Boost Charge All button doesn't always charge portal to 100% energy

Turtlezorg

When charging portals remotely using the Boost Charge All button, most of the time portals get charged to 100% requiring one button press, but sporadically only to ~90% or so requiring two button presses. I didn't really notice a pattern except for maybe when my XM is at low-medium, but still enough to charge the portal, it seems to happen a bit more often and pressing the button the 2nd time charges the portal to 100% without needing to refill XM, indicating that I had enough XM to charge it with one button press. Portal distance doesn't matter - most of mine are 99%+ range efficiency. Having the XM tank with Hypercube active doesn't matter. Seems to occur 1 out 5 times on average. Very easy to replicate - just keep charging remote portals using the Boost Charge All button and check if the button is still active after the first press, indicating that the portal wasn't fully charged and a second button press is possible to attempt to fully charge.

Attaching screenshots showing the issue:

The first two screenshots (portal1-good-1 / portal1-good-2) show a successful scenario - the portal got charged from 18,550 to 26,500 (100%) energy with one button press.

The three screenshots after that (portal2-bad-1 / portal2-bad-2 / portal2-bad-3) show a failed scenario - the portal got charged from 15,950 to 27,784 (95.8%) energy after the first button press, and then from 27,784 to 29,000 (100%) energy after the second button press.

Successful scenario:

portal1-good-1:

portal1-good-2:

Failed scenario:

portal2-bad-1

portal2-bad-2

portal2-bad-3

magicmarkus

This bug has been in the game like forever. Even the old client had it.

alistairw97

I’ve never noticed a boost charge being able to do more then about 20,000 XM or so, even with Hypercubes….. roughly ties in with the maximum xm capacity so doubt this is a bug.

Turtlezorg

If this is true, in my failed scenario example the portal was missing 13.050 energy and the first boost only charged 11,834. Why could it not charge 13.050 in one shot?

DrHydrosaur

I think it may be something like the following :

• The portal is exactly three 15% decays (55% full)
• Max boost charge is 15,000 XM
• Ingress tries to distribute this evenly to each resonator so that’s 1875 per resonator
• You’re not right at the portal so there’s a loss of 8 XM per resonator, so that’s 1867/resonator
• For the level 3 to 6 resos, that’s enough to fully charge
• The level 7 goes from 2750 to 4617
• The level 8 from 3300 to 5167
• That adds up to 27,784:

2000+2000+3000+3000+4000+4000+4617+5167 = 27,784

Looks like that would explain it all

Turtlezorg

That's pretty good math, it checks out for that one example. So are you saying that boost charge will never fully charge a remote portal if it has at least 1 resonator missing more than 1867 XM?

DrHydrosaur

Max is 15,000 XM divided by number of resonators that aren’t fully charged.

So if all 8 portals are at least 1 XM short of full, the maximum is 1875. If 2 are fully charged (or missing) it’s 15000/6=2500 XM per resonator

Turtlezorg

@DrHydrosaur - thanks for all the info!

Niantic, I am recommending to change the formula that calculates how much XM each portal will receive when pressing the Boost Charge All button. Rather than dividing the total XM sent to a portal by the number of resonators with missing XM, and sending an equal amount of XM to each such resonator (and thus not completely filling the L7 and L8's in my failed scenario example), change the formula so that the total XM sent gets divided into different chunks proportional to each resonator's missing XM. This should accomplish filling each resonator to 100% with a single press of the button, given that the player has enough XM currently in their tank.