Ingress Prime - Betterness and Worseness

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A year after it's release Ingress Prime has been getting a steady stream of updates and fixes. Agents have been really awesome in getting the community participate in the process by using an Ingress Prime Feedback on Reddit (since retired) and creating list of known issues Public Ingress Prime Known Issue Tracking. Nowadays you can head to Ingress community and view posts tagged as bugs eg. bug-report. I have to encourage agents to "Like" / "Insightful" any bugs you're affacted by and let Nia known they really need to address them.

Anyway, onwards with the praise and nagging. My experience playing with Prime so far.

Better

  • Client looks and sounds awesome.
  • Nominations interface is awesome. Especially now with the added range.
  • Recycling stuff by level on the grid view is awesome.
  • Linking interface is FAST, but along the last update came the bugs (again).
  • Map view is awesome especially when zoomed out and planning fielding, you can now actually see in most situations from which side the link will pass another portal. Yet another feature request is to get links from intel synced to scanner somehow and/or a ruler tool.
  • Shuffling keys and items in and out of capsules. Easy to keep track of total key/item counts and I just wish I could recycle in this same view. That'd make it perfect.
  • Glyphing experience is "smoother", especially without the 1-2-3 countdown.

Same old, same old

  • Key locker and capsule management is still nuts.

For example moving 1 item from capsule to inventory requires 14ish actions :

Menu -> Inventory -> Sideways scroll of categories -> Capsule category -> Sideways scroll to capsule -> Tap capsule -> Manage -> Scroll to item -> Tap to select item -> Tap item or + to select 1 -> Unload -> Cancel -> Tap X -> Tap X

As recycling and dropping capsules, at least for me, are considered secondary actions. Those two should be tucked deeper in the menus and management could be brought even to the main level of inventory.

Some vertical lists and sideways scrollers replaced with only sideways scrollers when you could do :

  • A grid view of categories or condense the view to fit all categories without scrolling.
  • A grid view of capsules, especially those with limited numbers such as key lockers, as it would be nice to see all of them at one glance.

Worse

  • Most annoying feature so far : Speedlock error with an empty error box or "Scanner Communication Error" if you're trying any action right after unlocking your phone at least on Android. I cycle short distances between portals and it might take anywhere between 1 to 300 seconds after unlocking phone or switching application from The Other game before any action can be performed.
  • Sluggish UI - transitions take time and serve no purpose for some players. A setting toggle for 0ms transitions.
  • GPS accuracy and refresh rate. This makes resonator placement hard as you're to drift away from the portal for a few seconds after stopping.
  • Stability. Client freezes are common and almost certain if you're playing in excess of 15min of active play.
  • Linking interface - Maximum outbound links error message still doesn't make any sense. It also doesn't always register a link you just made thus key counts and map view don't stay in sync. Fixed be leaving the linking interface and going back or just linking slooooowly. When rebuilding fields which links creating two fields is a major nuisance as you might end up making null fields all over.
  • Key inventory - number of keys shown between range and address is silly. Redacted has the count in the corner where you can more easily see if you're running low and have excessive amount of some key. Map view with key counts could be nice, eh?
  • Glyphing - Cannot abort glyphing as in Redacted by switching task or if another application steals focus.
  • Activity and XM bar take too much space in the top and prevent viewing portals. Could be moved to the bottom of UI or removed except for XM bar which could be displayed as a single row along with the powercube +-button.
  • No push notifications (alerts) on Android for sometime.

Linking interface state machine easy fix!

Client UI:

  1. Player presses "Link" on key.
  2. Indicate key has been queued for linking.
  3. Allow user to add links to queue.

Client background job:

  1. Pop link request from queue
  2. Check range to portal, portal condition, number of outbounds, crossing links etc, if any of the conditions fails go to 5.
  3. Send link command to server.
  4. If server responds "Link from here to there done" => Indicate key as "Linked" and go to 1.
  5. Linking condition fail, server responds fail or in case of timeout : Clear queue, scroll key carousel to key on which the action failed, show error message.

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