Friday, May 17, 2013

Ingress: Team? What Team?

Dutch F-16 Demo
Dutch F-16 Demo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There are hundreds of people who have signed up to play Ingress in New York City over the months. Of those less than 200 have signed up for this or that G+ group on both teams combined. Of those less than two dozen are active in both the game and on G+. The blue team is slightly ahead and does more L8 farm events. The green team mostly does L7 events.

My point being the vast majority of Ingress players act solo. Even those hard core ones who meet to create their L8 and L7 farms mostly act solo. They might meet for some farming, but mostly they go out to play solo.

You can think this is about territory but this really is an AP (Action Points) game. A lot of L8 agents will tell you it is not about AP anymore. And what they mean is there is no Level 9. But strictly speaking it is about AP. It is about fun, and it is about AP. If your idea of fun is playing solo, that is your game. If your idea of fun is teaming up and doing events together, that is your game.

But there really is no team. The global score keeping makes it even less so. Vaguely speaking you do choose one of the two teams. But actual teams that have coalesced are not necessarily essential to the gaming experience.

I do think the game is more fun through the team experience, but with the right kind of team. Many team types are possible.

In New York City currently blue is the slightly more dominant team, but the top agent in the city is on the green side, and by a wide margin too. Actually both of the top two agents are on the green side. And I think that is not accidental. Perhaps that top agent needs to belong to the team that is not dominant. It goes together.

The majority of agents are free agents. Even the tiny minority of agents who are part of loosely organized teams spend much of their game time in solo action. That makes team a rather vague, unessential concept in the scheme of things.

But when there are 10 times more people playing the game, and there are many types of teams moving around trying to put together spectacular events the game is going to be more fun.
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