Best Of
SITREP: AM01-MIKE-03 Cell Battle
Man.... What an adventure that cell battle event was. I don't think I've had the pleasure of that kind of competition since I was back in MIKE-04. Well fought everyone.
About a 1-2 years ago, one of the Res I speak with regularly forwarded along an open discussion an agent was having about one of our ENL counterparts. They ridiculed their profession, stating they felt their job was better than theirs and they made more money than the other player. I suppose this was a compensation to make light of the fact that if they can't beat someone in a game, they at least feel as if they are winning in real life. Things like this stick with me, I've held onto that for a while and decided to let loose on this event because of this attitude. I can't abide pretentious jerks. I enjoy being one right back to these types of people, in spades.
We all come from different walks of life. Older, younger, employed, retired, unemployed... Where we come from and what we do outside of Ingress has no bearing on what we can do and achieve in the game outside of affording us the luxury of free time and gas money. Some have more than others, but those with limited time and resources can use their skills, knowledge, and teamwork to overcome those gaps.
I want to give a huge shoutout to the Massachusetts ENL who went above and beyond for the cell battle. They put together a couple of really great draws and we were able to work together to merge/execute those draws together, resulting in two consecutive large fielding ops within two checkpoints on Sunday with support from ENL from outside their area and eyes in the sky. This resulted in changing the landscape of the event, putting up over 17 million MU over multiple checkpoints, on top of the MU they contributed in the lead-up to the weekend. By and far, this was the killing blow that moved this from a competition, to the Resistance chasing damage control on how many more points they would salvage in the 12.4 to 2.6 point blowout. Pulling off a fielding op in the middle of this event is hard enough... I was told via my Res contact that on at least three occasions, our stray links ended up blocking Res plans. But the ENL merged draws overnight on Saturday, moved keys Sunday, and executed back-to-back operations flawlessly for the 1pm and 6pm checkpoints. Excellent work agents!
It's not a secret this game has been in decline for the past few years. The playerbase has slowly aged out or retired from regular play. There isn't much new blood and it doesn't appear new development from Niantic is helping that trend. It was fantastic to finally get back a feeling of team play which has regrettably been something that I felt must be chased rather than a regular occurrance. I hope everyone had an enjoyable time competing, meeting up for meals/drinks with other agents, reminiscing about "the good old days", and being able to put up a few fields together. With the end of this event, I will be semi-retiring from Ingress like the rest of you guys. I hope to see you at anomalies and events, it has been an interesting life experience for me.
That being said, I would like to dedicate my efforts from this event to the ENL agent who was ridiculed. Like I said, we all come from different places. There is always someone who has it better or has it worse in life. Video games are awesome in that they don't discriminate. They do not care about your job, your age/health, and they do not care about your social status, or lack thereof... The only thing they care about is how well you move around the bits and bytes of data on a computer somewhere. We're all on an equal level, we all have an opportunity to accomplish great things. To the toxic person who felt they had to make it about their personal life, I hope you can improve as a person, and as an agent. Your result was 12.4 to 2.6. We'll see you again for the next event. Best of luck.
Re: "Claim 1 Kinetic Capsule Program" is a horrible bounty
The time commitment is a personal issue and varies widely among players. The 'ableist' is an argument you can apply to many aspects of the game. A personal physical ability will always apply to the person. Does that mean portals requiring hiking rough trails are not appropriate? Or those along beaches? This game is about getting out and about, moving, going to where you need to in order to accomplish things. A distance related task is totally appropriate.
Re: "Claim 1 Kinetic Capsule Program" is a horrible bounty
I think @InvestigateXM is on an any % speed run to see if they can get me kicked off the forums before Niantic decide to scrap them.
Re: "Claim 1 Kinetic Capsule Program" is a horrible bounty
If a bounty can't be done due to personal reasons, then skip it. Don't try to force a change on everyone else. Why is skipping one such an issue for players? I do understand wanting completed days and streaks of them. But we can't all pull it off every time. Thinking on that, if everyone, could complete every bounty, every day, without fail, where is the challenge? Might as well hand them out for opening the app.
Re: "Claim 1 Kinetic Capsule Program" is a horrible bounty
I totally understand that the reason some people hated the mission bounty is that they wanted to preserve a particular layout of the missions on their profile. I have no problem with people deciding that, but I kinda do have a problem with the bounty being taken away from everyone because some people didn't want to do it for their own personal reasons. It wasn't a hard thing to achieve beyond getting to a location with a mission, but getting to a location with (whatever you need to accomplish) is going to be a part of most bounties. Someone in an area without competition probably will find it difficult to destroy two enemy links because they have to travel to a location with links to destroy.
The kcap bounty is totally different because it can require a couple of hours of physical effort to accomplish, and for some players that effort may not even be physically possible, or they may not have two hours in one day to dedicate to Ingress. Yeah, you can keep a finished cap around just in case but that kinda defeats the purpose of bounties.
Re: Link to rss feed for ingress news (outside this forum)
The feed was never fixed and is now removed.
But a feed can now be generated from the new website using https://morss.it/
https://morss.it/:items=||*[class=_cardWrap_3i8q9_96]/https://ingress.com/news
Re: "Claim 1 Kinetic Capsule Program" is a horrible bounty
Like other folks mentioned, the problem with the mission task was never that doing a single mission is too hard. It was that doing a single mission without messing up banner order is a potentially multi-day task because you need to plan for finding 5 more single missions before the next time you do a banner not knowing how many times you will get that task in a given time period. People were literally making speed banners they could repeat in their neighborhood in order to avoid this problem. I decided I was just never going to do that task unless I happened to get it on a mission day or first Saturday or some other random day I had already scheduled for doing a banner mission. Hyooooge headache. Walking 5mi is WAY easy compared to the level of strategic planning involved in doing the mission task to fit in with banners. I'd actually like more of the tasks to be harder. But not stressful like the mission one.
Re: "Claim 1 Kinetic Capsule Program" is a horrible bounty
Actually the problem with the mission bountie was that some players are very into making banners. And those same players were unable to deal with making the decision to skip that task and not get a complete day. The ability to choose one thing over another and to accept the consequences is one of those things that make 'adulting' such a challenge.

