A letter for Niantic

Many agents have expressed growing dissatisfaction with the way officials have handled cheaters recently.

When Ingress started to promote the subscription system, agents expressed their support in the hope that the game would operate in the long run.

But a few months later, the game content has not improved much, the server is often stuck, and even more cheating players than before.

From the last Kinetic event, we found that the server only updates the data every 5 minutes, no wonder you can't catch the cheaters using GPS spoofer.

It is not only the cheaters who occupy the strategic points that are cheaters, but also the players who cheat in the city are more dangerous because the city is the area where most of the players will be active, and not solving the cheating players' behavior one day will only disappoint and dissatisfy the players who are really playing and enjoying this game.

In this appeal, please official to the game mechanism to deal with more perfect, or close the server, in the delay will only make the situation worse.

Comments

  • GreenVamGreenVam ✭✭✭✭✭

    From my experience, I note that the company does not fight players who play from two devices at the same time, almost does not fight helicopters and the company does not fight players who have more than one account. It has become unrealistically difficult to play. Not only did all honest players leave the game for this reason (and also because the game is not developing), but also many of those who remained began to cheat en masse. 

  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited October 2021

    just today experience an agent that did the so called xmp stacking on a portal, everything just flew off in like 1 second.. no lag just poff fully modded portal lvl 5 or so insta taken down in split second barely could even try recharge and then some lag came? all is in favor for attacker today but xmp stacking is impossible defend against almost... how is this even allowed ?!.. and ofc no punishment even if u report... just sad how things are today spoofers and glitchers running around ruining fun for all legit players out there.. not really fun

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    It could have been the lag. My bursters often stack now and defending is hard.

  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited October 2021

    lol ive been playing since 2012.. i can tell the difference, we have our agents that have been suspicious play not first time. its sad some need to play dishonest to "win" in this game today. pure honest play some cant relate to anymore.

  • I disagree, where I live most players play honest. The players we lost, we lost with Redacted but new players have joined since then.

    And some old players have been seen again now that Prime has improved.

    Just continue to report suspicious behaviour and possible cheating!

    I recognize that Nia is working on cheating lately I have noticed less spoofing 👍

    Helicopters? Playing Ingress in a vehicle like a bus or a helicopter is not cheating?

  • PkmnTrainerJPkmnTrainerJ ✭✭✭✭✭

    From the last Kinetic event, we found that the server only updates the data every 5 minutes,

    This should be easier when Adventure Sync comes in. Hopefully this month?

  • VenomousToadVenomousToad ✭✭✭✭✭

    The biggest problem are all the multi accounters. They have unlimited resources and never have to hack for gear. They can fully deploy link and field with multiple accounts and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. The easiest fix is to stop allowing inactive accounts to drop gear. So many players have dozens of accounts full of quantum capsules replicating gear so they don't need to ever hack for it. So they destroy any farm attempt of their opposition to restrict their opponents gear all while having unlimited gear. So the opposition cannot compete at the same level. It's a great strategy but it shouldn't be allowed. But it is allowed. Many players deploy with more than one account and there's literally nothing anyone can do about it. So that's allowed as well. Even local communities accept those players into their groups. Everyone always points to the spoofing but it pales in comparison to the multi accounting. These issues will never be addressed because there is no answer. Although more accounts looks good when talking about the game to prospective clients for advertising but for gameplay, it's terrible. You could stop all quantums and go back to the og way of playing but the butthurt would be tremendous.

  • It's not enough to just ban the cheater. If the cheater can create infinite accounts. Here where the game has a player taking ban after ban. And makes a point of showing off using the same agent name just adding a number at the end. You have to create a way to verify and limit the creation of accounts. As it once existed.

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    Still reckon, make capsule drops appear on COMM. Maybe 15 min delay.

  • No. Plenty of spouses drop gear to each other at home. It's not safe to do any Comm action from home or work. Cheaters can be creepy.

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    Can i ask for reasons not to put on COMM?

    If you don't want home location betrayed, do it when you go shopping or something.

    Location does not have to be disclosed.

    Or Niantic can randomise location of msg +/- 10km etc.

  • This is Game Breaker described a saboteur in my opinion.

    They exist, I also know of one.

    Again just registering new accounts. Nia putting a cap on allowed number of accounts for a player (one!) would help!

    https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/16894/situation-in-milan

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited October 2021

    Hrm:

    1) Betray location - If there is a delay or randomization on the coordinates, that would solve this.

    2) Witchhunts/ multiaccounting accusations - These are already a thing and fed by suspicion and doubt. I would have thought knowing for sure that X is dropping a capsule and not Y would remove doubt/accusation/result in tickets to Niantic to examine the accounts. At the moment, multis can stay invisible apart from the odd time we see capsules appear and vanish around portals we have keys for etc.

    We already have old guard agents who follow via keys watching for capsule drops etc.

    3) Spoofers grabbing spoils? Again, foiled by location randomization. I may be wrong, but I have heard heavy duty scrapers can already see this information?

  • Most of the issues presented here would be solved by a comm message stating "Agent A picked up an item dropped by Agent B" at the time of pickup located at the last portal agent A interacted with (similar to how comm messages work)

    It would solve the spoofers sweeping items and disclosing an agents location.

    About the witch-hunts/accusations, like @SSSputnik said, these already happen... This would be further proof and might actually stop people from having multiaccounts.

  • VenomousToadVenomousToad ✭✭✭✭✭

    Showing capsule drops and pickups in comms would show what we all already know. The game is full of multi accounters with accounts full of gear. But it would be a great first step in identifying all of them. You don't have to see a location in comm, just the action. Niantic doesn't really do anything about this type of cheating. But maybe they should.

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    Hrm, historically, in all the years I have been playing, I have had zero success in reporting this.

  • I'm my experience, Niantic has been fairly speedy with banning spoofers, but big issue there is they can easily make a new account and repeat. So I guess some sort of verification would need to be in place, however how to do this while still respecting privacy and not making things unfairly difficult for those who play fair? The verification badge does seem intriguing - perhaps this is something that other agents would need to vouch for?

    Also when returning sabotaged links.. since links cannot be returned if there are any new crossing ones, there's always this frustrating mindgames & accusations played when both factions do still make some links (prior to knowing of the spoofing and then after justifying it 'someone else did too'), it's impossible to figure who nets the gain because it could be either (taking your own portal down to adjust which links exist is a big strategic point of the game). So in conclusion, when links are returned after a spoof, they should be properly returned - all of them, not just the ones that are requested. I think this would discourage spoofing strategic places in the first place because then it would be known that it will just be returned as is. Though this seems to mostly be an issue with restricted military area portals, so perhaps removing those would remove the issue too - there are plenty other places that are challenging enough.


    However, multi-accounting doesn't seem to be punished by Niantic at all and this is a problem. But we also return to the issue of how-to counter this fairly while valuing everyone's privacy. Word of agents cannot always be trusted because there are certainly individuals who will lie in favour to get someone they don't like banned if they can, some will spend years of dedicated smearing to make others believe it too (sometimes what this game makes people do goes totally over my head).

    Everytime I've heard of "stacking" it seems mostly like the fault of server lag, agents who's bursts lag are rather just annoyed they don't deploy as they should and then agents defending are also annoyed the scanner doesn't update swiftly enough to make defending possible - I'm not sure if this even happens simultaneously or if it's random individual lag and the server still counts everything timely (but the client sees the actions too late). Especially now that 8-lvl gear is easy to obtain, there's a very short window when defending is of any use. Also the random factor of when and how shields can break adds to the feeling of unfairness, since a shield of any efficiency can just explode from one low level burst, it adds a massive variety of how fast a portal can potentially go down.

    Improving server polling rate and less random factor to shield breaking could easily fix this. This is not the first game I've played where "critical hits" make most people feel cheated on, they often don't add any fun to a game.


    Also I don't think the comm should announce any other location than actions at portals, anything else compromises too much location data. But it could be useful for administration to keep private track of items being exchanged. Randomized or vague coordinates do not help because it's very easy to pinpoint a location from data if drops happen a few times in the same location, as few as three times.

  • GreenVamGreenVam ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited October 2021
  • I think multi accounting would be prevented if players were required their phone number to login rather than the email address. To my knowledge, it's impossible to have multiple Whatsapp profiles on the same device, why cannot be the same for Ingress? You may create infinite email addresses, but for what I know, we still need to buy SIM cards in order to get a new number. Also, let's put one time payment at first login: spoofers create dozens of accounts, I think they would bother doing so if they lost houndreds of bucks on them. This makes more sense to me considering that for my experience most of the cheaters do it for personal reason / trolling / seeking attention. I saw cheaters writing to their same accounts, creating accounts referred to real players, bringing any kind of persona issues on the COMM... It's like they took Ingress as a place to free their personal frustrations, and they can do indeed because it's free and it doesn't cost anything to create new accounts. So I am sorry, but to me paying and phone number verification are the only solution. I wonder if resetting cell scores after a fake account action would discourage them as well, but that would mean that we assume they care about the game, when they don't: a good player would never cheat, not even when loosing, it wouldn't make sense to win without any effort or without playing.

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