My experiences with MD Glasgow and Edinburgh
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!
Don't ask and definitely don't do and googling about what goes into black pudding.
Good write up 🙂
@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 :)