Are you really worried that somebody would spend *at least* 6 hours to complete a single mission?🙄How many missions could you realistically complete this way from your couch? If people are that lazy about going outside yet wanting to do missions, I imagine they'd sooner resort to cheating/spoofing than doing 1 mission every 6 hours within their line of sight.
And drones can't interact with waypoints, which many missions use so that would be a nonstarter anyway..
I'm currently at a portal 1.5 km away from origin, and stats still show 1 km. I've plotted the legs on Google Maps and it shows that the traveled distance is 2.5 km.
I'd rather not backtrack right now, as it took me a while to get to this point, and I'd rather not have to repeat it again twice. But I will continue collecting data.
I hope we can get new design of dronnet and controller and steer drone to portals with mobile. Same we do with real drone. Please relese it soon @NianticBrian
Its weird it will not work with missions, sometimes a portal can be very hard to reach due to GPS drifting etc please consider this for next version maybe.
What if we can use the drone to travel by links regardless of the range limit? That might be quite cool cuz a) some shard strategy can be applied if drone's presence is made public and b) people can link big farms into multiple neighborhoods, making the farm be like a central terminal to pickup agents at home and let them fly to farms quicker.
Also, this restriction of mobility brings a whole new perspective for us to examine the portal distributions. And it is extremely like sailing a ship in the Age of Discovery cuz you gotta find nearby islands to dock. And since the drones' max ranges are fixed, we can use simple calculation and draw a world map of accessible lands and its boundary portals. I'm pretty sure there will be more continents than we have geographically. Then we can encourage agents to fill in those gaps between continents and islands, or expand the boundaries.
But what if the max range isn't fixed? What if it depends on the portal level/energy or the recursions the agent has taken? Or what if the range depends on the terrain, like land units in the game Civilization? Some fast moving and/or big range drones can be made as well. Some little flexibility on any aspect will make it a lot more dynamic, especially if the independent variable is a real time one like portal energy.
There can also be a postcard function in which the drones can hack a key from really far away but it takes days to complete the process.
The last thing that should be brought up again is the Unique Cells Visited badge. The inspiration of making this stat a badge was brought up a long time ago and was denied in an AMA because then Andrew thought this badge could be easily abused by spoofers (although I don't see how other badges being not). But since we have this, a drone, can we please have at least a Unique Cells Visited by Drone or sth like that?
I guess all of the above or most of it has already been mentioned in your brainstorm stage. But still maybe other agents are interested in discussing, too. If you have any thought please do reply. Thx!
It would be great if you can Ada or Jarvis that portal that you are visiting by drone. The way the game is going is to use more unreachable portals to the other faction and this would change back that dynamic.
While I consider direct portal interaction like attacks/deploys using a drone would be a game changer (nope, please do NOT add features like that), I would love to see drones getting some more useful features than just hacking, for example:
Give your drones some of your cubes and have them automatically recharge portals for you.
Maybe let your drone cycle along predefined routes in order to do so for several portals in a row?
What about enabling agents to obtain more drones to use (-> drone"NET")
A portal could be immune to flips while it has a drone.
Whatever effect a drone may have in the future: it could be "stackable" when more agents have drones at the same portal.
Again: PLEASE make sure, the use of drones will never affect the game in a way, which voids the actions of players NOT using them. I consider their use to be supporting your own gameplay, not to actively substitute it.
Suggestion of a new medal for Furthest Drone Flight (FDF)
A game to extend FDF record seems interesting. it is strategic because we have to plan a longest path by carefully checking Intel Map to avoid a dead end. It also need a lot of manual work for re-deploying a drone. This effort deserves a medal. I don't think It might go as planned because sometimes it suddenly comes to end if forcefully recalled. It is kind of game of luck to an extent, but it would rather make this game more interesting. How about "Aviator" for the name of this medal ?
@NianticBrian there are things I like about the Drone,
For example, being able to hack a P8 when you are unable to walk down the road to it, for example you are sick with the flu.
What I don't like about it, is that it consumes all Hacks for 5 hours, I'd change that to limiting Hacks to 4, no less than 15 minutes apart, for up to 4 Hacks per hour until the 5 hour cool down occurs.
It is touchy to know if using heatsinks and multi Hacks will improve gameplay, or shift too far and be over powered. I reckon the lattter.
Ingress is about getting out and about.
What I'd change about the drone, is that it should be limited to link lines of whatever faction it started out from, when hopping from one portal to the next, ie if you are Resistance, and want to use it on Enlightened portal links, then YOU travel to an Enlightened portal to put the drone on.
Another suggestion, is that you can possibly one Hack one key only, ie glyphing more keys will not work, thus you would be limited to the one key
Putting that key into a locker would be the only method to be able to hack one more keys, but I'd prefer this not happen, as it will seriously unbalance the game.
If at some point the DroneNet will be upgraded to Level 2, and enable linking with it, ie, one link per 60 minutes might be possible, but then this would be exploited too easily.
Instead, maybe one link only, then the DroneNet 2 would be immediately returned. Still no deploying mods. To maintain balance, as a lot of people go out of their way spending upwards of thousands for big fielding ops, and the DroneNet 2 if it comes with linking, should consider the ramifications of that. I would err on the side of caution, than hastily add something that is detrimental to the game.
I can see that Niantic want to return to Hack Only for Sojourner, and remove the recharge facet, where the drone is useful for that.
The use of Drones for flipping portals should also never happen, again, too easily to be exploited.
It can’t be used to retrieve a Portal Key or take any other action. It does count as a Drone hack towards Sojourner, but it can't be used to complete a mission or as a proxy for event attendance — these will continue to require your physical participation.
I'd only ask that it forever stays like this.
Let's face it, drone is a legitimized spoofing. The less portal interaction it can do, the more valuable agents' real life movement is.
Its hack counted for Sojourner is already not good. An agent of my community once walked kilometers everyday during winter time to achieve it, earning it the hard way. Now you just made Sojourner drastically (I'd say 95%) easier. There's literally no value in this badge anymore. Earlier you had to get away to the street to hack a portal no matter what is happening to you this day; now feeling sick or lazy? Just use a drone. This is gross.
I agree with a person saying that he doesn't understand why this feature even needed after COVID is passed. I see this as making Ingress easier. And not in a good way.
Please develop drones in a way which doesn't change portal network state. I've already saw a multitude of good ideas: "alarm drone" which sends you a notification if a portal in 200m radius is attacked; "recon drone" to see other's drones (and possibly be able to force recall them?) and so on. No portal interaction.
Fantastic! I would love to see multiple drone types, perhaps one can only make links, one that can only get keys(stores them till recall), one to deploy(from a resevoir). Lots of ideas, and plenty of ways to balance them. I want to see as many features as y'all can balance!
Indeed, I would say that anything that alters the portal network (deploys, mods, destroys, links, ...) should only be possible while being physically present.
So that only leaves hacking. And recharging since you can do that remotely aswell.
I wouldn't mind if drones allowed me to recharge the portal it's on as if I was present (so without the reduced effectiveness)
Dronenet seems to be incredible. I take advantage and type about the tessellation event, because sometimes it is necessary to obtain 1 media by doing the hack on the portal.
Release Tesserae in the hack with Dronenet, and other types of media, events also like Hack Start for IFS, IFS restoking portal.
Dronenet can be used in many different ways in the future.
How many media can Dronenet save? With only 2,000 space in the inventory, we were unable to save many media.
* recon drones: able to see if enemy drones are on a portal or in the vicinity. (This might be unfair to casual players and lead to hunting like guardian hunting)
* Mod drones: when on a portal they act like a mod (shield, turret, etc). Although that can be like a remote action on the portal, which I think ingress wants to avoid
@NianticBrian I'd like to propose a few things with drones which are not going to alter portal state (which is fundamental for me) but make drones more interesting still:
Recon drone. Is unable to hack or do anything with portals, but has a radius (say 200-300m), in which it reveals other drones. When drones are revealed, recon drone owner possibly can see owners of revealed drones. This way recon drone owner can neutralize specific portals which have enemy drones, and force recall them. Recon drones can see other recon drones and be force recalled if portal changes color, too.
Alarm drone. Can't hack too. Notifies its owner if owner faction's portal in some (possibly even adjustable) radius, up to 200-300m, is attacked. Can be seen by recon drone and force recalled too.
Current Mark I drones can have some slight buffs to their hack speed (let's say up to a hack every 45 or, debatable, 30 minutes), if they reach certain distance or certain count of hops during a current flight. If their flight is disrupted, this has to be achieved again.
Also, if force recalled, a drone might have some cooldown (let's say 48-72 hours) before being able to be deployed again, to reward drone hunters and make Sojourner value at least somewhat higher.
This way, people would try to hide their drones on rarely touched portals, other people will use recon drones to find them, and drone hunting would become quite interesting.
As long as drones can only perform their functions on portals you can see in the Scanner, like the Mark I does now, I think they’re fine doing all sorts of things.
More complex ones like attack or defense drones should probably be paid upgrades though.
I would very much like the drone to become a faithful companion of the agent during the game. Not once in 1 hour, but on an ongoing basis. Like a chosen pokemon that helps a trainer in pokemon go.
An agent can choose a drone as a companion, for example, an agent goes and hacks a portal, and the drone increases the number of items dropped. Or for example, a drone enhances the power of bombs. There will be a sort of fully customizable, or multi-functional personal ingress assistant!
Also, an agent can send a drone for a specific task, for example, collect a key from a portal, or transfer a capsule to another agent.
Also, drones could be used to protect a specific portal (a sort of additional shield or turret) or to protect even a specific area.
You CAN SELL modules for drones, which will increase the strength of the additional attack by the drone, strengthening the protection of the agent from portal counterattacks, expanding the inventory for drones. And much more. I ALREADY AGREE TO PAY MONEY FOR SUCH IN-GAME COMPANION, WITH THE POSSIBILITY OF CUSTOMIZATION.
Comments
Are you really worried that somebody would spend *at least* 6 hours to complete a single mission?🙄How many missions could you realistically complete this way from your couch? If people are that lazy about going outside yet wanting to do missions, I imagine they'd sooner resort to cheating/spoofing than doing 1 mission every 6 hours within their line of sight.
And drones can't interact with waypoints, which many missions use so that would be a nonstarter anyway..
Completely nailed it.
This is entirely antithetical to Ingress, cheapens badge achievements, and further lowers the effort bar for farming.
This feature is ridiculous. It's legitimized spoofing.
It already is. No agent is present for the hack - they've just built-in heavily throttled spoof farming.
I'm currently at a portal 1.5 km away from origin, and stats still show 1 km. I've plotted the legs on Google Maps and it shows that the traveled distance is 2.5 km.
I'd rather not backtrack right now, as it took me a while to get to this point, and I'd rather not have to repeat it again twice. But I will continue collecting data.
I hope we can get new design of dronnet and controller and steer drone to portals with mobile. Same we do with real drone. Please relese it soon @NianticBrian
You can do 1 keyless hack per hour.
If that seems unfair/gaining an advantage to you, you aren't even playing the game.
Nobody is forcing u to use the drone.
Its weird it will not work with missions, sometimes a portal can be very hard to reach due to GPS drifting etc please consider this for next version maybe.
What if we can use the drone to travel by links regardless of the range limit? That might be quite cool cuz a) some shard strategy can be applied if drone's presence is made public and b) people can link big farms into multiple neighborhoods, making the farm be like a central terminal to pickup agents at home and let them fly to farms quicker.
Also, this restriction of mobility brings a whole new perspective for us to examine the portal distributions. And it is extremely like sailing a ship in the Age of Discovery cuz you gotta find nearby islands to dock. And since the drones' max ranges are fixed, we can use simple calculation and draw a world map of accessible lands and its boundary portals. I'm pretty sure there will be more continents than we have geographically. Then we can encourage agents to fill in those gaps between continents and islands, or expand the boundaries.
But what if the max range isn't fixed? What if it depends on the portal level/energy or the recursions the agent has taken? Or what if the range depends on the terrain, like land units in the game Civilization? Some fast moving and/or big range drones can be made as well. Some little flexibility on any aspect will make it a lot more dynamic, especially if the independent variable is a real time one like portal energy.
There can also be a postcard function in which the drones can hack a key from really far away but it takes days to complete the process.
The last thing that should be brought up again is the Unique Cells Visited badge. The inspiration of making this stat a badge was brought up a long time ago and was denied in an AMA because then Andrew thought this badge could be easily abused by spoofers (although I don't see how other badges being not). But since we have this, a drone, can we please have at least a Unique Cells Visited by Drone or sth like that?
I guess all of the above or most of it has already been mentioned in your brainstorm stage. But still maybe other agents are interested in discussing, too. If you have any thought please do reply. Thx!
It would be great if you can Ada or Jarvis that portal that you are visiting by drone. The way the game is going is to use more unreachable portals to the other faction and this would change back that dynamic.
Absolutely not!!!!!!! This is an awful suggestion.
While I consider direct portal interaction like attacks/deploys using a drone would be a game changer (nope, please do NOT add features like that), I would love to see drones getting some more useful features than just hacking, for example:
Again: PLEASE make sure, the use of drones will never affect the game in a way, which voids the actions of players NOT using them. I consider their use to be supporting your own gameplay, not to actively substitute it.
Thinking about it: what if you just enable advanced features only on portals a player has physically visited before?
Oh and btw: We need media lockers urgently! ;)
Suggestion of a new medal for Furthest Drone Flight (FDF)
A game to extend FDF record seems interesting. it is strategic because we have to plan a longest path by carefully checking Intel Map to avoid a dead end. It also need a lot of manual work for re-deploying a drone. This effort deserves a medal. I don't think It might go as planned because sometimes it suddenly comes to end if forcefully recalled. It is kind of game of luck to an extent, but it would rather make this game more interesting. How about "Aviator" for the name of this medal ?
@NianticBrian there are things I like about the Drone,
For example, being able to hack a P8 when you are unable to walk down the road to it, for example you are sick with the flu.
What I don't like about it, is that it consumes all Hacks for 5 hours, I'd change that to limiting Hacks to 4, no less than 15 minutes apart, for up to 4 Hacks per hour until the 5 hour cool down occurs.
It is touchy to know if using heatsinks and multi Hacks will improve gameplay, or shift too far and be over powered. I reckon the lattter.
Ingress is about getting out and about.
What I'd change about the drone, is that it should be limited to link lines of whatever faction it started out from, when hopping from one portal to the next, ie if you are Resistance, and want to use it on Enlightened portal links, then YOU travel to an Enlightened portal to put the drone on.
Another suggestion, is that you can possibly one Hack one key only, ie glyphing more keys will not work, thus you would be limited to the one key
Putting that key into a locker would be the only method to be able to hack one more keys, but I'd prefer this not happen, as it will seriously unbalance the game.
If at some point the DroneNet will be upgraded to Level 2, and enable linking with it, ie, one link per 60 minutes might be possible, but then this would be exploited too easily.
Instead, maybe one link only, then the DroneNet 2 would be immediately returned. Still no deploying mods. To maintain balance, as a lot of people go out of their way spending upwards of thousands for big fielding ops, and the DroneNet 2 if it comes with linking, should consider the ramifications of that. I would err on the side of caution, than hastily add something that is detrimental to the game.
I can see that Niantic want to return to Hack Only for Sojourner, and remove the recharge facet, where the drone is useful for that.
The use of Drones for flipping portals should also never happen, again, too easily to be exploited.
Anyways, these are just my opinions.
It can’t be used to retrieve a Portal Key or take any other action. It does count as a Drone hack towards Sojourner, but it can't be used to complete a mission or as a proxy for event attendance — these will continue to require your physical participation.
I'd only ask that it forever stays like this.
Let's face it, drone is a legitimized spoofing. The less portal interaction it can do, the more valuable agents' real life movement is.
Its hack counted for Sojourner is already not good. An agent of my community once walked kilometers everyday during winter time to achieve it, earning it the hard way. Now you just made Sojourner drastically (I'd say 95%) easier. There's literally no value in this badge anymore. Earlier you had to get away to the street to hack a portal no matter what is happening to you this day; now feeling sick or lazy? Just use a drone. This is gross.
I agree with a person saying that he doesn't understand why this feature even needed after COVID is passed. I see this as making Ingress easier. And not in a good way.
Please develop drones in a way which doesn't change portal network state. I've already saw a multitude of good ideas: "alarm drone" which sends you a notification if a portal in 200m radius is attacked; "recon drone" to see other's drones (and possibly be able to force recall them?) and so on. No portal interaction.
Fantastic! I would love to see multiple drone types, perhaps one can only make links, one that can only get keys(stores them till recall), one to deploy(from a resevoir). Lots of ideas, and plenty of ways to balance them. I want to see as many features as y'all can balance!
This is exactly what would kll the game imho. It would void any effort in terms of fielding and teamplay.
Indeed, I would say that anything that alters the portal network (deploys, mods, destroys, links, ...) should only be possible while being physically present.
So that only leaves hacking. And recharging since you can do that remotely aswell.
I wouldn't mind if drones allowed me to recharge the portal it's on as if I was present (so without the reduced effectiveness)
@NianticBrian , good morning!
Dronenet seems to be incredible. I take advantage and type about the tessellation event, because sometimes it is necessary to obtain 1 media by doing the hack on the portal.
Release Tesserae in the hack with Dronenet, and other types of media, events also like Hack Start for IFS, IFS restoking portal.
Dronenet can be used in many different ways in the future.
How many media can Dronenet save? With only 2,000 space in the inventory, we were unable to save many media.
@FMotaBra
@NianticBrian after recusing this morning i can no longer use my drone: insufficient access level!
What are the requirementsfor using the drone?
@NianticBrian Please fix new design of drone and give us joystick we use to move the drone and real sound of drone when we use drone mode.
Ideas for future drones:
* recon drones: able to see if enemy drones are on a portal or in the vicinity. (This might be unfair to casual players and lead to hunting like guardian hunting)
* Mod drones: when on a portal they act like a mod (shield, turret, etc). Although that can be like a remote action on the portal, which I think ingress wants to avoid
@NianticBrian I'd like to propose a few things with drones which are not going to alter portal state (which is fundamental for me) but make drones more interesting still:
Current Mark I drones can have some slight buffs to their hack speed (let's say up to a hack every 45 or, debatable, 30 minutes), if they reach certain distance or certain count of hops during a current flight. If their flight is disrupted, this has to be achieved again.
Also, if force recalled, a drone might have some cooldown (let's say 48-72 hours) before being able to be deployed again, to reward drone hunters and make Sojourner value at least somewhat higher.
This way, people would try to hide their drones on rarely touched portals, other people will use recon drones to find them, and drone hunting would become quite interesting.
For meme's sake (made by @pwrlmt ):
Will there be medals for drone stats?
As long as drones can only perform their functions on portals you can see in the Scanner, like the Mark I does now, I think they’re fine doing all sorts of things.
More complex ones like attack or defense drones should probably be paid upgrades though.
Making drones visible on map would really be a great idea and incentive to make the game a little bit more competitive and interesting!
Also the idea to be able to hide it, for a certain amount of jumps, would be nice.
Another issue might be if you do not have any visible portals in sparse areas, in this cases you would have to go back...
I would very much like the drone to become a faithful companion of the agent during the game. Not once in 1 hour, but on an ongoing basis. Like a chosen pokemon that helps a trainer in pokemon go.
An agent can choose a drone as a companion, for example, an agent goes and hacks a portal, and the drone increases the number of items dropped. Or for example, a drone enhances the power of bombs. There will be a sort of fully customizable, or multi-functional personal ingress assistant!
Also, an agent can send a drone for a specific task, for example, collect a key from a portal, or transfer a capsule to another agent.
Also, drones could be used to protect a specific portal (a sort of additional shield or turret) or to protect even a specific area.
You CAN SELL modules for drones, which will increase the strength of the additional attack by the drone, strengthening the protection of the agent from portal counterattacks, expanding the inventory for drones. And much more. I ALREADY AGREE TO PAY MONEY FOR SUCH IN-GAME COMPANION, WITH THE POSSIBILITY OF CUSTOMIZATION.
Ingress is not Pokemon GO. We are different. Please stop proposing such pay2win mechanics.