Netizen

Friday, May 17, 2013

Ingress: L8 Farm Types

The Unisphere, built for the 1964 New York World's Fair, in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, New York City (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don't think there is one right way to do it. Two things are for sure: it takes eight L8 agents coming together, and the L8 portals are targeted very, very fast.

You pick a time, you pick a place, and you collect the RSVPs. 10 is the safer number. And you maintain silence. All this is common sense. If your location is remote enough, maybe they will not come. But then it is harder to get your agents to go to that remote location as well. It cuts both ways. An odd time like 3 AM might work better -- and I have been to those -- but then again it is harder to get your agents to show up at such odd times as well.

Ideally you want to hack to burnout. It might cost you one L8 resonator per portal, but then you get back about five L8 resonators and five L8 bursters from each such portal. The good part is after agents are loaded they feel compelled to go out there and do some damage. Doing L8 farm events -- and that alone -- might be the top act of a team if the idea is to dominate a territory.

Of course more portals are better. 20 portals are better than 10. 30 portals would be a bonanza. You have to factor in the response time. In Manhattan the response time has been anywhere from 40 minutes to 10 minutes. Sometimes the attacking agent has showed up before the L8 farm even took shape! Because after a few times you kind of know the times and venues. They become predictable to an extent.

There is the thrill of taking down a L8 farm. It is an experience.

Even in New York City there are not enough active, organized agents to make complex events possible. But I organized a L8 farm at the Flushing Meadows Corona Park that just so happened to coincide with an inter-faction event in Bryant Park and I actively sent out a L7 agent to keep a local green agent -- currently the King of Queens -- engaged in battle on his home turf. So we created two distractions, one by accident, another on purpose. I managed two burnouts of half the portals that day.

I like the idea of involving L7 agents in the fightback. It is possible to have enough agents waiting who will keep recharging. In return they get rewarded with L7 bursters. It is not the ideas that are lacking. It's just that there are not enough active, organized agents. And if you can manage a burnout, you don't really care if the L8 portals get taken down, as they surely will.

Ingress: Team? What Team?

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.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Ingress NYC Resistance "Secrets"

Ingress is not a complex game and the two teams have ended up with pretty much similar strategies independent of each other. L8 farms get attacked as soon as they show up. And so maintaining "radio silence," as in doing nothing that shows up on the COMM -- something both sides do -- makes sense to an extent. But I have yet to hear of a L8 farm built by either side in Manhattan that lasted a long time because, guess what, "radio silence" was maintained! As soon as your first L8 portal pops up, it shows up on the map. And by now I believe the map of the city gets "watched" pretty much 24/7. So no matter how much "radio silence" you maintain, your L8 farm is not going to be a secret, it never was. And for some reason both sides are leery of trying something obvious: like, how about looking for farm spots outside of Manhattan! But then derp and Das did show up at the Flushing Meadows Corona Park at one in the morning when Queens built its first ever L8 portal! And Kogent drives over to New Jersey as necessary. On Staten Island there is one guy hacking the blue L8 portals, so it probably makes sense for the green team to let him hit his 2,000 limit instead of bothering to take down his portals.

This is tic tac toe. The make believe I have no patience for. And there are green agents who are like, don't tell me your secrets, because if I know your secrets, my fun vaporizes. The idea of L8 farms: no secret. The idea of "radio silence," not a secret. But wait, maybe the idea of a G+ group is a secret. Maybe the green gremlins organize conference calls, and if they found out the blue smurfs instead use G+ to organize their L8 agents, they might copy the practice, and then where are we! The advantage has been lost!

Event venues and times are secrets that should not be revealed. I buy into that. But the last L8 farm I hacked to burnout I found on the Intel map! Maybe others can do it too!

And there are the really obnoxious agents. They end up suggesting nothing less than that you are maybe playing t-h-e-i-r game! Oh, really!? Elected leadership would make zero sense, and unelected leadership is heresy. Basically the point is, Don't tell me what to do.

What it really boils down to is that this is a game, and it is supposed to be fun. Your Ingress operation is not a CIA operation. All you can hope for is spectacular events. Even there you don't build anything permanent. All you got is not a lousy T-shirt, tomhuze, all you got was a few screenshots. But wait, those can not be shared!

Al Gore invented the Internet and tomhuze and rmazzara invented Ingress! Give me a break. Mazzara is not even at 1.4 million AP. Wait, the guy might have hit 1.5!

This whole thing about helping low level agents level up is also on the weird side. My observation is and has been that there is a reverse pyramid out there. There are way more high level than low level agents. So just go duke it out.

Some people's idea of the game is, oh, you play Ingress? Me too. Wait, you are Resistance? Me too. Let's go have beer for four hours. Today, tomorrow, and the day after, and what is your schedule looking like next week? Nothing wrong with that. It's just that I believe there are other gaming ways possible. And by the way, don't let the other side know we are having beer. All secret societies have secrets.

For my squad membership starts at 2.4 million AP but is not automatic. And for leadership positions you need 4.8 million AP, which I don't have, which I am now working towards. And so when I harvest and deploy an endless number of L1 resonators, maybe I ran out of L8 ammo (NOT) or I am just trying to hit five million in AP, or maybe I am helping low level green agents level up! The game has more than two sides.

This is a game. It is supposed to be fun. And it is not supposed to take too much of your time. It is just that intense fun asks for an elite squad, I think. Niantic, open up the floodgates, let in 10 times more people.

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