Tuesday, September 3, 2013

My Wishlist for Future Ingress Development

Over the past 8 months or so there have been many upgrades and enhancements to not only the game but to the user experience. I'm sure our friends at Niantic have some great enhancements to come. Here's my pie in the sky list of what I'd like to see in some form or another.



Greater Number of Items in Inventory

2000 items seems like a lot, but like many of you I am hitting my inventory cap several times a week. I would like to be able to have more items at my disposal. Now, I don't think I necessarily need more at any given time, but I think it would be nice to have more items in a cache. The trade off could be that once you put something in your cache it would not be available again to you for 4-5 days. 

Greater Functionality from the Intel Map

Well first lets say I've been really disappointed with the functionality of the Intel Map. One of Google's strengths has always been Google Maps. So I was expecting more. 

I'd like to be able to search for portals with multiple criteria. For example I'd like to only be able to see blue, L7 & 8 portals with links in a certain radius of a given location. 

I would also like to see more game interaction from the Intel Map. When I receive an alert of a portal being under attack I'd like to access my portal keys from my desktop somehow and recharge my resonators. 

I think it would also be great if we could access our inventory from the Intel Map including being able to drop and recycle items.

I would also like to have the ability to redeem codes again through the Intel Map like we use to be able to. 

Portal Invisibility 

Imagine a portal mad where you can make a portal invisible to an individual enemy. So you have a pesky enemy agent when you deploy this mod you can enter a players agent name and the portal will not be visible to them. But a portal equipped with this mod wouldn't be available to be linked to other portals.

Instantly Create a Portal of a Certain Level

When you deploy to a neutral portal you select what level portal you create and the correct resonators are deployed instantly to make that portal. The same rules apply so an individual can not create a L8 portal. But say I want to create a L4 portal I just select a create L4 portal button and it is done. 

Instant Portal

Another cool item the game could add that could be even more rare than Jarvis/ADA is an Item where you can instantly create a portal without any approval needed. Now if you give it an inappropriate name or make it inaccessible to the public, then it would be removed. 

Offensive Weapons

Think of how awesome it would be to have a weapon which can directly used against enemy players. You can fire this weapon at an enemy who is physically in proximity to you and disable their scanner for some period of time say half an hour to an hour.

Another offensive weapon idea would to have a weapon that has a range of a certain distance and when an enemy passes within its range it would fire at them and do damage to their XM levels. These weapons wouldn't appear on an enemy's scanner or Intel Map, but could be destroyed with an XMP of proper level in proper range.

Scanner Mods

I mentioned some mods which attack individual players, so to keep some balance we could offer some scanner mods. Like a scanner shield. The shield could mitigate damage done by offensive weapons, but the trade off would be it would lessen the range/ power of your XMPs or Offensive weapons.

Another scanner mod would be one which would be interesting would be a mod which you can increase your likelihood of obtaining a certain type of item (resonators, bursters, cubes, keys) but not exclusively. If you had this mod set up to increase your chance of getting XMPs you would still get other items just at a proportionally lesser amount.

Care Packages

When I was a leveling player I had some L8 agents help me out by dropping items for me. Some of these larger drops could take half an hour or more to transfer items. What I'd like to see is a way to build into a package. So I can in one package transfer hundreds of items if I wanted. It could be as easy as selecting an item then, selecting the quantity you want to add to the package. Then the intended recipient could just pick up the one care package.

This doing things in bulk could also apply to recycling items too. So you could instantly recycle say all of your L4 XMPs at one time.

Portal Transport

Say I have some items I want to transfer to another player. If I am at one portal and the other player is at a different portal then, I can select what portal I want to send items too. The portals must both be under control of the same faction and items not picked up within a short period of time would decay.

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