Machina spread is too slow for active areas
I live in an a city with 3 thousand portals, most of which are captured and contested, especially in the city center.
There are 3 clusters of machina portals close to the city center: one of which steadily (but slowly) grows, and two others which consist of 4 portals each and have made one link per whole cluster during the entire last week, two links in total, even though they have grey portals nearby.
This has formed a weird stance towards machina in the city. People cherish the machina portals, hoping they would grow. Whoever goes to touch them, gets contacted immediately to at least not neutralize high-level and spawn machina portals. Machina is always monitored in hopes it creates new links.
This is sad. Almost nobody has even bronze Reclaimer, let alone higher tiers. I think machina should spread more aggressively in areas of active play.
Comments
I agree, i still wish machina would infect blue and green portals if no human player has done anything in x hours. That way it would make even dead areas without opponents having something to do. Frustrating when there is a badge for it and machina in my hoods will probably never spawn unless i stop playing completely...Not sure why niantic holds back they are afraid agents will get angry their portals gets infected by an AI faction ?
I noticed the same behaviour when I was in Adelaide for the Anomaly.
Not much Machina for the city
Maybe it's a way to encourage us to leave our stomping grounds and explore.
Sometimes I travel an hour or so to where Machina is, for Second Sundays. New missions get approved pretty quickly in the 2 weeks before 2S.
I know that's not practical for everyone. And doesn't help with everyday play. Just an idea.
I prefer the suburbs over the city centre
Cauz city centres tends to ha e awkward moments when biking etc crowds, narrow sections and so on.
last summer I took some snap shot data of Machina portal and link stats for future reference.
There are 5.5 million Machina portals globally right now, about the same as there were in July last year. 1.1 million Machina links have been made in the last week, somewhat lower than the 200k/day in July.
Generally, local Machina here look similar to last summer. In our central areas where less people actually play about 1/3 to 1/2 the portals are red. I find they recover quite quickly to large attacks as there are so many perimeter red portals.
Machina does grow exponentially if it has enough seeds (red portals), targets (neutrals) and room (low numbers of blocking links).
Away from the peak areas, for example where I play most regularly, Machina are rare and barely grow. It really seems to settle into a binary pattern. Machina are either fairly dominant in an area or almost irrelevant.
“There are 3 clusters of machina portals close to the city center: one of which steadily (but slowly) grows, and two others which consist of 4 portals each and have made one link per whole cluster during the entire last week, two links in total, even though they have grey portals nearby.“
1 link in a week from a cluster of 4 is actually a pretty typical growth rate, on average. that’s easily enough to cover your whole city in 6 months if left alone.
You need the Machina to reach dozens , arguably hundreds, for them to be remotely large enough to “harvest” sustainably.
And to finish my triple post, that all means that if Machina is aggressive enough to reach that level in your, apparently very active by 2024 standards, area it would likely end human play in more typical areas.
A tweak to allow significantly more aggressive Machina growth in active human agent areas needs to be done extremely carefully
but u shouldnt have to travel 1 hour outside from where u live, thats a little counter productive i think. active area if nobody takes it down machina will never infect sadly... unless niantic changes the formula which they should if u ask me.
If your area is "active", you don't need an AI Player replacement.
Except when you have a badge for clearing the AI Player portals.
make it 5km and crosslink again !
Machina is way too aggressive. It has taken almost every neutral portal in my area like last year. Machina has totally ruined the joy of playing the game. Looking at how player-activity has rapidly declined in my area as soon as Machina started to (over)grow again, I am not the only one experiencing this.
Disagree on crosslink.
Have you tried to fence it off with links?
If no one does anything then the portals will decay to grey and then Machina can infect them. If they're not grey then that means the area is active in some way.
Fencing off with links works but you have to remember the scale of Machina in a large city with few active players. It takes a lot of effort to cut through the mess of random links to place just one significant blocker. That adds up to several weeks to make significant dents over a broader area.
If your preference is to play Ingress without a car, that’s a lot of work that can unfortunately be quickly undone by a single opposing agent who suddenly decides while they don’t like playing vs Machina , they have a deep ingrained habit of attacking anything of the opposing faction.
no problem is my agents charge most so nothing decays almost lol.
and also an area must be almost abandoned for machina to grow anything
And this is why "I refuse to engage unless there's a badge" is a problem.
it gives a motivation if there is something to be earned
You said "if no human player has done anything". But recharging is doing something. I wouldn't be a fan of Machina instantly taking over portals that I'd been recharging.
(Fun fact: that actually happened this week. There were some portals with 6 days' decay that should have been green but I think they must have double-decayed. As soon as they were grey, Machina linked to them.)
Machina is pretty aggressive in Las Vegas. One park is normally fully taken over by machina within a week of the portals going neutral after res or enl capture.
I think machina should have the ability to field, think red fields would look crazy on the scanner and make agents want to destroy it even more.
Time to travel some. I did that over the weekend and picked up my Gold Reclaimer badger. Go to towns where only pogo folks play. They are full of red til you show up. Wait about two weeks and repeat. In that two weeks, travel to other such towns. they are all over the map. Yeah, they do require you to travel some, but either travel and enjoy the easy red destruction or keep on crying about how you can't find any red stuff.
Global warming is your best friend :-D
However good job for getting gold.
Some travel is more than just Ingress travel. Though some travel is only Ingress travel. Too bad the local area doesn't grow faster. But the pogo towns...they are redder than red. I need to find some place to get rid of some mods too. 😎