I’ve been playing for almost 2 weeks now. Very interesting.
I’m lucky that from my desk at work, I control 2 portals. One was updated to give 12 hacks in a 4 hour period. There are a number more in the parking lot. I work in a Government building, and we have lots of art, statues and the main library here.
It’s interesting. I’m in Summit County Colorado. One of the two most liberal counties in the state (I would say first is Boulder County). Summit County is a sea of green (the ‘enlightened’ team). Wonder if ‘liberal’ folks tend to choose the enlightened (green) team, and more conservative areas tend to choose the ‘resistance’ or blue team.
I think the terms enlightened and resistance are loaded with maybe not so subtle semantics.
From the general perspective, do the other players on the dope see the same? If you are in a conservative area, do you see more blue? If you are in a liberal area, do you see more green?
Bumping to mention that in mid-2014 the game came to the iOS world, and now I’m playing it, and although I bow to no one in my conservative creds, I am Green.
In my neighborhood, which is more conservative than liberal (if yard signs at election times are a reliable metric) I see a slight edge of Green over Blue.
Bumping this again with an update from me. In almost a year of playing, I have made it to Level 12. I need to work more on fielding (making big green triangles) but I’m still having lots of fun.
There’s an interesting mix of players in the local area. Lots of cheating, which I guess isn’t all that surprising given lax enforcement mechanisms. Still fun.
I’ve just started playing the game and have found people in my area to be very friendly. I was wandering around the arts center(where I spend a lot of time) and found it’s a farm. There are even sites where players have published a guide on the best way to build the fields among all the points in the arts center to get maximum points. I was ineffectually firing off my level 1 xmps and got level 2, then I was hacking portals to get more xmps when I got a message from a high-level resistance player(I’m enlightened) giving me tips on the game and offering to hook me up with some local high level enlightened players. My daughter has started playing too and we are two of the rare enlightened players in a sea of resistance. Most portals around here are blue, so the resistance players love to have us around kicking their stuff down so they can rebuild it. We don’t get much building/farming time, but we certainly get lots of combat experience.
One of the local high level players is a level 15 who used to play enlightened and was level 8 there before he started his resistance account. He knows all the tricks and at one point built a field that covered all of DFW by driving several hours north, southeast, and southwest and finding remote portals that he could link. The field didn’t last very long, but when you cover 5Million+ people it doesn’t take long to rack up the AP.
My daughter has been chatting with some other local enlightened players and has arranged a meet and greet with them for some tips tomorrow night. Should be fun.
Overall it’s a very well developed game, with a good story and compelling competition. But there are games and drama within the community that are frustrating. Apparently there is a faction of players called the bar codes whose usernames are all combinations of “l” and “1” so they are virtually indistinguishable and they use this pseudo-anonymity to be douchebags and basically griefers.
I’ve been involved in one pretty epic power struggle over the nearby arts center where I deployed ~140 resonators in about thirty minutes as I struggled to hold portals as fast as they knocked them down. There were about four resistance players there against just the one of me, so I just kept circling and spamming the deploy resonator button because they were trying to clear all the portals so they could field them in a specific order and I was just being the fly in the ointment. At the end of the night they had all the portals and kept them, but I had a ton of AP and my local friendly resistance player sent me a congrats when I hit level 4.
I started playing (Long live the Resistance!) the day it got in iPhone. I worked in downtown Columbus, and there was a constant war. Frogs usually had the East and Smurf the West with a continually changing no-man’s-land inbetween. Some portals never held for more than a day.
I did mange to keep my Guardian for 280 days there though, largely thanks to construction that blocked access to it.
Now I’ve moved to an area that’s mostly green and I had to submit a portal to have one at work.
Anyway, I enjoy it even if I’m not as involved. It gets you to go out more, meet new people (if you want) and find new things. I found a historical marker I never noticed in 25+ years less than a mile from my house thanks to this game!
The game is definitely at its best when there is a friendly rivalry between the teams. Emphasis on friendly. There’s a few smurfs in my area who take attacks on portals personally and show up to respond threateningly, especially when the toads are alone and female. (There may be similar toads as well, but I don’t know of any.) Despite that, I’m having a lot of fun with my casual style of play, mostly keeping my own neighborhood green and exploring around work during my lunch break.
The Fella and I have been playing about a year or so. (I heard about it here.) It’s fun. It gets us up off our butts and out–finding uniques or missions. I’ve basically lived near where we live most of my life and we’ve found little pocket parks that I didn’t know existed.
I’m a smurf. And most frogs are fine, as are smurfs. Everyone gets that it’s a game!
But there are always whackadoos and there is a really bad one on the frog side here. To the point of “don’t feed the trolls”.
It’s fun. I still don’t get some of the local slang but it’s fun!
So I met up with some other frogs yesterday and learned a lot more about the game, mostly mechanical stuff(if you try to hack a portal during cooldown it still takes one of your 4 portal hacks on that portal per hour, points don’t scale with higher level gear, etc.). But we also learned things like putting keys in containers so you get duplicate keys, these duplicate keys are useful for making links and that the Lawson power cube should be saved for high levels because when you use it the XM gained is based on your max, not a fixed amount. Also there are apps which help you practice the glyphs and which hook in with google maps to do what the “intel” section is supposed to do, but doesn’t because it sucks.
But we also got warnings about a couple of smurfs and frogs in the area who apparently take this game far too seriously. Stalker/revenge smashing/rage flip(didn’t know that was a thing, but apparently it is) type seriously. A bunch of frogs were having lunch at a chain restaurant and tagging the portals from the swag on the walls and in the restaurant and some of the local smurfs showed up and drama ensued. Apparently one of the smurfs used to be a frog and was a drama llama as a frog which is why he quit and became a smurf. One of the other frogs was calling him a traitor and saying he’d track down all his portals and wipe them out even if it meant he’d never sleep, etc. I gotta say, some people have more time on their hands than I apparently do.
Like JSexton, I’m a casual player. I have my competitive vices(cough) but I’m pretty sure this won’t become one of them.
Also, apparently Anker makes the best external power bricks and it seems all ingress players buy an external power brick at some point.
Not true, actually! Only successful hacks increment the counter. Also, installing a heatsink resets the counter, enabling quite a lot of hacking if you’re going to be in one place for a while.
So I tested this over lunch today. I hacked a portal and then attempted to hack it about a dozen times during the cooldown period. It didn’t burn out, and once the five minutes was up I was able to hack it again. So score one for JSexton and -1 for the local guru. Good to know, thanks.
I did enjoy learning that you can recycle keys for small amounts of XM, because I was in the middle of a big smurf farm and I was firing off XMPs and then about ten portals would nuke me, so I’d wait a few seconds, recycle a spare key for ~500 XM, which would allow me to fire another XMP. Doing that over and over kept me from using power cubes, which just would have been a waste because all those portals would have just zapped me.
And I got another Lawson Power Cube last night so I put it in a replicating capsule ASAP along with other high-level gear. About 2/3 of the way to Level 5 and climbing. Headed downtown to the theatre tonight so I’ll go early and my son and I will hack the heck out of the arts district portals.
I strongly recommend you learn and practice glyphs.
Apart from the gear bonuses, you’ll earn points towards your Translator badge. That will be very helpful once you pass level 8 and need badges as well as AP to level up.
Another benefit is that at the start of the glyph screen, you see a brief flash that says “Command Channel Open.” During that brief moment, you can enter the glyph for “MORE,” and you will get a second key even if you already have a key out. (Note that this doesn’t guarantee a second key, just as an ordinary hack when you have no key doesn’t guarantee a key. It simply bypasses the logic that says, “Don’t get a key when one is already there.”
This is very useful for key farming.
If there is one thing I wish I had paid attention to earlier, it’s glyphing. I did not start serious glyph ing until I hit level 8, and I was way behind the power curve.
Good plan, but be aware that Niantic recently nerfed MUFG capsules on Very Rare objects, they replicate much less often than other items. Too many ADAs and Jarvis’ floating around.
157/200 on my first level of the translator badge. That was the first thing the experienced players told me when they saw me ineffectually pinging their portals. I glyphed up to level 3 that night and have made it to level 4 pretty quickly too. I’ve shown others how to glyph hack too. I already have four other level 1 badges, recharger, trekker, guardian, and explorer.
Frankly I like the glyph hacking as a player, but not as a person. Ingress has a inplicit goal of walking and you can’t really glyph hack while walking. So I find it less useful for one of the key benefits I want to get out of engaging with this game.
Just wanted to point this out to anyone who hadn’t seen it.
Both Enl and Res teams in Orlando got together to make a big fielding op. You can’t see it in the screenshot because the field art is miles across, but in the center, just a couple blocks south of the top valley of the heart is the Pulse nightclub. They literally built the heart around it. And they’re maintaining it, it’s been up for several days now, as opposed to most big field art project like this which get taken down for the massive AP they provide pretty quickly.
That’s so great! When we were in MN, we were playing in a small town and were messaged by the blues to please not take down certain portals b/c they were in memory of a green player who had recently died.
So sweet! I will never understand people who can’t get the ‘it’s a game!’
