This morning has consisted of people messaging me to ask how I was able to deploy resonators at unclaimed portals inside a military base. Yeah, think I won't be launching this app around work anymore.
I think you mean, you will always play at work and get a sweet advantage.
Tell them an awesome lie! Tell them you flew over the base with a helicopter! Or glided over it in a parachute! Or burrowed beneath it with nary but a spoon! Or spoofed your phones GPS data! Make them up their game by thinking you've upped yours.
I don't know about now, but GPS spoofing on your phone used to be pretty trivial. It'd be a shame if the game was ruined by people doing that. A coworker of mine used GPS spoofing to become mayor of practically everything in the Hartford area on Foursquare while bored at work a few years ago...
Been thinking about the balancing issues. Would adding another team (which I can only imagine is the next step in this game, besides adding an iPhone app) actually help? It would be much more difficult for one team to dominate an area, since anyone controlling a portal immediately has two enemy teams, rather than one. It would also explain why both teams can obtain both Jarvis Viruses and ADA Refractors, as you could break down enemy links by switching one enemy portal to another enemy, even if you couldn't take it yourself.
The only problem is that it would practically require a total game reset. The two existing teams are so entrenched that it would be nearly impossible for the smaller, weaker third team to gain a foothold and become an actual threat.
Some crazy shit went down in my area, tell you what. I clocked off in the afternoon, all green around me, surrounded by a control field. Clocked on the next morning, blue as far as the eye can see. I still have no idea what the fuck happened.
Given that it's coming out of beta, that kind of event wouldn't surprise me. Some folks are already getting pretty bored of winning. Some folks might be angry about a reset, but if it's some 'plot-canon' event, what are they gonna do?
Maybe give existing players the chance to switch? Randomize portal ownership the day of the event? Put everyone at the same level? This could go in a lot of different directions.
When I started, I didn't care what side I was on, so I chose the Resistance. I haven't played for months. Now that Rym reminded me it existed, I do kinda wanna play. I could change sides, but most of my campus is covered by blue portals, so I'd be up against heavy resistance. Should I bother changing?
Nah, just stick with it. If you use the ingress intel map, you can find portals around places you go that are contested, to get extra xp. Universities are usually pretty thick with players, so it's hard to get a personal foothold there, but plenty of other places will have portals for you. And you can submit portals, don't forget.
Listening to what Rym had to say about ingress on the show was interesting - it appears that the perception of the game is subtly different depending on what side you're on(his experience with Enlightened was very different from mine in resistance, and not just because I picked a side arbitrarily without giving a shit about the fluff), and by the area you're in, but other stuff is oddly identical despite very different communities.
Also, This is really interesting to look at. You can get a much broader overview of the game around you, or worldwide using this - the downside being that you don't get the low-level detail you get from the app, like magic dust concentration, potential portal locations(which is often shown by XM concentrations popping up in spots without portals) and so on.
One thing I didn't consider is that I live in New York.
There are something like 200 portals within a short walk of my office. I can see about 50 on the screen right now sitting at my desk without moving or rotating the view at all.
A portal set with eight level-8 resonators can change hands on a daily basis, and there is a big bitch-fight going on in TiBeCa right now.
One thing I didn't consider is that I live in New York.
There are something like 200 portals within a short walk of my office. I can see about 50 on the screen right now sitting at my desk without moving or rotating the view at all.
A portal set with eight level-8 resonators can change hands on a daily basis, and there is a big bitch-fight going on in TiBeCa right now.
Yep, it's dense, there, but most of that isn't unusual. The city here is identical, huge amounts of portals in tiny areas, changing hands rapidly, almost on an hourly basis. The two universities and shopping centers near me are no different, just a rolling brawl. Trust me, it's not unique to New York, the biggest difference there is that you have a larger area for that to occur over - here, you tend to get massive portal density in areas, but those areas are spread out. You end up with hotspots, rather than a hotspot the size of Manhattan - barring the CBD and valley, which is a hot-spot about the same size or bigger.
Near my place, it tends to be more about control fields, and battle is much more tactical - figuring out which portals to attack to best use for creating the largest control field, rather than just going hard at one point. It's actually a little annoying, because it takes more time - I can't just walk out my front door and hit 50 portals, I have five within a reasonable distance - just look over Salisbury, Brisbane with the intel map, you'll see what I mean.
Edit - Also, interestingly, there appears to be exactly ONE portal in North Korea, on the north-west border.
Whoops, I didn't know what I was talking about in the above post.
I just started capturing points and it seems like the Green team in Perth is well organised -private Google + groups, regular messaging in the game and on G+ plus it seems to promote meetups which is why there are so many strongly defended pubs.
I didn't realise portals would drop documents regarding the game.
This is a pretty amazing social game (as compared to Farmville).
It seems crazy, starting out, that some players have captured upwards of 1000 portals.
In the suburbs of NJ, the concentrations of portals can vary pretty wildly. It seems to fluctuate based on where they tend to place portals. Here, they're on every small monument and historical site. Barring one of those being available in a populous area, they'll be on the post office or something along those lines.
In my town, there is a municipal center, a high school, and a fake "downtown style" strip mall next to it that make up the center of town. It's littered with tiny little plaques to commemorate this thing or the other. Every one of them is a portal, each just outside of walking distance from the next, but outside of that there isn't a portal for a few miles around.
It must be proportional within some bounds. The only way the current situation for my town would align with that is if the portals representing several population clusters all happened to be placed on the outer edge of the clusters, grouped together around a central point.
Yep. If it wasn't, a city like Tokyo would have vastly more portals than New York with it's piddly little 8 million people, but this isn't the case. It has more, but less than you'd expect considering the staggering difference in population.
Just had my first encounter with a spoofer. Either that, or just had my first encounter with an invisible man who can either run silently at 60 kilometers an hour, or an invisible man with a silent, invisible car that can somehow make turns that would be almost impossible.
So, it was a rainy day out, thought I would set up a few fields because I hadn't played in a while. I get all my keys in order, drive out to the first point, and... there's suddenly blue everywhere.
I think, huh, that's weird, must be another person in the area. I zoom out, see it's a pretty damn huge field. I pull up my area in the "intel" web browser page. FUCK.
The worst one I've had is when both resistance and enlightened made a massive set of layered fields over the whole city here. Which is cool, but made it fucking near impossible to see anything other than a big, dense field when you're walking around.
Crossposting this from my local Enlightened group's page because I figured all you green team types might have fun reading it:
Today two high level blue agents single-handedly wrecked almost our entire Legislature Grounds farm. I don't know how many XMPs they had, but it was enough to keep them going for at least a couple hours of wanton destruction all over the grounds. I started getting attack alerts around 5-ish. Tried to remote recharge things from where I was, but I only just got to level 6 today, so I wasn't fast enough to keep up. Decided if I was going to do anything, I had to go down there myself.
Detoured to the grounds off of my commute home and started hacking and attacking everything. Luckily, all the smurfs had been doing was placing single Lv. 7 resonators on captured portals, so I was able to take a lot of stuff back pretty handily (in big part due to a big drop of Lv. 5 XMPs I got from our most recent Legislature operation). I eventually spotted the two agents wandering around together while I was doing my work. Once I knew who and where they were, I alternated between avoiding them to work on other areas, and getting close enough to defend while remaining out of sight. They never acknowledged me, so I'm not sure if they figured out who I was or not (tried to be sneaky with my phone usage) but I wouldn't be surprised if they knew and just didn't engage (I'm not exactly a super spy, lol).
Anyway, even with my recent inventory gains, I still don't have a ridiculous amount of gear and the grounds are a huge area to defend. So I burned through a ton of stock in resos, XMPs, and power cubes doing all this. x_x Worth it, though. Eventually, around 7 PM, the smurfs left. I stuck it out another hour afterwards to re-link a couple things and build up more stock, if only a bit. Would have stayed longer, but both my phone and external battery ran dry (was doing another fielding session earlier in the day) and it was getting rainy and windy outside. So I called it quits, hopped a bus, and then had coffee while I recharged my phone.
TL;DR -- the Legislature Grounds' honour was sort of defended! A decent portion is back to green now! It's pretty unstable considering I'm not Lv. 8, though, and there are still plenty of other portals to take care of yet. Hopefully we can build our beautiful farm back up the way she was sometime soon.
Comments
Edit: Accidentally a whole question mark.
Some crazy shit went down in my area, tell you what. I clocked off in the afternoon, all green around me, surrounded by a control field. Clocked on the next morning, blue as far as the eye can see. I still have no idea what the fuck happened.
Maybe give existing players the chance to switch? Randomize portal ownership the day of the event? Put everyone at the same level? This could go in a lot of different directions.
Also, This is really interesting to look at. You can get a much broader overview of the game around you, or worldwide using this - the downside being that you don't get the low-level detail you get from the app, like magic dust concentration, potential portal locations(which is often shown by XM concentrations popping up in spots without portals) and so on.
There are something like 200 portals within a short walk of my office. I can see about 50 on the screen right now sitting at my desk without moving or rotating the view at all.
A portal set with eight level-8 resonators can change hands on a daily basis, and there is a big bitch-fight going on in TiBeCa right now.
Near my place, it tends to be more about control fields, and battle is much more tactical - figuring out which portals to attack to best use for creating the largest control field, rather than just going hard at one point. It's actually a little annoying, because it takes more time - I can't just walk out my front door and hit 50 portals, I have five within a reasonable distance - just look over Salisbury, Brisbane with the intel map, you'll see what I mean.
Edit - Also, interestingly, there appears to be exactly ONE portal in North Korea, on the north-west border.
I love how pubs have level 8 resonators.
I just started capturing points and it seems like the Green team in Perth is well organised -private Google + groups, regular messaging in the game and on G+ plus it seems to promote meetups which is why there are so many strongly defended pubs.
I didn't realise portals would drop documents regarding the game.
This is a pretty amazing social game (as compared to Farmville).
It seems crazy, starting out, that some players have captured upwards of 1000 portals.
In my town, there is a municipal center, a high school, and a fake "downtown style" strip mall next to it that make up the center of town. It's littered with tiny little plaques to commemorate this thing or the other. Every one of them is a portal, each just outside of walking distance from the next, but outside of that there isn't a portal for a few miles around.
I think, huh, that's weird, must be another person in the area. I zoom out, see it's a pretty damn huge field. I pull up my area in the "intel" web browser page.
FUCK.
(I live directly in the middle of that triangle.)
Edit: It got worse.
Was blue.
Now I own half the portals on the island.
Crossposting this from my local Enlightened group's page because I figured all you green team types might have fun reading it:
Today two high level blue agents single-handedly wrecked almost our entire Legislature Grounds farm. I don't know how many XMPs they had, but it was enough to keep them going for at least a couple hours of wanton destruction all over the grounds. I started getting attack alerts around 5-ish. Tried to remote recharge things from where I was, but I only just got to level 6 today, so I wasn't fast enough to keep up. Decided if I was going to do anything, I had to go down there myself.
Detoured to the grounds off of my commute home and started hacking and attacking everything. Luckily, all the smurfs had been doing was placing single Lv. 7 resonators on captured portals, so I was able to take a lot of stuff back pretty handily (in big part due to a big drop of Lv. 5 XMPs I got from our most recent Legislature operation). I eventually spotted the two agents wandering around together while I was doing my work. Once I knew who and where they were, I alternated between avoiding them to work on other areas, and getting close enough to defend while remaining out of sight. They never acknowledged me, so I'm not sure if they figured out who I was or not (tried to be sneaky with my phone usage) but I wouldn't be surprised if they knew and just didn't engage (I'm not exactly a super spy, lol).
Anyway, even with my recent inventory gains, I still don't have a ridiculous amount of gear and the grounds are a huge area to defend. So I burned through a ton of stock in resos, XMPs, and power cubes doing all this. x_x Worth it, though. Eventually, around 7 PM, the smurfs left. I stuck it out another hour afterwards to re-link a couple things and build up more stock, if only a bit. Would have stayed longer, but both my phone and external battery ran dry (was doing another fielding session earlier in the day) and it was getting rainy and windy outside. So I called it quits, hopped a bus, and then had coffee while I recharged my phone.
TL;DR -- the Legislature Grounds' honour was sort of defended! A decent portion is back to green now! It's pretty unstable considering I'm not Lv. 8, though, and there are still plenty of other portals to take care of yet. Hopefully we can build our beautiful farm back up the way she was sometime soon.
Agent over and out. Vive la Enlightened!