The Shonin Anomaly series saw the biggest shake up in scoring since 13Magnus. Fixed points for Strategic Fields were brought back, the Connected Fields category was introduced and the value of Volatile Portals went down while the value of Links and Connected Cells went up.
The new scoring values resulted in the points being more evenly spread out amongst the scoring categories for Shonin with all areas worth between 10% and 20% of the total points compared to 0.5% – 40% for Darsana.
Another effect of the new scoring system is how much the ground battle (including Portals, Volatiles, Connected Links and Connected Fields) is worth compared to the global battle (including Shards, the Portal Array, Regional cell scoring and Strategic fields). For Darsana, 90.5% of the points were earned in the ground battle, whereas for Shonin, it was 58.6% of the points earned on the ground, putting a greater emphasis on the teamwork on a global scale.
Did the new scoring help either side?
Across all the categories that were used between both Anomalies (All Portals, Links, Strategic fields and Cells), the Enlightened scored between 4% and 15% more during Shonin compared to the Resistance but that wasn’t enough to for the Enlightened to win most of those categories.
Then there is the elephant in the room, the Devra Shards. Before the Shards came into play, the Resistance would’ve won by 3.4% with the Connected Fields and Cells giving them the boost to win, but when the Shards are included in their score, they make up 27.2% of their total points. The announcement of the value of the shards towards the end of the event made it look a bit like an episode of Saturday Night Live when Niantic Researchers’ lives are at stake here!
All jokes aside, the new scoring system appears to try and distribute the points more evenly across the categories to put more emphasis on getting the rest of the world involved in the events but still keep the ground battle worth while.