplace; visit as many as you can. Driving down the I-5 in California and the desert southwest, I'd see them flit on the edges of my scanner. You'd know them when you saw them... A Nowhereville library with one resonator. An abandoned church fully with two common shields in a dusty Arizona town. Quad AXA, little cross on a .bluff near Mendocino.
Everybody loves an optimist.
Two things that I've thought of that might help feel this void for push for seeing more of the world.
I. "The Portal Warden"
Measure Portal-Days: The value of total number of portals you're holding, crossed with the days held. Portal Warden is a stat that slowly ticks up as this stat increases. It's monotone increasing, so you lock in gains. But the best way to juice the badge is either to own a *lot* of portals, or to own a few portals that tick up for a long time. Tricky bit is deciding how hard to make it, but it fixes a lot of the problems with Guardian while still incentivizing finding those obscure places.
II. "The Big Score"
There will always be portals which are seldom visited. Sometimes it's raw difficulty; other times it's that they are nowhere and seemingly important to no one. Why not make it special when you find one of these? The longer a portal goes with few visits, the greater the yield when hacking it. Go long enough, start to get really rare things -- VRLA, items which can be truly limited in game and that you can only hold a few of. Players are incentivized to constantly find new places for the shot at the big score. If you want to apply this logic a little more creatively, de-power hacking commonplace portals just a bit, so that nobody fracks the same portals for lunch every day.
[duplicated post edited to blank]
I worked my tail off to get a Guardian badge, I'm damn proud of outlasting the cheaters, but I think the badge going away was one of the best things to happen in the game for a long time. The source of organized systematic cheating, interfaction tension and hatred, and people getting a coveted badge by the sheer luck of capturing a portal on a day the scraper network was temporarily down? No thanks.
However, I do think Ingress needs a badge to incentivize people to go on adventures to remote portals. Maybe something cumulative like Translator points, where you get progressively more points for owning older portals that are fully deployed and distant from roads. Yup, points for owning potential field anchors.
50-80 days old, 1/3/8 points per day for portals 0/1/10 km from the nearest road.
81-150 days old, 3/5/10 points per day.
Etc.
Nope, and the badge should be hidden in the scanner. Bury it out back, in an unmarked grave, and scrub it from the history books.
people have moved on from Guardian hunting to OPR hunting. They have a new focus to disrupt areas and agents they know who do OPR to gain badges, so they focus on particular subs coming through for areas under strong control by a faction and then reject reject reject. Yet, Nia do not enforce TOS violiations in this area as they outlined they would do when OPR was roled out.
I fully agree with @GibsonGirl71
Guardian should remain a dead stat/medal. Leave it gone. I've heard all the horror stories from local agents in my area regarding this medal, I don't want to hear or see people getting mad at each other over a virtual item in a mobile video game, it's super ridiculous and immature.
R.I.P Guardian, and may you never return for the aforementioned reasons.
I fully agree with @GibsonGirl71
Guardian should remain a dead stat/medal. Leave it gone. I've heard all the horror stories from local agents in my area regarding this medal, I don't want to hear or see people getting mad at each other over a virtual item in a mobile video game, it's super ridiculous and immature.
In my area, this is not at all accurate. We have a fantastic cross-fac chat room where the only thing discussed is how to improve the portal network via OPR. We don't just accept/deny portals in our local area either, it's worldwide. Hopefully other areas have something similar.
No reason to bring it back at this point.nice that's its gone