Carousel Jumps - Out of XM

The Ingress carousel model is one that we've had ever since the early days of the Classic client.

When building a portal, as you deploy and hit resonator limits, it drops down to the next level of Resonators. When you open the carousel up again, it's back at the Resonator you last selected to begin deploying. This works great, and makes deploying easier than it would be if you had to manually move the resonator carousel.

However, sometimes while you're spamming the deploy button, it suddenly deploys an R2 then tells you you're out of XM. When you cube and restore your energy, it's still looking at that R2, and you have to scroll the carousel back to where you wanted it to be.

Even in the Classic client days, this used to annoy me a bit. However, since we've moved to Prime, a combination of increased inertia in the carousel, and a bug where after recharging the Carousel doesn't jump back to where it should be, it's harder to manually correct the Carousel back to where you want it to be. And we've all had that situation where we expected to deploy two VRS and accidentally deployed a VRS and a CS because we weren't paying attention.

With this latest Resonator Challenge, and the difficulty of having low level resonators when you're building R6s constantly, those accidental low level deploys are even more annoying so it got me thinking:

Should the Carousel stay put when you run out of XM for the given item?

Firstly, I'm in no way suggesting removing the changes due to Resonator limits etc. Those are good, and successfully reset for the next portal. Just the out of XM version.

Secondly, yes, I know this was "In Redacted", but that doesn't immediately make it a good thing, especially given how the Carousel's interactions are a bit different now.

But given that if you chew "enough" XM that you can't deploy your lowest level resonator or mod, the carousel doesn't jump and simply says Out of XM, I'm suggesting that we take the uncertainty out of this situation, by not jumping when XM is low enough for a lower item but not the one you had selected, and just saying "Out of XM".

I'd be interested to hear whether the behavior is important to anyone's regular gameplay. When I asked others, it was always only niche scenarios and 'when rushing' which doesn't really overrule fixing it for the 90% usage case.

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Comments

  • ToxoplasmollyToxoplasmolly ✭✭✭✭✭

    The carousel should not jump in response to there being insufficient XM for the currently selected item or the item that would otherwise be selected next.

    The XM bar is at the opposite end of the screen from the "Deploy" button. This puts it in "out of sight, out of mind" territory, which makes any jump to a distant item basically feel random and unmotivated — an all around terrible way to signal, "you're running low on XM." This is especially bad with the mod carousel, where there's no guarantee that the jump will keep you in the same category of mods.


    I'd be interested to hear whether the behavior is important to anyone's regular gameplay.

    Um, yes? I'm baffled that this is even a question. The current random jumps are always annoying. Changing the current behavior to something more sensible is perhaps best viewed like building wheelchair-accessible entrances to buildings: Absolutely necessary for a small percentage of cases, but helpful and welcome for all.

  •  I'm baffled that this is even a question.

    I meant relying on the jump to happen as a benefit or desirable play style. Not that it's annoying as hell which I think many people agree with already.

  • GoblinGranateGoblinGranate ✭✭✭✭✭

    Well, my good sir, I believe you pretty much answered yourself: pay more attention.

    I find this specially easier thanks to the fast power cube menu which did not exist in Redacted.

    Also, I'd say that is part of the game learn as an experienced agent, the kind of details that can make the diference in a 1v1 portal combat (unless the oponent is a bot, ofc).

  • Carousel should stop at a current item if you do not have XM to use it. You wanted to use it, but do not meet criteria - fix it.


    It bugs me off especially when it comes to mod deployment, and do not tell me that I should maniacally look at my XM bar, I recurse as soon as possible, so my level varies a lot, it is impossible to learn how many XM bar mans which XM amount.

  • PangarbanPangarban ✭✭✭✭✭

    The carousel jump seems like a useful feature, but if you run out of XM while deploying and it jumps down to level 1 resonators, you soon run out of XM for those as well, so in reality it is almost never a useful feature. I would be happy if it was removed.

    (On a side note, @Perringaiden I'm glad you initially refered to the original client as the "Classic client" rather than "Redacted" which only appeared after the release of Prime. "Redacted" as a word means "censored" implying it is a reduced or incomplete version of the game.)

  • (On a side note, @Perringaiden I'm glad you initially refered to the original client as the "Classic client" rather than "Redacted" which only appeared after the release of Prime. "Redacted" as a word means "censored" implying it is a reduced or incomplete version of the game.)

    I try to keep that wording wherever I can, for that reason.

  • I find this specially easier thanks to the fast power cube menu which did not exist in Redacted.

    Given we now have the fast power cube menu, why do you feel the dropping to a lower Resonator is necessary?

    "Pay more attention" to avoid having the UI create an unforced error seems like a bad justification.

  • Carousel jumping around when out of XM is sort of a feature, one could argue it's poor design but it's not a bug. But there's a bug too which makes it jump even with nearly full XM bar. Either this bug has remained unfixed for a very long time or it keeps reappearing every now and then, I remember it used to happen even in Redacted times.

  • It's not a bug, it's implemented design. That's why this is in General not Report A Bug. But implemented designs can be bad, and bad designs can persist because of familiarity. We still use a floppy disk as the "Save" icon in a world where there are adults who were born after we stopped routinely using floppy disks.

  • getengeten ✭✭✭

    When we are focusing of the ridiculous decision from NIA to put store items in the carousel, it would be fair to bump this too. The "design" of the carousel jumping when out of xm is simply just bad design and causes you to accidently place wrong mods etc when it jumps right before you press

  • Still a relevant request :-)

  • getengeten ✭✭✭

    Yep, they have the opportunity to right two wrongs :)

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