Onsite and offsite anomoly badges.
AgentSANT0RI
✭✭
in Anomalies
What are the viewpoints for these badges. Should they be different or the same as onsite participants?
Please include your faction to gauge the opinion of your team.
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I think everyone who bothers to request it should get it, it does not matter. What is important is experience not badges
I think everyone who plays and helps should get the same badge.
- Enlightened
I think Ingress already has about 300 ways for you to prove you're "better" than other players. Your fragile ego doesn't deserve another one.
playing offsite (aka recharging, i'm fine with ops/dispatch getting a badge) shouldn't get anything at all.
I agree that the participants in the recharge rooms should not obtain badge of anomaly, the recharge rooms should exist but as support to your faction ... rather it seems an easy and free medal compared to the agent who pays your trip or attend, nothing ensures your contribution in the anomaly
As someone who travels extensively for anomaly and also participates in recharge rooms, I support people getting badges. How does someone who does off-site support getting a badge affect you personally? It doesn't, so why should they be denied the badge because their method of support is something other than boot on the ground (which is way better by the way).
There are plenty of people who can't travel to anomaly for any number of reasons - money, health, work, family, and other commitments. But for 4-5 hours, they can commit some time to helping people who do do the traveling.
The current system Niantic have in place for awarding badges to rechargers is great - badges are only awarded to those who actually recharge keys/portals in the playbox. It is by no means perfect, but it works, and it ensures participation rather than just "this person showed up to the room" situations like it was before.
But I'd be happy to hear any counters as to why offsite support should not be awarded a badge.
> How does someone who does off-site support getting a badge affect you personally? It doesn't, so why should they be denied the badge because their method of support is something other than boot on the ground (which is way better by the way).
There are plenty of people who can't travel to anomaly for any number of reasons - money, health, work, family, and other commitments. But for 4-5 hours, they can commit some time to helping people who do do the traveling.
Because it's not just people who genuinely can't make it, it's turning into people using recharge rooms as a free badge without having to bother going to anomalies, and drastically affecting on-site turnout. You can still recharge, there just shouldn't be a badge for doing so. It's intended to enourage anomaly participation after all, not just sitting in a pub playing PoGo after reaching the minimum recharge mark.
I've never understood the expression "without having to bother going to anomalies"
Is it onerous, for you? If you don't enjoy it, stay home, or take a holiday somewhere you'll enjoy...
I don't see anomaly attendance as some awful burden that I need a shiny set of pixels to persuade me to do.
> There are plenty of people who can't travel to anomaly for any number of reasons - money, health, work, family, and other commitments. But for 4-5 hours, they can commit some time to helping people who do do the traveling.
then these people should shift their priorites if they want a badge. I never understood this whole recharge thing. Yes, from one side it's sort of helpful, but it also makes onsite participation boring as hell if you only stay at a fully charged portal and have nothing to do but to put a new shield in from time to time.
...it also makes onsite participation boring as hell if you only stay at a fully charged portal and have nothing to do but to put a new shield in from time to time.
Then two of you can stay and deploy shields while the rest of your team go and capture more portals.
Traveling to an anomaly is a reward by itself. You meet nice people, see a new city, enjoy the excitement of the action. I wouldn't exchange it for a recharge room, but RRs are now a formalized way of taking part in an anomaly, so it is absolutely fine for rechargers to get the badge, as well as the operators who are also not on site.
when niantic is going away from multiple days for same serie, and reducing number of regions with close proximity (why to have kaunas and helsinki on same date ???) more people dont have a choice but to go for remote support.
I think there should be more ways, not less, for off site participants to get badges.
Either that or have more cities, more widely distributed, per series, so that everyone who wants a badge has the chance to get one.
The current anomaly distribution still ignores large parts of the world. Travelling in certain parts of the world costs a lot more than in the US for example.
"then these people should shift their priorites if they want a badge"
This reminds me of the response of a student of mine when we watched a documentary about poverty: "why don't they just move somewhere better?"
Let me turn the question around. There are some people who register for an anomaly, check in, get the swag, hack the registration portal and then leave town. Why should they get a badge simply for turning up but not actually participating?
@SoylentGrien
at a recent anomaly we had some players turn up late, didnt contribute a lot before leaving early. They got the Badge then flipped Blue so also got the recent badge for Blues winning the series
Recharging isn't going to change that. You will easily burn out the hacks while standing there. It's just one of these minor points that doesn't impact you.
I'm also reminded of the last Brisbane anomaly where an entire team spent the whole 4 hours "defending this bar" without a single in game action.
I think both type of participants should be rewarded, and by participants i target only the agents that put some effort in what they did, and all by ToS. The badges should be different. I got only one badge, from on site anomaly and im very proud of. The game is social, so i compare myself with the rest, I want to brag when i show my agent profile, to tell stories where i went and how i got this badge, and to hear my friends story about theirs.
Now when i ask i got: someone gave us keys, we drank beer for 2 hours and recharged, easy. Who, how gave the keys - no clue. No one knows what happened. It's like they found a capsule full of anomaly play box keys in front of the bar. And i've read stories back a year ago of how hard was to farm the keys, to transfer them for more than 2000 km etc.
Every system model has flaws
Both ways can be abused, it's just that recharging abuse is way less effort and for me it looks like a trend. In my region every cell nearby has like 10 agents with a full set of the last 4-5 anomaly badges and none of them has a mission day medals from the anomalies - pure anomaly badge hunt.
It's for NIA to analyze their stats and data and decide if and what to do.
Same like quantums, frackers or recruitment - all great options, but when it gets too much abused, it has to stop/ to be changed.
ps. english not native, sry for errors
The argument that RR impacts on-site participation in an impactful way is false. We stopped giving remote recharge medals for a quarter or two after some POC fraud until we could design a way to measure recharger performance. The events that occurred without RR medals had no appreciable onsite attendance increase.
The reason for this can be found in our player survey data or by just talking to Anomaly attendees. The number one reason Agents indicate that they go to Anomalies is to hangout with their friends. As with most thing related to Ingress, it's about the meta game and the experiences Ingress enables.
tl;dr version: If people can go to an Anomaly, they almost always do to hangout with friends as a mini-vacation.
recharge rooms should have never imo give a badge... cant go to anomaly ? no badge then... thats the whole point.... otherwise nobody needs go to anomaly and u can all sit home and still get badge ? no thats not ok at all..
I can say with 100% certainty that it's not false. Okay, I may not have the same global view you have, and it's possible the people bailing out of anomalies to get a free badge for 10 minutes of recharging then playing PoGo that I've witnessed pale into insignifigance when viewed globally, but it's not false. Unless there was even more PoC abuse, there was only one series where recharge rooms (with badges) weren't offered, and that was EXO5. If there were meant to be more, then I'm afraid they were still being run.
It should be both Well there is not just money, health and commitment are the issue of one can't travel there are other legal situation too like visas travelling time so as the dates not all anomaly happen in vacation time. I like the recharge room distance restrict reason this way one can recharge certain countries while not have to go through the Hassel of visa etc