Lol, yeah...There is that!

BellyButton: you should join the Green team and Ingress with me! Be Enlightened!

I finally got data on my phone again, so I've been playing hard the past week or so.

I devised a route around my town that most efficiently takes me past all the portals.
I also submitted 6 new portals for review. [eager] I hope they get approved.

Man, I need to get back out in the wild. I haven't played properly for a year now, and my area's been overtaken by many greens. My poor blue self needs to shake those portals loose again!

I have the opposite problem. XD My whole town is overrun by the Resistance, and they're all much higher level than me, so it's hard to get a foot in edgewise.

I just figure that as an extra challenge though; I have to work so hard to gain AP, I'm being forged in the flames!

I went up to Seattle last week and met up with a bunch of enlightened L8 players! It was awesome! We met up at a local food joint and ate and hacked the 3 portals you can reach while eating there. Then we went around UW and 8ed over 150 portals! I walked for 3 hours straight and got so much GEAR! It was awesome!

Chexala: Have you reached out to any other agents via the faction com? Sometimes you can meet up with others and they can help you that way.

3Squirrels: My area is like Chexala's. All Blue. But because of that, we greens are a tight nit bunch. It's fun. [yes]

I haven't really reached out to other greenies around here, because the comm is usually dead quiet. Occasionally I'll see flurries of activity showing that one side or the other has taken over town, but nobody talks about it. [sweat] I always see the same 4 or 5 players attacking things on each side. It's...kinda eerie.

---------- Post added 06-23-2014 at 10:24 PM ----------

<cough> maybe I just needed to widen my comm range...[ninja]

Where I am, com is rarely used because several smurfs out here have fake green accounts to spy. We use google hangouts a lot. We are also transitioning to another hangout type app, but I am a jerk and have not bothered to install it. I have enough going on and don't have time for more hangouts.

Supplementary hangouts? Eek! This game sounds too social for me now [lol]

But seriously, I was given a GPS-capable android tablet recently, installed the app, but now it's having battery overheat issues so I'm waiting on the whole "send us your defective thing and we'll send you a new, hopefully-not-defective thing" process so maybe, possibly, one day I'll actually be able to give this a try. :) Perhaps the weather will be more tolerable then, even.

Ugh, I built up a few portals and links in town yesterday, nothing very big or fancy, and only got to have them for a single day! My main opponent came into town today and smashed everything. [cry]

What bugs me is that the blues mostly don't seem to care about building, linking, or maintaining their stuff. They don't seem to care about portals being unclaimed or anything, they just can't stand to see any green in town. /rage

On the plus side, I finally hit Level 4 today!

BellyButton: The game is as social or as antisocial as you want it to be. I don't have time to be uber social and to man chats all day long, as I am sure you can tell. So I just, don't. I do what I want, and since it is a game, I play to have fun and that is it. There are several "agents" who have outleveled me, but who cares? Really the goal is to hit level 8 so you can use the good bursters (bombs) and after that...Meh! Your area is very blue, and has a lot of portals, so you'd be able to level quickly. There is an area very near where you are that is very green, so you could get "gear" easily. If you are not too wigged out by it, Mr. Daria works in that area and he and I could come out and level some stuff for you to deploy on. It'll make the smurfs get cranky LOL. We got some people to get out of their beds when we got home from the airport and took down some stuff...It was like 1 am!

There are a lot of driving "farms" for when the weather is too bloody hot. I went walking farming at the local community college on Tuesday night. It was really not too bad as the sun was down. I got a lot of walking in, and then went to the gym. LOL.

Chexala: Congrats on level 4! The fun of the game is putting back up what is destroyed. If you think about the game, it is a defensive game. It's all about building stuff and defending it the best, with the knowledge that it will be taken down again pretty quickly. Every time they take stuff down, you get the opportunity to get more experience by putting it back up and taking their stuff down again. [hug] Don't "rage quit" just keep plugging away! You can do it!

Totally! I won't be rage quitting any time soon. [lol] I was a bit frustrated at first, but mainly I was just startled by how quickly all my stuff got taken down. This particular blue player, sometimes I think they're actually helping me, because otherwise there wouldn't be much action around here (except for a a few tourists now and then.)

I have no idea who this other player is, but I have a little fantasy in my head about who they are, based on a few things they've said in comm and the times they tend to be in town. They're level 8, so I know I can't really compete with them, but I kind of enjoy the sparring we've done. I still haven't met any other greenies around here, but I don't really mind, because I have this smurf to keep me occupied. [rofl]

Chexala: Once you hit level 6 you can really start doing some damage, so don't feel you are useless until you hit 8. I am working my way up to 10. Surprisingly my area is very green tonight =D We have a very active little group up where I live and the minute a smurf puts something up, there is usually one of us around to take that stuff down.

You are probably right, your smurf friend is probably helping you more than anything. We have one smurf out here who seems quite nice. He has joked with me more than once about good places to eat lunch and stuff like that.

I had one guy ask me out for lunch from the other team. Um. No. I am not sure Mr. Daria would approve. [;)]

We have one guy who is absolutely NUTS out here playing this game. He's a postal worker. He plays while working, and all day/night. I don't think he sleeps.

The thing I have found about Ingress, is when it stops being fun, just...Stop. I can't walk 6 hours straight. I sure as hell am not going to drive all day long for this game. I enjoy the walking, I enjoy the discovery of new portals, and I enjoy the occasional social side of the game. That's plenty for me. I have so many other things I do in a day (such as Mene), I sure don't get lost in the game. It's just a fun little pass time I do a few times a week for exercise.

Meeting up with agents in Seattle was definitely a highlight for me with the game. It was like I had an instant social network completely away from home. The people were very nice, and it was fun seeing Ingress in a different town. If I go back to Seattle, I definitely hope to meet up with some of them again. It was awesome!

I love the idea of playing Ingress while traveling. When I was explaining the game to my sister, it occurred to me that you could use the app like your own tour guide of whatever new place you find yourself in. I'm looking forward to doing that someday.

Right now, my favorite part of the game is submitting new portals. There are a couple portals in town that have wildly inaccurate coordinates so I submitted edits for those, and I have 9 new ones awaiting approval. I keep thinking about other places I could add, and how that would effect my walking route and the overall portal density in town. It's fun! I hope they get approved.

@Dar - I'll get back to you when my replacement tablet arrives. I do want to give the game a try, it sounds interesting. :)

Chexala: It takes a while. I had a portal I submitted Valentine's day weekend finally come online about a month ago. BUT, 10 new portals discovered gets you a badge! In the higher levels, badges are needed to level up along with experience. I have only had 3 portals approved so far, but there is one I really want to come online, because I think the name I picked is catchy. Churches are almost always accepted as portals, so heads up on that. Many art pieces are easily accepted too.
I am working on my linking and fielding badges now, that will take some time [yes].

I went to a fun Thai restaurant last night I never would have found were it not a portal. I gotta say, the food was great! I enjoyed a nice dinner and burnt out a portal =D That really is one of the best parts of the game. Finding new things you never would have seen otherwise.

There is an adorable statue near me called "the Valentine" of an elderly couple snuggling on a bench. I would never have seen this very touching sculpture if it were not for this game. =D

I am going to my first anomaly! [squee] I will be going to the Helios anomaly in San Diego in two weeks! It is kinda incidental, I was going out to San Diego for a concert and to help prep for a friend's wedding. We already bought tickets for the concert when they announced the anomaly! I am so excited! I have never been to an event. I will get a badge too!

Also, the game comes out for the apple IOS as of this weekend! BellyButton: If you don't yet have your tablet, you won't have to wait now. [squee]

Ooh, I'll have to give it a whirl, then. :)

I tried to play this but that damn portal was too far from my chair! [illgetu] (It was a quarter of a mile and I was lazy)
I inevitably uninstalled it :(

The Wandering Poet: LOL, this is a location based game. You can't play it from your chair, so perhaps it is not the game for you?

I guess so. though I've played location based games that didn't fully require me to get off my bum. XD

probably doesn't help that it was 12 at night and I couldn't go outside XD

makes me curious to try again... maybe when I start up walking in a year or two

I like it for the fact that it makes me walk and or drive to new places. I have enough sit time between work, paperwork and online gaming (GO MENEWSHA!!!! WOOHOO!!!). This gets me out, it helps me socialize, I have met neighbors and discovered great local food places through the game! It's awesome.

I will say that I feel the game is slanted toward the blue team. And with the IOS release, my team is now even more outnumbered than we were before. It makes it frustrating to get gear, as the minute we make a farm they come and break it. BUT, I actually know my teammates, and I am pretty sure the blue team does not.

Maybe in some ways, this will help my team, because we will be small and strong, and they are getting so big, I don't know how they can effectively manage themselves.

Interesting. Why is it in favor of blue?
I'd it android vs apple?

How does it do on battery draining?
maybe actually knowing someone helps.

There are a lot of things that seem to make it favor blue.

The game icon is blue. In my opinion it should be half blue and half green.
All the advertising is done with a blue agent's profile.
The training that you do when you start the game, is done in blue.
The newest youtube propaganda with two girls who are "sisters" but on opposite teams, spent an entire video with the blue team when they made a megga filed over an ocean....On the same day the green team blanketed HALF THE GLOBE. They underplayed the green team's field to favor their blue team's video. 2 weeks later, they did finally show an operation for the green team doing a megga field, but time wise...Again favoring blue by presenting them first, as usual.
The most recent video for the game, starts with a player turning a portal green and then shows it being smashed and turned blue. They never seem to show the green team being dominant in any game related propaganda. All I would like to see is equal time showing both factions as successful.
When you log into the game the first time, the first option you see listed is Resistance. IMHO, it should be randomized, 50% of the time green on top, 50% blue on top.
Psychologically, I think the naming (which is too late in game to be changed) is weighted. It is more in human nature to "resist" change than to accept it. If they could change some of their definition of "Enlightened" to be more about "embracing technology" I think it would be more appealing to many gamers.

Numerically, there are more blue team players than green team. This "weight" to one "Faction" will inevitably screw the game. It is more fun to have it be an equal fighting ground. It is very hard to not get discouraged when numerically green is at a global disadvantage. I can speak for my region and my team when I say, we have a hard time getting gear. The minute we make an "8 farm" (Make a portal the highest level possible) there are blue members taking it down. Farming for gear is frustrating and difficult. We often have to drive about two hours to a very remote location to get our gear without interruption. While this does make us closer as a team with our existing members, if the game could at least do some things to try to balance out the tenancy for everyone who starts playing without any preexisting knowledge of the game to go blue, it would make the game more challenging and more fun.

Games should be fun! If this game stops being fun, people will stop playing and where does that get the game?

ah that names sense. I think I picked blue because it was blue...

Granted I never managed to finish the tutorial so I can't really say I joined either one XD

but very true. perhaps if they introduced a bonus system so that if green has 10% less players they get 10% better stats