Portal scanning in 2.55: Share your experience
I applaud the Ingress team for removing friction from portal scanning. 2.55 gave us substantial quality of life improvements and dealt with most of the issues pertaining to the act of scanning.
Agents, how did this update change the way you feel about portal scanning?
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The change seemed to go live as I was outside scanning portals, so I immediately noticed the differences.
The badge tier reduction from 15k to 12k is a good start, but it's still a ridiculously high amount. This has been discussed in great detail in previous discussions. The jump from gold (1k) to platinum (5k) is extreme and is demoralising to continue conducting unique scans.
The 15 second minimum for scans feels far too long. I can walk around a simple sign in less than 10 seconds, a tiny little plaque flat on the ground can be scanned in 2 seconds, a mural higher up on a wall is difficult to scan as you can't really maneuver around to get anything more than what is essentially a flat 2d image. So you end up waiting for the 15 seconds to timeout before you can move on.
The average portal scan being 14.3 seconds is probably because most people performing the scan didn't seem to realise that they could press the button to stop the scan, rather than waiting for the timer to finish. So changing it based on this average seems silly, why not change it to what would be realistically suitable? Maybe 5-10 seconds
The removal of the encoding is amazing, I don't have to waste time waiting for it to encode anymore. However I am nervous about losing the scans now because I don't know what has happened to them. Can I switch off the phone or change apps as soon as the scan is done, should we wait? No idea.
Portal scans renewing after 7 days I don't like. 200 each fornight worked out pretty well as a moderate and reasonable amount of scans to perform. I could average 15-20 a day and not have to waste too much time performing this free labor with no reward. Now that I could do 30 a day (200 a week), it's a much more daunting number if I am wanting to simply capture unique scout controller points, as it's a lot of effort in finding 30 uniques a day, every day. Having it spaced out over a fortnight ensured that I could have a few days off from scanning and not have to suffer from scanning fatigue by doing it too much. On the other hand, having more scans will make it easier for people to perform more scans.
On the whole, I've enjoyed scanning portals. I've spent more time exploring and finding each portal, updating photos and descriptions. The key issues are still prevalent; ridiculous badge tier, 15 second minimum video and bugs. It would be nice to have an AP reward or something as it requires a huge amount of effort and time when compared to other actions (linking, fielding, smashing, etc.). Ultimately we (the players) know the results of scanning is going to be useless, nobody likes AR features, it's just a novelty for a few seconds before it gets ignored (see PoGo buddies, photos, or HPWU foundable catching or portmanteau opening).
Thank you very much for sharing such a detailed impression of the update!
I don't mind scanning for 15 seconds at all. If that's the amount of time they require to collect 3D data, so be it. But if some scans only need two to three seconds to complete, why not make life easier for the scanners and reduce the minimum requirement to 10 seconds or less?
I've noticed that the files are much smaller in size. Before 2.55, the average scans I uploaded were about 180MB; now they're under 70MB. This has been the biggest change for me.
This update didn't change anything for me (except there are a few more bugs compared to 2.54). I don't scan and I will not until I see how it benefits Ingress.
15 seconds is too long... its still not fun to scan it doesnt bring anything to ingress gameplay or will it ever ??
"We’re exploring ways to use Portal Scans for new Ingress features, but these are early days in our development."
agree, 5 - 10 sec is still discreet.
Now people start looking at me like wt h is he doing
Removal of encoding and the shorter upload time are both massive improvements, especially the first. I like to scan while doing missions. It was taking forever, especially where the portal already had a controller and therefore had to be done two or three times. Now it is almost as fluent doing missions as it was before and it is nice to feel we are contributing to the next level in terms of world building.
... and when they actually have them used in some ingame feature, I'll reconsider my stance. Not earlier than that.
Appreciate the information, but:
Having it spaced out over a fortnight ensured that I could have a few days off from scanning and not have to suffer from scanning fatigue by doing it too much.
This isn't a job. If you need time off, take time off. Treat it as if you only have half of what you actually have or that it resets fortnightly.
Look out for yourself and don't burn out. 👍
What is missing? A progress bar while uploading the results at home. Minutes and minutes go by with rotating the symbol. Please include some progress bar which shows us the remaining amount of data.
Isn't the background upload exactly that? Background?
Well there is no background uploading, and the uploading needs a lot of work at that. A few weeks ago I was able to go out and get scans encoded about 2/3 attempts at scanning a portal (1/3 of these would just back out instead of showing me a preview and letting me hit upload later). I dealt with it and would come home with 20 good scans and upload them. Well as of this last patch there's no encoding of course but sometimes I get a preview of frames and other times I get a white square with a few red splatters. In either case, when I get home and try to upload my scans for the day it fails immediately. Even after rebooting, etc. it persists and I'm told the only fix is to clear out all my scans for the day. This is beyond infuriating :/.
This happened to me today. I scanned 200 unique portals and only 26 of them were successfully uploaded. It's frustrating the time I wasted to have the others 174 unique portal scans thrown away.
200!? Wow. I'm surprised you were able to upload any of them - unless I suppose if you are doing them on cell data. Mine is $10 per gigabyte so I tend to be conservative with it and just can't justify uploading them until I'm done for the day, making the sting much worse.
I upload via wi-fi, it's unlimited here. every 2 weeks I try to do all 200 scans for the badge (I always managed to upload all the scans), but in this last update, apparently some of the scans got buggy just like what you said. I didn’t notice at the time and ended up causing me to not be able to send all the 174 remaining scans I did.
It's great that the issue of the long wait time of encoding is gone. I can scan a portal multiple times in succession now.
However, I've observed a noticeable slowdown in the app when I was done scanning. At first, I thought this was because the encoding part took place in the background now. When I switched apps, and back to Prime the slowdown was gone.
When doing another scan, I noticed the same. This time I left Prime in the foreground and waited 30 minutes before uploading them. The slowdown didn't go away, making me believe this isn't a background process after all (the scans would've been encoded by then, and I had already uploaded them).
Anyone else notice slowdowns (when rotating the map for instance) after portal scanning?
I can't even scan anything due to the ARCore update issue, would love to get that taken care of so I can fully test this out.
The slight slowdown after scanning has now increased to render the game unplayable. After scanning 6 portals in succession, the game slowed down to a crawl about 4fps). After restart, everything worked again. I could scan another 4 without slowdown. Strangely, the bug doesn't appear to happen all the time.
Hope I'm not aborting background processes with restarting each time...
I got the silver scout controller with the previous version and then stopped scanning. For me it's not really fun, I prefer to play Ingress ;)
Progress of upload check intel it's a start...not the best solution but better than a rotating triangle.
I'm getting a lot of 'too slow' errors, even when I'm walking as briskly as I can. This seems especially bad when the object is a very large building.
not seeing this...
I hadn't scanned in a few months. Last weekend (Second Sunday), while doing missions, I stepped out of my car into the sun, to scan a portal I'd submitted. Of course I could hardly see the screen. And it popped up with some kind of tutorial or something. I didn't want to stand there and read - I wanted to scan and get to the next portal, like I did last spring. I managed to "OK" or "Next" or whatever. Then I held my phone up to frame the object for the start of my scan - hand ready to press the target button to start the scan. And I realized it was already recording. So I guess the first couple seconds are of my feet and the sidewalk. By the time the recording stopped, I was just ready to move on.