First let me start by saying that I like the Aurora challenge and that there are several great aspects in that challenge that I haven’t heard agents mentioned yet.
The two biggest issue with Ingress and to keep agents motivated in my view are
- Give the players goals – most level 16 agents (or often way before they even reach that level) need something else as incentive to grind AP or they stop playing
- Stagnation in an area slowly kills the game as it is the same again and again
I think there are some aspects of the challenge where Aurora counters both of these issues. Badges and medals always are goals – and getting gold in Aurora is a challenge and not a simple undertaking.
The point scoring system forces either travel or upgrading/taking down of portals. Both is good to fight stagnation.
Unfortunately Niantic might have underestimated how much effort it is / what is truly realistic. It took me nearly 9 month of play to become a decent glyph hacker. In the long run this will help me immensely in my game. But the journey has been slow and frustrating at times. Aurora is a good incentive to glyph hack more – but for some it might look like being forced to glyph hack.
I regarded the overall goal too optimistic. I even spend a lot of time to evaluate what a realistic goal might look like – alas my calculations didn’t give me the result that my gut feel was telling me.
Now with the first 12 hour results in it looks bleak.
I plotted the 12 hourly hack values from Myriad. I split them into 5pm-5am and 5am-5pm as this allows a pattern to be seen more clearly. Agents don’t play the same amount during each hour of the game. It therefore makes sense that certain times of the day see a spike. We get on average 30% more hacks in the second period compared to the first one.
Shocking is, how low the first reading for Aurora is compared to Myriad. This represents just 44% of what was reached during Aurora. What makes it worse – the goal for Aurora is 24% higher as what we reached during Myriad. This means we should have got approx. 3 times the value to be on track.
I expect a higher value for the next reading. But don’t be fooled – we need to get A LOT higher to compensate.
There is also another trend – weekends seem to score slightly higher compared to week days. This trend might be more pronounced for Aurora as you need a lot of time for the glyph hacks.
I haven’t taken into account that we lost around half an hour due to a late start (that would be 4-5% lost) or that there was no reset (I started with 10 points) which would be extra bonus points.
But right now we seem to go towards well below 20 million overall. Actually the 43% would get us to approx. 13 million – the original goal of Myriad. I will keep this updated as more data comes in.
I personally found it a lot more effort as expected. I’m still sure I will manage the gold badge – but I’m currently at a palsy 29. Yes – I got playing with my son yesterday – a rare event – instead of power glyphing. And I likely spend too much time analysing as I have some time in the following days and don’t feel in a rush.