Lets talk Prime Functionality

iBotPeachesiBotPeaches ✭✭✭
edited December 2019 in General

So lets chat. Hopefully you (Niantic) and myself, and whatever agent stumbles upon this.

I'm a vocal person when things could be better and I just experienced a situation that should not happen. It never happened in the history of my experience with Scanner v1.0 (Redacted) and can entirely make or break an experience for an Ingress user.

I went on a journey, along with a bunch of other agents located in various parts of the United States. We were working together for something amazing. My journey was in the warmth, but swampy while others were traversing through snow and freezing temperatures.

I stayed quiet on the Intel map traversing to my destination through mud and flooded trails.

These pictures I'm attaching to prove there is a human behind every scanner. This journey wasn't preferred, but with a common goal in mind - I must continue.

I arrive at my destination way too early, so I sit and relax. I check on messages and enjoy a little swim. Time is almost here and it is time for my action. I claim a portal and throw down some mods. I see my target show up and fire the link! "Crossing link detected." :(

Oops. I went too early, but not to worry. The blocking link was cleared a minute later. Now I'm up again with a crowd of people watching. Link Established! However, I don't get the 313 AP gain. I ask others to confirm my link and they don't see it. I quickly try again - same thing :(

The group is asking me to restart my app, then my phone, then to capsule all my keys, then to throw a smaller link, then try a different portal. Great suggestions from a group of anxious people, but I'm not a novice to this game. I know how to throw some links when the pressure is on.

The clear arena won't last long, we are against the clock here and my game is refusing to cooperate. Agents are convinced there is a blocker I'm not seeing, but once a real blocker goes up - my device responds with the familiar "Crossing link" message.

So I can't throw a link. I'm 45 minutes early to checkpoint though, maybe it will fix itself. Long story short - it doesn't. It takes 1 hour and 4 minutes from my initial attempt to throw my intended link, requiring a cat and mouse game of "blocker" killing. Even though the lane was clear for probably 45 minutes of the delay.

When operations are planned down to the minute, you are probably aware that an hour plus diversion from the plan is a game killer. Things did not succeed as planned, and you best believe Niantic that I am very weary to attempt anything again with all the effort required to get blocked by something out of my control.

I thought I was alone in this issue, but others in this same journey reported stories that matched mine.

  • "It said Link Established, but I don't see it on my scanner"
  • "I see it on Intel, but not on scanner"
  • "I didn't get any AP"
  • "My account is **cked, but my wife didn't have an issue"

We were doomed from the beginning, but not from healthy competition, but from an application that can't seem to work at the most required moments. Was this a server issue? Is this a Prime issue? Is this a me issue?

I don't even know what to say here. We have accounts that transcend time and space flying between anchors and killing everything in their path. We report and utilize new Trusted Reporter systems, but the accounts stay alive from our point of view of checking profiles. They aren't affected to the eyes of the agents who care, they just continue destruction until one day they show up banned.

On the flip side, an agent can walk a flooded trail path which they've walked many times and even Ingress`d with many times over the course of years, but can get stopped by what I can only assume is some faulty anti-cheat behavior that seems to only get in the away of the legit agent.

I'm willing to help you Niantic get to the bottom of this, but it is absolutely horrendous and a slap in the face of the work of many to have the 2nd iteration of this game get in the way of success. Please please, I only want to fight the opponent - not also my scanner.

If you want to debug things, my account between 315pm EST -> 416pm EST on Dec 1, 2019.

@NianticBrian #Ingress #GooglePlusHashtag

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Comments

  • NysyrNysyr ✭✭✭✭

    Only tuned in about 2 hours after it started so can’t say if there was blockers or not, but longer links seem to handle extremely poorly in less than optimal conditions on prime. Pressing the skip button at all on a longer link seems to fail quite frequently.

  • Yeah I get this too, I've assumed it was the speed lock, eventually I just shut the app.

  • We had similar problem in old scanner. When another agent clears a far blocker, your scanner may not notice for a while that path is now free and refuse to link (I also suspect that it happened more often if virus was uses to clear a blocker). But in old scanner, in 99% of cases it was enough to press "Sync data" button to fix this problem (but alas, I know few cases happened on BAF linking operations when an agent failed to link anyway, no matter he tried, and have to give his keys to another agent which linked successfully).

    Now we have no "Sync data" button, so any inconsistency in cached data will cause havoc and frustration.

    Also it seems to a be another bug which may be related - errors during linking or deployment are not handled well. If something wrong happens during deployment or linking (portal becomes out of range, or you have not enough XM to complete the action) - client becomes crazy. For example, it will fail to link but will not allow you to link to this portal anymore (although you can link to another direction)

  • KarM3LKarM3L ✭✭✭✭

    #thatsnotprime

    What you are reporting has been happening for atleast 3yrs....

  • caytcayt ✭✭✭

    Which makes it even sadder that it is still happening. Don't discount the post just because of your hashtag.

  • NineBerryNineBerry ✭✭✭✭✭

    This is from reddit from 3 years ago

    Niantic is investing a lot in Ingress. If they didn't care, they would have pulled the plug a long time ago. They spent a lot of money and resources on implementing Prime. Look at all the effort put into the Nemesis background story.

  • ProsalirusProsalirus ✭✭
    edited December 2019

    Thanks for sharing @iBotPeaches. I'm hopeful, Niantic's developer have been working hard to make every update better. I know how frustrating it can be to have a BAF fail at the last minute, we've had this happen more than once with ghost links in Redacted.

  • You remember, I'm sure, when we saw this during shards at Isla when an Enl agent couldn't make the link to The Beacon of Hope. Didn't matter what she did, no link. They had to flip the target and we flipped Isla del Sol, then you were able to make the link.

    Yes, I remember seeing this issue in the original scanner as well, but when it was still very much a work in progress (Roma, TX to Hawaii in 2014), but hadn't experienced it since then. It did happen (rarely) before, but it appears to be much more common now.

    If this does continue, it will **** the larger ops for sure

  • Ending large scale coordination will happen faster than a deflating a popped balloon. I’ve had a few discussions in the past 12 hrs questioning future plans and whether they get canceled or pushed further to the future so Niantic has a chance to push more updates.

  • The story is utterly pointless for gameplay. And is a lot cheaper than devs who know what they are doing!

  • We certainly saw this issue during the last round of competitive global shards -- e.g., failed link in the PNW from Stehekin to our desired router, which forced us to use a ski resort for a temporary hop. This sounds worse, though.

  • edited December 2019

    "The group is asking me to restart my app, then my phone, then to capsule all my keys,"

    "capsule all my keys"

    I'm sorry, you mean to tell me you go for a field covering most of the states and you can't even capsule all your irrelevant keys beforehand? Lol ok, keep blaming prime 🤣

    Sorry you're salty, but disliking my post won't bring your field back. You didn't have Eastern lanes in check and didn't capsule your keys. Multiple critical mistakes made on your part. Don't blame an app for user error.

    Post edited by SmurfHunter on
  • I know you sort of brushed off the short link topic to then discuss the long links, but just to confirm, we have to restart the game just to see links for portals we have keys for if the link fails the first attempt(for what could be a variety of reasons) for "short distance" linking?

    Doesnt that seem a bit excessive? Are their technical limitations that require full restart vs having it refresh on restarting the link process regardless of the link size?

    I thought I was going crazy with links I was needing to make disapearing even though I had keys for them and knew they would clear due to having low desynced xm or other weird problems.

  • edited December 2019

    Doesn't change that Niantic hasn't stated, and our side never saw, that this lane that's being spoken of was open to begin with, ever. Multiple agents local to me threw multiple blockers along the lane the moment the planned field was visible and this really just looks like a case of lanes not being walked from the outside. Y'all can keep blaming Prime though. I won't stop you.

  • Happens regularly and been happening for years. Quite often I've gone to throw a link and I'm thinking "this will be a nice field" only for the key to be used but no link or field established. I've had to travel miles to link backfrom the other portal

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