Niantic -

First off, I would like to say congratulations on making a mobile game that has connected so many people all over the world, and created friendships a lot of us wouldn't think possible, so thank you for all your hard work.

With the goal of this game being earning medals in order to advance in levels (other than acquiring the first eight levels through racking up experience points of course), this can become quite difficult to do for the average joe who doesn't have as much time to spare as they would like. To your credit, the parameters that need to be fulfilled in order to earn these medals is actually quite fair, giving just enough of a challenge to keep players wanting to play the game and earn medals, and also with these numbers seeming reasonably attainable. However, I am here to tell you that there is one particular set of medals that turns this game from being playable and fun, to frustrating and meticulous: the Seer.

We, or in the very least, most of us players, are just like you, being people with jobs to go to, families to take care of, and friends to hang out with. Simply put, we have lives. This is the kind of game where people will set aside anywhere from fifteen minutes to maybe an hour a day going around recharging portals, destroying enemy portals, linking one thing to another, and maybe, if they're lucky, finding an unclaimed statue or plaque to submit as a new portal to claim once it goes live.

It seems fun at first, earning a bunch of bronze medals when you're still at a lower level, with hours and hours of time and gas money going down the drain as you caravan with other players to make a giant field over your home state to earn a lot of points and try to catch up with all the higher level elites or some other crazy antics, but over the course of time, you begin to notice that one little medal still remains locked, even after all your efforts: again,THE SEER.This is when everything goes downhill.

Just by simply looking at the initial numbers required to earn the Seer medals, it doesn't seem too bad, until you see the highest number required for the last medal:5,000 portals.

This alone is absolutelyridiculous. Add this to the fact that it is taking people anywhere from 3-4 months, and sometimes more, to find out whether some of their portals got accepted or not.

Take, for example, myself. I have been playing this game for not even an entire year and I have a measly four accepted, and live, portal submissions under my belt.Four. Granted, I am a more inactive player, seeing that I have better things to do with my time than play a mobile game all day long; however, waiting that insanely long tomaybeget an approved portal submission is absolutely ridiculous. In fact, I got to thinking. How longwouldit take a player like me to fulfill your requirements to get the highest Seer medal possible at a whopping 5,000 submissions?

I have officially done the math.
If I receive approximately 2 portals every 3 months of my life (so about 8 portals per year at the rate you all are accepting my submissions), it will take me exactly625 YEARSto earn my onyx Seer medal.

Congratulations, you are expecting me to waste myentirelife and beyond trying to earn a stupid digital medal. Unless you are blind and/or have no brain, you can clearly see that the number I have written in bold is absolutely outrageous, and even more so, physically impossible to attain. Even people who play much more often than me (and also have been playing the game for longer too), are complaining of the same struggle, and wonder who even thought to make the maximum number of portal submissions be that stupidly high.

So, finally, here's my proposition (A.K.A the tl;dr version of my rant): I believe it would be fair, way easier, and fun for everyone, including you folks at Niantic, to drastically reduce the number of portals we have to submit to get the highest medal possible, especially considering, to my knowledge, no one in theentireworldhas reached the 5,000 portal goal, and even more so, very few people have even reached the 500 mark.

Think about it: if you reduce the numbers necessary to earn the highest medal, the people desperately trying to submit everything they can to get that insanely high number of submissions will be able to not have to worry about it anymore at a certain point, which will enable more people to have a chance at submitting portals, having them go live, and earn the levels of Seer just like everyone else.


I would like to put forward some numbers for your approval that I believe will still live up to the challenge and attainability of the other types of medals, will align more with how long it takes to get a portal submitted and approved, and most of all, make attaining the Seer medal way less threatening and impossible:


Bronze = 1 published portal
Silver = 10published portals
Gold = 50published portals
Platinum = 200published portals
Onyx/Black = 500published portals

To conclude, on behalf of myself, and every Ingress player in the world, thank you very much for listening, and we hope you take these words to heart, and help us make this game even more enjoyable.

Regards,

Ultimatefan, and everyone else in the vast Ingress community