Ingress: The Google ARG

I just logged into my Ingress and found I have invites. Looks like they've finally opened it up.

Man, I leveled up twice in just two outings.

Edit: and using headphones gives you lots of bonus info.

I also have invites - for people who agree to play Resistance! Or, if you're desperate to play with Enlightened friends and you don't live in the Philadelphia area

I live in a small town just outside Philly, and there's a number of Enlightened players who really play full time, ranging far and wide. The two-faction game breaks at that point - they have all the portals, tons of links, tons of defenses - but it's still fun to try to figure out a way to harass them in the limited amount of time I play per week.

There's also a Philly area Resistance Google+ group, and smaller local groups, and it's been a fun way to meet local tech-friendly people I may never have encountered otherwise.

War between the Smurfs and the Toads rages on here in Seattle.

My part of Atlanta was almost all resistance for a long time but we're finally getting some back-and-forth.

And I want know who set up (and approved) 4 different portals on opposite street corners. I can hit all 4 while stopped at a red light.

I have 10 beta keys to give away. Just PM me. If you can get to level 5 before mid-December you get a special badge that indicates you were a participant in the beta. I've been in the beta program since last year and...I'm only level 2. Time to get crackin!

checkm-8 wrote:

I have 10 beta keys to give away. Just PM me. If you can get to level 5 before mid-December you get a special badge that indicates you were a participant in the beta. I've been in the beta program since last year and...I'm only level 2. Time to get crackin!

Well crap... I'm only level 2 as well... I guess I need to get back into it.

The game is in open beta, so anyone should be able to get in now.

I've joined the Resistance as SqueegeeJoe, for anyone in NoVa

I have beta keys too and am still at level 2 as well. Time to hack some portals.

I made level 3 yesterday.

On the way home tonight I noticed that some green folk had taken over a portal I had recently had approved.
I burned through a lot of level 3 and 4 bursters... but it was worth it to see the links and field crumble.
Not much chance to do this in my area. A lot of high level players on both sides, so I end up mainly hacking.

TraderG wrote:

On the way home tonight I noticed that some green folk had taken over a portal I had recently had approved.
I burned through a lot of level 3 and 4 bursters... but it was worth it to see the links and field crumble.
Not much chance to do this in my area. A lot of high level players on both sides, so I end up mainly hacking.

Yeah, Seattle and Vancouver are both pretty organized. I even managed key and item drops with a couple locals the last time I was up there. You guys should have a decent Resistance group on G+ if you're into getting intelligence (or gossip). A lot of high level players will burn a portal, then leave it for you to capture if you're nearby and communicate with them. They have the most efficient blasters, you get the points to level up, everyone wins.

Great Cthulhu people, how many portals do you need in a one block area?

IMAGE(http://imageshack.com/a/img189/2604/5lmg.png)

Heh, you should see my neighborhood.

Edit: Why are you wasting time posting here? Go grab that lonely one in the middle!

HACKING TARGETS!

Smurfs 11, Toads 0.

clover wrote:

Edit: Why are you wasting time posting here? Go grab that lonely one in the middle! :D

My wife was driving; I was just hacking targets of opportunity along the way. She has enough trouble with my hobbies as it is, asking her to go out of the way would just be asking for it.

tanstaafl wrote:

asking her to go out of the way would just be asking for it.

Truism is true.

I'll just put this here as a reason why I am still level 2.

Ha ha. I can't even be bothered to bike "downtown" to hit the portals there.

Just put this on my phone. Seems really cool, but I think I'm gimped by living on a rural island. Might have to go around and start submitting places to be portals...you can do that, right?

Mwdowns, When you long press anywhere in the map that doesn't have an item (portal, key, etc), you should see the option to submit new portal.

Here in the San Francisco East Bay area, there are portals everywhere, and some of the portal farms are quite dense. My team (resistance) normally keeps control of the Downtown Livermore farm (DTL) portal farm that is near where I live:

http://www.ingress.com/intel?ll=37.6...

And the Dublin Heritage Park portal farm near where I work is always a hotly contested area:

http://www.ingress.com/intel?ll=37.6...

With all the game activity ramping up due the the #13Magnus Ingress event on Dec 14th in SF, lots of battles have broken out over who has farms up in order to get their team's inventory levels as good as possible going into the event. Sadly, due to work schedule, I won't be able to participate next week. Makes me sad because I worked hard to hit L8 recently and was looking forward to using the high level gear to my teams advantage.

Just signed up to the Resistance. Just south of me, about 500 meters is a huge area of linked portals for the Enlightened, they are all fairly levelled up. Is this a good or bad thing for me? They all appear to be from the one user... The portals are full with protections ranging from level 4 to 7...

Just keep hacking them for AP and items.

Cool. Here's my area, my faction seems to be in the majority across my home city, but I'm smack bang in an intense pocket of Enlightened. See the blue dot basically in the middle, that's very near my house. Can't wait to go for a ride tomorrow and see if I can submit some additional Portals and try and take down some one else's portal if possible...

IMAGE(http://imgur.com/0mPxv1B)

Welcome to the Resistance! From my tips below, you should realize that enemy portals are a good thing as it gives you targets of opportunity.

Some tips no matter what side you join:

You will level up by destroying portals (gives you a small amount of Action Points (AP)), then deploying your resonators to build a fully built portal (better amount of AP) and then linking three portals together (best amount of AP). You will level the fastest when linking three portals together to make a control field.

You need portal keys for linking portals, and the destination portal key is consumed when you create the link. So hack portals every chance you get, even when they belong to your team and are already linked. This way if the enemy converts the portals in your play area, you have already acquired the keys needed to do the portal linking when you take the portals back.

You are more likely to obtain a key from a portal when you don't already have that portal key already in your inventory. When trying to farm multiple keys for a specific portal, you will want to drop the key(s) you already have before hacking. Items dropped on the ground last 12 hours before they decay and are removed from the game. Be aware of enemy activity in your immediate area, I've lost keys to nearby enemy players that had snuck up on me.

Always stand as far away from the portal as you can when deploying resonators, the distance a resonator is located from the center of the portal when deployed is determined by what your distance is from the center of the portal when making the deployment. Resonators that are spread out away from the portal will cause your enemy to use more XMP units to destroy the resonators, while resonators clumped together near the center of the portal are easy to take out with single XMP bursts.

The level of the item obtained from hacking a portal is determined by the lower level of either the player or the portal. In other words, if I am L5 and hacking a L8 portal, at most I'll get L5 items. If I am L7 and hacking a L3 portal, at most I'll get L3 items. With the exception being that there is a small chance that you'll get an item that is one level higher on some hacks.

Do a search in G+ to find the Ingress player communities for your local area and join them. The game is built to scale up to where you need teammates to build the higher level portals. You can only deploy to a portal two L6 resonators by a single player, so to build a portal that has all eight slots filled with L6 resonators, you need 4 different players. Players can only deploy one L8 resonator to a portal resonator slot, so in order to build the highest level portal that you can build in the game, you need 8 different L8 players working together.

So once you get above level 5, you'll want to join up with the players in your area for the 8x8 portal farm builds. This is where 8 or more level 8 agents get together and build a portal farm. This gives the players the ability to hack the portal farm for higher level items. Make sure you hack your portal farms until they burn out by making multiple trips through the farm. High level portal farms are quickly targeted for take down by the enemy as it is a means of keeping the enemy's inventory levels low.

Make sure you don't reveal any high level strategy by use of the in game comms...

IMAGE(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-SmtEI4Oy2FI/Un20uQwU6gI/AAAAAAAAAuQ/PlYrytywgbg/w741-h980-no/dontlisten.jpg)

See you on the field of battle!

TEAM BLUE

Well, I guess this isn't the right place to say I picked Enlightened, is it?

Also, there are a grand total of 5 nodes on Sado. They're all green, too, which means all I can do is hack them and refill the resonators from time to time. I was able to swing by and hack them all today and have 40AP (experience?). My app says only 2500 more to go until I reach level 2! Le sigh. Guess I'll have to get out and start submitting places, but in reading the how-to for that it seems that it can take around a month to get stuff approved.

You can also switch control of a portal to the other team by using either the ADA Refactor or JARVIS Virus weapon and then tear it down and build it up as your own. Sad to hear that you joined the toads.