Nun goes octagonal!

[sistawendy]

As of this afternoon while waiting for a test to run I have reached level 8 at Ingress. That means that I can use all of the in-game resources to be had. I did it in a hair under four weeks without receiving any in-game items from anyone, thankyewveddymahch.

This means I'm as ready as I can be for the Anomaly that happens on the 27th. No, I won't be able to stay for the whole thing or the afterparty because my son will be with me that weekend. No, the Anomaly (or, I suppose, Ingress in general) does not seem to be a good way to meet women: judging by the team I've been assigned to, men outnumber women about two to one among Ingress players. But the Anomaly does seem to be a big deal to longtime players. I've seen online chatter about a few coming up from San Francisco.

If you'll recall, three weeks ago I wasn't so sure I could pull this off. My secrets are:

• Busgress. As long as the bus isn't moving any faster than 35 MPH (60 km/h), you can hack portals - thereby acquiring gear - to your heart's content*. It's hard to play strategically that way, but it gets the points.
• Population density means portal density. Downtown, where I work, and Belltown, immediately to the north of downtown, are lousy with portals, and they change hands frequently. That means a lot of them get left neutral - i.e. low-hanging fruit - possibly by people playing from vehicles as I do.
• Parks tend to be portal-rich as well, and I live five blocks from one. Since I can be strategic there, at least on weekends, I put the green in Green Lake, baybee.

*An observation, possibly inaccurate: My bus route, the E line, tends to have more Enightened (green) portals. The parallel 5 has more Resistance (blue). Where the two routes overlap - on Aurora on the east side of Queen Anne - toads rule, d00d. I'm pretty sure I've written here before about how the E is faster, but it's surlier, smellier, skeevier, and skankier than the 5.

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Acquire keys, tons and tons of keys, and man does fielding-along-a-route become a points factory.

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

True, that. I never set out to do that, but hacking as I went paid off.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Boy does it ever.
At some point, a keylocker becomes a fairly useful asset. Key management, and grouping keys from areas into specific capsules, can be a big help in fielding.
If you ever get into more rural areas, grab keys to stuff out in the middle of nowhere, then chuck them in a mufg capsule, and wait. Some day you'll have three or four, and have the opportunity to throw very long skinny fields from two adjacent portals wherever you're at.

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

Dude! This is fantastic advice!

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

One of the leveling-up tools we use locally, for new players, is for us to walk around the outside of a bunch of stuff a couple of times, so each of us has collected a bunch of keys. Then we nuke it, link up the circle around the outside, go to a portal inside, and make links from there to every point on the circle, then nuke that, and do it again, until we're out of keys. You can easily make 100k points in an hour with shenanigans like that, but it requires a lot of care in key management, and that's why keylockers are pretty useful: they seem to keep their colors, so you know the red one is for keys around your house, the yellow one is for commute up to cap hill, or whatever. With capsules, it's hard to keep track of which is which and then the keys get all mixed up and you're fumbling around trying to find the ones you wanted. Totally irritating. It's not so bad if you can just have one empty capsule that you use for the operation you're on because you remember which it was and where it is in your inventory. But over time, that's not organized, and the capsule names are totally not useful.
We keep hoping some day they'll let us rename capsules.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

By the way, I'll bet people are coming in from a lot further than San Fran. In the Shonen anomaly in Denver, people were flying in from California/Washington and driving in from Iowa.

with that said, it's like war: a ton of waiting with a few minutes of hysteria.

Hey. If you haven't done so already, get in contact with local organizers and get some idea of what they need. Generally it works best if you optimize your inventory for either attack or defense. Ideally you'd get matched up with another person who has the opposite inventory. Way more efficient and effective than trying to do it solo, in my opinion.

[ximinez]

"Nuke"? Is that what you call destroying resonators and such by firing xmp at them?

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I'm using it for two different things here, so I'm being imprecise. I usually use 'blasting' when I'm knocking portals over with xmp. I should reserve 'nuke' for using a jarvis/ada to flip a portal for operational reasons.

[ximinez]

I haven't gotten to play with a jarvis/ada yet. Of course, I've only been playing a week or so.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

They show up something like 1/5000 hacks. More often the higher level the portal you're hacking. There also appears to be some relationship between usage and getting them: people never seem to acquire more than about 20-some unless they start stashing them in a capsule, but if you use them regularly you seem to get more. That may be confirmation bias, but a lot of people have made similar observations. (Likewise, people that blow up a lot of stuff seem to get slightly more bursters, and people who deploy buttloads of shields seem to get more shields.)

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

By the way: CONGRATULATIONS on level eight!