Thoughts on Perpetua Hexathlon
MonkeyPelt
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I just returned from a 1,200 mile trip to attend the Perpetua Hexathlon in Salt Lake City, Utah. As a fairly active player who has begun traveling for Ingress events in the last 18 months, and who has helped on orga/POC for local events (First Saturday/Mission Day), I would like to share some quick thoughts and concerns.
As many players, I’m beginning to miss the team-based competitive nature of Ingress, but I was intrigued enough to travel for this event. Overall, I enjoyed the event for what it was (NOT as a replacement for anomalies). I had no issues with lag/server errors, and the shorter 90min format gave me a sense of urgency to complete the tasks I had intended to accomplish to achieve Elite status. In that regard, well done Niantic!
My main concern arises from the layout of the media portals, which more-or-less designated the playbox. After observing several Field Test sites on intel back in Sept, I found that nearly all media portals showed up within a ~575m radius of the registration portal, with all portals falling on the edge of the circle if possible. Throughout the Perpetua Hexathlon, I observed this same behavior in the APAC and EMEA regions as I prepped for my time in Salt Lake City (attached image below is from Perpetua Hexathlon in Porto, Portugal [yellow star=registration portal; blue ornaments=media portals]).
I found this concerning because our registration portal was at the entrance to a large beautiful park, next to a busy road, and just across that busy road from a large hospital. If this pattern followed suit, half of the portal-dense park would not be included in the media portal ring (not a huge deal), but worse, several media portals would show up in the much less portal dense hospital complex, drawing players across a busy road and into a zone to potentially interfere with emergency services. This is in fact what happened. Three media portals showed up in the hospital complex and two more at the far end of a large parking lot of a nearby busy shopping complex with only two media portals in/near the park.
Thoughts/Conclusions:
Again, I really enjoyed the gameplay aspect of this event and am impressed with how stable Prime was during this event compared to even 6 months ago (though I heard other sites struggled with stability). However, in my opinion, the layout of the media portals was unacceptable. I really don’t mind them being spread out, in fact I enjoy having to cover a lot of ground to accomplish a strategic goal, but not near a busy hospital! This shows me that Niantic is relying on an algorithm to set the media portals and not actually looking at the map themselves. This could have been easily avoided if they set a few locals as event POCs who’s only job was to advise on the ‘playbox’ and point out potential hazards or places to watch out for (like the nearby hospital). Even without POCs, Niantic could have looked at the ‘playbox’ themselves, but I don’t think even that happened.
The past is in the past, but this leaves me concerned for the Lexicon Hexathlon in April and frightened for what can happen in Munich in May.
Comments
In Santa Clara, the media was in a circle, and everyone did a lap before settling in to build and destroy in the center. Sounds like nothing changed.
I just wish I could have attended. Sites we're to.difficult to get to from Guam.
this is what happens when no POCs involved...
We were concerned that the library media portal was across a busy main road but there was a crosswalk there, whether by design or by luck. I didn't visit any of the media portals in the outlying neighborhood to see how suitable the locations were for bunches of people standing around.
I only made it to 4 media portals, collecting the maximum 5 media from each, before settling down in a few 3-portal clumps to deploy all my resonators, but my 20 media were only 1 short of Elite level; apparently not many people wanted to do much of the full circuit around the perimeter. (A few of us walked directly from the unofficial group photo to our first media portal, to wait on the restaurant patio until the event went live.)
The park was full of Pokemon players doing their special raid day, so 80 extra people staring at their phones didn't get much attention from the locals.
IIRC Santa Clara had a few close to the center that the thundering herd visited before dispersing; a lot of people stopped after getting 6. SLC didn't have that.
Map key: orange, registration portal; blue, media; beige, commercial buildings. (Park and medical center not shown on this map but look at https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Desert+Star+Playhouse/Murray+Library,+166+E+5300+S,+Murray,+UT+84107/@40.6607898,-111.8913887,16z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x87528a24b8c0edaf:0x9dd0200c924bed34!2m2!1d-111.888046!2d40.665788!1m5!1m1!1s0x8752898a2212ab97:0x11ea7dbd112cf628!2m2!1d-111.8863142!2d40.6557722!3e2 for context.) There was no scale on the map but Google Maps says it's about 1.3 km direct walk from the library on the south edge to the playhouse on the north edge.
Other than "Rubio's Waterfall" they all seemed to be reasonable cultural content, though I only did 4 myself, restaurant patio, two parking lots, and a sidewalk; can't speak to the safety of the others as places for groups of people to clump up.
IIRC Santa Clara had a few close to the center that the thundering herd visited before dispersing; a lot of people stopped after getting 6. SLC didn't have that.
Not really, no. Everyone I saw walked in a circle.
https://storage.googleapis.com/ingress-internal-event-data/field-test/hexathlon/SantaClaraCAUSA_instructions_17c27133-3d91-5ccc-9b3b-b03a9fed18a4.html