Ingress: The Google ARG

sithload wrote:

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.

!!!

Man. I'm level 11 for Life, I think. I do like how differently you can play the game. Like fielding and strategy still interest me, but I no longer have the desire to wake up in the middle of the night because THERE'S A BLUE 8 FARM GOD DAMMIT AND IT HAS TO BURN. Which means my stats are pretty, well, static.

ccoates wrote:
sithload wrote:

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.

!!!

Man. I'm level 11 for Life, I think. I do like how differently you can play the game. Like fielding and strategy still interest me, but I no longer have the desire to wake up in the middle of the night because THERE'S A BLUE 8 FARM GOD DAMMIT AND IT HAS TO BURN. Which means my stats are pretty, well, static.

As enlightened in my town, it is hard to level up. When I started, the areas I played in were mainly resistance, so I could get AP steadily by hacking and the occasional destruction of a portal that someone had forgotten to recharge. However, over the past couple of months, some pretty hardcore enlightened players have turned the areas I go to pretty much green permanently except for two or three portals.

And, like ccoates, no way am I going to go for a 30 minute drive to find portals to hack in order to get AP.

mudbunny wrote:
ccoates wrote:
sithload wrote:

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.

!!!

Man. I'm level 11 for Life, I think. I do like how differently you can play the game. Like fielding and strategy still interest me, but I no longer have the desire to wake up in the middle of the night because THERE'S A BLUE 8 FARM GOD DAMMIT AND IT HAS TO BURN. Which means my stats are pretty, well, static.

As enlightened in my town, it is hard to level up. When I started, the areas I played in were mainly resistance, so I could get AP steadily by hacking and the occasional destruction of a portal that someone had forgotten to recharge. However, over the past couple of months, some pretty hardcore enlightened players have turned the areas I go to pretty much green permanently except for two or three portals.

And, like ccoates, no way am I going to go for a 30 minute drive to find portals to hack in order to get AP.

I've found in areas like that you should reach out to the hardcore and explain you need AP. chances are they'll let a dense cluster of portals decay so you can deploy/link/field them. Everyone can always use another level 8 on their team.

We're fortunate in New Orleans because there's a few areas where if you find them grey, you can easily get 100k-200k AP but deploying/linking/fielding.

I finally hit level 12 thanks to the Roomba (Trekker) badge.

I do have a bunch of portals near me that I am going to start letting decay (all except for 1 resonator) so I can build them up again.

I also realized that I have been building up portals all wrong for the past 7 levels. I have just been putting on high resonators and then working my way down. What I should have been doing was working from the low level resonators up. More AP that way, and each upgrade also counts as a resonator built for the badge.

ccoates wrote:

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.

Woohoo, you helped plan nola? I think agents d0gb0y and crystalbell made it out from cali for that one, if I remember correctly.

mudbunny wrote:

I do have a bunch of portals near me that I am going to start letting decay (all except for 1 resonator) so I can build them up again.

I also realized that I have been building up portals all wrong for the past 7 levels. I have just been putting on high resonators and then working my way down. What I should have been doing was working from the low level resonators up. More AP that way, and each upgrade also counts as a resonator built for the badge.

You only get the AP if you upgrade someone else's resos, though you still get credit towards the badge. Most of the people doing this for the badge have so many AP they don't care, and tag teaming an upgrade takes so long there are faster ways to get AP. I'll frequently do a single level upgrade across the board and move on though.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/wZnXvhQ.png)

I'm happy Snuck in a platinum guardian badge over the holiday, the portal was destroyed at 93 days. Then all I needed was a couple million ap.

On to 16! A little under 16 million ap and another 785 km walked and I'm there. Should only take...yeah, it's going to take a while

I started poking around at this a little while ago. I have no idea what I'm doing, or whether I'm helping or hindering my team. I just made L2, though, so I guess that's good.

merphle wrote:

I started poking around at this a little while ago. I have no idea what I'm doing, or whether I'm helping or hindering my team. I just made L2, though, so I guess that's good.

That's how it goes... until you hit 4 or 5 your aren't hurting anyone. Go play have fun, contact your local group on G+ and someone might be willing to help teach you while leveling you up.

merphle wrote:

I started poking around at this a little while ago. I have no idea what I'm doing, or whether I'm helping or hindering my team. I just made L2, though, so I guess that's good.

The Ingress sub-reddit is surprisingly helpful for newbies.

I'm Pac Man. Why am I Pac Man? And there are green ghosts on nearby portals.

Welcome to April Fools.

All of Google Maps is Pac Man. Go to Google Maps and hit the Pac Man icon in the lower left.

They even made a video. https://plus.google.com/+Ingress/pos...

If you just started, they redcently added XP gains to glyphing (long press hack) which might not be widely known.

Police in Burnaby, BC are turning to Ingress players to help solve recent homicide.

TraderG wrote:

Police in Burnaby, BC are turning to Ingress players to help solve recent homicide.

I'm getting a broken link here? Care to elaborate?
SUPER GLAD I quit playing this game in vancouver, then. jfc.

I found the article here, but in case that one is broken too...

News1130.com wrote:

BURNABY (NEWS1130) – Police are asking members of an online geo-tagging game community to help with their investigation of a homicide in Burnaby.

The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team says people playing a game called Ingress were in the area of Smith Avenue and Moscrop Street on Wednesday night.

The body of 33-year-old Elmer Libertino was found in the area just after 3am the next morning.

Sgt. Stephanie Ashton says officers believe Libertino travelled from Surrey by public transit to the area of Kingsway and Boundary between 2 and 3am.

She says there might have been quite a few people on foot in the area at the time and police are asking them to come forward to tell investigators if they saw anything.

Ashton says Libertino has no criminal record or contact with police, and he has left behind a grieving family who want answers about what happened to their loved one.

Ingress is a multi-player game created by Niantic Labs, a startup within Google, in which participants visit real locations to establish and link together “portals” around the world.

I may not be terribly active but Smurfs! Represent!
IMAGE(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/nEDlm3mlzMUaeEqLH8E5P0swO3nREM5bCRx3n97oo65r=w1691-h951-no)

Quite the child-bearing hips you have there groan!

Dr_Awkward wrote:

Quite the child-bearing hips you have there groan!

Why thank you. I've worked hard to get them to the awesomeness that they are.

groan wrote:

I may not be terribly active but Smurfs! Represent!
IMAGE(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/nEDlm3mlzMUaeEqLH8E5P0swO3nREM5bCRx3n97oo65r=w1691-h951-no)

+1, nice hardware Groan

I've had a good summer. Hit L16 at the beginning of June, picked up my onyx Trekker, Translator, and Guardian, platinum Builder, and crossed 50m ap in August.

Anyone still playing this?

Every now and then I remember I have it, log in, hack a portal or two, then forget I have it again.

I have been a bit more active over the last week or so since Pokemon Go came out. Since they both use the same geolocations I tend to hit the Pokestop/Portal on both apps while I'm there.

I just reinstalled this last night after being disappointed with how simplified Pokemon Go is in comparison. Haven't had a chance to do much yet, but the neighborhood I live in now seems far more active than where I lived when I first played. Should be fun.

I'm next to a portal in real life. They put some picture, I know where it is. And as per Google map, I'm like 50m off...

Is there a way to send adjustment for those issues? Or it's a GPS thing?

Sometimes the photos don't actually match the portal location. There's one near me where the picture is ~150m from the portal location.

You can take and upload your own photo for portals, I think? Portal submission was horribly manual when I first started playing (in beta), so I never got in the habit of taking photos or submitting new portals. There's definitely a way to vote on your favorite photo for a portal, so you might be able to take your own photo and get other people to up-vote it to replace the incorrect photo.

Niantic is famously unresponsive when it comes to portal submission approval and updates. In their defense, they're a very small team managing a game played all around the globe, I think they just get overwhelmed with requests.

I burned out a couple months back, took a break, and started back on Ingress after hitting L20 in PoGo and getting bored. Currently sitting at 83m AP, working on Onyx Connecter and...whatever the Fielding badge is called. I'm about 300 fields away from 10k, and a couple thousand links away from 25k.

Any know if Ingress is still active, or have all the cool kids gone somewhere else? If so, any suggestions on the new ARG hotness, other than Pokemon Go?

Ingress just finished a double XP event. Although I am not active, it seems the reddit page still is.

I think they monetized with branded gear. I don't know any details though.

I resumed playing for several months this summer, it was still pretty active in my area but I imagine it varies from city to city.

Cool - thanks!