r/Ingress

I’ve been thinking about drones and how their only real options are move, hack, glyph hack, or recall. I don’t think drones should become remote XMPs, but I do think there might be room for a limited “Drone Overload” mechanic.

Basic idea:

Once every 24 hours, you could overload your drone on its current portal. This would recall/destroy the drone and trigger a redeploy cooldown.

The overload would not be a payload or bomb the drone is carrying. It would be more like the drone destabilizing after charging from the portal’s XM. Because of that, you could not move a drone onto a portal and instantly overload it. The drone’s normal movement cooldown would have to finish first.

Possible rules:

- Once per 24 hours

- Drone must be off movement cooldown

- Drone is recalled/destroyed after use

- Fixed weak XM-drain / damage pulse from the portal center

- Better at damaging mods than resonators

- Mod damage is indiscriminate, regardless of faction

- Weak against healthy, charged player portals

- Naturally better against Machina because red portals are often low-charge

- Could recall other drones sitting on the same portal

- Little or no AP

- Should not reliably neutralize player portals or break fields remotely

I think this could make drones more interesting without replacing in-person play. It would be useful for surgically weakening Machina, clearing unwanted mods from your own portal, stripping mods from enemy portals, or knocking drones off a portal.

The main balance point is that it would be slow and limited. You would have to leave the drone sitting there through its cooldown, then spend your once-daily overload and lose the drone for a few hours afterward.

Would something like this be balanced, or would any drone-based overload mechanic still be too much?

About a half hour ago, I completed my daily assignment and went to claim it. Only - when I clicked on the claim assignment button several times, nothing happened. So I turned Ingress off and restarted the program. When I looked at the daily assignment, not only were the yellow claim markers gone but the entire assignment appears to have reset for me to start it all over again as if I hadn't done it already. Anyone else experiencing this issue?

Does the support even have any way to eliminate a cheater at all? Because it looks like they don’t. For example... we’ve got a “recurrent case”: a guy (known for many years) who has already had tens of bans on various multi-accounts, including recently on his “main” account — and we reported him with not much effect. He just keeps "playing", keeps creating new puppet accounts on the fly, and always has at least 3–4 accounts ready. Getting to lvl8 takes him about 1.5–3 hours, depending on whether he feels like using double AP, and he always does it the same way, on almost the same route ending at his home. The accounts add resonators to the same home couch portal; some don't move at all, only hack the gear, some move and "play" along known routes with other members of cheater's family.

Everybody knows about his cheating, tens of reports were sent. People met him playing using two phones, often on accounts of his family (which never got banned for this). When met personally he openly admits he's cheating, and when people complain, he simply says "will be more"...

So, what’s the point of offering paid inventory space (+500 CORE, +5x100 CARGO) if a cheater can just make another backpack account and get +2000 for free, risking nothing but this backpack?

What’s the point of limiting the number of resonators in a portal, so that making a lvl7 requires 3 players and a lvl8 portal requires 8 players, if a cheater can just create the needed number of accounts and instantly build that portal by himself?

What’s the point of heat sinks and multi-hacks if a cheater can just put a few phones on the table and get the gear N times faster and N times more?

What's the point of shields and building network of portals if the cheater, whenever feels like it, just loads thousands of xmp8 hacked and stored using backpacks into a few accounts (his and his family) and drives around wiping out everything instantly (things which require many players to build).

Getting one puppet account banned takes weeks of reporting and proving to support that yes, the cheater is still a cheater — while in the meantime he makes another account in 2 hours. With the same nickname as before, plus one character, he doesn't care. Or with a nickname insulting the people who report him — when he used the direct name, it got banned, but when he created just “DickAt<address>”, our game support apparently doesn’t see anything wrong with it.

And that’s how it goes in our city — people gradually stopped playing because there is zero sense in competing against blatant cheating ignored by the support... At least recently there is less spoofing, but multiaccounting destroys the game too. There are now only 2–3 somewhat active players left per faction, so a cheater with 8 accounts who can build himself a lvl 8 portal wherever and whenever he wants definitely shifts the balance.