Best Of

Hindsight and all that, right?

I'm fairly sure ENL thought they had Chicago as a certain win, and decided to use the Lens in Amsterdam to try and win the portal capture game. That's really not suspicious.

There's also a difference on the other two awards (Carrie's Journal and Hank Johnson's presence) . The Journal awarded Intel to ENL only.

Hank Johnson's presence spawned media on the surrounding portals, and wasn't limited to RES-only. ENL could also hack that media.

It was RES ingenuity that made the most use of that award to benefit RES and limit the benefit to ENL. RES also coordinated the use of the Lens more effectively.

Overall, sour grapes is what you have there. RES outplayed ENL in Chicago, devising and implementing a strategy to make to the most of the awards they had available. It required EVERYONE'S buy-in. The strategy alone would be useless if the agents on the ground didn't employ it. And it paid off.

Answer to that first question sigh. Is Brian paying attention to the forums at all? Does someone else at least give him reports?

I know it was problematic for a lot of people and I understand why... the implementation wasn't great.

The flip side is that I was enjoying it tremendously. There was very little around my home but I'd managed to turn the town around my office into a well-tended Machina garden. Each day on my commute I'd take out a couple dozen red portals, leaving enough behind that it would grow back so that I could harvest some more the next day. Hunting it down also pointed me toward unique caps in areas that I hadn't explored, or newly-created portals that I'd overlooked... double onyx isn't going to pioneer itself. I also had fun on road trips because I would target towns that had an overgrowth of red and clean a lot of it out as I passed through.

I hope it comes back soon, albeit in a less problematic form. It gave me something new and interesting to do and I enjoyed that aspect of it.

they should, this is what causes many legit players to quit and cheaters show its ok to cheat since nothing happens

Machina is great. It's easy ap that regenerates every day. The fact that players are just now complaining about using fuel is crazy. The game is primarily played by car by the majority of players. Very few get out of the car. I've seen people play eight hours a day every single day so the fuel argument now is weak. People have been driving hundreds of miles every week for years just to play a game on their cell phone. The real reason is that it's more active than the current player base and they can't keep up with it. Ingress needs players

Highly disagree. You frequently must go out of your way to clear red in areas that NO ONE PLAYS IN in order to field or in order to clear those one or two portals that frequently derps through a play area. Even though Machina is only throwing 4 km, some people forget about those natural features, such as rivers, mountains, valleys, hills, lakes, ect that you can't travel straight through. Gotta go around. It eats up extra fuel and extra time. It's a place you don't often go or wouldn't go at all.

Trying to contain, and eradicate Machina is a pain, because whatever faction is trying to clean it up, the other faction is dead set on one color, and it's not red.

Indeed, but Niantic apparently thinks that AP is the only important thing in the game now.