Episode: 1233
Title: HPR1233: Playing Ingress
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1233/hpr1233.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 22:04:38

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In today's edition of Thought Kindness, the pseudonymous epicanus of the asylum for the
sufficiently nerdy discusses observations from beta-testing Ingress. Google's new location
and driven capture the flag game. Next, on it, I mean, hacker public radio.
Hello, once again, everyone. Before I get started, for everyone worrying about how
Bunnies is doing, it's fine. For anyone who hasn't heard my previous submissions, Bunnies
is my Linux laptop, which I got from a Linux company called O'Hava Computers. O'Hava
actually just helped me out with getting the wireless networking going again after the
internal card it came with apparently started going senile, so I figured they deserved another
quick unsolicited plug because they're awesome. I know, I've mentioned them every episode so far,
but I promise they're not paying me to do it or anything. Though, hey O'Hava, if you're listening
and want to pay chill, let me know. Today's episode is already getting pretty long, so I'll just
leave it at that and get on with it. Originally, I'd planned that my next episode was going to be on
the subject of geotagging, but something else came up, and so instead today, I'm going to start by
describing one of the most unoriginal and brain-desolvingly tedious video game concepts you've ever heard.
Yeah, I know, this is the second and maybe third episode in a row where I said I was going to do
geotagging, but then ended up putting it off. I swear, I'm not trying to make this a running gag
or anything. Besides, today's episode is somewhat related. But first, the game. Imagine I'm trying
to sell this concept to a major video game company. It's like a capture-the-flag thing, right?
And like, there's two teams and players sort of decide which team they're going to join at random,
and when they first start playing. And instead of trying to take a flag from somewhere and return with
it, it's like you have flag poles and you hang flags on them. But the other team cuts them off and
hangs their own flags, and you like take turns taking down each other's flags and hanging up your
own. And if you do it enough, you can get bigger flags, but then your opponent gets bigger flag
cutters, and so it's the same thing, but like harder. But also, you do it forever because you don't
actually win or anything. You just keep doing it. Wake up! Stop snoring! This is awesome! Because
also, there's lots of these flag poles, and you scroll around all over the game world so you can
put up your teams' flags on the flag poles and cut down the opposing teams' flags. Woo! No, wait,
don't call security on me. There's more! See, if your team has three flag poles at the same time,
and the flags are big enough that you can see them from the other poles, and you can say that the
triangular area between the flag poles belongs to your team for special team points. No, the special
team points don't do anything, but it's special team points! Well, I mean, the other team players
keep getting your flags anyway, and you lose the points again, but still, isn't that more awesome
than any three other awesome things? No? Okay, maybe not. That actually sounds pretty friggin stupid.
Okay, now let me describe something that is pretty nifty. It's exactly the same thing, except
the video game flag poles are real places, and instead of scrolling around on a screen,
players get off their lazy butts and actually go there. Also, the playing field is the entire world,
or at least that portion of it with some sort of internet access available. That brings us to
Ingress, the location-based game being developed at Google by their Niantic Labs group,
and which is currently in what they're calling invitation-only beta testing.
I had actually forgotten that I'd put in for a beta testing invitation early on until it showed
up at my Gmail account back in mid-December of 2012, about a month after the testing started. As
of when I record this episode, I've been playing, testing, and investigating the game for about three
months, and what you will hear today is a somewhat organized collection of observations and opinions
I've developed so far. This was originally going to be all one episode, but it started getting pretty
long, so I decided that rather than bore everyone for two hours, I'd split it up into sections.
You're listening to the first section now, which is simply about playing the game.
The second section will be about what I think is the more interesting topic, which is playing
with the game. I may even extend into a third episode on the fluffier subjects of the philosophy
of the two factions, and the story in which the game is set, and how I'd design a game to cover
features that don't fit in English, but which I would have liked to see and so on. At least,
that's the plan at the moment. While I suspect that English started with some sort of fairly ordinary
concept involving hidden computer nodes in some sort of international cyber-war scenario,
it seems that sometime early on, the premise of the game went way out there, and is now the stuff
of comic books, okay, graphic novels, and science-flavored fantasy stories. Going back to my description
of the hypothetical boring game, in Ingress, the virtual flag poles are called portals, which,
according to the backstory for the game, are special places where some mysterious influences
pushing from some unknown dimension and ingressing upon our world. Somehow, this influence appears
to inspire or compel people to mark these places with memorials, displays, or artistic expressions,
which is the explanation for most of the portal locations being statues or other public artwork,
monuments, exotic architecture, historical sites, and so on. There's an ongoing archive of
various media being added daily at NianticProject.com that is fleshing out the game's story.
But to give you an extremely abridged and non-canonical version, these portals are a source of
exotic matter, which is a phrase I can't say without picturing a little trademark symbol at the end.
Anyway, this stuff turns out to have impressive but somewhat unpredictable effects on the minds of
people who can sense it. The story talks in very vague terms about mysterious hypothetical
beings from another dimension that it calls shapers, which might be influencing and guiding people
sort of like the muses of Greek mythology. This happens through the influence of this exotic
matter, which everybody now just calls xm, because evidently it's cool to avoid using whole words,
especially when you can pretend one of them starts with an x. Anyway, scientists working for
a secret project discovered all this accidently exposed themselves to a bunch of it during an
experiment, inspiring some of them to go rogue and run off and explore further for their own agendas,
while the mysterious National Intelligence Agency, or NIA, tries to keep things under control while
pursuing their own sinister agenda of world domination or whatever the heck it is there up to.
The players of the game are agents of one of the two rogue teams or factions. One of these is
referred to as the Enlightened. This is the faction that sees the beneficial inspirational potential
of xm and wants the technology available to uplift all of humanity before it gets suppressed by
the other faction and completely owned and controlled by the NIA alone. This other faction is
the Resistance, who have been convinced that this is all some sort of frightening and nefarious
mind control scheme by ancient aliens from another dimension, and so they want to use it to
control the minds of people in such a way as to scare them away from what the Enlightened are trying
to do. I should admit that this is slightly different from the way the official game documentation
describes it. There, this situation is presented with something of a deluded weak-minded hippies
helping nefarious aliens from another dimension in slave humanity versus brave freedom fighters
who are awesome and cool like Batman and everyone will greet them as liberators' angle,
which I honestly think is skewing the balance of participation in the faction slightly,
possibly by design. That's kind of silly given that both factions' players' goals are exactly
the same in terms of how the game is actually played. Meanwhile, the role of the NIA is played
by anionic labs itself, giving the developers an in-game persona to correct problems and explain
adjustments to the game world during the beta testing. Either way, the explanation for why the
players are running around messing with their phones is that the Ingers application actually
involves secret exotic matter technology leaked from the NIA labs, which allows the players to
interact with all this unseen stuff from another dimension. Getting back to the mechanics of the
game, players literally run around collecting virtual XM from around portals and scattered in
other places and then interact with these portals to gain virtual items made of XM, with which the
game is played. Well, okay, maybe not literally run. I mean, you can walk or bicycle or drive or
unicycle or in some cases even kayak, but I mean players do literally go outside and move around
to do this, not just scroll around on a screen. The virtual flags that go on the virtual flagpole
portals are called resonators, which claim the portal for the player's faction and increase
the strength of the portals. The virtual flag cutters are exotic matter pulse burst weapons,
which are actually just called XMP bursters because using hold words is for dorks. When you set
them off, they damage and destroy nearby resonators belonging to the other faction, and once you've
destroyed all the opposition's resonators on a portal, you can put your own faction's resonators
on it. Each portal can have up to eight resonators, then the opposition can come back and do the
same thing and claim it back, repeat as necessary. That right there is pretty much the entire core
of the whole competitive part of the game, and I swear it's a heck of a lot more fun than I just
made it sound. Other than the special effects, if you think of claiming a portal as checking in,
deep down, the game can be thought of as a slightly more competitive version of any other,
hey, everybody look where I am right now, app. The XKCD webcomic actually described the game as
four square with space noises, which is both amusing and not too far off, though naturally there's
a bit more beyond that. For one thing, levels. Players, resonators, XMPs, and media, which I'll talk
about later, all have levels that go from one to a maximum of eight right now, though rumor has it
that's going to be extended. For players, level is the familiar concept from many other games,
where it determines in a general way how capable the player is, based on the earning of experience
points. Oh, sorry, I'm using whole words again, I mean XPs, there now I sound cool again.
In Ingress, the player's level is formally referred to as access level, and this level goes up
as the player accomplishes tasks to earn what they're calling action put AP. The player's level
really just affects two things. The maximum amount of raw XM that the player can collect and
carry around at one time, and the maximum level of XMPs and resonators that the player can actually
use. XM in Ingress is more or less analogous to energy or fuel, or to what a traditional
zap-death magic and swordfight game would call mana. It gets used up for just about anything that
gets accomplished in the game. It also sort of fills the role of what most games would call hit points
or health, except that instead of virtually dying and losing the game, if you run out your scanner
just doesn't work right and you can't do anything else until you've collected more of it to
recharge yourself. I'll come back to the uses of XM later. For resonators, the level determines
how much damage it can withstand, and influences the effective level of the portal itself that it's
attached to. For XMPs, it determines the maximum damage they can do to the opposition's resonators.
Since the effect of XMPs is a circular wave spreading out and dissipating from where the
player is standing, kind of like that special effect in Star Trek and Star Wars movies,
it also determines the maximum range of effect. A portal's level is based on the average of all
the resonators attached to it, including the missing ones. That is, the total levels of attached
resonators divided by 8, rounded down to a minimum of 1. For a portal, the level determines the
range of levels the items you get from it can be, and determines the range at which it can link
to other portals. Well, yeah, linking, that's one of the bit more beyond that things. Hang on,
I'm working my way over to that. There are exactly three things a player can do with a portal when
they encounter one. Well, three and a half. For portals that are unclaimed or are controlled by
the player's faction, the player can attach items to it from their inventory. As I assemble
this information, there are exactly two items that can be attached. Resonators and portal shields,
which I didn't mention yet because they don't have levels. Attaching one or more resonators to
an unclaimed portal is just how you claim it for your faction. The other interaction a player
can initiate with a portal is referred to as hacking. Hacking portals is how you gain exotic
objects for your inventory. A player can hack any portal repeatedly, but no more often than once
every five minutes, nor more than four times in four hours. You can hack any portal no matter
which faction if any controls it. However, if you hack a portal controlled by the opposition,
it may also attack you draining some of your XM. On the other hand, hacking an opposition portal
earns you some action points, whereas hacking unclaimed or friendly ones gets you none, so at least
there's that. In all cases, the result is anywhere from zero to several exotic matter objects added
to the player's inventory. In addition to XMPs, resonators, media, and portal shields that I've
already mentioned, hacking may also get the player a portal key, which will bring me to the subject
of linking, which is the third thing that players can do with a portal. But first, I'm going to skip
tracks and go off an aranting tangent about the use of the word hack here. Let me start by proposing
a definition. Hacking is the art of finding novel or unexpected uses for a system. That's the
definition I use anyway, or welcome to disagree with me. I have a big problem with them using this
word for this activity in the game, though maybe not for the reason you might think. It's obviously
not because I think hacking means doing bad things, so we shouldn't say what that's what players
are doing because I don't think that. It's not even because I think other people think hacking
means doing bad things so we shouldn't say that's what players are doing. In fact, I think the
solution to that particular problem is dimension hacking more often in as many contexts as possible.
It's even plausible that whatever pressing the hack portal button symbolizes within the game
world, it might even fit my own definition in letter if not in spirit. No, my complaint isn't
philosophical or political or even semantic. It's aesthetic. While it seems to be impossible to
find anyone who can or will say exactly what sort of in-game action pressing the hack portal
button is supposed to represent, the background story material seems to imply that in some way,
it involves activating incomprehensible technology to invoke some sort of magic psychic powers
in connection with ineffable, transdimensional alien intelligence to gain uncanny knowledge of
how to shape exotic matter into new forms with which to control the unseen world. Calling that
hacking just seems like a ridiculously utilitarian understatement. By analogy, imagine if this were
a fantasy-themed augmented reality combat game where the players wander the world, gathering
virtual ancient mystical powers with which to destroy their rival players from the other team.
And then, when the rivals meet, they invoke these ancient mystic powers which command vast
cosmic forces to smash their way deep into their opponent's minds to dissolve their very souls!
Okay, got that pictured in your mind? Okay, now imagine that the button in the app that
represents this activity is labeled stab opponent. Okay, rant over. I've actually got some
suspicions about what that hack portal button really represents, but that's a fluffier
topic to save for a later episode. Meanwhile, back to linking. A key for a particular portal can
be used for two things. One use is that a player can use a portal's key to remotely send some of
their XM to recharge the portal's resonators, which without a key you need to be there on-site
in person to do. Recharging resonators is the half part of the three and a half things I
mentioned. I'm calling it half an interaction because if you want to be pedantic enough,
you're really not interacting with the portal itself, but just the resonators attached to it.
Once resonators are attached, they actually decay at a rate of 15% of their capacity per day,
so in order to keep them from decaying to nothing and disappearing after a week,
players need to periodically feed XM to them to recharge them. When an opposing factions player
attacks a portal's resonators with XMPs, all the XMP really is doing is instantly draining off
more of the resonators XM, so recharging is also how you repair damage from attacks. You can't
replace completely destroyed resonators by remote, but if you have a portal key, you can at least
recharge the remaining ones back to full capacity after an attack. A portal's key can be reused for
this purpose as often as you want. The other thing you can do with a portal key is form links between
portals. To link two portals, both of them must have a full valence of eight resonators.
The portal the player is standing at needs to be of high enough level that the other portal
loops is within its range, and the player needs to have at least one portal key for the portal at
the other end. For this, the key itself is used up to form the link between the two portals.
If three portals are linked to each other, the triangular area within the links becomes a
quote-control field. For linking range, if you really want to know the detail, the range over which a
portal can link is its exact portal level including fractions, meaning the sum of the portal's resonator
levels divided by eight, to the fourth power times 160 meters. In Ingress, the two factions
collectively are competing in a sort of meta-game where they're both struggling to apparently inflict
exotic matter-mediated mind control in the general populace. That's what the control fields are for.
The factions' own scores are rated in mind units, which are calculated from estimates of the real
world population that lives within the virtual field. The faction score has no direct effect on the
player, but links and fields do have strategic value, because links cannot cross other links and
fields cannot be formed inside of existing fields. So you can use placement of links to thwart
the opposition's attempts to make links, or if you're not careful, thwart yourself, which can be
a problem since forming links and fields is a major way to earn AP. Actually, there is one other
thing you can do with a portal key, though it's not strictly part of the game. You can check
on portal locations you have keys for, even if the portal is unclaimed or owned by the opposing
faction. With the portal key, you can see the little thumbnail picture of the real world portal
location. You can see the condition of any resonators attached to the portal. If applicable,
you can see who the current owner of the portal is, which is to say the code name of the player that
last initiated a claim on the portal, and you can see additional information about the real world
site of the portal if there is any available. For example, if it's a historical monument,
there may be a few paragraphs about whatever historical event the monument is there for.
So, in addition to being a game piece, a portal key is also a virtual souvenir, which I think is
kind of neat. There are two other kinds of items you can currently get right now as I record this.
In addition to the eight resonators a portal can have, a portal can have up to four quote
mods, unquote. Right now, the only mod that exists is portal shields. These reduce the
amount of damage that XMPs do to the portal's resonators. Portal shields don't have level ratings,
but they do come in common rare and very rare variants, which are worth a quote mitigation,
unquote, rating of 6, 8, or 10 respectively. Before you ask no, I don't know exactly what those
numbers mean, and so far I've not found anyone willing or able to say. The common consensus, though,
is that these are probably percentages. The official word is that this mitigation rating does stack
up, so there is benefit to putting four portal shields on a portal, but each additional shield
after the first is less effective than the previous one in some way that is never clearly explained.
My guess is that each shield's effect is applied successfully, so that if you had, say,
two shields with a rating of 10 each, instead of damage being reduced by 80%, it's really 90%
of 90%. Portal shields last until all of the resonators decay away or until they are destroyed by
opposition XMP attacks. The last type of item currently appearing is media. These are currently
really just website links to images, audio clips, and video that go with the background story,
most are all of which I believe can be found at nianticlabs.com. Hypothetically,
each of these may have some sort of clue hidden in them to a so-called passcode,
which can be typed into the scanner to give you free bonus game inventory stuff until they're
redeemed. I've not yet encountered this aspect of it myself, and I've seen people complaining
that by the time they get their own copy of the media and puzzle out the clue if there is one,
too many people have beaten them to it, and the passcode comes up as already redeemed and therefore
worthless. These days, the way to get passcodes seems to be to watch on the internet for someone
to publish that they've decoded one, and jump into the app to type it in as quickly as possible.
You'll have about 5 to 10 minutes, and if you're quick enough, you'll get a few hundred points
of XM, probably about 200 action points, and one or more things at a dear inventory.
Not a huge reward for the difficulty in obtaining it, but still, this is kind of a nice touch
and something that I could see being made more effective use of later. Now about all that XM,
you collect and say while playing. That gets eaten up if you're attacked by an enemy portal,
which will happen if you either hack the portal or attack its resonators with XMPs.
The higher the level of the portal, the more XM they drain. Don't actually worry too much about
this. The amount of drain is actually pretty small for lower level portals,
and again, you don't die or anything if you lose it all, you just end up needing to walk around
and collect more XM before you can do anything else. Also remember that portals themselves normally
have large amounts of XM for collection associated with them. You also use up XM in the actual
hacking process itself, which costs you 100 points of XM per level of portal, or three times that
for opposition-controlled portals. I like to think of this as pulling out a lot of exotic
matter from your stockpile, and then, under the guidance of the mysterious forces from the portal,
you form that matter into whatever items you end up with. The level of the portal tends to dictate
the level of the items you get. Typically, most of the items will be the same level as the portal.
Therefore, if you are hacking a level 3 portal, you can expect to see level 3 XMPs and level 3
resonators showing up as a result, though items may sometimes be a little lower or higher level
than the portal itself. You might also get nothing. Enemy-controlled portals resist this process,
and you get less from them as a result. Also, remember that unclaimed portals are still technically
level 1 portals, so you can also get items from them, including portal keys.
If you're into the spirit of the game at all, most of your XM will end up being spent recharging
your portals, or other portals belonging to your faction. Resonators decay at 15% of their capacity
per day regardless of their level, but higher level resonators have higher capacity,
so it can take quite a bit of labor to collect XM to keep a higher level portal near full strength.
There are two ways to recharge a portal's resonators. When accessing the portal from the scanner
screen, either by remote using a portal key or in person, one of the buttons there is labeled
recharge resonators. Using this to recharge the portal will put exactly 1000 points of your XM
into recharging that portal's resonators, spread evenly among any that aren't at capacity.
It's worth remembering that if you're charging by remote, the efficiency goes down with distance.
The penalty isn't too bad, but it's an extra cost to be aware of. I was maintaining some portals
that are about 500 kilometers away at one point, and the efficiency for me was about 70%.
The other way to recharge can only be done in person at the portal. From the same screen,
there's a button labeled upgrade portal. In addition to replacing existing resonators with higher
level ones and installing portal shields, from this screen, you can select and recharge individual
resonators directly. There's currently a token action point award of 10 points every time you
recharge something, so you can get a few points taking your time to maintain portals. If you're not
into the spirit of the game, and are instead just insecure about the size of your player level,
you might just let the resonators rot away for a week until the portal reverts to being
unclaimed and then go rebuild it again for more action points. You gain action points to increase your
player level by either building or destroying. You get points for attaching resonators to a portal,
attaching portal shields or other hypothetical mods that may be added to the game later,
creating links between portals and forming control fields. There are additional bonus action
points awarded for putting the first resonator on an unclaimed portal, which also makes you the
owner of the portal, and for putting the eighth resonator on a portal to give it the full collection.
Destroying gives you 60% of what building is worth. So, for example, attaching a resonator to a
portal is worth 125 points, destroying a resonator is worth 75. Building a link is worth 313 points
for some odd reason, and forming a control field is worth 1250. So if you damage or destroy the
resonators on a portal at one corner of a field, enough to make the links fail, you get 187 points
for destroying one link, 187 points for destroying the other link, and 750 points for also destroying
the field. As you can imagine, if the portal whose resonators your attacking has multiple links and
is the corner of several fields, you can score a lot of points all at once by successfully attacking
it. As I mentioned before, you also get a flat 100 action points for hacking a portal that belongs
to the opposition faction. I count this as a form of building since you're really sort of manufacturing
items out of raw XM. It's worth noting that as I write this, level plays no role of any kind in
determining action point rewards, destroying a level 1 resonator or a level 8 weight resonator
gets you 75 points either way. Finally, more game jargon and numbers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, I hope this hasn't all been as tedious for you listening as I fear it might be.
Let me just throw in a couple of strategic observations I've made while playing the game,
and then I can wrap this up and start working on the next episode with the more subtle stuff.
Most of the strategy is commonly known, but some of it might just be me being full of crap.
You'll have to test and judge for yourself when you play. One of the first strategic elements
that you'll end up considering and dealing with is the placement of resonators. Ingress takes
exact location into account when taking control of a portal from the opposition, and where an attacker
is physically standing directly influences how much an XMP burst will damage each of a portal's
resonators. So far, this is the only element of the game that makes particularly precise use of
location. The common wisdom is that when you take control of a portal, you should spread your
resonators out as far as possible. Trying to control exact placement of individual resonators in
their circular pattern around the portal is somewhat awkward, but controlling the distance is easy.
When you attach a resonator to a portal, it will appear at the same distance from the portal as
you were when you attached it. Out to the maximum range of about 35 meters or so. The intent here is
that by spreading the resonators out, it minimizes how badly multiple resonators can be damaged by a
single XMP burst. For example, if you're standing right at the portal location itself when you deploy
all eight resonators, the resonators will all be right next to the portal and an attacker standing
there will be doing near maximum damage to every single one for each individual XMP burst they set
off. If they're spread out as far as possible, the attacker has the choice of standing at the portal
and doing relatively low damage to all of the resonators or standing at the location of one
resonator at a time and doing near maximum damage to it, but relatively little or none to the others.
Put simply the ideas that spreading out the resonators make sure opponents work harder.
Although you can't place resonators precisely, they do end up arranged along the cardinal
compass directions around the portal, north-south east-west, north-east-north-west-south-west.
From the portal information screen, if you select upgrade portal instead of just pressing deploy
resonators, you can actually pick and choose which resonators to put in which direction.
For this part, you don't have to walk around, only your distance from the portal matters.
This might be useful if you're mixing up resonator levels on a portal.
One restriction I haven't mentioned yet is that there are limits on how many resonators of a
particular level an individual player can attach to the same portal. One player can attach up to
eight level one resonators, up to four each of levels two three or four, two each of level five or
six resonators, and just one each of levels seven and eight. Geez, more tedious details.
Slap yourself awake, this won't take long. One effect of this is that by yourself,
after first level you can't actually build a portal level as high as your player level.
In order to accomplish that, you'll need to collaborate with another player.
However, an individual fourth level player could mix, for example, two level four resonators,
four level three, and two level two to build a third level portal.
In this example, you might want to try to put the harder to replace fourth level resonators in a
hard-to-reach spot. For example, if the portal is an entrance to the south side of a large building,
you might want to stick your fourth level resonators on the northern end of the portal so that
they're virtually inside the building. This can't make them immune to being damaged,
but it does limit how close an attacker can get to them and somewhat limits the damage they
can do. In my own opinion, which more hardcore players may or may not agree with,
this does make a fairly large difference when dealing with lower level attackers,
but for mid to high level attackers, this trick becomes more of an annoyance than a serious burden.
As the increasing range and damage of higher level XMP bursters, not to mention the tendency
for higher level players to hoard hundreds of XMPs so they never run out, makes the extra
few meters less and less meaningful. Because of this, I like to consider psychological
defenses when I place resonators. One of the minor unavoidable annoyances with Ingress is the fact
that players can effectively buy advancement. I don't mean directly from Niantic Labs,
but indirectly from any gas station. Players who can afford time and money to drive around will
advance much more quickly and easily than some poor Schmuck who has to walk or bicycle everywhere,
unless you happen to live in a place like London, Boston or San Francisco where there may be
hundreds of portals to work with nearby. One side effect of this is that there are a lot of
players who are lazy and impatient. If I'm capturing an apportal that isn't immediately at a street
or sidewalk or parking lot, I'll sometimes intentionally bunch up some or all of the resonators
close to the portal, such that an attacker has a hard time doing much to them without getting out
of their car and walking up closer. As I said, I don't think this makes much practical difference,
but I think this may tend to put off a lot of the potential opposition who may just drive on by,
not feeling like it's worth the effort of exposing themselves to the cold,
cruel elements outside of their comfy car seat. Otherwise, if I just conventionally
spread the resonators out as far as possible, the one or two sticking out so that a casual
drive-by opponent can virtually park right on top of one and destroy it easily might bait them
into stopping to do it, at which point, well, they've already parked and started attacking,
can't stop now, might as well go ahead and get out and walk over and finish the job.
I'd like to think I'm seeing signs that this actually works as a defense,
but in truth, I haven't been playing enough yet to really tell for sure.
Other than this specific situation, all you really need to worry about as far as location
is managing to get within 40 meters of a portal or a patch of XM so that you can interact with it.
As far as I can tell, getting any closer makes no difference in the results of portal hacking or
XM collection. The one other major strategic element that comes to mind is the formation of links
and fields, which I mentioned briefly earlier. Building links and fields is an extremely useful
way for a player to earn action points and increase their level, since any player of any level
who has a portal key can make links. As I mentioned earlier though, links cannot cross other links,
and you also can't form links from a portal that is completely inside of a control field.
In addition to potentially accidentally cutting yourself off or other members of your faction,
you can use this intentionally to slow down advancement of the opposition. By building a link
across an opposition controlled area, you can cut off potential action point earning links
that they could form, and if you manage to build a field that covers their area,
you can stop them from getting additional points from linking and field building completely,
at least until they get around to attacking the portals you use to make your links.
Conversely, since destroying links and fields is worth bonus action points,
you may want to avoid making links and fields in areas that are likely to be attacked.
If you have a collection of portals that you farm for equipment,
keeping them unlinked makes them a less attractive target.
Of course, if things are getting boring, you might want to intentionally make as many links
as possible in hopes of baiting the opposition into showing up and giving you something to do.
At this point, I think I've covered all the basic elements of the main game,
or at least I'm not convinced that if I keep shoveling details at you, it'll do much to improve
the explanation. There are more strategic details involved in how links and fields work,
and how you can coordinate with other players, and how you can exchange items from your inventories
and so on, but I think it'll probably make more sense if you google that stuff up or ask around
what you start playing. If I board you to sleep while I was joining on about the rules,
don't worry about it too much, it's actually pretty easy to pick up when you start playing.
Speaking of starting playing, I should probably talk about faction choice for a moment here.
Once you've gotten the ingress application installed and your account is connected so that you
can play, there is a series of training missions that covers the basics of gameplay.
After the training missions, you'll have a chance to choose which of the two factions you want to
join, so don't let the fact that the resistance appears to be the default, throw you off.
After the training missions, you get a pep talk along the lines of
join the resistance, everybody's doing it, you gotta join the resistance if you want to be human,
but then another voice comes on, and more or less says the resistance is the tool of the man
to keep humanity down and you should join the enlightenment. Then you get a screen with a blue,
join the resistance button on top, and a green, join the enlightenment button at the bottom.
Choose carefully, because if you change your mind, you have to petition Nyantik Labs to let you
switch, which can take a few weeks, and involves pretty much resetting your player account back to
nothing. Also, if they let you do it at all, you only get to do it once. There are a few
considerations when it comes to making this choice, but really there are just two ways to choose.
First, once you've got your account activated and have the game running, pull up a web browser
on your computer and go to www.engress.com slash intel. That's the Gameworld map, which is an
overlay for Google Maps. Look up the areas that you're likely to be spending the most time playing
in, presumably your home or perhaps where your work or go to school, and see which faction is
currently dominant. Then, if you're into the spirit of the game, you ignore what you see and
just join the good guys. If not, and you don't care if you end up working for the bad guys,
you'll generally want to join whichever faction is less dominant where you're going to play,
because having more opposition will give you more opportunities to earn action points and level
up faster. As I said before, the gameplay goals of the two factions in the game itself are exactly
identical, despite the melodramatic presentation of the conflict, so your choice won't change what
you'll actually be doing. It's up to you and your personal philosophy to decide whether the good
ones are the ones individually seeking to reveal the hidden shoes for the benefit of all humanity,
or the ones willingly working together in lockstep with a secret, quasi-governmental
organization to hush everything up and take control of themselves. What are you looking at me like
that for? Somebody has to try to balance out the presentation here. I do have some additional
observations on the two factions, but I'll save them for later when I get deeper into the parts
that might be of less interest to the just want to play the game crowd in the next episode or so.
I think this more or less covers the regular gameplay, or at least as much of it has been
implemented up to this point, so I think I'll wind up today's episode here, and no wait,
I haven't had a chance to complain properly yet, so let me do that first. I should point out that
I really enjoy Ingress a great deal. It's a delightful implementation of a location-based game,
and has completely sucked me in. At this point, it's even got me occasionally posting sort of
in-character comments on Google Plus threads that all most amount to fanfiction, and I usually despise
the idea of fanfiction. It's also given me a good excuse to more thoroughly explore areas that I
live in and visit far better than their previous attempt with their field trip app, and I've actually
learned quite a bit about my new hometown's history, and started noticing even more than before
the kinds of things that most people just walk past without paying any attention to. As an amateur
geodata nerd, I'm also especially jealous of the people working at Niantic Labs for getting
to work on this game. Hey, if anybody there at Niantic Labs ever hears this and you're hiring,
let me know. Anyway, the point is that I'm winding up this piece of audio with a bunch of complaints
just because this is a convenient place in the audio to do it, rather than because I don't like it.
Ingress does have a number of flaws, limitations, and frustrations I've run into. Much of this has
to do with the fact that this software is in Google beta testing, and is expected to need fixing
and adjusting. Reportedly, beta testing is expected to go on for about a year and a half before
general release. If you find yourself playing Ingress before late 2014, you will almost certainly
be acting as a software tester for something that isn't quite finished. I really ought to go a
step further and say if you're playing in the year is till 2013, chances are good that what
you'll be testing isn't even really in beta yet. A quick review of how most software developers
seem to use the terminology. Software that is beta normally means that the programmers have
finished putting in all of the planned features, but the features have not been fully tested and
may still have some bugs that need to be found by people trying the software out. As of right now,
in early 2013, Ingress has not even reached that point yet. There are plenty of planned features
that are still not even implemented, and even the basic rules of player still subject to
potentially dramatic changes based on how the game goes. This state is usually referred to as
alpha testing, where enough of the software is working to be useful, but doesn't even have all
of its parts written yet. That being the case, my first complaint isn't about Ingress, it's about
some of the players. As often seems to be the case, there is an annoying portion of the player
population that seems to think beta testing means I get to play a cool new thing for free with
no obligation at all, and the whining from these game consumers who don't really want to
participate in actually coping with the growing pains and making the development easier can get
really irritating at times. This isn't unique to Ingress at all, of course, but Google being a bit
more of a famous mainstream name, it seems like they certainly have more of these people playing
than a typical open source project in alpha testing would. Just something to be aware of,
if you think you're going to be frustrated and angry, if nionic labs allow us flaws to exist
longer than you'd like, just wait a year or so until it's closer to general release before
you start playing. This is not to suggest that there aren't legitimate complaints going on
currently, even among the winers. Here are some. Probably the two most common general complaints
that pop up can be condensed down to either it's too hard for me to win, or it's too easy for
someone else to win. The whiner version of the former usually involves someone complaining that
they got on a car and drove some distance to assault some collection of opposition portals,
and they weren't able to take it all over and make a bunch of their own fields from it,
and it's just no fair because if they drove all that way, they should be entitled to take over
everything. While that complaint is being bitterly relayed in one comment thread online, next to it,
there's likely to be someone else complaining about the latter issue, saying that they spent days
of hard work traveling around taking over portals and collecting portal keys to build a big field,
and then some weeny from the opposition just showed up and blasted the virtual crap out of it
in under five minutes and destroyed all their hard work, and it's just no fair because if they put
all that effort into it, they should be entitled to have people prevented from undoing it for a while.
I've got to admit, I've got a little bit of sympathy for that one,
and both sides of the situation have reasonable people objecting along with the whiners.
It is true that right now destruction is much easier than building up. My cynicism about
resonator placement earlier is a reflection of my experiences with this. Some recent gameplay changes
have actually made both sides of this issue more prominent. For one thing, when the game started,
resonators decayed by 10% per day instead of 15. For someone stretched to keep their existing
portals charged, this makes it much harder to avoid losing portals to natural decay and having
to go rebuild them when they finally fail, and means keeping links and fields going as substantially
harder, especially if they span long distances. They've also recently changed the behavior
of portal shields. Originally, portal shields stayed on a portal until all of the resonators were
destroyed. Now, the shields end up destroyed during the attacks, leaving a portal's resonators
unprotected as the attack continues. Combine this with the fact that players have noticed that you
don't have to wait for one XMP burser to go off before queuing up the next one to fire,
and it means that any moderately well-equipped player can drive up and park in front of a portal
location and push the Fire XMP button 10-15 times in a few seconds, wait half a minute or so for
them all to go off and see if any resonators are left before doing it again. The fact that it seems
to be typical to do it this way, instead of getting out of the car and carefully walking around
to position one's XMP detonations near resonators in an optimal fashion, suggests that most players
tend to be well-stocked up on equipment before they hit portals and don't need to take their time.
Since attacks like this are finished so quickly, there's really no way to actively defend
a portal, unless perhaps you happen to be standing right there within 40 meters when it happens,
in which case you can frantically hit the deploy resonator button to try to replace them as fast
as the opposition can destroy them again, and hope they run out of XMPs before you run out of
resonators. You can also hypothetically use the remote recharge capability of portal keys to recharge
resonators while they're being damaged, but that depends on being alerted to the attack,
getting the ingress application started, scrolling over to the portal key, selecting it,
and hitting recharge resonators repeatedly and getting all of that done faster than the enemy
can rapid fire the Fire XMP button. Good luck with that. On the other side of the issue,
when you are the one doing the attacking, if you've shown up well equipped, it's very likely you'll
successfully take over the portals you're after. However, you're likely to find yourself frustrated
when your subsequent hacking of these portals gets you few or possibly no portal keys with which
to build links and fields. This is another gameplay change that happened not long after I started
playing. Originally, the way portal key availability worked is that when you hacked a portal,
if you didn't have a portal key for that portal, you'd nearly always get one,
but if you did have one, you wouldn't. I assume the idea was that if you used the key to
make a link, you'd need to go revisit the portal a second time in person to get another key to
be able to recharge the portal's resonators by remote. Of course, there's an obvious loophole,
because you can drop items to put them on the virtual ground for someone else to pick up,
so players would show up at a portal, drop their portal key, hack, get another key, then pick up
the key they dropped before. Five minutes later, they'd come back, drop the two keys, hack,
get a third key, pick up the other two, and so on. Now, portal keys show up at random,
just as other items do, and they're not common. It's pretty typical to drive to a remote area in
hopes of picking up portal keys so that you can link to portals there, only to hang around until
you've hacked all you can and end up with no portal keys anyway. If you started early in the game,
when you could decide to spend an afternoon virtually painting a whole rival city with your
faction's color, and be confident of having plenty of portal keys to build a control field
when you got there, this might seem like a frustrating change. As annoying as this destruction
favoring situation can be, I think it's actually necessary right now because of another common
complaint. Right now, the player advancement curve is very oddly skewed. A new player,
starting at level 1 in an area where opposition players got a head start and are a few levels
ahead or more, may find themselves it's surrounded entirely by higher level portals belonging to
the opposition. Since hacking opposition portals tends to be costly in XM and usually provides far
less return in terms of equipment gained, and if the portals are higher level than the player is,
may often end up providing equipment that is of too high a level for the new player to even use,
a new player in an established area may be literally incapable of mounting any kind of
effective action against the opposition, and has to rely on hacking enemy portals 100 times to
get from level 1 to level 2, which gets pretty tedious, especially if there are only a few
portals in the area. Hacking 200 times to get from level 2 to level 3 would seem almost
intolerably tedious, and beyond that, the idea of advancing entirely from action points earned
from hacking enemy portals a few times a day is pretty much infeasible. On the other hand,
once a player reaches somewhere around fourth or fifth level, if he or she can manage to stock
up enough equipment of an appropriate level, they can probably take control of just about any
opposition portal. The situation is almost as bad if a new player starts in an area controlled by
their own faction, in which case it's not nearly as difficult to build up a good stock of equipment,
but it's possible that there will be no way to earn action points at all, except for getting a
token 10 points at a time for spending half of the new player's XM recharging portals.
The adjustments that make portal ownership more volatile helps with this, because it makes it more
likely that a new player can find an neglected, partially decayed opposition portal to attack,
or a spare friendly portal that might decay away and need to be rebuilt from neutral and then
relink to the local network for more points. A great deal of both sides of this problem is also
being alleviated by the rapid growth in the number of portals available in the world.
Even as recently as a month ago as I record this, portals were so scarce that it was usually
pretty easy for whichever local faction got a head start to control and monopolize all of their
local portals. Now, the addition of new portals is being ramped up, and the huge number makes it
more likely that you can find an neglected or even unknown portal to claim for your own,
and makes it less urgently necessary for the opposition to use up their inventory trying to
destroy every single portal that your own faction can manage to claim. I'll get to the useful and
exciting topic of how new portals get added to the game first thing next episode, but for now
I'm not done complaining yet. Speaking of portal issues, another problem that comes up is misplaced,
non-existent, or inappropriate portals. I'll be talking more about this next episode as well,
but in short, you can still find a lot of portal locations that just plain don't make sense.
Post offices supposedly located in the middle of an empty field,
fire departments sitting in front of some random stranger's house,
a block away from the actual fire department, 10 different portals for the same tourist attraction
scattered over the space of a whole block, portals named Untitled, or which appear to be random
pictures of trees or squirrels or fast food restaurants, otherwise legitimate portals that appear
to be in a restricted area and so on. For today's episode, just be reminded that portal locations
are all game features, and therefore all of these issues are actually bugs to be reported.
There is a page at support.google.com slash ingress with a contact us button where you can report
these problems so they can be fixed. I'll cover this in detail next episode. One last complaint for
now. Google pays its employees lots of money. All right, that's not actually a complaint,
other than maybe a bit of petty jealousy on my part. Seriously, are you guys hiring out there?
But it's what I infer from the game right now. It would seem that Google employees involved with
ingress can all afford phones with 1280x800 resolution and unlimited 4G data plans and external
battery packs. At the time I'm recording this, the current release of the game is version 1.21.3,
so if they fix all of this in 1.22.0, don't make fun of me I swear I'm not making this up.
The game actually works pretty nicely at the recommended minimum of 800x48 resolution,
but even there you'll occasionally see places where the screen elements are smashed together
oddly because somebody somewhere keeps forgetting that screens are not a print medium,
and it doesn't make a lot of sense to design everything with a fixed number of pixels.
You'd think web heavy companies would get this by now. Maybe somebody needs to apply the
boot of encouragement to the seat of complacency somewhere in Google's Android department and finally
get native SPG support into the operating system. And tell them to hurry up with native
opus codec support while they're at it. Sorry, getting off track there. Those of you with
phones that are decently fast but have screens with lower resolution than 800x48 are likely
to find this game unplayable. As the fixed size elements, the user interface is made from
smash into and overlap each other. You didn't hear this from me, but if you search around,
there are unsanctioned, unofficial repackages of ingress made with lower resolution graphics that
reportedly play just fine on these phones. In addition, somewhere around release 1.20.0,
the amount of data that the client exchanges with Google server seems like it has exploded.
The app doesn't appear to cache much of anything, so every time you go through your inventory,
it seems to re-download all of the portal pictures for your portal keys,
and it isn't able to pre-download and cache road vectors, and so it's constantly re-downloading
map data. It is also probably relaying additional location data beyond what it did before,
as part of Niantic Lab's efforts to spot cheating, which is a problem I've thankfully not run
into, but plagues players in some areas. The upshot of this is that you can easily eat hundreds
of megabytes of data just driving around playing ingress. And if you're in a place like the US,
with you serious charges for data and horribly restrictive data caps, this can become a major problem
for you. It also seems like it causes major performance problems at times, as I'll often notice
that, if some game action seems delayed, my data indicator seems to be showing a constant
stream of data at the same time, as though the game were pausing to finish exchanging some big
wad of data with the server before letting me continue. I'm hoping the next release of the client
improves this problem, but in the meantime, the best you can do is try to always start the game
when you're in wireless land range, and wait for it to download your local data before moving
onto cell network data. Ingress will also mercilessly devour your battery while it's running.
I see many people blaming this on the GPS, but I'm pretty confident that's not the problem.
Instead, it's the constant data transmission and the graphics heavy screen updates that do it.
If you have a good, reliable phone, just having an external charger to run off of should take
care of it for you. If you have the misfortune of having to try to play it on a crappy Samsung
mesmerized with its flaky prone to failure radio chipset that needs to need almost constant
rebooting after an hour or two of use if it gets overheated, such as when the CPU is working hard,
running Ingress while I'm trying to get it charged back up, and the charging circuitry is
generated the same time, trying to keep the battery fed, and you just want to throw the dang thing
out the window, but it was the only one that was available from the only carrier in my area with
halfway decent coverage that could be upgraded to cyanogen mod, and you can't afford to upgrade
to a Galaxy S3 at which knowing my luck will probably have crappy hardware problems do, and anyway,
curse you Samsung, what are you doing to me? I'm sorry, or was I? Oh yeah, anyway, in summary,
Ingress is extremely resource-heavy for a simple capture of the flag sort of game.
The graphics and sound are pretty nice though. Did I mention the sound was in high-quality
augborbous format? No? Oh, well I will in the next episode. I will mention that version 1.21.3
had just come out as I was finalizing this material, and the performance is noticeably better than
the previous version 1.20.0, with several interface design flaws corrected, and possibly a reduction
in the amount of data it insists on exchanging with the servers at all times, but the new version
seems to have its own new issues as well. Such has some very odd behavior with the GPS,
where it seems to occasionally wander along strange paths while you're standing still,
and other times refuses to notice when you've moved. I suspect this is a side effect of their
cheater detection methods, which I'll speculate on next time also. Finally, if you have serious vision
impairment, you're probably completely out of luck. Ingress is entirely dependent on the graphics
for control, and I'm not sure there's any feasible way to design around that. That should
about do it for my complaints related to basic gameplay for now. Next episode, I'll move on from
playing the game to playing with the game, starting with how to get new portal locations added to
the world, how to get bad ones fixed, how cheating happens, and why you shouldn't murder cheaters
when a simple 5 or 6 kicks to the groin will suffice. I don't really like cheaters. Some hints
hidden in the game on where the game may be going, and what things you and Google may learn from
both inside and outside of this project. Also, a few more complaints, along with more praise.
If you like what you've been hearing, please let me know by whatever channel you feel is
appropriate. If there's interest, I may even do a third episode related to this topic before
I move on to others. I'm actively working on the second episode in this series even now,
and hope to have it up within the next week or two. The more interest there is, the harder
I'll work on getting it out more quickly. Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a strange buzzing
in my head that seems to be coming from something about a block from here and I am compelled to
investigate. So until next time, don't forget to hack your what the crap this is in my material,
this is Thomas Gideon's script. Where did mine go? Wait, what was he supposed to be presenting
it as next talk? Oh god, I've got a warning before it's too late!
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