Ingress: The Google ARG

If you ask in your faction chat, you can usually find people willing to help.

Yeah, but when you practice with pebbles eventually you can throw boulders and then things will get interesting. It really seems like it takes time to make a difference, but you'd be surprised how fast you'll level in enemy territory. You'll learn when one of those portals is weak enough to take and then you can start messing up their days.

Definitely. It's boring when your own team already runs everything... I play more when there's a lot of back-and-forth, or when the other team is controlling more territory than usual (blue team in Seattle is better organized than green, so tends to dominate for longer periods of time).

I just joined a hangout with my local Resitance Fighters and we're 60 members on this hangout. It's cool to be able to chat and coordinate attacks and upgrades.
Got my level 3 this morning. Need to find much more concentrated portals so iI can stock up on Mods and stuff.
I guess I'm heading downtown! It saddens me how much green there is there though. All the better to hack with I guess.

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7779045/ingressdowntown.PNG)

groan wrote:

I just joined a hangout with my local Resitance Fighters and we're 60 members on this hangout. It's cool to be able to chat and coordinate attacks and upgrades.
Got my level 3 this morning. Need to find much more concentrated portals so iI can stock up on Mods and stuff.
I guess I'm heading downtown! It saddens me how much green there is there though. All the better to hack with I guess.

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7779045/ingressdowntown.PNG)

groan, or anyone trying to play, finding a local Hangout is the best way to really get hooked into the game. My little town was green almost all the time when I started playing, and in a way, it helped me level faster. Any time I managed to claim and link anything, it got knocked down fast, and I could claim and link again.

It does suck when you're in the middle of a concentration of high level enemy portals and you can't even hack without your xm bar disappearing fast. There are about 20 portals in a 2 block radius by the train station where I commute from every day, and on days the greens have been active, it's painful to take them down. Definitely helps to do it with friends - I think only one of you gets the damage when a group attacks simultaneously.

I'm level 10, almost have the xm for level 12, but the badges are holding me up. I don't drive to play, I just hack whatever is near me on my daily rounds, so I miss out on unique portals hacked and/or claimed.

If you're trying to level fast and you're short on gear, the first resonator down gives the most xm, and the last resonator to fill out a portal also gives a little boost. Linking and making fields also helps the levels fly by.

Level 6 is where I felt like I could start to have some impact on higher level green portals, so don't get too frustrated early on Recruit friends, level with them, and soon you'll be painting the town blue.

That's nice to have that diverse a map. I live on an island that is all green (seriously, look on the map at the little s-shaped island off the west coast of Japan) and the game lost its fun around winter time.

I started up while I was waiting for a haircut near my house. It looks like there are two portals in my town? I wasn't sure how to scroll around and find more. One was on my way home, so I pulled in, and did...something. It was owned by the other team and was lvl 6 or something. I hacked it, maybe, then I think it did damage to me? It also said I could fire something at it, so I found an item in my inventory that seemed to let me fire it, and that did 1 damage. I'm not really sure what actually happened.

I might check in at work tomorrow to see if there's anything around, but since my daily routine is mostly home > gym > work on highways, I don't know that I'll get much out of this.

I just started playing a couple months ago, and New Orleans is heavily blue controlled, but we managed to pull off this 7-million MU field last week:

IMAGE(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-bZnCMr5Iink/U8bPcYLfdoI/AAAAAAAAAVk/lY47KEiKh5A/w1163-h523-no/9+layer+7+million.gif)

HAIL HYDRA!

daaaaang

cool except its the wrong color.

Are we back to the smurf-and-toad part now?

Hey, you mean I'm not the only Kermit around here? I thought everyone here was a Smurf!

FWIW, here's what Atlanta looks like. We have a metro area of 4.5 million. Get it together, someone!

IMAGE(http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d172/tanstaaflWDM/ingressatlanta_zps2fc88484.png)

It's faster than typing Resistance and Enlightened.

Where are you guys finding the links to the whole area you are in??

If you want a better overall view of the world, and your area, head here.

mudbunny wrote:

Where are you guys finding the links to the whole area you are in??

In game chat normally gets you to a google plus group if you ask.

athros wrote:

If you want a better overall view of the world, and your area, head here.

That's helpful. Looks like there's really not much going on around where I live. There's a portal that my team owns right near my gym, but that's about it in areas where I usually am.

Apparantly, you can also submit portals for your area. Still looking into how to do this.

mudbunny wrote:

Apparantly, you can also submit portals for your area. Still looking into how to do this.

Just take a picture on your Android device (not sure if its available for IOS yet) and in the share menu you share to the NIA Super Ops item.
Sorry for the giant screenshots.
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7779045/Screenshot_2014-07-17-10-55-40.png)

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7779045/Screenshot_2014-07-17-10-56-02.png)

Takes 6 weeks. Make sure to take a good photo first, then stand at the actual object location to fix the GPS pin.

mudbunny wrote:

Apparantly, you can also submit portals for your area. Still looking into how to do this.

iOS Submissions are not working from what I've been reading.

Enlightened here. I enjoy being on team underdog, it's more of a challenge. Vancouver itself seems like a pretty even spread.
Amoebic, of course.

I chose Resistance before I looked at the map, but Fayetteville seems pretty split so it's a wash. Hopped into faction chat and immediately was invited to a secret google plus group (you know because that resistance chat is a spy). Tonight I captured a few portals and did a bunch of hacking. Still struggling with the glyph game. The timing seems off and the touches aren't picking up well. Don't really have the firepower to make a dent anywhere yet, but it was fun. A good excuse to get out of the house and go for a walk at least. According to Google's minute by minute tracking of me I walked 2.96 miles which is pretty good.

In-app chat is full of spies! It's a Thing.

I need to get back into this, now that I have an external backup battery. I stopped playing for a while because I kept draining my phone while I was out running around.

I'm at 1,166 km walked. And I was playing 10 months or so before they introduced stat tracking. Closing in on level 11, with level 12 not too far behind. I have plenty of AP, just need badge stats.

I have one recruitment left. Someone please take it so Ingress can stop reminding me that I have one recruitment left.

i38warhawk wrote:

I chose Resistance before I looked at the map, but Fayetteville seems pretty split so it's a wash. Hopped into faction chat and immediately was invited to a secret google plus group (you know because that resistance chat is a spy). Tonight I captured a few portals and did a bunch of hacking. Still struggling with the glyph game. The timing seems off and the touches aren't picking up well. Don't really have the firepower to make a dent anywhere yet, but it was fun. A good excuse to get out of the house and go for a walk at least. According to Google's minute by minute tracking of me I walked 2.96 miles which is pretty good.

I forgot to talk about glyph hacking. Couple tips.

1. Use your fingernail, not your fingertip, to trace the glyphs. Totally know what you mean about the sensitivity. My fingernail seems to slide better and doesn't give as many false readings. I still get them, but not nearly as much.

2. At first, don't worry about anything but the first glyph, and don't worry about the time bonus. Just getting the first glyph correct will give you bonus gear. Any glyph you can remember after that is gravy, and eventually you'll start to see patterns.

3. Either learn the official glyph names, or name them something they remind you of. I have Pac-Man, Kite, Longhorn, Headphones, check mark (several are named check mark, I just try to remember which one it is ). I know a bunch of the official names as well. I repeat the names in my head, concentrating on the ones I don't remember more than the ones I have down cold. After doing this for a while, I can usually get 4/4 with a 66% bonus on L6 and L7 portals. The increase in gear is really worth it.

I walk when I play, so it's always easy for me to stop and glyph hack. If you're in a car, it's probably better to skip glyph hacking, the portals go by too fast, and moving too fast gives you "hack produced no items" anyway.

If you're looking to level up, remember the first resonator placed gets bonus ap, as does the last resonator to complete a portal. Mods give you ap, but I'd only put on common ones and save the rare and very rare for when you're L8. Linking a portal is an extra 313 ap, and a field is...more. Lol, I've made over 1200 fields and I can't remember exactly how much they give you. It's over 1000 ap. Two fields is 2813, totally laughing that I can't remember a single field ap score.

Blowing up portals gives you ap, and blowing up portals with links gives you much more ap.

Ultrastrikes should only be used if you're standing directly on top of the center of a portal (strips off mods) or directly on top of a resonator. They have an incredibly short range. I think you also have to use an US that's at least as high as the portal level to strip something off in one shot, maybe a level above the portal level. They're really nice for stripping a well-defended portal of mods, which makes it much easier to take out almost any level portal.

And links in (or out?) of a portal add damage mitigation as well, I think. Sometimes it's better to take a couple less-defended outlying portals and remove the links from a heavily-linked portal.

It's probably been linked, but Decode Ingress is a helpful site. And it's quite possible some of what I've written isn't entirely correct, I don't keep up with changes to the game as much as I could.

Hope that helps, even if you're a frog

Interesting article about playing Ingress

Meeting strangers in the street

Whew. That kind of absorbed my life for awhile.

I guess that's the problem with games that are always on.

Taking an Ingress break after nearly killing myself helping prepare and plan for our local anomaly THAT WE WON. A bright spot of green in an otherwise blue series.

Haha, congrats on the Anomaly win I'm still playing, but not obsessively. Plugging away at badges (just got gold Liberator today, 5,000 portals captured) and I'm one platinum badge and 1.8 million ap away from level 15.