I was wrong about the Aurora Challenge.
in General
It was the right amount of hard. People who wanted the badge could easily achieve bronze. Gold was brutal but not impossible. It just required free time, time management, and inventory management. It refilled my rare and vr mods. I threw hundreds of links and fields, so AP gain was a huge benefit.
I hit 1000 this afternoon and probably only visited half of the portals I did for Myriad. Although most of my playing was at night, mobiity and Hydration were key. Keep moving, keep glyphing. Go for second tries if you mess up. And save time by using "complex" on level 1 and 2 glyphs. You can do it.
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Agreed. The task seemed daunting and felt tedious initially, however once you get the momentum it became quite easy. Plus the benefit of lots of VR gear and AP has been great! I'm pushing to get at least 1500 now 😁
So...agents have learned how great micro fielding can be?
Hell no, microfielding still sucks, but making a bunch of mini bursts is a fun way to burn keys from the event.
Agreed. I knew I was never going for the top tier, it was just too much for me. But I knew if I just took my time and did decent chunks every night, I'd get to "silver" without burning myself out or stressing over it. Sure enough, here I sit at 498 and perfectly content to hit my goal whenever I feel like it. I applaud Niantic for making an actual challenging challenge! It's been fun!
It did make me realize that I'm not fond of key management in Prime, however. Trying to dump keys quickly using it seems to be very difficult at present - and this becomes an issue when you're having to burn gear constantly....
it requires nothing more than time. but time is what I don't have...
the previous challenge was more about visiting new places and Aurora is just about moving the same way 2-3-even4 times...
Previous challenges have rewarded aspects of good normal game play. Carefully building portals up to level 2 is not part of normal good game play.
But glyph hacking is part of good normal game play. And the system they implemented makes it fairer to rural players while forcing urban players to work a little harder for their points.. No easy points for hacking an P8.
I glyphed my 20+ portal p8 farm the night the event started. Predictably it was destroyed in a day or so, so I was able to get 3 to 4 more points out of all the portals in the farm as it was recaptured and rebuilt.
I used the "no key" command so many times during this event that it has become muscle memory to use that command, even when my intent is to request key lol.
I am not a fan of the key carousel in Prime. the up/down scroll is slower and i have a harder time recognizing the keys by the image because they changed the orientation to landscape and it cuts off huge parts of the portal pictures that were taken in portrait
i gave up in that badge some days after the event, i considered it a waste of time, glad some others liked it
Bronze was resasonable ok.
But the higher levels were very hard, especially if you don't have many portals.
I was on holiday and all the nearby towns had max 50 portals each.
For a chance at gold I'd have had to driven to a city (around 100km away) and even then not sure a single day would have been enough, given that many portals were already green high level.
This was the huge difference with the myriad challenge, for that I drove 100km to get my last 250 for gold once I ran out in my home town but the level didn't matter so I knew it would be okay.
Maybe really pushing it I could have got silver but I didn't want a blue badge anyway (Niantic should really avoid faction colours for challenges).
With 2 days to go we're still only half way to the global objective which is enough to show that this event is a failure for most agents.
I know very few who have done better than bronze and most of them are just thankful it is over.
Myriad was a nice occasion to move a bit and visit new places. This was just pure grind.
Yesterday was, a gamble day, bas my city had been raining every single day, while most could be done by car, stopping, glyphing.
Still needed 250 more to complete.
Saturday turned out to a good day, though it started out raining early in the morning.
Good challenge, more enjoyable than glyphing In HPWU
Only problems I had was the nasty sunburn I got on the first weekend and it was too hot to go out for most of the week. Still, got my silver in just the first three days and could have gotten gold without taking a very long to the state capital if I wasn't tending the sunburn and the weather was more agreeable.
This whole challenge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U43Ate3Itjs
I'm okay with Niantic occasionally doing hard challenges, and totally fine with losing them too. This one though was mind numbingly boring and absolutely didn't help my motivation to "go for it". It's nice that they tried the thing where you can team up and get more points per portal but in the end I think most people were just scoping out 1000 uniques and that whole mechanic was moot.
I tried getting to tier two/silver the only evening I actually had some time, but after two hours and 230 event points I called it quits and just accepted bronze because I was bored out of my mind just walking around glyphing.
I wont lie it was a ball ache. Did just over 1100 in the end. I was so happy when I hit 1000. It felt like a struggle at first. I do like these events and hope Niantic keep them coming!
So Flip-fielding for the EXO5 challenge was normal gameplay to you? Or neutralizing portals and not reclaiming them to spite the other faction? Or **** random shitlinks out of town for link distance?
This challenge called for some collaberation with your teammates to get portals to the right level to gain unique glyph points. Teamwork is a huge part of Ingress, but not mandatory. It did cost some time, but a challenge isn't supposed to be easy! If it was easy, it isn't a challenge.
The only thing that bothered me this challenge was the endless recycling of items.