I Cringe Inside

Wow, I didn't realize how long it has been since my last post.

I've been out there fighting the good fight. I was part of a cool event where members of my faction built a control field yielding nearly a million mind units. I was responsible for clearing the southern most links and capturing the southern target.

But what I wanted to post about today is how I cringe inside when I pass a portal and cant hack it.

This seems to happen for 2 reasons and I don't know which is more annoying. 

First, not that long ago in one of the system updates they apparently installed a script which determines your speed and will not allow you to hack if it calculates your speed is too quick. From what I've read online it appears that they calculate the distance between the last portal you visited and the current one. If your time between the two gives you a speed above ??? then you can not hack, deploy, recharge, etc... 

This system is very flawed. take for example my morning commute today. There is one stoplight I almost always catch. When I'm stopped I hack and recharge it. While I always seem to catch this light it is only for a minute or so tops. Then I get to a stoplight further down the road. Now this light is one I've written about before. As of now it has a level 6 portal on one side and a level 7 portal on the other. I want to catch this light, but almost never do. Well today I caught it and got nothing from either of the hacks. Grrrr.

Now I understand the reasons which have been given as to why this is done:

• To prevent playing while driving---
• I am a responsible adult and do not play in a way which would endanger myself or others. I realize others may not, but that is not an issue with the game that is an issue with the individuals playing. These individuals are putting themselves and others in danger and in most areas probably breaking the law. But Niantic/ Google can't be held responsible for individual's behavior.
• What about commuters/passengers? While I live in a rural area not terribly far from me is a light rail system. Each station has a portal, but you cannot hack those portals from the train. Also, I've been the passenger in vehicles and want to play, but can no longer do so. There is also a portal I use to hit every day on my way home. I would be driving, hand my son the scanner and tell him, "When the hack button lights up, hit it." and he would and I'd get that every day, but not any more. 
• To prevent spoofing--
• Cheaters are going to cheat. Liars are going to lie. Yes this could prevent spoofers, to a certain degree, but maybe if they moved the threshold to a much higher speed one that will not hamper the game play of honest people. 
• By far and away, the vast majority of people play the game fairly. Don't ruin the game on their account we as players will report them, and Ingress can ban them. 

The second thing that makes me cringe is when I'm there looking at a portal and in my mind I can see the portal and it's resonators around it. Unfortunately, I'm with my family and they are not fans of me playing Ingress. A trip to the nearby grocery store has 2 portals on the way and another 3 very close by. After so many times of these "quick trips" being longer than my wife or kids want, I've succumbed to their will. It is just not worth the grief.

Now my plan is to load Ingress on my wife's phone for her and get her playing. She has a friend who plays and I think if she tried it she'd enjoy it. It would be a cool thing for us to do together. My daughter has expressed interest, but she has an iPhone...

Is the Ultra Strike Worth All the Hoopla?

So the new Motorola Droid phones came out earlier this week. These phones were preloaded with +Ingress and when you activated your account on these phones you also got a goody bag of items including several of the the new Ultra Strike weapons. 

Now since these phones have been released Ingress internet sites have been buzzing on how to get hold of the Ultra Strike weapon if you do not have one of these phones. These theories run the full spectrum from crazy to to easy to be true. Some of you have even commented here on rooting your phone and altering your build.prop file to mimic or be seen as a Droid. 

Sounds interesting to me and why I am not a technical neophyte, I have learned that I know/think I know enough to end up getting myself into trouble, but do not know enough to get myself out of it. So I will pass. Besides I do not believe this would fall in line with the game's TOS.

Other than being complete Ingress addicts and just needing to have the newest stuff and try it out, I haven't seen anything that makes me say I need this new weapon. Sure I want to get my hands on one and use it, but I doubt it will be able to knock my socks of.

The fact that you are using one item to destroy one resonator doesn't impress me by itself. What would impress me is if this new weapon were able to do its job and not result in the portal attacking and draining my XM Energy.

The one cool advantage I see with this weapon is that you could strategically go and knock out resonators of your least favorite opponents, just to screw with them.

I'll update if I feel differently later.

Happy Hacking!

Ingress Version 1.28.1 Released

I haven't been following +Ingress  as much lately for a variety of reasons, so this release caught me by surprise. But this was a very welcome surprise.

I woke up this morning, and my scanner showed it had automatically updated Ingress. (By the way if you haven't set your phone/scanner to auto upgrade this is an app I definitely recommend allowing the auto upgrade). Initially I didn't think much about it, but when I launched Ingress on my way to work I was really impressed.

The first and most noticeable upgrade is Portal Vectoring. This is an awesome tool. If you have no portals in view on your scanner you will get pop ups with direction and distance to nearby portals. You can also immediately see the portal level and which faction controls that portal.

This solves one of my major complaints about Ingress. If you were in an area with you are not familiar with, it could be hard to find portals. I am really excited about this portion of the upgrade.

Other important features include the release of 5 new portal mods.

• Multi-Hack - Now there are "blackhat" methods of multi-hacking a portal. Now it appears that you now have the opportunity to "legally" multi-hack. But the number of multi-hacks will be limited before the mod burns out.
• Turret - This is another long awaited mod. But I am not quite certain of just how powerful they are going to make this mod. What we do know is that it will increase the number of defensive attacks on an enemy hacking a portal. But will it increase their strength? Will it automatically attack enemy faction players who get within range even if they do not attempt to hack? These are  some of the rumors out there.
• Link Amp - As the name implies this will amplify the distance between points of possible links
• Force Amp - This mod boosts the force of an attack on a portal
• Heat Sink - When hacking a portal you must wait 5 minutes between hacks. If you try to hack again too soon you get a message telling you the portal is in a cool down period and you must wait. This mod greatly reduces this time. The question remains: will this prevent portal burnout?

Happy Hacking

New Ingress Item - Power Cubes

In the 1.23.1 release of Ingress we were treated to a new item among other things; Power Cubes.

So what is a Power Cube and What will it do for me?
It appears they are XM storage units. and there are 8 levels of power cubes. The higher the level the greater the storage.

What I do not know yet, but am assuming, is that they work like XMP Bursters and you can not use Power Cubes greater than your player level.

How do I find Power Cubes?
They are an item you get when you hack a portal, much like XMP Bursters, Portal Shields, etc...

Get out there and find some Power Cubes!

New Version 1.21.3

March 14th a new version was released. 

Version 1.21.3
* Portal Discovery - players can take photos of cool new Portal locations and submit them via the Ingress app to be reviewed and added to the game.
* Portal Editing - players can submit a new photo for an existing Portal, and/or submit suggested improvements to the Portal name, description, or location data.
* Embedded Video Player for story media.
* Improved player GPS location acquisition - more stable, less jumpy.
* Bug fixes and performance improvements.