Mission Week/Month - Tess II - Drone event suggestion
Atunatunak
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This was intended as a reply for the current drone hack event thread, but I fear it may be lost there or change its topic so I'm opening a new one.
I've been reading comments all over the forum and I'd also like to see a "proper" drone event or medals for the drone stats. And yes, there are also ideas around about virtual MD, but this is a slightly different one (at least the final idea I present).
I already made a suggestion a few months ago (two different messages in the thread I link below) regarding the drone deploy that could be useful to implement to help everybody participate if there is an event or if medals are activated:
A MW- MM (week or month, not day, so it doesn't count for that medal and people don't complain about it perverting the meaning of a MD) drone event could be interesting, but maybe harder to do for some players because of distance/trolls.
Niantic could design some missions or just contact the community so we send special missions for some cities as we do when a MD is organized, and then give us a week (or even a month or two) to try to complete them. I'd give more than one day so everybody has plenty of time to move the drone to the nearest city with the MW-MM or in case some troll decides to force recall everybody's drone.
For this, in order to make it available for everybody, they would have to implement something like my linked suggestion, or maybe they could use some lore thing to make everybody's drone able to appear inside their nearest MW-MM playbox, where forced recall would be deactivated.
Even further, instead of appearing in the nearest playbox, it could appear randomly in any MW-MM playbox around the world, and when that mission is complete, the drone jumps to a different playbox in a different city. If they make it a month, the goal could be trying to complete as many global missions as possible, it could be a nice way to virtually "visit" cities around the world, like we do with Fevgame's A Puzzle A Day. But they would need to make a banner that looks good if not all the rows are completed or they'd need to give us plenty of time so the people won't complain later about not being able to finish the banner.
(Sorry for the mix up of ideas, I'm just writing as I'm thinking and the pause for having dinner has been fruitful)
Even better, we could have kind of a Tessellation II (drone version):
This wouldn't need to be presented as a MD-MW-MM, but NIA could make something similar with missions based on the lore. They could use it to create a new event where, for some reason, a new glyph is discovered (i.e: use of wrong tech by one of the XM companies from the lore, safeguards from Eos Protocol going south, or a different company trying to develop their own drone*).
(Suggestion for the new glyph, probably @Ishira will have a better idea)
Here, we would have two options depending on the story chosen to create the event, either the new drone is able directly to teleport or the new glyph can be used as a command for MKI (like complex or simple but meaning "teleport" or something similar).
Anyway, the drone would appear in one of these playboxes (with forced recall deactivated because the XM has been affected in these areas) where strange missions have appeared. What do they mean? Who made them? What are the symbols that appear in the badges? What is their purpose? Why don't they appear in intel? (just don't add them) Why don't they appear in Ingress Mosaik? (please, talk to them beforehand so no one can add these special missions to avoid spoilers). Are they new or already known exogenous entities trying to contact us? Has the development of this new drone opened a breach in our Universe/node protections? Agents would have to participate in order to find the answers.
After completing the mission/banner from each city, the agent would get a media. After X agents complete the mission/banner from each city, that media would then reveal to have secret info that would need decoding. The factions would have to get the decoded info from each city's media in order to find a secret playbox (this time they will have to enter coordinates by hand, perhaps?) with a final mission/banner that, upon completion, would give a final media to be decoded.
This way, people interested in decoding could join, like in Tess, and people not interested in decoding would have to participate to get that OMGWOWNICEFOMO banner and help their faction.
The winner faction would be the first one decoding the final media and entering the password in intel map, and they could get some info useful for the future, some random VRLA (kind of like the prizes we would have got with Eos Protocol) or they could just receive some new item (a new recipe for Kinetic Capsule, for example) that the second faction would receive a week or a fortnight later (Truthseeker could leak it to the public and make it available for everyone in that case).
If NIA doesn't want to design soooo many badges, they could make it just like a single badge for each city (it seems you can add around 100 waypoints or more for a single badge) and the final banner could have 12-18-24 badges in total, depending on the duration they want the event to have or how many cities they would need for their purposes (perhaps cities already related to the lore, or cities that won't get an anomaly ever because of the lack of agents, security reasons and so on).
They could also rollout the playboxes at their own pace, so that they can control the factions' advance.
*Being a drone not created by IQTech but by a different company, it could explain the strange missions (perhaps the company had laboratories in these cities, they participated in the creation of this new drone opening XM gates they didn't know where there). Perhaps it could be coded as a different item (I have no idea about coding, sorry), so that it is able to do the missions and use the teleport glyph, and later may dissapear from the inventory because of (lore) reasons.
Sorry for tagging you @NianticBrian but I think this could be a starting point for a great idea to motivate people and have a FvF event again while keeping everybody safe. Also @Truthseeker may find it interesting. Or @ofer2 could give some insight about the difficulties it may have in terms of coding.
Comments
I really love the idea!!
Its time to expand drones with new versions if they are here to say forever but why is niantic so against even a basic medal for the drone we have now ? i dont understand.... would be nice with a drone that can jump via links or even make missions. Would even be fun with some mini events factions vs factions... seems we will not have global challenges anytime soon so whenever they make some event that dont give badge i dont feel much motivated use it really...
Adding more functions with drones could end legitimating spoofing. The drones are fine as they are, what she is proposing are new game modes.
I personally don't need a badge for everything we do (they are always welcome though), but it would be nice to have at least some kind of advance in terms of lore or in the big picture of FvF.
My idea could also be used to introduce new drone versions or drone skills in a way that wouldn't be: "Hey, the drone now can do this and that", but it could be: "Hey, something weird has appeared here and there, we have to investigate to find out more about it", so that they can make the reveal last longer and use it to give us something else to do, instead of just reading an announcement. Even if the final result is: "Meh, this is boring", at least they could do the road to it worth it.
They could put on hold the current FvF status (the advances that have already been won, like Umbra and Tess I think) and start and alternative path in the story to be done with these minievents you mention, like events from home (recharging, glyphing, droning, decoding) and maybe some parallel outside events (but all quantified in terms of factions achieving a target, not individual achievements, to avoid FOMO stupidity) so that people can help their faction playing outside or from home depending on their current COVID situation.
I mean some alternative path that doesn't influence the big picture, that is not unfair regarding the advances already made (winning an anomaly requires far more effort than posting screencaps from home) nor really unbalanced (because of cheats, scripts, bots and so on for things done in the forums) so at least people is motivated to participate in order to help their faction to win. It could be some sort of investigation about events from the past that just sheds some light about the current events (maybe about the Undine or some previous magnus). And they could even add the result to the current FvF status, but like winning a big point for each 20 minievents won (or whatever higher number, although I'm not convinced about mixing points from real play and home play).
It seemed to me that the Tabula Rasa part was going in that direction of giving us something to look for, but I feel it is stagnated or I don't have the impression of it going anywhere.
Also, it is difficult for many people to use gear, so having normal gear as the prize (like cubes) or even special gear (like VRLA) is not quite motivating either because you can hack them or they will stay wasting space in the inventory, but making your faction win points (or just win, even if the prize is only bragging rights) could be a real motivation.