Do not be greedy, developers also need to eat and feed their children. I am ready to make a payment for a specific in-game item. Such as, for example, as a module for a drone expanding inventory or giving + 5% to the probability of knocking out shields.
And the drone companion is much more useful than the “cripple” which cannot even get the key from the portal!
@jontebula is really funny the way you think. You're always complaining about everything, blabbing about how new things will damage the game, etc. But as soon as a new feature is released you eat it raw and ask for more, making suggestions that will truly break the game... You dislike subscription with 200 extra inventory but you want to add flight physics, gps joystick controller? You're basically asking for Niantic to create a entire new startship war game and insert it to ingress. Might also add VR oculus rift support as well...
Current drone maneuver/controls are perfectly fine. I would just agree that they could be visible.
Have given this one a bit of thougth and I think it shouldn't be the case you can complete a mission with only a drone. But a good compromise might be that drone hacks do count for a mission, but the mission can only be completed if at least one action is non-drone. Combined with the 1 hack per hour that should still promote people to go discover.
I see a potential benefit for the future: I visited quite a lot portal that where placed very poorly by some lazy agents on private property or behind fences.
Would be nice if the drone was able to extend your action radius a few meters and place maybe a single resonator to capture those portals. Just a single one, not to fill a portal completely and not to enable remote linking, just to get those nasty few.
If you make it so we can see the drones at the portals so we know attacking that portal will send home a drone that would be good because would create more portal churn and salt :D
I am enjoying playing with the current drone functionality and thinking about things I'd like to see in the future.
1. I don't think there is any harm in allowing drone hacks to count towards mission completion on "hack" mission steps. Any "capture or upgrade", waypoint, link, field, or password step in a mission would prevent people from completing the mission unless they were there in person. If you find a minimum 6 hack mission, and use the drone to complete it entirely, it would take at least 6 hours. If any of those portals changes faction when your drone is on it, it gets recalled, and you'd have to do it over again. If somebody wants to spend 6 hours per mission, I'm honestly fine with that. I'll personally do the same mission in 10-15 minutes. And that's assuming the player is otherwise near the mission. If they have to make a whole bunches of jumps to get to the mission start anyways, that's even more time and effort. I really just don't see this being a real problem at all. It's just not realistic to think that this devalues missions. If a person who makes a mission doesn't want people to be able to complete the mission remotely, they can just make the mission include a non-hack checkpoint. I'd also be okay with requiring at least one in-person interaction for a mission to count. But I've definitely come across a whole bunch of older missions where the person who originally created the mission is no longer active, and where one or more portals are no longer accessible (temporarily due to construction or permanently, but not yet removed from the game network), and being able to get that one portal hack in is the difference between completing the banner or leaving a hole. As a creator of several missions and a banner myself, I'm completely okay with people completing them remotely.
2. I like the idea of being able to traverse any links from the current portal. Ideally, I'd like both line-of-sight jumping and link jumping to be available. Maybe the Mark 1 drone can only fly line-of-site, Mark 2 could additionally fly along friendly links, and Mark 3 could fly along both friendly and opposite-faction links? I could also see just limiting the drones to friendly links for lore purposes.
3. Not 100% sure, but maybe have enhanced actions available to portals that you have a key for, have physically interacted with before, have owned in the past, are currently deployed on, or are the current owner of (or some subset of the above)? I don't know what these actions might be. Perhaps a lowered cool down time. Perhaps allowing multiple hacks on the portal before burnout. Maybe deploy or upgrade if already owned by your faction. I don't think you should be able to use a virus, nor should you be able to attack or create a link.
4. I'd like the drone to have a limited cargo inventory. Perhaps the basic drone could have no inventory, and upgraded models could have increased inventory (1, 2, 3 slots, not much). I would see the inventory serving 2 purposes. You could place an item in the inventory slot for the drone to use before you sent it out, or the drone could carry items back to you. Items you place in the drone inventory could be used to deploy on a portal where the drone is located (adding a mod to an open slot, or deploying or upgrading a resonator). Having a limited inventory and having to place the items in the drone from your inventory beforehand would limit the overall impact, and it would still be inferior to going to the place and taking actions in person. I'd also like you to be able to drop items from the drone inventory at the portal the drone is currently at. This could be used to send care packages to friendly agents (we can already drop items and capsules on the map for other agents to grab, and keys already drop from destroyed links, so it's not without precedent). If you drop something any agent would be able to retrieve it, so there would still be strategy. Finally, I'd actually like you to be able to hack a key from a portal. I know this is controversial, but I think there could be enough safeguards to make it tenable. Keys already can be duped in quantum capsules, and keys can be dropped and given from agent to agent, so it's already completely possible to have keys from places that you, and potentially even the person who gave you the key, have never been. If you let a drone hold a key in its inventory, you could use it to retrieve a key from a remote portal. Limited inventory space would mean that you'd have to be selective in which portal you wanted a key from, and wouldn't be able to get a bunch of keys from a remote area -- it would still be much more efficient to go places in person if you wanted to farm keys. You could also place your own keys in the drone inventory and send it out to a remote portal where you could drop those keys for a friendly agent. To make things even more balanced, perhaps when a drone is destroyed its inventory is lost, too? That way there's a risk involved if you want to use the drone to send or retrieve items and you still have to carefully plan your flights. I think there are ways to make this work without ruining the spirit of the game.
5. I think that recalled drones shouldn't come back immediately, especially if they can hold items and keys as cargo. Give them a 100 kph speed limit (for example; it could be lower or higher), and then take the distance between your location where you recall the drone and the drone's current location and divide it by the travel time, rounded up to the nearest hour, and that's the amount of time it will take the drone to come back to you. Combine that with the risk of losing inventory if the drone gets destroyed, and you have another gamble between jumping closer to you (possibly via links) vs being safe but potentially taking a longer time.
6. It would be nice if we could upgrade our drones in different ways by using them or earning badges with them. Things like being able to hack the same portal multiple times without moving, or being able to jump more frequently, or being able to jump larger distances (zooming out the map a bit and showing more portals), or adding more inventory slots, or deploying multiple drones at once, or tons of other great ideas.
I think drones can be used to augment the game without completely destroying what we have now. I think the priority should always be on getting out and exploring in real life, and that should be encouraged over doing things remotely. But I do think that we can add features and functionality to the drones to improve the game experience without losing the primary motivation. Drones should be used as a tool to augment gameplay, rather than to replace the current gameplay. I think there are plenty of ways to do that without devaluing anything we have right now.
Suggestion of new stat "Enemy Drone Recalled" and a medal for it
We need statistics for how many times you forcefully recalled a drone of enemy faction and a medal for it. Current drone specification doesn't motivate us to go outside. However, "Enemy Drone Recalled" stat and a medal would motivate us to go outside. Adventure on foot !
Along with that, there should be the way to see enemy drone location to some extent, though exact location should not be disclosed. I'm not sure what kind of function is good for it. One option is an item to tell you whether an enemy drone is in neighborhood or not.
First of all, thanks for rolling out the drone in such a way that it is possible to gain some experience, but without messing with the core gameplay.
I am trying to maximise Furthest Drone Flight Distance, but it seems impossible to get more than 7 or 8 km because the drone can only fly a maximal distance of around 600 meters. That way, areas without a dense portal network become an obstacle: residential suburbs, industrial motorways, even a 6-lane motorway.
And this is in Brussels, Belgium - an area which is densely populated and has a lot of historical and cultural points of interest. The situation will be much worse for a players in rural areas - a village with 3 portals and surrounded by fields. It just reinforces the disadvantage that rural players have with respect to medals and AP.
My suggestion: In addition to the visible portals, allow the drone to get to the nearest portal in all 8 compass directions. There may be a XM cost - the further the distance, the higher the cost.
How doesFurthest Drone Flight Distance handle NL1331 Portal? What if I put the drone on it when the van arrive near me and then wait that the portal crosses the ocean to move it again? Sorry for my English
Drones Could be visible during the cooldown period. If you are hacking/moving it every hour, it would be visible, after the cooldown it get stealth again.
@saarstahl even better than just jumping to closest, should be able to move through links!
I think after a drone has sat at a portal for an hour, the portal should be hackable again, not burnt out until moved. Maybe the rehack can can count as the hourly move.
Trying to figure how much of a difference so much dev time has in improving gameplay. It's one of those minor things that really doesn't change much for agents. With all features - does it have an effect on combat, fielding or anomalies? If it doesn't, where is it going? Is it really aiding exploration in a visible manner? It currently seems like a fix for Sojourners a little too late.
Considering the current conditions, it could have easily been given more features temporarily. That would make it a lot more useful right now. For example let drone hacks count for missions.
Could even introduce a new waypoint type for missions - Deploy your drone.
Other things that could make it interesting are audio proximity warnings. Nothing visual coz too many things already on the screen. Like if you / your drone are within range of more drones. Not give their locations but just let us know they're in the area.
Some new stats & medals would be interesting. Just listing new stats without in-game medals doesn't get anyone to go after them.
Max Continuous Jumps (would keep drones moving)
Drones Repelled (drone hunts might be fun. Especially if you can only guess / listen to audio to find them)
Max Days Drone Deployed (would get people to actually use the feature normally)
Unique Portals Deployed At (would help exploration a bit). Edit: already there.
Some other features that would make drones slightly useful -
Revealing hidden portal data. This could be limited to special portals with lore relevance.
Unlocking drone-only glyph sequences
Increased hack output. Would be fair given it instantly burns out a portal.
Synced intel / views if Ingress had a friend feature / enough faction mates in proximity
Maybe actual portal actions if enough agents are in actual proximity? Like get 8 agents to deploy a drone at the same portal & be within 1000 meters of it to use X8s (bye bye annoying inaccessible anchors).
I don't often, if ever, comment in here. But I see this as the first realistic solution for levelling the playing field amongst the 'with' and 'without' couch portal agents. Everyone knows it's a roll of the dice in terms of luck, but having an agent sitting on one, two or maybe more portals for 23 hours a day is clearly a playing field disruptor. Now I can glyph/hack from home, some balance is reintroduced, albeit only once per hour compared with those sitting on VRHS/VRMH P8 home portals.
Develop this concept with the goal of levelling the playing field, please.
I'd bet that's controlled server side. If the hackers can get into Niantic's server, this isn't going to be what they change.
It allows one more hack per drone visit. If you're skipping back and forth between two portals, that's a whole extra 2 hacks per portal before the burnout resets. I think we'll survive.
Is anyone using boats, antenna, tickets, etc to go and hack a portal once and not get any keys out of it? Anyone?
If anyone is actually using as primary gameplay instead of going out and exploring after COVID-19 is under control, I will be extremely surprised.
Comments
Look around you at all the suggestions on how to expand it. You really think it's going to stay at this current limit?
Bro, you're like two steps from GPS Joystick.
Do not be greedy, developers also need to eat and feed their children. I am ready to make a payment for a specific in-game item. Such as, for example, as a module for a drone expanding inventory or giving + 5% to the probability of knocking out shields.
And the drone companion is much more useful than the “cripple” which cannot even get the key from the portal!
Do not be greedy, developers also need to eat and feed their children.
@GreenVam there's a ton of options on how to monetize a game. Pay2win mechanics is the most worthless and lazy way.
After sleeping on this a bit,
It devalues Sojourner, perhaps alter the mechanics so that it does not work towards Sojourner?
Drones should always be visible
Jumping should from portal to portal should be via links only, and only up to as far away as the scanner can see, so no 6667km jumps
Limit one faction link network jump per day, within view range on the scanner, ie jump from an Enlightened link net to a Resistance link net
If DroneNet V2 comes out,
No remote linking,
No modding portals
No flipping of portals
No bursters
List available portals with links to enable slightly longer jumps
Minigames which utilises the drones to battle each other, similar to like we had with the shard game, but with drones,
No key Hacking but perhaps, something else?
I'd also like to propose an opt-in notification when a Drone is ready to next jump. Would help if someone needs to move every hour.
@jontebula is really funny the way you think. You're always complaining about everything, blabbing about how new things will damage the game, etc. But as soon as a new feature is released you eat it raw and ask for more, making suggestions that will truly break the game... You dislike subscription with 200 extra inventory but you want to add flight physics, gps joystick controller? You're basically asking for Niantic to create a entire new startship war game and insert it to ingress. Might also add VR oculus rift support as well...
Current drone maneuver/controls are perfectly fine. I would just agree that they could be visible.
I hope you all keep in mind that allowing drones to affect the portals would be a disaster. Please never even think of going that way.
Like more how you steer drone in real world with controller or joystick. I hope Niantic relese we steer the drone with controller.
Steer to where? You want free flight? For what purpose, watch the beautiful black soil with gray streets?
You want to fly the drone up and down? Why develop a joystick if the job is perfectly done by clicking?
Maybe you should try Jurassic World Alive. They have a drone almost the way you want. But of course, it makes sense that way for their game.
Have given this one a bit of thougth and I think it shouldn't be the case you can complete a mission with only a drone. But a good compromise might be that drone hacks do count for a mission, but the mission can only be completed if at least one action is non-drone. Combined with the 1 hack per hour that should still promote people to go discover.
I see a potential benefit for the future: I visited quite a lot portal that where placed very poorly by some lazy agents on private property or behind fences.
Would be nice if the drone was able to extend your action radius a few meters and place maybe a single resonator to capture those portals. Just a single one, not to fill a portal completely and not to enable remote linking, just to get those nasty few.
If you make it so we can see the drones at the portals so we know attacking that portal will send home a drone that would be good because would create more portal churn and salt :D
Dronenet X Quantum Capsule
@NianticBrian , Good evening.
The scanner allows you to store the Drone Mark1 inside a Quantum capsule,
but in the end it gives an error.
It's like a new guardian game except the guardian is invisible and your teammates can mess it up as easily as your first.
I am enjoying playing with the current drone functionality and thinking about things I'd like to see in the future.
1. I don't think there is any harm in allowing drone hacks to count towards mission completion on "hack" mission steps. Any "capture or upgrade", waypoint, link, field, or password step in a mission would prevent people from completing the mission unless they were there in person. If you find a minimum 6 hack mission, and use the drone to complete it entirely, it would take at least 6 hours. If any of those portals changes faction when your drone is on it, it gets recalled, and you'd have to do it over again. If somebody wants to spend 6 hours per mission, I'm honestly fine with that. I'll personally do the same mission in 10-15 minutes. And that's assuming the player is otherwise near the mission. If they have to make a whole bunches of jumps to get to the mission start anyways, that's even more time and effort. I really just don't see this being a real problem at all. It's just not realistic to think that this devalues missions. If a person who makes a mission doesn't want people to be able to complete the mission remotely, they can just make the mission include a non-hack checkpoint. I'd also be okay with requiring at least one in-person interaction for a mission to count. But I've definitely come across a whole bunch of older missions where the person who originally created the mission is no longer active, and where one or more portals are no longer accessible (temporarily due to construction or permanently, but not yet removed from the game network), and being able to get that one portal hack in is the difference between completing the banner or leaving a hole. As a creator of several missions and a banner myself, I'm completely okay with people completing them remotely.
2. I like the idea of being able to traverse any links from the current portal. Ideally, I'd like both line-of-sight jumping and link jumping to be available. Maybe the Mark 1 drone can only fly line-of-site, Mark 2 could additionally fly along friendly links, and Mark 3 could fly along both friendly and opposite-faction links? I could also see just limiting the drones to friendly links for lore purposes.
3. Not 100% sure, but maybe have enhanced actions available to portals that you have a key for, have physically interacted with before, have owned in the past, are currently deployed on, or are the current owner of (or some subset of the above)? I don't know what these actions might be. Perhaps a lowered cool down time. Perhaps allowing multiple hacks on the portal before burnout. Maybe deploy or upgrade if already owned by your faction. I don't think you should be able to use a virus, nor should you be able to attack or create a link.
4. I'd like the drone to have a limited cargo inventory. Perhaps the basic drone could have no inventory, and upgraded models could have increased inventory (1, 2, 3 slots, not much). I would see the inventory serving 2 purposes. You could place an item in the inventory slot for the drone to use before you sent it out, or the drone could carry items back to you. Items you place in the drone inventory could be used to deploy on a portal where the drone is located (adding a mod to an open slot, or deploying or upgrading a resonator). Having a limited inventory and having to place the items in the drone from your inventory beforehand would limit the overall impact, and it would still be inferior to going to the place and taking actions in person. I'd also like you to be able to drop items from the drone inventory at the portal the drone is currently at. This could be used to send care packages to friendly agents (we can already drop items and capsules on the map for other agents to grab, and keys already drop from destroyed links, so it's not without precedent). If you drop something any agent would be able to retrieve it, so there would still be strategy. Finally, I'd actually like you to be able to hack a key from a portal. I know this is controversial, but I think there could be enough safeguards to make it tenable. Keys already can be duped in quantum capsules, and keys can be dropped and given from agent to agent, so it's already completely possible to have keys from places that you, and potentially even the person who gave you the key, have never been. If you let a drone hold a key in its inventory, you could use it to retrieve a key from a remote portal. Limited inventory space would mean that you'd have to be selective in which portal you wanted a key from, and wouldn't be able to get a bunch of keys from a remote area -- it would still be much more efficient to go places in person if you wanted to farm keys. You could also place your own keys in the drone inventory and send it out to a remote portal where you could drop those keys for a friendly agent. To make things even more balanced, perhaps when a drone is destroyed its inventory is lost, too? That way there's a risk involved if you want to use the drone to send or retrieve items and you still have to carefully plan your flights. I think there are ways to make this work without ruining the spirit of the game.
5. I think that recalled drones shouldn't come back immediately, especially if they can hold items and keys as cargo. Give them a 100 kph speed limit (for example; it could be lower or higher), and then take the distance between your location where you recall the drone and the drone's current location and divide it by the travel time, rounded up to the nearest hour, and that's the amount of time it will take the drone to come back to you. Combine that with the risk of losing inventory if the drone gets destroyed, and you have another gamble between jumping closer to you (possibly via links) vs being safe but potentially taking a longer time.
6. It would be nice if we could upgrade our drones in different ways by using them or earning badges with them. Things like being able to hack the same portal multiple times without moving, or being able to jump more frequently, or being able to jump larger distances (zooming out the map a bit and showing more portals), or adding more inventory slots, or deploying multiple drones at once, or tons of other great ideas.
I think drones can be used to augment the game without completely destroying what we have now. I think the priority should always be on getting out and exploring in real life, and that should be encouraged over doing things remotely. But I do think that we can add features and functionality to the drones to improve the game experience without losing the primary motivation. Drones should be used as a tool to augment gameplay, rather than to replace the current gameplay. I think there are plenty of ways to do that without devaluing anything we have right now.
Suggestion of new stat "Enemy Drone Recalled" and a medal for it
We need statistics for how many times you forcefully recalled a drone of enemy faction and a medal for it. Current drone specification doesn't motivate us to go outside. However, "Enemy Drone Recalled" stat and a medal would motivate us to go outside. Adventure on foot !
Along with that, there should be the way to see enemy drone location to some extent, though exact location should not be disclosed. I'm not sure what kind of function is good for it. One option is an item to tell you whether an enemy drone is in neighborhood or not.
I hope drone always are free in app and not P2W when drone are complete and mutch better in the foture.
First of all, thanks for rolling out the drone in such a way that it is possible to gain some experience, but without messing with the core gameplay.
I am trying to maximise Furthest Drone Flight Distance, but it seems impossible to get more than 7 or 8 km because the drone can only fly a maximal distance of around 600 meters. That way, areas without a dense portal network become an obstacle: residential suburbs, industrial motorways, even a 6-lane motorway.
And this is in Brussels, Belgium - an area which is densely populated and has a lot of historical and cultural points of interest. The situation will be much worse for a players in rural areas - a village with 3 portals and surrounded by fields. It just reinforces the disadvantage that rural players have with respect to medals and AP.
My suggestion: In addition to the visible portals, allow the drone to get to the nearest portal in all 8 compass directions. There may be a XM cost - the further the distance, the higher the cost.
How does Furthest Drone Flight Distance handle NL1331 Portal? What if I put the drone on it when the van arrive near me and then wait that the portal crosses the ocean to move it again? Sorry for my English
Drones Could be visible during the cooldown period. If you are hacking/moving it every hour, it would be visible, after the cooldown it get stealth again.
@saarstahl even better than just jumping to closest, should be able to move through links!
I think after a drone has sat at a portal for an hour, the portal should be hackable again, not burnt out until moved. Maybe the rehack can can count as the hourly move.
Trying to figure how much of a difference so much dev time has in improving gameplay. It's one of those minor things that really doesn't change much for agents. With all features - does it have an effect on combat, fielding or anomalies? If it doesn't, where is it going? Is it really aiding exploration in a visible manner? It currently seems like a fix for Sojourners a little too late.
Considering the current conditions, it could have easily been given more features temporarily. That would make it a lot more useful right now. For example let drone hacks count for missions.
Could even introduce a new waypoint type for missions - Deploy your drone.
Other things that could make it interesting are audio proximity warnings. Nothing visual coz too many things already on the screen. Like if you / your drone are within range of more drones. Not give their locations but just let us know they're in the area.
Some new stats & medals would be interesting. Just listing new stats without in-game medals doesn't get anyone to go after them.
Max Continuous Jumps (would keep drones moving)
Drones Repelled (drone hunts might be fun. Especially if you can only guess / listen to audio to find them)
Max Days Drone Deployed (would get people to actually use the feature normally)
Unique Portals Deployed At (would help exploration a bit). Edit: already there.
Some other features that would make drones slightly useful -
Revealing hidden portal data. This could be limited to special portals with lore relevance.
Unlocking drone-only glyph sequences
Increased hack output. Would be fair given it instantly burns out a portal.
Synced intel / views if Ingress had a friend feature / enough faction mates in proximity
Maybe actual portal actions if enough agents are in actual proximity? Like get 8 agents to deploy a drone at the same portal & be within 1000 meters of it to use X8s (bye bye annoying inaccessible anchors).
"Friendly Drones Recalled" does not sound quite right.
You move your drone to neutral or enemy portal and then your friendly faction captures the portal and it will result your drone to be recalled back.
Somehow this does not sound quite right.
Maybe it could work so that the drone is recalled only if enemy captures the portal and maybe also when the portal is decayed to neutral.
I don't often, if ever, comment in here. But I see this as the first realistic solution for levelling the playing field amongst the 'with' and 'without' couch portal agents. Everyone knows it's a roll of the dice in terms of luck, but having an agent sitting on one, two or maybe more portals for 23 hours a day is clearly a playing field disruptor. Now I can glyph/hack from home, some balance is reintroduced, albeit only once per hour compared with those sitting on VRHS/VRMH P8 home portals.
Develop this concept with the goal of levelling the playing field, please.
In order...
Why am I able to hack with Dronenet with a full inventory (More than 2,000 items)?
Does Dronenet increase the inventory limit to more than 2,000 items?
This is an interesting concept.
Maybe during an anomaly put two start portals for each faction.
And put an end portal for each faction far outside the playbox.
The faction that reaches more drones or first to the end wins.
This would of course require a shorter flight cool down.
Maybe increase the decay rate of portals with drones on them by 5% per drone. That would really mess up some P8 farms 😂
Maybe allow 1 key / item to be transported by a drone but use up a ton of XM & CM to do so.
Dronet are results of corona virus?