[Feature Request] Make recharge actions visible in Activities
FireFight001
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There are plenty of accusations of people from both teams about so-called recharge bots that make capturing a portal or whole areas nearly impossible to capture, even when spam-attacking using Level 8 bursters.
This is a topic which is common to see brought up in some of the largest cross faction chat groups, such as 'IUENG Discussions' with people from both factions accusing the opposite faction of using recharge bots.
There's an easy way of stopping all these rumors, or prove that it is a problem - make recharge actions visible.
The recharge action should be visible based on the location of the portal, not the playing doing the actual recharge, but should contain timestamp and agentName of the user doing the recharge. It should also be visible only within the set view-distance of the Activities tab.
Comments
They previously removed stuff from comms to clean up comms. Don't add more **** back to the comms. Recharge has always been a silent activity. We don't need it in the comms.
You are not the #IngressPolice. This is yet another "I'm going to brigade people who don't want to be harassed, by adding things to COMM" attempt, same as "Announce dropped capsules" etc.
Niantic has all this information. If they're not doing anything about it now, they're not going to do anything about it when you can see it.
Why do we need more information on the COMMS? Broadcasting too much COMMS activity may worsen the game's lag. Besides, do we have to know in the COMMS if one needs to go to the loo to recharge? :)
Recharging is such a low cost activity, one could make the same argument for portal Hacking.
Still we have to realize that Ingress at it's core is a strategy game, if every action was displayed publicly, it would not help the game, where secrecy is paramount
Only in Intel and diffirent tab. Or comm will be spammed enough to become useless.
I am sure Nia has access to all data and to "who recharged Portal".
upd: both capsule drop/pick and recharge messages can and possibly will be abused as spam/ddos tool,this may lead to problems with latency. And comm scraping too.
In REDACTED we could see all actions that gained AP in comms, even if only on the client (silent). I wish they would revert back to that; get rid of the silly cropped images and make it show all own actions again.
There were also nice mockups of 'journal' like logging, as we have in 'that other game', but I guess it's too hard for Niantic to keep the game running as is...
In Redacted it did not report in comms recharge and Hacks publicly.
What you may be remembering is all those people who scraped intel (some still do)
Even scraping wouldn't be able to reveal hacks and recharges.
If recharge was in comms, you would not see any other normal activity ever. Especially in big cities where there's over 100 agents. Trolls would only do normal recharge just to clog up comms.
That’s what I said.
Hate to break it to you. It was extensive, and prolific.
And yet still limited to what is available on comms. And hacking/recharging doesn't generate comm entries.
People have made that actual request before.
I would love a separate "Actions" log that told me what I'd done and only me, on my client. But that's a long way from "I want to prove you're spoofing or a bot".
Of the extensive client that I was aware of, it was more that it tracked when a portal's health went up, rather than who did it. Because the information doesn't exist in any datastream unless you're MitM'ing the person doing the recharge (in which case you don't need to be told).
Yeah I wouldn’t export it to prove anything, but was just pointing out that it was information that was provided before; and was raised multiple times during transition from redacted to prime as one of the things keeping us from reaching feature parity.
Comms has always felt bloated and silly on prime. Add to that the many issues we had with it, it makes the choice to not simplify it just weird.
It doesn't need to be in comms. But having agents be visible in some manner when recharging, would massively help cross faction relations by creating transperency.
It would also help agents trying to track down keys for allied portals, if that information was visible, as you would know who was maintaining a remote field anchor.
That level of transparency is really not needed.
Do you want the opposing faction to know exactly what keys you have?
No to recharge notification, however, I think Niantic should cripple accounts that make no COMM visible actions for say, 30 days.
The arguement that Niantic know more than we do about accounts is true. It does not mean that Niantic do anything about such accounts unless a complaints made, and for that, you need an IGN.
I can easily go 30 days without making a comm-visible action, and I'm certainly not the only one. Punishing players for not showing up in comm while still taking legal actions is not the way to go.
You could probably do one if you wished to though?
Not always, no. If I'm in Namibia I'm out in the sticks with no portals nearby.
But even if I had the means, I should not be punished if I choose to just drone hack and recharge portals. They're perfectly legitimate actions and I do not need to validate my actions to other players.
Being COMM silent has always been a strategy. Punishing players in this manner is horrible logic. Niantic has the logs regardless of visibility.
Reactivation needn't be difficult, for what it's worth. as simple as scanning a portal, in an area with signal.
Drone hacking and recharging could continue, but deploying mods, resonators, dropping capsules should be locked.
As for OP, @Azhreia Do you have any suggestions on what could make the experience of attacking a built up farm, alone, against multiple rechargers who you have no idea who they are, a less frustrating experience?
That's what is at the core of all the allegations of recharge bots, when you specifically change up your schedule, to attack at obscure times of day, when your opponents are presumably sleeping or working, and having no idea how they continue to defend so well, with multiple agents, in relatively quiet cities with < 40 opponents.
I've experienced this firsthand, and had accounts level up and upgrade the farm again, named after my agent name. Niantic support doesn't do much, which isn't a surprise, but it'd at least be less frustrating if I knew whose main account was recharging along with the multiple accounts, or maybe they would opt to have 1 less recharger.
In addition, farms with seemingly no owners, in cities long abandoned (from the game pov), would be broadcasting the names of the hack-bots recharging and supplying 3rd party stores.
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There are ways of creating alerts, that can be shared with your team, seemingly without violating the Terms of Service, and alerting anyone with keys, without having to have alerts turned on for all portals.
However, this behavior causes farms that during the day, can't be readily attacked, at least not without 1k bursters or 50 ultrastrikes for a relatively small area.
Props to the opponents, if that's what they are doing. But without that visibility, most people start assuming foul play, as the game doesn't provide that functionality out-of-the-box.
But what I believe is actually happening, is that the resonators of these multi-accounts is driving the alerting system they have set up, so only the portals they care about in the farm alert the multi-account, which alerts the rest of the team to recharge.
I don't scan. And scanning is not available on all devices that can support Ingress.
No, there is no legitimate reason to cripple players for not making a visible action. Nobody needs to validate themselves to other players.
Just imagine how spammy will be comm especially by pressing left button to make even more spam by legit action.
So NO to visible recharge. Niantic has all logs,ask them to judge in specific case (i expect ada-d/jarvis-d portal at l8 is the case). Even more if that is done by a multiaccount,should you monitor "whole world comm/recharge" 24/7 or simply use parser which is against ToS too.
Leave recharge off comm. Way too much spam otherwise. I spend at least an hour most days recycling and charging portals. You really don't want an hour or more of my charging clogging your scanner.
"Back in the good ol' days"
I was made aware of a few players (both factions) that tracked/scraped more info than just basic scraping that was prolific at the time.
These people have since moved on. We do need these types of people in our game
Scanning on all devices is eventually coming with Lightship V3, whenever the Ingress team update their ARDK version.
The Ingress team have all the tools the need, and only need to put measures in place to have questionable activities do either a portal Scan upload or Overclock a portal.
But other than a scan achieving scout controller, the in game comm is better off not having every, single, action, publicly available.
So recharging and Hacking are good to be not in the Comm.
And it keeps things less noisy