LA Anomaly Feedback
Hi Everyone,
I (and much of the Ingress Team) was at the LA anomaly. We have been to a few anomalies before, but I wanted to take some time to talk about this one. I was playing as a player (i.e. I didnt not tell my team that I am a Niantic and used nothing that a player wouldnt have access to in order to participate). Similarly, I am making this post as a player (meaning that I simply want to learn what the community thinks and any ideas / changes / comments will be read by me, but I can make no guarantee of any changes) With that being said, some of the things that I experienced include:
- Scanner freezing + crashes.
- Server lag
- The massive amount of non-niantic tools needed to participate including everything from verifying player team, to private communication, to watching whats happening.
- Not being able to know what the score at any point was
- Having there be a massive player imbalance between the teams.
- Being "stuck" at a specific place for a while fighting over a beacon instead of being able to go see the whole play box
The crashed I noticed during the anomaly sucked and I got some information about whats causing them (with some help from others as well) so I'll make tasks to improve that.
Server lag is something we're already working on, but what I saw was generally in line with what I saw in redacted lag.
As far as players pretending to be part of the other team: I wonder if there should be some larger punishment for being caught doing this.
As for the player imbalance: battle beacons hit that point really hard. The larger team will win. I wonder if the format should include things which are based off of percentage (e.g. what % of players visited every portal in the playbox) so that the number of people is irrelevant. What do you think?
Overall, I am curious about the format of the event. Battle beacons hit the inventory pretty hard which makes extended play harder. When we were originally designing battle beacons we wanted the reward for participating to be large, so we created the category system which would yield large hack outputs. I think that waiting for a player to hack is what makes using battle beacons in situations like anomalies feel bad. I wonder if, instead, we gave you just one huge pile of rewards when the beacon finished automatically if that would feel better and would let you keep going much better.
We've done a lot of very similar style events before, but I was wondering about what new formats you think may work better? I was curious: what if there were "phases" where there was high intensity (e.g. battle beacon or shard play) followed by a "recovery" phase where players were able to a. go to the bathroom b. farm gear back c. eat something d. have a "portals visited" challenge in that phase so you can go see other places in the play box might be better. I was also curious if we structured the reward for victory in an earlier phase by giving one team extra information for a later phase if that might be more fun (and allow comeback mechanics even if one team was thoroughly trounced in an earlier phase). An example there might be: the winning team would be told which portals shard would start at and what the targets were during the rest phase before or told which portals would have the battle beacons / volatile battle beacons. That information is certainly a large advantage, but its not impossible to overcome which may make it a good reward for winning an earlier phase.
Is there anything simple that I've missed that we could do?
Just to reiterate: this is just me asking questions trying to gather some feedback and information, not the team. I cannot promise any specific changes from this, but I will read every comment and I will use that information to see what I can do. Also, I am not involved in the planning of anomalies and I know that there is improvement there, but for this thread I would ask to focus on the content of the anomaly over the planning (I have read through the other thread about the planning already)
Comments
As a long time player, I disagree that the current lag is still something on par with redacted. I don't recall redacted hanging for minutes and/or requiring restarts anywhere near as often.
@ofer2 I hope you know how much this means to the community. You going out and experiencing what us as agents experience on this level is beyond words amazing to see. It shows us the care you give to this community and it's something I think many of us have wanted to see happen. Thank you for taking the time to participate on an Agent level, in one of our most intense interactions to see the difficulties faced. I wasn't present on scene so I feel that I should leave room for those that attended to speak, but I can say I could practically 💋 you right now for doing this. Thank you
I remember back during older anomalies (I think Helios and Interitus) there were recovery periods. Having one or two wouldn't be the worst ideas. Especially in the hotter areas during the summers, foot and bike teams run low on water very often, so getting water to them becomes worked into the car team's actual strategy to make sure people stay hydrated.
Adding a turnout balance to things like battle beacons would certainly be great. Shards feel much less determined by turnout and more of reaction time and strategy - although the imbalance can still be present there.
Punishing players for impersonating the other team - I don't see how this could be done, nor do I know what a fitting punishment would be. Proving an agent has stalked or trespassed is already a difficult enough task - proving they pretended to be the other faction during an anomaly would be much more difficult for players to prove to Niantic.
Thank you for making this post! This attention to detail and actual firsthand experience won't go unnoticed, and all your points are absolutely worth having a wider discussion on.
Are you talking anomalies or general gameplay? I had some terrible lag at some of the anomalies close to the end of redacted. My last two anomalies were prime only and actually worked well, although I'm not sure about epiphany dawn as I did not attend. Abaddon Prime was just a nightmare on both scanners, unfortunately.
I think you hit most of points on the head. Also thankyou, this post is incredible and something we have wanted for years.
Live scores = yes
Better balancing = yes
Being stuck at portals fighting, honestly, this is just always part of the game, but part of overall strategy, learning when to leave and move to another target, the only way to change it would be making offense way more powerful which is probably a bad idea. (or having the PVE element interact somehow).
Regarding player tools, verification and comms, this is always going to be a thing. Depending on Niantic to offer the requirements we the players decide we need will never happen. You'll never give us everything we want (for whatever reasons you decide, good or bad). I think maybe Niantic providing some sort of onboarding flow for basic level of comms for new agents that faction leads can view might be of help. Campfire could help here.
Yeah, I participated in the last Redacted anomaly and it was at times unplayable because it froze and we would try and restart to no avail.
Yeah, recovery periods are needed for sure. 2 30 minute breaks to split up the anomaly.
OMG Ofer2 this is just a GOLD STAR post.
Some notes: Players posing as opposing team is expected - we're agents and I don't think we should make a penalty for this. Often this is circumvented with official ID tags, (like those paper one-use bracelets you get at a bar to go on the tab etc). Watching out for imposters is a fun part of the game IMHO.
Player imbalance has always been a major factor. I fully expected LA to go to the Enl. Historically Enl have more boots here. I expect the same for Yokohama.
Beacon rewards - yes - a lot of the time at an event, you do not have time to stand around hacking rewards. Solo deploys, yes. But even then, it's tedious. A bulk reward would be easier at battle completion. (Must have interacted).
Seeing the status of the play field - this is a mixed blessing. Initiative by players can be good, it can also be bad. We have Intel operators for a reason, they are supposed to have an overview and direct players as required. That said, Intel often miss stuff. A few anomalies I have been at we have been "Uh, there is a volatile just over there, nobodies there, lets go get it" and won points. That said, you don't want half the team running off to something neglecting the big picture.
And yes, there are a ton of tools in use. (Usually all within ToS). I've seen teams refuse to use recommended tools as they may be considered scrapey etc. But things like Zello etc are usually require by Team Leads etc.
Ideally you have enough players for "Emergency response teams". Bike teams etc.
Contesting portals can be VERY gear intensive. I remember blowing around 300 U8's on one portal at Obsidian Hong Kong as fast as I could fire them.
Also - Each faction has to do a LOT of organising. Validating players, forming teams, making maps, setting up Intel, comms checks, food, water - all sorts of organise stuffs.
I'm really happy you decided to take part and post this, it's really refreshing and validates us as players. Awesome! Brian at the post-anomaly speech said the game was all about the community - it's fantastic to see you contributing to it!
Such an interesting thread to see pop up, kudos to doing this. I'll just add some honest 2c to your points.
As for impersonation - as helping for near every role in an anomaly. I do wish I could just API to Niantic and validate profiles or have some shared OAuth sign in. Since yeah, finding out you have someone intentionally sitting in to extract secrets isn't fun. However, at what point is that part of the strategy of an event? I think once you have an account on the other side - you've crossed a line. Everything else sounds like fair game.
Regarding lag - Redacted, you could issue the command usually. (Fire - deploy- whatever) and the action would be delayed, but the scanner was usually not lagged.
(So you could keep hammering fire, and not know if it was doing anything).
With Prime, the actual command is hung, you go to do action, and cannot.
I have been a player since July of 2013. My first anomaly was Cassandra Chicago. I was not a part of any community or group at that point. I was just your typical "walk up the day of" type player. Since then, I have participated in some capacity in every series (until this recent cycle) from player all the way to primary organizer. I say this not at you, as I get you're newer to the game and to the team working on the game. I get it. You don't have the history a lot of us do, and I'm not about to direct this comment at you. EVERYTHING YOU HAVE SUGGESTED HAS BEEN COMMUNICATED TO NIANTIC SO MANY TIMES SINCE 2013 WHEN ANOMALIES STARTED. All of these suggestions we have been begging to implement, ALL OF THEM. (OK maybe not battle beacons since they didn't exist, though your point about explorations still remains regardless). The Ingress player base has gone through iteration after iteration of rules. People on both factions have been saying all of this stuff since literally forever. I'm glad finally someone who works for Niantic is listening, I'm sorry this is the first time you've experienced any of these issues, I understand you're new to all of this, but it's EXTREMLEY frustrating that none of these things have gotten through to the people who can implement.
So, this is the first time someone from Niantic actually played the game.
@ofer2 Did you have fun though?
To clarify a bit: one of the things that irks me about the extra tools + impersonation is the process of "having to verify." I had a well known player to verify me, but I dont imagine that to be the case for everyone. I would like someone to be able to just sign up and come and have that be good.
Separately, there was a player who bragged about wearing the other teams logo and using a screenshot of their account (because the player they were talking to didnt verify that it was intractable) and the other player got "scammed" basically. I think for me, listening in because the enemy is talking loudly is alright, but actively tricking someone and taking advantage of their compassion feels too far. Even though we are playing a competitive game, we are a community: all of us. I feel like things which tear the community apart (like making people feel bad for being compassionate) shouldnt be allowed. It may be true that enforcing that sort of thing can be difficult, but maybe even just saying what the line is / should be can be an important way of guiding the community.
I did :) I was on a team of 4 and managed to fight off a team of 12! I was super upset that I blew 300 X8 + 100 U8 on 1 shard target and was pretty much out of the game after that though....I did manage to find a few battle beacons which literally had noone there....I deployed + hacked and then walked away to not draw attention and just remote recharged it....noone noticed hahaha EZ points!
As for the player imbalance: battle beacons hit that point really hard. The larger team will win.
Welcome to Ingress! You'll find that all other things being equal, brute force wins portals, links, and fields.
I wonder if the format should include things which are based off of percentage (e.g. what % of players visited every portal in the playbox) so that the number of people is irrelevant.
The more recent of the pre-COVID anomalies did have a scoring component based on unique anomaly portals visited. I thought it worked rather well. It encouraged teams to move about.
I was curious: what if there were "phases" where there was high intensity (e.g. battle beacon or shard play) followed by a "recovery" phase where players were able to a. go to the bathroom b. farm gear back c. eat something d. have a "portals visited" challenge in that phase so you can go see other places in the play box might be better.
Sans the portals visited challenge, welcome to anomalies from 7-ish years ago: 10-15min of intense activity at the top of the hour followed by 45-50min of mostly nothing. I don't know how we arrived at the more recent non-stop formats, but yeah, they can be quite draining on energy levels, etc. etc.
I was also curious if we structured the reward for victory in an earlier phase by giving one team extra information for a later phase if that might be more fun (and allow comeback mechanics even if one team was thoroughly trounced in an earlier phase). An example there might be: the winning team would be told which portals shard would start at and what the targets were during the rest phase before or told which portals would have the battle beacons / volatile battle beacons.
There used to be a whole intel-decoding aspect to anomalies that provided exactly that sort of information.
A lot of good thoughts, @ofer2, but I might say that at some level, Ingress has already been there, done that, and now tossed all those lessons aside for the current "battle beacon anomalies."
>To clarify a bit: one of the things that irks me about the extra tools + impersonation is the process of "having to verify." I had a well known player to verify me, but I dont imagine that to be the case for everyone. I would like someone to be able to just sign up and come and have that be good.
The problem is, team work is required. Connecting new agents with faction leads on the ground is basically required. Lone wolves won't achieve anything. I think Niantic needs to push that a lot more and give us the chance to help them out.
Thanks for posting this, @ofer2! I was unable to be in LA for this specific anomaly for work reasons, but I think you echoed a number of my thoughts on the general user experience.
The massive amount of non-niantic tools needed to participate including everything from verifying player team, to private communication about portals, to watching whats happening.
I'm sure Campfire was intended to help alleviate this, but it does still have a way to go. Way back during the beta, I suggested integrating Campfire's API into the COMM UI to create custom faction-specific COMM channels that require passcodes and verification to join and don't rely on a tacked-on external app to use.
Not being able to know what the score at any point was
This should have been something for a while now: a widget in the menu that shows relevant ongoing event metrics. For example, right now we have an anniversary event with a bunch of temporary gameplay changes. There should be an in-app way of seeing what gameplay has changed, and for how long. Along with that, there should be a scoreboard for the current Anomaly with relevant scoring and point allocations.
As for the player imbalance: battle beacons hit that point really hard. The larger team will win. I wonder if the format should include things which are based off of percentage (e.g. what % of players visited every portal in the playbox) so that the number of people is irrelevant. What do you think?
I think this is something that has really kept BBs from being what I always hoped they'd be: a platform for players to design and build customized xfac competitions. There really should be a set of different metrics to choose from at the start, rather than just a brute force exercise. Off the top of my head, one option could be game modes that locks the Portal to one faction for each round and rotates each faction between an attacker or defender role. maybe the BB is counting the number of links off the Portal during that round, so the assigned attacking faction needs to throw up blockers while the assigned defending faction needs to build connecting links. That also brings the Portals in the immediate area into the fray, rather than each user focusing on a single high-value Portal. You can then counteract gear use by doubling output of attacking items for the attacking team and building items for the defending team.
Thanks again for reaching out with your thoughts. It serves as a great springboard for discussion.
Gotta make sure you come stocked with gear and the right kind of gear! I'm sure your team lead gave you the desired amount / type of gear. But did you arrive with it? That can really make or break your anomaly fun. They aren't too fun when you can't do much.
I've been a team lead that's had last minute agents added to my team who showed up with all L6 gear or even some who knew they were coming but didn't bother to farm gear or even ask for it.
John Hanke participated in the shard battle at XM Festival Fukuoka in April 2018.
Regarding verifying agents for the 3rd party tools, you could provide some api or place where 3rd party tools can query that.
Anomaly scores could and should display in game. Have a setting to enable it during anomalies or automatically pop it up with "you're in the playbox, are you doing the anomaly?"
Hi Ofer,
Thank you for sharing your experience in the anomaly as a player. It's good that we are seeing this kind of feedback from Niantic staff.
Based on past anomaly experiences, it's always a numbers game in anomaly. However, there were rare occasions where the underdog team manage to win the anomaly sites with the given right conditions and scoring elements.
Team impersonation is rather common on both sides with agents wearing shirt of the opposite faction color to troll and confuse agents. IMO it's will be a challenge for Niantic to regulate this kind of behavior in the gameplay basis. If the punishment is implement wrongly, it might be used to weaponize against opposing faction as well. Basically, It's really up to their faction to handle this verifications and checks. However, what niantic could do is to make it harder for team impersonation to occur on a scanner level (I'm not sure how but I'm just suggesting it at the back of my head)
I wonder if, instead, we gave you just one huge pile of rewards when the beacon finished automatically if that would feel better and would let you keep going much better.
Rather than a huge pile of rewards, maybe tiered restock boxes which allow agents to use when required (with an expiry date for use) . In an anomaly situation, I don't think we want to be spending our time recycling items after receiving huge pile of rewards from the battle beacon. Movement across sites is key as agents do not have time to really farm on the spot (unless getting portal keys for objective purposes)
I came here to say this. If agents want to get involved, there is usually someone around to help. If they live in the middle of nowhere with no other players around, the chances of them buying an airplane ticket and traveling to an anomaly are probably low.
There will always be people who try to infiltrate the other side. As long as everyone knows that, we know to watch out for it.
I heard of one agent joining a team in LA as a "walk on" and then they mentioned they had accounts with both factions. They were *walked off" as fast as they walked on. I don't think Nia can punish them any more than they can punish that one guy ™ with 5 backpack accounts.
Oh I'm sorry, " family accounts" 😒
Awesome :) I've never had a bad time, even when soundly trounced.
Player verification -
Yes a bit of a pain, but most people accept it and are happy, watching for tricks is part of it.
What is worst - disgruntled own faction members going rogue. Blocking Shards with x-links, flipping own portals etc.
This is my opinions based on 10 years of gameplay and participating in every but 2 anomalies series on intel/dispatch side.
Scanner freezing + crashes.
Huge problem with Prime is not just crashes/lockups/lag, but often EXTREMELY slow loading times to get back into the fight. So punishment for those crashes is a lot more painful. And the older the phone, the more painful it is.
The massive amount of non-niantic tools needed to participate including everything from verifying player team, to private communication about portals, to watching whats happening.
For many years the community have been asking for API access to player authentication..
We use many different tools because those tools do what they do best. It's not necessarily bad that they are not Niantic tools. Allows communities to decide what they use rather than being forced to use officially provided but inferior tools.
Not being able to know what the score at any point was
Yes, Ingress Year 10 and we still don't have player-accessible real-time scoreboard.😕
As far as players pretending to be part of the other team: I wonder if there should be some larger punishment for being caught doing this.
How would people prove that this kind of behavior took place? Take the opposing faction's word that it happened? This is just asking to be abused. What a better way for one faction to eliminate their competition is by lying to Niantic that somebody pretended to be from the other faction?🙄
what if there were "phases" where there was high intensity (e.g. battle beacon or shard play) followed by a "recovery" phase where players were able to a. go to the bathroom b. farm gear back c. eat something d. have a "portals visited" challenge in that phase so you can go see other places in the play box might be better.
I don't see breaks happening during that time. It'll just be the time for factions to continue executing their predetermined strategies, which most likely would be either flipping the whole playbox or building linkstars.
I was also curious if we structured the reward for victory in an earlier phase by giving one team extra information for a later phase if that might be more fun (and allow comeback mechanics even if one team was thoroughly trounced in an earlier phase). An example there might be: the winning team would be told which portals shard would start at and what the targets were during the rest phase before or told which portals would have the battle beacons / volatile battle beacons. That information is certainly a large advantage, but its not impossible to overcome which may make it a good reward for winning an earlier phase.
So you'll give the winning team even more advantage to win further?🤔 Maybe turn it around and give the LOSING team advantage to catch up?
Is there anything simple that I've missed that we could do?
We need faster Intel map. It refreshes just too slow for efficient real-time team management during anomalies. Publicly adopt and support IITC since the stock intel map is useless beyond beginner level fielding around home neighborhood.
We need API access to improve agent verification process, to get legal access to other Ingress features. Let the community build better tools and ecosystems around Ingress...since Niantic doesn't provide any.
Overall it's awesome that you are asking these questions after experiencing this anomaly in person👍....
But...it's surprising to me that you experienced it only just now?🤨 Were all these problems not known to you/experienced by you before? I would've expected that Niantic (highly) encourages for all employees to experience all aspects of their games, including anomalies.
BAF cover control can help even things out, OR, make it even worse.
Short break periods are nice for sure, especially in harsher climates. Possibly consider climate at the location when scheduling anomalies. (For instance not Jan-Mar in Perth Australia when it can get to 43 deg Cish).
Also - concur with others that it's surprising to many of us Niantic aren't aware of all these issues already.
It's great to see you taking part on the ground though!
First of all, I think its absolutely awesome that you got to participate from the perspective of a player on the ground and the feedback you have seemed to gather by doing so is really quality. Its really awesome for you to put yourself in a different pair of shoes. That aside its sort of crazy to me that this sort of testing and feedback wasn't already something that was being gathered outside of having you decide to just do it on a whim!
I mainly want to address the player number point you made. It has shown at sites in the past that primarily depend on portal control such as Battle Beacons (shards play into this as well due to playbox control being a large part of it) are usually very reliant on number of boots at a site. This makes a lot of sense due to that the team that got more people to show up should naturally have an advantage and thus win, but it leads to a sort of effect where many agents judge a site based on location and know way ahead of time what team it might favor and thus makes this imbalance even more. When stuff is imbalanced like this its really terrible for the down numbers faction that does decide to attend and is fighting a very uphill battle and its just boring for the dominate faction (depending on the site of course). Battle Beacons directly feed into this. Connected Cells can help with this as they add more of a variety of points to the pool and thus give the down faction a change to have a win, but those are also extremely dependent on what cells are randomly picked and many can predict what cell will do what before anything even happens.
In contrast to this around when I started getting really into anomalies was the Osiris Series and the Nemesis series. Many of these anomalies had lots of other challenges along with just portal control, and some of which didn't even have portal control in the scoring (Myriad - https://storage.googleapis.com/ingress-events/nemesis/ING_Myriad-Rules.pdf)! if you look at some of the scoreboards for some of these anomalies you might see a wider variety of scores and strategies that were done which lead to more diverse gameplay and less overall dependency of just getting massive amounts of player numbers. In my opinion it also lead to much better player experience and a lot more fun. Here is the myriad scoreboard with the different sites on it and their breakdown by scores - https://storage.googleapis.com/ingress-internal-event-data/nemesis-myriad/score.html along with a leaderboard for unique hacks for the different sites(defaulted here to madison) - https://storage.googleapis.com/ingress-internal-event-data/nemesis-myriad/portal-hack-leaderboards/madisonwiusa.html
Another big takeaway of a difference between the current battle beacon anomalies vs some of these older anomalies are less structure and rules. BBs are much simpler and thus the experience is much different then some of these ones in the past. After going over some of the rulesets (located here - https://ingress.com/events/anomaly-rules) you can tell some of the creativity that could come with some of these events as if you are down players you could adjust your gameplay to target other types of scoring based on the score breakdown. Granted this seems like it was back when they actually released rules way before the event was set to happen, and it seems like more thought was put into it, when now the rulesets don't really matter at all as its the same thing different place every single time.
Creative rulesets give a lot of variety to these events and makes them play very differently from an anomaly to anomaly basis and a site to site basis. The most obvious example of this was Abaddon Prime which might be considered a bit of a soft spot for some people as it was mainly won through unique hacks (which during this event were weighted much higher and media which was highly influenced by certain very creative factors). Stuff like the Longest Link Snake, Unique portal hacks, and artifacts while more complicated really are cool mechanics that really only lived inside anomalies and lots of the time encouraged exploring the paybox or utilizing portals different ways. Just look how crazy Recursion Primes anomaly rules were, this **** was 10 pages -https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ayjryaurVvA6JOgKp_glhf9ahn6OJZVDrZJIzrbGhyg/preview!
I do think that if we are going to continue with these very boiler plate BB/Shard Anomalies going forward that people are just going to look at the site and judge it based on the potential draw for each faction (with exceptions of course for sites that have tourism draw, or badge tick goruck events) and frankly that just leads to less creativity/strategy and more bigger number win.
Hi ofer2.
It's quite nice of you to reach out even if you have no control over the outcome.
This really does make large events incredibly difficult. I'm guessing most agents hope this issue resolves inside 60 seconds and when it doesn't, it's force close app or reset phone, restart and pray. Takes players off the field for 2-3 minutes or longer.
Compounds the freeze/crash above. Also makes it nearly impossible to mount an offensive against a hard target. If one team had a dollar for every "too many attacks pending", that team could buy Niantic.
I think this is an issue easily solved by fixing server lag and scanner freeze.
Honestly a non-issue. Most the players have already committed to playing. We're not bouncing after the first checkpoint because we're loosing.
This is always a thing and will continue. Weighted scoring maybe, but honestly it's part of why people turn out certain placed. There's no fix for this.
Easy solution is cool off periods. It's nice to get your unique in without hoofing it to another side of the playbox. Let people enjoy the exploration part.
1) Shorter windows between movements of shards. It takes a lot to defend / attack a portal for 10 minutes.
2) shorter overall time of play maybe 4 quarters of 20 minutes of play with a 10 minute break between each quarter. (20 minutes at half time) we could be done in 2 hours.
3) wipe the playbox and reset inoculations frequently. Maybe a prize for winning Stelth Opps is the ability to choose a time to do this.
4) only registered agents can participate. (could have mechanisms in place to negate numbers advantages by seeing all who participated)
5) exploration hacks was a great thing in Chicago.
6) more events like the hextathalons we were starting to do before the C 19 hit.
7) during breaks restock portals could appear (immune to weapons, can only be hacked, permanently fracked)
I'm sure there is more.
[redacted]