Ingress: Real Augmented Reality in Real Life. Really.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Ingress: Real Augmented Reality in Real Life. Really.

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Meatsicle posted:

Does this actually happen?

Someone was harassing local players, doing things like threatening to call the police and report them for suspicious activity when they were playing at night even though they were on public sidewalks. There was also a married couple who separated because the husband took the game way too seriously and was a huge dick toward his wife, but they've both quit and patched things up. I forget where, but I think there was a case where some George Zimmerman wannabe pulled a gun on a player and accused him of being a drug dealer because he circled the block around a post office a few times trying to get a GPS signal.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2013 17:16

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 13:33

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

DrPlump posted:

They just threw away any ability to ever punish 3rd party apps. Everyone who does not own those phones is going to go 3rd party to an app that supports using the new item.

The only difference between this and other new items is that you have to have a different phone to get it in the first few weeks (or edit your build.prop file to make Ingress think you have a new phone :ninja:

) instead of using codes.

Zodijackylite posted:

The most recent update has rendered my Droid X almost completely useless, the game is nearly unplayable. Portals take a very long time to load (I waited 60+ seconds next to one that didn't show up until I was 200m away) and I get a lot of lag and failures simply attempting to recharge a portal that I'm standing next to. Unless this is just a rough spot today, I probably can't play the game much anymore.

Oh, exclusive items for new Droid phones? Makes sense.

I have a Razr Maxx and I've been having the same problem, probably with the same portals as you (took the better part of a minute for the nearby portal box for Cascades to show up, then another 30s to load the portal itself.) It's also a huge pain when I'm playing on the train and portals don't load until I'm out of the station and out of range. It's mostly in areas with spotty coverage.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2013 18:12

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Zodijackylite posted:

There's a portal at the other end of the building I work in. Enlightened players have been taking it and it would usually be at level 5. They are also very quick to start recharging portals, and one of them even complained when we had three people on one portal (two of us getting a low-level friend some AP while drunk) and went out at 3am to take back a level 2 portal. I decided to take a different approach.

I keep my phone plugged in with Ingress up, and I fire off a low level burster every 5-10 minutes. Doesn't take it down, but it notifies the owner every time I do. Every once in a while I'll fire a few level 5s so it looks like it needs recharging. After that, back to burning those low level bursters. A week later I took it back and nobody came to attack it.

It's an MMO, you hit the level cap and start griefing other players.

The local term for this is "doorbell ringing," as in the old prank of ringing the doorbell and running.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2013 04:40

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Two local players were hit by a car while in a crosswalk this past weekend. One just caught the mirror and is OK, the other went over the hood and into the windshield and needs an MRI on his knee to find out how badly it's damaged. Remember to never trust drivers and stay aware of your surroundings when you're out walking.

On a lighter note, a portal in range of my office went live today, thank God for rare heat sinks.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2013 18:12

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

cheese-cube posted:

Who was at fault in the accident (I'm leaning towards the pedestrians, staring at their phones when they should have been checking for oncoming traffic).

The driver was at fault.

Mister Fister posted:

FWIW, Stamford's drivers make Boston's drivers look like driving instructors.

Where'd you hear about this btw?

They were up in Monroe, I think. Heard about it from local players who know them.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2013 19:26

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Obakan posted:

So I installed this game and finished the tutorial and to try the game out I figured I would take a stroll around were I live and attack some of the local enemy portals. Needless to say I was a little surprised when literally within minutes a group of four people with android tablets and a hand held GPS were walking around trying to find me.

Is this game safe?

You may run into the kind of obsessive players you'd get with any other MMO, but there have only been a few incidents of people being confronted about suspicious behavior. One guy chatted with my brother and me, asking what we were doing since we had walked by his house (a historic building and therefore a portal,) a few times. We explained the game, asked if he had a few minutes to tell us more about the history of the house, and offered to invite him to play (unfortunately he had an iPhone.) The San Francisco PD talked to the press with Niantic saying that the increased foot traffic in 24 hour parks had made them safer. There have also been a few phone snatchings and as I mentioned recently two local players were hit by a car while in a crosswalk (the guy who ended up on the windshield is going to need a lot of knee rehab if not surgery) so exercise common sense and don't stare so intently at your phone that you lose track of your surroundings. Just exercise common sense in general and you'll be fine.

For the most part, once they find out you're a real person and not a double agent, your side will accept you and the other side will either be friendly rivals or whiny dicks. I've made friends in the local community and there are a lot of cool people One of the local guys asked if anyone needed an Android/KitKat contest code since he'd won his $5 and wasn't eligible to win again; I said I hadn't, he gave me a code, and I won a Nexus 7. There will be people who take the game Really loving Seriously, but laughing at them is as much fun as playing. The big thing is to get into your local G+ communities and hangouts and get to know people

FistEnergy posted:

Most of my fellow Cleveland greens are cool. There's a few blues that blatantly cheat with either several accounts or location spoofing, which goes unpunished, but for the most part we all get along and at least say hello to each other.

I'm one of the few people on either side in my area without even a mule alt account. There's a lot of heat from both sides about alts (we don't make L8 portals with ours, they do, but they accuse us of alts constantly and it goes nowhere,) but our communities have strict rules on what you can do with alts before we'll throw you to the wolves.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2013 04:48

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Well that was intense, the Jarvis Shard from NYC was evacuated to a portal in Westport CT overnight since it had been someone's Guardian portal and a lot of people had keys to keep it recharged so they knew they could keep it recharged. The plan was to transfer it to a portal at Avery Point in an area with heavy Resistance presence as an intermediate stop on the way to Bermuda, but Enlightened managed to take down the link every time, once with only 4 seconds to spare. People started clearing links at 9:30 with the hope that it could be transferred at 10AM At about 4:30, Resistance on Long Island came together to clear blocking links, we made the link straight to Bermuda, and one of our agents took out the portal they were going to make a blocking link from and slowed them down. Traffic was heavy and I actually manned the crosswalk button to give an all-walk signal and delay traffic as they drove to the shard portal. The clock hit 5 and the shard transferred after 8 attempts with several of our people having gone 33 hours without sleep since they had initially driven from Eastern CT to NJ last night due to lack of reinforcements down there.

If anyone sends a shard to CT again, the enlightened can loving have it.

kitten smoothie posted:

It was really more a deal Google made with Google, but in any case, if you have one of the new Droid phones you are able to get "Ultra Strikes" from hacks. Anyone can use them, if you pick one up that was dropped.

An Ultra Strike is basically a focused XMP. It's only really useful if you are standing right on top a resonator when you set it off. I guess one reason to use it would be if you're in an area dense with portals and you want to surgically take out high level resonators first, before you go firing off XMPs and having all of the portals zap you back at once.

In any case though it's not super useful all the time and I don't think it changes gameplay in any sort of material way.

You can also pop mods if you're on the center of the portal. Great for portals with bad resonator distance, too.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2013 02:02

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Qu Appelle posted:

Huh.

My triumph was to submit 12 portals. I don't know if they'll be accepted, but my subdivisions were tragically lacking in them.

Hopefully, that has been rectified

The accept/reject process is a crap shoot. Every time they're rejected, submit them again with increasingly stupid cringeworthy "creative" names and eventually the person who goes through them will laugh and accept them.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2013 04:09

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Portal submission appears to be entirely based on whether the reviewer has the drinking bird toy pecking at "Y" or "N" that day.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2013 18:57

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

FrickenMoron posted:

Players with cars and time to spare totally dominate the game here. With the recent changes a drive by via commuting is harder to pull off, depending on the portal defense. You can't fire 20 bursters in 3 seconds anymore.

I miss carpet bombing from the train. If you fired fast enough, you'd get a nice visual of the Doppler Effect and watch resonators explode as the shockwave hit all of them.

FrickenMoron posted:

Players with cars and time to spare totally dominate the game here. With the recent changes a drive by via commuting is harder to pull off, depending on the portal defense. You can't fire 20 bursters in 3 seconds anymore.

You can still stack them by forcing your device into airplane mode and queuing them up, then letting it reconnect.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2013 15:54

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

This morning's operation hit a few bumps, but Resistance now holds a solid lead with 1.1 billion MU to Enlightened's 430 million.

STFU Pumpkinhead posted:

What do I do with hundreds of X1s?

Am I missing something simple when it comes to inventory management? There doesn't appear to be a way to multi-select or select quantities of items.

Drop them while walking around and draw dicks on the map.

edit: up to 1.2B MU, and for those who started playing more recently, today Ingress is one year old.

GWBBQ fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Nov 16, 2013

# ¿ Nov 16, 2013 13:39

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Higher levels and missions are coming. beyond that, Niantic's people are unclear. It would be awesome to get a badge for handling a shard, but if nothing else my agent name is on the SitReps for Unight8 operation.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2013 04:41

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Word on the street is that it wasn't for using IITC per se, it's because once they optimized the Intel map the mobile client started hammering the server with requests and it was automatically interpreted as an attempt at denial of service.

Hooters Etailer posted:

Welp beat my edit. Don't disagree that the official one sucks, but obfuscating some numbers/mechanics is totally a thing I could see them intentionally doing.

IITC was only able to get all that data that you couldn't see on the official Intel map because it would send all of that to the client but never display it. Aside from all the location data mining, Ingress is gathering valuable data by all but asking dedicated players to try to game the system in any way they can. I think I've mentioned it before, but Google has received patents for novel methods of detecting falsified device location, the only reasonable explanation I can imagine for the client-side fuckery that's possible is that they want to watch us do it so they can learn from it.

Maker Of Shoes posted:

Came in to post this. Maybe now I can can actually get some Guardian badges without some poo poo heel trolling portal age in IITC.

I feel the same way. It's obnoxious as gently caress that the local ENL normally don't even bother to get out of their cars to take down portals but a few days before you get a guardian badge someone drives to a portal they've never been to and hits it with a Jarvis Virus.

GWBBQ fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Dec 2, 2013

# ¿ Dec 2, 2013 01:31

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Peanut3141 posted:

So I've been 8 for quite a while and have become tired of driving around accomplishing nothing in the end due to the massive effort it takes to keep a large number of portals recharged.

Is it wrong that my main reason for playing the little I do is to report invalid portals and combat the ridiculous buildup of bullshit portals now that people are looking for their seer badges?

Maintaining farms is a huge pain in the rear end now, you need a few people for it to be practical. The XM increase has helped some, but it still decays ~135k a day total. Miss a day and there go all your power cubes. I've also thought about submitting some portals for deletion considering they're all seasonal art and most of it was long gone by the time the game was released.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2013 02:46

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

EscortMission posted:

Just got an agent survey from Niantic asking for basic marketing information in exchange for ~special items.~ While I'm down with receiving free treasure, I'm also kind of wondering why Google just doesn't use the data they've no doubt already gathered about the players.

Items are free for them to give out and they don't ask at the register whether you're going to use the code under the Hint water cap.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2013 17:39

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

I am Roland Jarvis and I am Hell Bent For Leather *fog machine*

# ¿ Dec 15, 2013 03:52

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

chemosh6969 posted:

Anyone still playing? I just heard about this a week ago and it looks like it just started picking up in my area. There was a a bunch of unclaimed portals around me but now they've all started to get claimed. Go team terrorist smurf!

Plenty of people are playing (I think they let slip that they had over 100,000 active unique accounts playing,) but we could be a lot more helpful if you give us a general idea of where you are.

# ¿ Dec 26, 2013 13:47

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

chemosh6969 posted:

Ah. I did this a couple days ago and thought you could but now I'm seeing I didn't really do that at all.

So would it have been better to do something like what I did or work on less fields but bigger ones? I'm thinking for the AP that the large group of smaller ones would be better but possibly worse for the MU(?) of the faction.

Do you want to maximize AP, maximize defense, or strike a balance between both? Maximizing AP is easy to do, portal defense is laughable and anyone who tries to do it should be laughed at.

WhiteHowler posted:

MU is basically meaningless. You did the right thing - make as many tiny fields as possible for maximum AP.

Big fields are generally just vanity projects for bored level 8's.

We were talking about this in a local chat again today, and I said what I've always said: Ingress is an MMO and what you do in MMOs is hit level cap then grief people. AP and MU are points, but the real score is kept in your community's gallery of screenshots showing whining and complete meltdowns by members of the other faction, plus the people in your ranks you've convinced to put in for faction change.

Of course I'm saying that from the perspective of a CT Resistance player, our situation is a bit unique.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2014 04:59

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Major enlightened op just happened, most of the western US and parts of Canada and Mexico were covered by megafields. I missed the total at three biggest, but with two of the big anchors down already, they're still ahead by 100M MU. I guess we can stop making fun of them for lighthouse now.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2014 02:02

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Definitely suspicious, but considering my local group gets accused of cheating frequently with no basis (in reality we're just much better organized,) I'll at least wait at least until the accused people have a chance to respond.

GWBBQ fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Jan 13, 2014

# ¿ Jan 13, 2014 04:09

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Maker Of Shoes posted:

On the flip side there are crazy obsessive people. Just came across a local guy with 33 million AP. The only explanation for that is that he plans his day around a cell phone game. Every day.

People have done some crazy poo poo for this game. Off the top of my head there was the Russian team who sent a shard from Russia to Israel then flew down, drove a few hours, and sent it to the next destination, one guy managed to get permission from Russian state security services to access a restricted area to move a shard, a group who chartered a helicopter to fly them over Yosemite to capture portals for an operation, and your run-of-the-mill obsessive players.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2014 04:17

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

I'm seeing Screenshots of Very Rare Force Amps in the wild in confunction with today's anomaly. Also, for anyone who plays casually and doesn't follow the storyline groups on G+, looks like we're about to start seeing XM Artifacts that need to be moved to faction-specific portals. Looks like it will be the shards all over again; hope you've been saving your link amps.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2014 02:23

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

# ¿ Feb 21, 2014 02:21

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Exit Strategy posted:

Could be worse. We had someone here with 149 days in their Guardian. A fellow Enlightened ADAd and popped it to be spiteful, and was promptly uninvited from the AM01-KILO-10 coordination G+.

Up here it's a fierce competition for Guardians, people will drive hours to take one out. This is up in New England where an hour is a long drive in general.

cheese-cube posted:

My local G+ group doesn't have that much drama on it but god drat I've seen some huge dummy-spits on All Comms

Stupid arguments are a sign of good teamwork.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2014 02:35

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

If your local high-levels are taking all the AP, have you tried asking them to help you out? If you did that around here, we'd be throwing items at you and giving you a heads up before we cleared anything or let it decay. Some areas have no organization or are just pants-on-head stupid, but for the most part people want to help new players.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2014 16:23

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

I was exchanging items with someone today and he didn't know that you can hold the plus and minus icons when loading and unloading capsules, so that's another thing to make note of.

Also, I was reminded of the real hazard of Ingress today when I walked walked into a tree while taking a screenshot of a new badge.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2014 21:42

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Qu Appelle posted:

Ok, thanks all.

At least the Recharger medals are easy for me to get; I recharge portals as a matter of course. Almost at silver.

And I'd already have the silver Seer medal if Niantic approved portals that I submitted, that are legitimate and are allowed under the rules Until the new batch get processed, I'm stalled out at 46.

The submission queue is backlogged because a few hundred people who got banned for using Broot Mod banded together to poo poo up the game and pledged to submit 100 invalid portals a day per person. Niantic had to put together a whole team of people to go through the backlog of 750,000 bullshit submissions.

# ¿ May 16, 2014 02:11

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Spoofing, multiple accounts, sharing devices/playing for someone who isn't there (during 13MAGNUS, some teams would load up an account with keys and ship the phone to teammates in other areas.) Not to mention harassing and threatening people in real life

# ¿ May 26, 2014 17:43

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

EscortMission posted:

Spoofing and multiple accounts are real dumb but I think the sending a phone to other teammates through the mail is cool as hell and totally within the spirit of the game.

I mean its still buying an entire phone for a free-to-play video game and its probably still not kosher by the terms of service but that's totally something a clandestine cyber-Illuminati agent would do to get an advantage over the enemy cyber-Illuminati.

gently caress people who take it so seriously they'd harass another person over it though.

I completely agree that it's in the spirit of the game, but Niantic said you can't do it.

There are some people who will take any game too seriously and all you can do is report them to Niantic and/or the police. Fortunately there are decent people on the other team around here who try to rein in teammates who are toeing the line and will also report them if they cross it.

WeX Majors posted:

I just got a story about that very thing. I managed to find the one portal in my town NOT in a parking lot of the actual portal. There's a small Bridge about a cars length long with a sign for the river it's... Bridging. The portal Is SUPPOSED to be for the sign, but it's actually off to the side of the bridge somewhere in the brush. This Bridge has no sidewalk leading up to it, but the bridge itself has one, but only on one side.
Anyway, I hop over there and take a seat on the side of the bridge and flip the thing. As cars race by at a solid 50mph, I get messages from three separate players from green saying there's NO WAY I was able to get that portal without spoofing.
This just confused the poo poo out of me, cause clearly SOMEONE already had, but this thing was so remote and worthless and technically dangerous I just let it go and didn't bother with it again.

Farm keys, you've found your spam link target.

People will always whine and make accusations of spoofing, the poo poo I'm referring to is more serious stuff like threats of violence, trying to run people off the road, and intentionally coming inches from clipping people with their cars.

GWBBQ fucked around with this message at 20:51 on May 27, 2014

# ¿ May 27, 2014 20:46

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Pyroxene Stigma posted:

This happens even on expensive flagship devices. GPS only needs to be "good enough."

I just ran GPS Status & Toolbox (first time I've used GPS today) and got a time to first fix of 2 seconds and a precision of 33 meters. I'm indoors. I have a Moto X, not a high end phone, if you can't get a good enough lock to play Ingress your phone is broken. Try using GPS Status to clear AGPS data if you're having problems.

Cithen posted:

And again... This iOS release teasing is bordering on the absurd.

The joys of the Google/Apple dickwaving war.

WeX Majors posted:

Also, my point about the Link Amp still stands. It's a mod designed to do the exact opposite thing of what the rest of the game is designed around (going local). Really Portals should just have that ability full stop.If I can link some portal on the jersey shore out to...idk, somewhere in Africa, why should I need a mod to do that?

Look at how many resonators of each level you can deploy on a portal. Working as a team to do anything big is as much a part of the game as going local.

GWBBQ fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Jul 13, 2014

# ¿ Jul 13, 2014 23:05

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Killer-of-Lawyers posted:

Police calls, lost jobs, breaking into federal cemeteries, cheating, fights, we've had it all. Both sides are probably just as bad, but no one wants to admit that their poo poo stinks so the factionalism is rampant.

I probably should quit, but it's a fun game when I'm not getting into fist fights.

And here I was thinking I was being underhanded at the shard event to hit the push-to-walk button spuriously to delay incoming Enlightened players stuck in traffic another 30 seconds for an all-pedestrian phase as we approached the shard jump time.

Killer-of-Lawyers posted:

The data scrapping is a thing that happens all over. They removed the information on the website about how old portals are, which of course, doesn't stop it at all.

I had a portal in a forest I tossed a bunch of 1's on when driving back from Houston for the holidays, and a few portals near by that I tossed an 8 on and later filled out with 1's for the builder badge.

A week later someone messages me at 2:30 am with 'Guardian?' and takes the portal that was all 1's out. To do so he drove past all the other level ones I set up, right off the road, in plain site. If he was scanning intel for lvl 1 portals he'd have seen them as well, they were only 4km away. Never mind the fact he would have seen them when he drove in the middle of the night to take the portal out.

I'm guessing when they scrape they ignore anything that isn't filled with lvl 1 resos, as is standard for guardian portals, probably to avoid pulling a gigantic list of portals that just have an 8 and a 7 on them. Either way, it's a bit lame, but what can you do about it? I'm sure the ENL that do it feel justified because some RES were caught spoofing, or whatever. I just wish they kept the dates on intel, so you could at least legitimately hand scan intel for guardians of whoever takes yours down. Now you can't even do that.

Automatic searches are straight-up cheating, and there is still a way of doing it by sniffing scanner-server data. The hunt can be done cleanly and legitimately. Harder now that you don't have a date for anything, but not impossible.

GWBBQ fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Jul 17, 2014

# ¿ Jul 17, 2014 03:42

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Exit Strategy posted:

I agree with (Niantic developer) Joe Philley. Guardian hunters are the scum of the Earth.

I fully understand the frustration (every one of my guardians has been hunted and taken out,) but it's a core game mechanic and I think it's ridiculous to get bent out of shape over it as long as there's no scripting or spoofing involved.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2014 15:30

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Exit Strategy posted:

Oh, as long as they're not cheating I'm fine with the practice. I just find that people who are dedicated guardian hunters tend to be bullies who didn't get the memo.

Killer-of-Lawyers posted:

The problem is that there's very obvious scripting and such involved, like I said.

Some of us do hunt legitimately. I know my teammates are being legit because so many of them have no idea where their guardian is or who is recharging it for them.

PerrineClostermann posted:

What's the best way to get my rear end from 7 to 8?

Make lots of fields in dense areas. If your local team is halfway decent, ask them to leave a local farm or two for you to link up next time it goes down and stock up on a couple of keys per portal.

thehustler posted:

Is training bugged? I think I've finished everything but I can't get First Contact to "complete". Everything is greyed out.

Never wonder if something in Ingress is bugged. It's always bugged. It took them well over a year to make the compass needle point in the right direction.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2014 14:57

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Resistance have taken a slight lead

# ¿ Jul 18, 2014 21:12

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Anomaly weekend is coming up, I'm heading up to Boston. The Shard was fun and I hear this is a lot more intense. Everyone is going to hate me for saying this, but I'm hoping nobody manages 700M Mu and the decay rate stays where it is. It's nice to clear out all the stupid links and have room to make bigger fields

Bobulus posted:

I was curious about the mechanic behind shields breaking before the portal goes down. I've seen plenty of shields break from lv8 weapons, but I've seen lots break from lv1 weapons, too. What's the mechanic behind that? Is it just a % chance to break per attack, perhaps with a different percentage for each weapon level? Or is it a hidden 'shield health' stat that decreases with each attack or what? I know ultrastrikes work better if you're standing inside the shield, but do regular weapons take down shields better from within?

Niantic aren't talking specifics, but I've burned a bunch of gear trying to figure it out and regular weapons definitely pop mods faster from inside the shield. I think mod stickiness is linked to total portal energy, but they're also calculating damage on mods (no idea in what order, though.) I think there's a significant drop in attenuation once you're inside shield radius.

kitten smoothie posted:

They had a map of how things should be linked? That's just silly.

We have maps for how to link and farm clusters for max AP and optimal defense; max AP helps people level up, optimal defense keeps the farms standing so we can all stock up on gear. Our community has a lot of awesome people who want to get new players leveled up and generally help people out. Just last week we had a couple of out-of-state players coming through and we all sent them our farming maps and instructions for how to get there, they passed through CT with a few hundred more unique portal visits.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2014 04:12

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Teddybear posted:

So what's the deal with the anomalies tomorrow? One's popping up in Boston, so I feel like I should give it a whirl.

It's the 11th hour to get yourself assigned to a group, but if you're in your team's local hangouts ask if you can do anything. Anomalies are nothing like regular gameplay and you'll probably be assigned a single task like "put shields on the portal every time one falls" or "mash the deploy button."

Sonictic posted:

I was having the same issue so I just used bluestacks to load ingress and complete it there which worked fine.

Interacting with portals running Ingress in bluestacks will get you hit with at least a two week automatic ban last I heard.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2014 04:21

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Scipio Africanus posted:

Boston people - if you haven't heard otherwise head to Danehey Park a little before 4 and look for people in green/blue with wires sticking out of their phone.

We met up at Danehy Park and there were all of 3 enlightened there. Apparently their coordinators weren't interested in a cross-faction meetup, which was kind of disappointing but at least a bunch of players were willing to chat after the event.

Resistance lost overall, but I was with the old Compo Beach shard team and we scored for the 4 volatile portals we were assigned to.

Killer-of-Lawyers posted:

So most of the back story isn't succinct. The writers aren't that great (I read a post by one of the 'sensitives' and I had to vomit after reading about uber cabs in it. I'd say start with the book, and go from there. It covers the whole basic back story of the niantec project, epiphany night where everyone goes crazy, and ADA hunting down Jarvis and trying to merge with a government assasian. After that the lore is all done up in document leaks.

The books are impressively bad. The Niantic Project: Ingress and Ingress: Level 8 are great examples of how not to write sci-fi, and The Alignment: Ingress might as well be Indiana Jones fanfiction (actually, if you've ever seen the made-for-TV movie series The Librarian it's more like fanfic of that.)

thehustler posted:

Just tried to fire my first ever ultra strike. Didn't work at all. No animation or numbers or whatever. What's that about?

I wanted to knock a shield off a portal.

If this was happening yesterday any time between 20:00 and midnight UTC, it was probably because of lag due to the anomaly.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2014 17:31

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Killer-of-Lawyers posted:

Ugh. Fun game. Bad writers.

On the upside, trolling fans of the actual story is loads of fun.

I enjoy pointing out to my teammates that story-wise, we (Resistance) are far from the "good guys" as is typical of sci-fi resistance movements. I casually follow the story/could pick Susanna Moyer and Roland Jarvis out of a crowd, but the game is fun for me because we have a great local and regional community of people I like playing with and hanging out with.

Aside from the anomaly yesterday, I went on a day trip the previous weekend with my brother and two other players for something non-ingress-related and after we were done we spent a couple of hours wandering and driving around Brooklyn and playing Ingress (it's accepted in our community that it's OK for a passenger to play on the driver's phone in addition to their own so the driver can pay attention to the road.) One of the other people got the unique portal captures she needed for level 13 on that trip.

GWBBQ fucked around with this message at 02:23 on Jul 28, 2014

# ¿ Jul 28, 2014 02:20

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Apparently someone forgot to submit the Resistance group photo for Boston to the Ingress Report so the photo of my anomaly team was in the Ingress Report email as the Boston picture. Hooray for nerd cred, I guess.

Deceptive Thinker posted:

I'm not in the NH group so I can't know for sure - but based on stuff I've seen him post, you're probably right, though I still don't think people have any way of knowing what the day was other than the old google docs spreadsheets (or his own) that are probably still being updated

The capture date is still sent to the client when a portal is visible on screen. You can't access it legitimately, but you can by packet sniffing. Isn't it great to leave "features" in so that only cheaters can use them?

Teddybear posted:

Overnight resistance set up a field with points in New Hampshire, Vermont... and Bermuda.

And people say link amps are useless.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2014 16:06

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 13:33

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

EVG posted:

Saw a trail of keys leading away on my way home today. Would have followed it but I was on a bus. If I had picked then up, would I have hosed with someone's carefully arranged message/plan?

Guess there's no way to know! Can you see who dropped an item?

Chances are they were at item cap or sick of having so many keys and just dropping them. Someone dumped a bunch of keys from Europe at one of our farms today, it should be fun to see what we can do with them.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2014 00:12

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Ingress: Real Augmented Reality in Real Life. Really.

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