Ingress

[slimshady2357]

You need the keys to create links and to recharge the portals remotely.

So if you have a key for portal A and you are currently located at portal B you can make a link from B to A. If you don't have the key for A you can't make the link. Links gain you AP and when you link 3 portals in a triangle you make a control field which gives you even more points and captures 'mind units' for your team.

Every day resonators lose some power (I think they will totally decay in one week if not recharged). You can recharge any of your team's portals if you're standing beside it, but you can also recharge one remotely (i.e. from home) if you have the key. It's the only way you can defend your portal without actually being near it.

Edit: It's best to have a few keys for each portal, so that when you're travelling around capturing portals (or even just hacking them) you can link back to portals you've been at before. Each time you make a link it uses up the key and you need another one. If you already have a key for Portal A then you cannot get another one when you hack the portal. So you need to either drop the key, hack the portal and then pick up the key again or have a capsule to hide the key in while you're hacking the portal.

[Miisa]

Keys can be used to link portals together. If you are at one portal that has all 8:resonators and held by your team and have they key to another portal with also all its resonators and held by your team you can link them together. As long as there are no other links blocking it. Link three portals in a triangle and you will make a control field.

The other use is to remotely charge portals, they lose 15% of their power per day and will turn grey in a week without recharging.

Or: what SS said.



In other news, I just made agent #95 in the region that includes London and much of central England.

[JoeP]

Miisa has gained enormous numbers of points this weekend by attacking everything in the area. The entire neighbourhood of Casa JoeP is now safely covered by green fields.

[slimshady2357]

Also, when you deploy resonators they deploy in a circle around the portal (as I'm sure you've noticed), but they do so at a radius equal to the distance you are when you press deploy. So it's best to stand so the portal is barely in your circle and thus make the largest circle of resonators possible. It makes them tougher to take out since they are spread out.

I didn't know that until yesterday! I was just banging them down wherever and the smurfs were probably happy I was just leaving them all so close together

[chunksmediocrites]

Originally Posted by slimshady2357

Also, when you deploy resonators they deploy in a circle around the portal (as I'm sure you've noticed), but they do so at a radius equal to the distance you are when you press deploy. So it's best to stand so the portal is barely in your circle and thus make the largest circle of resonators possible. It makes them tougher to take out since they are spread out.

I didn't know that until yesterday! I was just banging them down wherever and the smurfs were probably happy I was just leaving them all so close together

Around here we call it camp-firing (because with the resonators all in close it looks like a tight circle of rocks around a fire). And yes, these are easier to attack. Sometimes it will happen even when the agent knows better- in a rush, Cargressing or Busgressing, or GPS drift.

[Qingdai]

Also called pineappling or "not knowing what you're doing" we have a player here thatis level 15 and should know better, but he's playing mostly by himself. I really hate upgrading his portals, but he's everywhere and will campfire the portals right next to my house. A seriously campfired, heavily shielded portal you can take out with 4-5 ultrastrikes, because the resonators are in range of the powerful blast.
Shields have changed, which Niantic is changing game mechanics all the time, some times to do with the bad drama/storyline, sometimes because they want to.
Anything above a common is much harder to take off, unless you stand in the center of a portal with an ultrastrike.

[Qingdai]

Also her is an example of key usage, really big layered green triangles or field art.
https://plus.google.com/u/1/10754227...ts/McwFVdgd3XG

[Miisa]

I have still not been able to do a thing with ultrastrikes, even if I am physically on top of the item in the map. So I just xmp the hell out of the resonators and the shields tend to come off sooner or later.

I have now reached the point where I constantly have to recycle stuff and try to sort out what I need as I am always hovering around the 2000 items mark. So not overly concerned about using a lot of bombs and power cubes.

[slimshady2357]

You must have soooo many portals around you I think there are a total of 36 portals within about 10 min driving distance of Boston. So I'm constantly short on items it seems. So today in town I was just hacking mostly and only took down 2 portals.

I finally saw someone else ingressing while I was in town (not including that guy I smashy-smashy'd with). He was killing two of my portals as I was walking by and I actually heard the sounds from his phone before I noticed anything else. He's level 7 so his XMP's do too much damage for me to recharge in time. I just stood behind him and as soon as he had greyed the portal I would refill with resonators He was killing two portals at once because they're side by side, so I don't think he was paying attention at first. I did it three times before I just gave up and left because I was already late. At least I got some points and it cost him some XMP's

[slimshady2357]

Oh and is there any way to tell when you captured a portal? I've got Gold on Guardian but it seems to be stuck on 22 days, which could be correct as I think it was taken over just after I got gold. But another portal I've held for nearly as long and I wondered if I could check as to when I took it over?

I was blasting a remote portal the other day and the smurf owner messaged me to say "You can't have that portal it's my guardian". He was recharging like mad, but I had enough L6 XMP's to finally get it. He said "nooooooooooooo you got it ". I had no idea what he was talking about, so I googled it and read up for a while on reddit about people trying to get the Black Guardian badge and how at one time there were people scraping data from the intel map just to guardian hunt and kill portals on day 149

[beyelzu]

Originally Posted by slimshady2357

You must have soooo many portals around you I think there are a total of 36 portals within about 10 min driving distance of Boston. So I'm constantly short on items it seems. So today in town I was just hacking mostly and only took down 2 portals.

I finally saw someone else ingressing while I was in town (not including that guy I smashy-smashy'd with). He was killing two of my portals as I was walking by and I actually heard the sounds from his phone before I noticed anything else. He's level 7 so his XMP's do too much damage for me to recharge in time. I just stood behind him and as soon as he had greyed the portal I would refill with resonators He was killing two portals at once because they're side by side, so I don't think he was paying attention at first. I did it three times before I just gave up and left because I was already late. At least I got some points and it cost him some XMP's

I walk a quarter of a mile to downtown willow glen and there are 20-30 portals on a street over less than a mile.

I love being in San Jose.

Me and ES are attacking the google later, it's pretty smurfridden according to ES.

[Ensign Steve]

Yeah, it is pretty bleak up here. There's a shitload of portals guarded by 8 x L7/8 resonators, and all linked to each other. I think we might have to settle for being scruffy rebels that go around vandalizing things and throwing trash cans through windows.

[BrotherMan]

Originally Posted by Ensign Steve

might have to settle for being scruffy rebels

[Miisa]

The resistance seem to have gone on strike around here. Or just given up. Used to be loads of blue portals, daily retakes, and now they are green for weeks with just the occasional tourist drive-though livening things up.



(we need to make the purple one green, STAT)

[JoeP]

And the image inside the dream bubble should be - appropriately coloured of course.

[JoeP]

Also,

Originally Posted by JoeP

WHY DOES YOUR AVATAR STILL NOT ANIMATE???

[Miisa]

BECAUSE I AM INCREDIBLY BUSY AND IMPORTANT.

[JoeP]

I am too BUSY to recolour the characters green and blue.

Because recolouring all the frames at once turns out to be tougher.

[beyelzu]

Does everyone know the hacking portal hack?



If you hold down the hack button, it brings up a mini game where you trace patterns. Get them right and so it quickly and it doubles your take.

[Ensign Steve]

Apparently that is "glyph hacking" and if you do 200 of them you get a translator badge. But mostly I'm just in it for the loot.

[Miisa]

You don't have to do 200 of them, but you need 200 glyph points for the badge. Higher-level portals have more difficult glyphs and give more points. You have to get the whole glyph right to get points, and when there are four of them in a set it gets sometimes difficult.

I used to be really bad at them but then I got an app to practice (I use Memoglyph, but there are others) and it helps to learn their names (or make your own up).

Perfect 1-Glyph Hack: 1 Point
Perfect 2-Glyph Hack: 2 Points
Perfect 3-Glyph Hack: 4 Points
Perfect 4-Glyph Hack: 8 Points
Perfect 5-Glyph Hack: 15 Points

I don't think I have even tried a 5 yet, probably requires a Lvl 8 portal, which aren't that common here.

[Miisa]

I am now at the point where I recycle all keys I probably won't need (all the London ones, for instance, even of the portals I own ) and all xmp bursters lower than 4. Soon I will get rid of also them, as there just is NO SPACE.

Virtual reality hoarding and decluttering.

[slimshady2357]

I'm the opposite, I'm constantly in need of stuff Like I have so few shields at any time that I often have to deploy useless stuff like link amps, just so I can at least get the engineer silver at some point

I'm also constantly short of L6 XMP's because there aren't that many high level portals around here, so I barely ever get them.

After walking the dogs I jumped in the shower and when I came out someone had taken my home portal (still a 10 minute walk away, that's how rural we are!). Then I noticed they had walked on to the War Memorial in the village nearby, so I started recharging like mad. In the end there was one L6 resonator on it that I was able to just keep recharging. I used about 80% of my power cube collection, but I held that sucker. According to the comms he used over 100 XMP's and never took it I messaged him to say that mobile coverage is spotty there and it makes it difficult to do things quickly. He responded that he has 3 different carriers to choose from and that wasn't the problem, he just ran out of XMP's!

How the hell can you have 3 different carriers to use? I know you can have dual SIM phones, but are there phones that can have 3 SIM's? Or are there SIM's that use more than one carrier?

Anyway, tomorrow I can refill the resonators and re-make the links/fields for some more points

[Ensign Steve]

Damn, you guys need to come play with us. You can't swing a dead cat around here without hitting a portal, and they are mostly level 7 or 8. So I get lots of good loot, but I'm not leveled up to use most of it. Heh.

[slimshady2357]

We're going to see the girls at university next month and I'm already all about all the portals around there. There are like 30 level 7/8 portals in a 10 min walk just on the campus alone. I'm hoping I can get out for 2 hours and just exhaust them all, like 120 hacks...