What do you need to play safely from home?
Owlx
Posts: 1,227 ✭✭✭✭✭
Hello SOS task force members
Niantic is trying to make the game safer to play from home.
@HPWUTeam thank you for all the changes to events, the april calendar. we appreciate your hard work.
I have seen several still very frustrated players post, and a increase in new forum members posting out the blocks they face to game play.
Maybe the information from this poll with better help the developers evolve the game. (Hi developers!)
Please be- positive, creative, constructive and respectful
What asset to you need most for basic day game play from home?
What do you need to play safely from home? 35 votes
More spell energy
5%
2 votes
Change to daily task list-Visiting POIs not possible or legal
25%
9 votes
more ingredients
11%
4 votes
more trace spawns
8%
3 votes
larger play radius
25%
9 votes
other what I need most to play daily is ....
22%
8 votes
3
Comments
Remote access to a fortress. 😊 pleeeaaasseeee
Its kind of discouraging if increased spawns is not reachable from home (action range) isnt it?
• Drop Radius all together. If we can see it on the map, let us interact with it
• Disable all Landmarks - they just encourage people to leave their homes - which they absolutely should not do right now
• Change Brewing Tonic for Trace Detection to include using a Runestone when Brewing the Potion so that the Runestone used will then influence what kinds of Traces are revealed by the potion
Eg. Add a level 1 Oddities Runestone when brewing a Tonic for Trace Detection. When you use that potion, 5 of your Traces will be Low Oddities and 1 will be High. The higher the Runestone you use, the more low Oddities That will appear and the more High, Severe, and Emergency Traces will be revealed.
• Double Energy for Spell Energy Gifts (Basic = 6-10, Extravagant = 25)
• All other Gifts give 3 Energy
• Green Gifts open a portal to the Greenhouse that gift is from. Allowing you to harvest that Greenhouse
• Blue Gifts open a portal to the Inn the Gift came from, allowing you to get a meal from that Inn
• Yellow Gifts open a portal to the Fortress that gift came from, allowing you to access that Fortress - and to see who else is in the foyer for a Chamber and to join them
This will make having friends with different access to different types of Buildings really valuable, regardless of the type of gift.
Until you are able to implement portals in gifts....
• Remove Fortress and Inn Tasks from Daily Tasks
• Double potion Daily Task
• Double Foundables Returned Daily Task
Without changes like these, the game holds little appear to people that cannot leave the home. More and more people are switching to Animal Crossing (not my thing, but it’s rising in popularity), and there’s no guarantee that they’ll come back once they can go outside again.
Remote access to inn and fortress. The most important thing for me!
Gifts are NOT the answer.
Some people do not have friends. The game does not give you any guaranteed minimum on gifts. It's not like the ministry sends you gifts if you have less than 15 or anything.
Interact with anything on-screen is not the answer. There are places in town where there is nothing on screen. Plenty where building X or Y is missing.
Right now there is better everything if you are outside moving/driving. That needs to change.
Spawns should not be based on where you are, just that you are playing. "Nothing spawns here" should never happen. "This area is dense because xxx" should never happen. Right now I can drive 1.25 blocks, park in a parking lot, and get about 2.5 times the spawns and plenty of map energy -- or stay at home, and can't even keep up with one TTD without a full days' worth of energy gifts.
Access to a greenhouse from home is more important than access to an inn from home. I run out of snowdrop regularly, and mushrooms occasionally. I have no problem planting them, and waiting; I can't do that from home.
Access to a fortress is kinda a requirement for progress in some areas of the game. So many pages where progress is limited because of the mix of fortress and map traces.
People who live in a flagged area need a way to turn off their flag.
And if the game is balanced around "We expect you to use DD's to get your severes", then we need a way to use DD's.
So your vote is for other then, @Keybounce? 🤔
My vote is "Everything is available without being location dependent".
This is a "location matters" game.
These are fundamentally incompatible.
Unless the game is going to become "Location doesn't matter" -- which is the opposite of everything Niantic does -- I do not see a solution.
Sidenote:
(source)
Fortress battles to be removed from SOS, there's not one within 20 miles of me. Ingredients in remote areas. If I use a trace is like to get something, anything that I actually need or a few rare items. Longer time for tonic so I can get at least 10 foundable with just one tonic. I know it's difficult for those of us that live in remote areas. But removing a few tasks and extending the time of a tonic would be greatly appreciated. There is nothing on the ground out here, no ingredients or portkeys. It will make it extremely difficult to finish anything for the events.
This has been the same for so many months, I don't even remember when I finally got to this level. Complete 3 wizarding challenges should be changed or removed.
@WonderingWendy I don't know if multiple copies of this post were intentional, but I have responded to you in the thread linked below. I have also tagged some of the moderators in it so that they are more likely to see your feedback.
(43 words)
I live in a very rural area, and ingredients/portkeys (or spell energy) never appear on the ground anywhere near my home, even if I walk a mile out my road (which still doesn't get me to a road recognized by the WU map). I love all the changes that have been made to accommodate at-home playing, but I'll still never be able to complete the "pick up 1 ingredient or portmanteau on the map" daily task without getting in my car and going out.
Can you make it so the tonic for trace detection ALSO makes ingredients/portmanteaus/spell energy appear on the map for us rural dwellers?
All of the above, please. Ingredient and energy are a bottleneck at the moment, even though I can see two greenhouses, 3 inns and 2 fortresses on my map. I'm just not "in range". I rarely get something to pick up unless I am standing in the right spot in my house or take the time to drive to the park where the inns and whatnot are (I 'll sit in my truck near them).
I'm running low on things to craft potions, and since most of what shows on the map are for tonics its been more difficult to build up my exstimulos.
The Kinghtbus will be a wonderful addition and I'm looking forward to offloading a lot of the runestones I've built up. But, I won't be able to do much if I don't have a way to get spell energy easily. If the bus drops us off right outside the fortress so we can pick up the items around it or access inns and greenhouses nearby, that would be wonderful.
Even better would be that if we can see one of these places on the map, that we can access it. Increase the radius and increase the drops.
I'm appreciative of all of the changes that have been made to allow everyone to continue to play!
Although some might not consider gifts to be essential :) , they are to me--that's the one thing right now (aside from fortresses, soon to be rectified with the Knight Bus) that I can't do/collect to give to friends from home. And I'm not going to collect what I can't give to others, so my gifts stack up lately.
@Spondee Go ahead and open your gifts. Those of us still able to send fully understand that others can't get to any inns to return gifts.
I want all those friends to open to help them out!
Need access to ingredients and portmanteau. I'm on a main road and have a greenhouse nearby, and have seen inns popping up near to me. But I have never been able to collect ingredients on portmanteau anywhere near my home. Please help, even if it's accessable through tonic for traces. Please help!! Thanks
This is my problem as well and I don’t live in a rural area. I don’t feel like they care or are doing anything to fix it.
I would LOVE to be able to grow ingredients from home. Even if it has a higher time to peak, I would be happy. I am often in need of certain ingredients that I wait for days before they pop up on the map. Or changing a lot of the 7 HR growing times to 8 would allow me to hit a greenhouse on my way to work and then I would still have time to harvest on my way home. At the 7 hour mark they would disappear before I can get to them. Or if they were to automatically go in your vault instead of having to go pick them up after groowing them would be magnificent!
I think it would be a huge benefit to those in quarantine if tonic for trace detection also made a few items (potions ingredients, portkeys, spell energy) spawn on the map in addition to just traces. I recently had to quarantine for a few weeks at a location where no items or traces of any kind appear in the map. The only way I could play during my confinement was to use tonic for trace detection however I was never able to complete the daily because there were never any items to pick up and thus I quickly ran out of spell energy and potions ingredients, and could not pick up the special portkeys to fully participate in events. I have learned that the lack of anything of any kind spawning on the map is common to military bases and rural areas, so I’m certain I’m not the only one who has experienced this and would benefit from the change.
I recently fired up my game in 'The Walking Dead: Our World" again, and developers there have now made it possible for you to virtually walk around your neighbourhood for a limited amount of time (5 minutes I think) without moving. A 'move' switch appears, and when flipped, the character starts to walk and you can steer it towards POIs. When those 5 minutes are up, the character remains there for 15 minutes tops or you can recall back to normal. The amount of times you can do that depends on completing missions, or buy in shop.
I think that is a very elegant solution and would suit most other GPS based games.