My experiences with MD Glasgow and Edinburgh

M1chaeIM1chaeI ✭✭✭✭
edited August 2022 in General

Hey y'all, just about a week after Munich, I'm back with more experiences! If you haven't caught up on the Munich recap, feel free to read along here: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/19812/my-feedback-and-experiences-on-superposition-anomaly-munich#latest


Anyways, on to the experiences from my weekend in Scotland. MD Glasgow and Edinburgh got announced around 2,5 weeks ago. I started looking at prices for plane tickets and hotel prices, and unfortunately they were uncomfortably high. I decided at that time not to go. The Wednesday before the event I got an unexpected promotion at my consulting company. I do Quality Assurance in IT (Software testing and test automation basically), and I went from Medior to Senior, which gave me quite a bump in salary. I decided that MD Glasgow and Edinburgh was the perfect opportunity to celebrate that promotion. I promptly requested the Friday and Monday off and after virtually swiping my debit and credit card a couple of times I had a flight and places to stay. I couldn't wait to get on a plane again :D

The Friday was pretty chill, my plane left from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport around 2 PM. With the chaos that is currently happening at Schiphol, I decided to be very early. My alarm rang at like 8 AM and I was at Schiphol around 10 AM. While waiting at the airport, I got a message that there was going to be a First Saturday in Glasgow the next day. Oh boy, an individual competition? I'm all up for that. So, while waiting for my flight, I started scanning a portal, and walked up and down the hallway from gate H2 to H3 tens or maybe hundreds of times. This gave me quite a couple of scans, but I wasn't at my cap yet. The flight was nice, it was a relatively short one, and we landed in Glasgow around 3 PM local time. I intended on doing one or two banners, but I messed up near the end of the first banner, and did 2 missions from a different banner. Welp, I guess I'm doing 2 banners then:


Ah, there we go. All fixed up! Fun fact: I've done over 10.000 missions, and I've never had an unrecoverable mess-up. All banners on my profile are completed.

Anyways, after the banners I went to my hotel and relaxed for the night.

Saturday

I've been craving a proper English/Brittish/Scottish (aah offending everyone at the same time here sorry) breakfast for a couple of weeks, so I couldn't pass up on the opportunity to get one. I had booked at 9:30 AM, but I was up quite early, so I was able to do 5 MD missions before breakfast. The breakfast was amazing:

There were some sausages and bacon below the bread. Good stuff! Oh, and the black pudding-y stuff that's not really pudding-y but I don't know how to describe it.

The rest of the morning was all First Saturday prep. I first went out to a secret remote portal to drop 1000 X8 for inventory space. I hoped nobody would find my stash. I went out to a sort of a bit of a remote shopping area. Like, it was not the center of Glasgow, but somewhere west. I burned 14 P1 portals with VRHS and VRMH to get just around 1000 R1, which would be necessary for my First Saturday strategy. Normally I don't play like that, but with an Apex, it was uncapped 4X AP for 2 hours, this is way too good to pass up on. Unfortunately, I still had some portal scans left, so after I did my 6th MD mission, I went to a portal that I could easily walk circles around and did that for a while until I was capped for the day. I went back, had some lunch, met up with everyone and after the group picture it was time to start. Please note that I also had 600 X8. So the strategy is as follows: Firstly, I make sure I don't get banned for wintrading. It's an official Niantic event? Check. I didn't make any pre-arrangements with other agents? Check. Alright, time to go full on AP-mode. Once the group picture was taken, I turned on 4 Apexes and started uploading the portal scans. I had around 550 saved up, so that's 1.1 million AP. What I did then, was to deploy 1 R1 on each white portal. This gives the capture. If you deploy more than 1 resonator, you're going to run out of resonators way before the 2 hours is over. If portals are getting blue, fire one or two bursters, then continue capturing portals with R1. After about an hour and 15 minutes, I ran out of resonators, so I went to the registration and asked my fellow Enlightened agents if they had any to spare. This was not the case, so I guess I had to farm them myself. I glyphed around and kept capturing with R1 until the time was over. It was time to upload my stats to the bot. I couldn't really believe my eyes: over 6 million AP in 2 hours:

I guess this is a reason there's normally a cap on the amount of AP that gets doubled during an IFS hehe. Anyways, with the stats uploaded it was time for the afterparty. I had some nice beers with everyone and enjoyed great company. Thanks for having me everyone! :) I won most AP and apparently the secret stats were Resonators Deployed and Resonators Destroyed, so I won those too. At some point I went back to my hotel and got some rest.

Sunday

It was time to go to Edinburgh! I was awake somewhat early again, so I decided to take a walk along the river to the station from which my train would depart. I got some nice pictures along the way:

I grabbed a LIDL breakfast along the way, which for me was 2 small baguettes and a package of Chorizo. For £1,50 this was quite a lot of food for little money.

My train left at 10 AM from the train station. Unfortunately, the final stop near the center of Edinburgh got canceled, but I was able to walk from the previous stop to the center and do 2 missions that way:

The missions were fine, and the 6 missions were done pretty soon. I did another banner (The Royal Mike), which went along a street where there were a lot of street performers. After the banner, I went to Calton Hill where the group picture was taken. Due to the weight of my backpack (couldn't drop it off, because the place I stayed at for the night was quite far to the west), my shoulders were pretty exhausted, so I layed down on the grass there for a while until the group picture was taken. Afterwards, I asked Thia for a picture (pro tip: if you're like me and have no idea what to talk about with people from Niantic, just ask for a picture, it's a good conversation starter), and well, here you go:

Shortly afterwards, I decided to do another banner, because well, that's what I like to do. I did the Edinburgh Skyline At Night banner, since the start was close and it went in the direction of my hotel for the night. After finishing it, I went to my hotel, because I have to get up at 3 AM, because my flight leaves at 7 AM. Oh wait I have to get up in 6 hours, I'd better go to sleep. See you people in the next blog!

EDIT: Forgot Edinburgh banners:


Comments

  • So... were your 1000 X8 still there for retrieval? You didn't mention that bit!

  • MrNateJoMrNateJo ✭✭✭

    Don't ask and definitely don't do and googling about what goes into black pudding.

    Good write up 🙂

  • M1chaeIM1chaeI ✭✭✭✭

    @pokestophope They were! I meant to get back to that, but I forgot. Thank you for noticing. I had plenty for MD Edinburgh that way and even gave Thia a capsule :)

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