Ingress

Oh man yeah. It is what I credit my weight loss and fitness to. I saw it on flipboard when it first came out and thought what the heck, i'll try it. Well as I learned how to play I started getting into it. I started walking but gradually started running to cover more ground. Before I realized it I was running five to seven miles a day. I always developed knee pain and thought I couldn't run but I can run now. The slow build up an intervals made me a runner. Every night a bunch of players on the blue team AKA Smurfs would capture and field downtown. I would get up at 4:30 AM and kill it all. I would run four laps around the town then run to two college campuses before running home. I focus more on my running now but still play some. It can be a solo game or a team effort and I have made many new friends. I am a level 15 on the Enlightened green team AKA frogs. When I was playing daily I was able to lose 50 pounds so I will always a place for Ingress. Let me know if you need some tips on playing or an invite. I was able to get my Nephew to level 4 in two hours.

It helps to play in an urban area, park or campus that is portal dense. Make lots of small fields (triangles) to level up quickly. Its hard to attack at low levels but you can capture, deploy and field empty portals or field ones that are your teams color. Been playing for four years now across this country and in Europe.

captainfantastic94 wrote: »

Hi all,
So i was looking for "walking games" and came across ingress,

Anyone play? What do you think of it?

I sit and watch the Walking Dead. I haven't lost a pound. What am I doing wrong?

The best way to describe the game is that its like a global game of capture the flag. Score is kept globally and local regions. It also has the top 25 agents in your area. There are 16 levels and various badges and even missions to be completed. Being GPS based I have heard some say it similar to geocaching. The game Pokemon was built using existing Ingress portal location too. There is a deep storyline that is fiction if you want to get way into it. Me I just play for exercise. Almost any church, sculpture, fountain or historic place or marker is likely to be a portal. I have never been but have friends that travel to ingress anomaly sites where Niantic Labs (Google) stages large day long events that involve scores of people and movement of shards from one part of the world to another. You can get as deep as you want or keep it simple and just play but there is some strategy to it.

Actually I have never seen that one but it was very good as a starter. There was an earlier one that showed people walking up the a sculpture and seeing the energy and wondering who else can see it. After you start playing in an active area it turns into "I wonder if that person is attacking my portal". At the height of the pokemon craze, because both games use the same location, I would run up to a portal and attack, hack or link. I would then run off to the next to do the same. The pokemon players would look at their phones and try to figure out what I did.

All this talk about Ingress got me out to do an ingress run this morning. I had run 16 miles the first three days this week and needed a rest. I was able to get about 90,000 AP in one hour. The trick is to not throw a link past another portal. Long links are called derp links. I took a small area and deployed eight resonators on each portal. Most I had portal keys to so I started make short links to make fields. You can only hack a portal once every five minutes and after four hacks the portal is burned out until it resets in four hours. You need to plan your link around what portal keys you have. when you link to a portal it uses the key for that portal up.