Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Thoughts on MUFG Capsules

There has been a lot of hype about MUFG Capsules and I wanted to add my two cents in on them, now that I finally have some.

First, Niantic adding capsules as an item was awesome. At the time it was a long over due addition to the game. Now, we have these MUFG capsules which pay a dividend on items stored in them. In a recent G+ post +Petr Morávek did some extensive studies on the return rate of MUFG capsules and concluded the return rate is approximately 1 - 1.5% return rate. Cross referencing this to Union Bank's current interest rate on savings accounts is 1%. I don't know if this is coincidence or not but it will be interesting to see if/when interest rates go up again if the MUFG capsules' return rate will increase.

Keeping your MUFG capsule loaded with approximately 96 items seems to yield the optimum results. However you must remember to pull excess items from your MUFG capsule daily because once the capsule reaches 100 items, it will not be able to generate any additional items.

This is a pretty cool concept, but the yield is not that great. Don't get me wrong I'm not going to turn my nose up at a free L8 XMP or two every day, but I can easily hack that on my ride in to work. Now if I ever get to the point where I get 8-10 MUFG capsules and am getting 10+ L8 XMPs- now were talking. But it's a freebie, so no complaints.

But the hack rate on MUFG capsules is different. Until very recently I hadn't hacked my own and in the month I've hacked several thousand times. But my daughter who in the last month has only done < 500 hacks has gotten 3. She must be very lucky, I'm just unlucky or some combination of the two.

So it's a nice improvement to the game, not a game changer, but I see a day when I do have 10 or more of them and only have 2-3 regular capsules strictly for trading items. But this is absolutely no substitution for farming as I think some people may have expected.

Monday, August 3, 2015

My Daughter Made Level 8!

My daughter hasn't been an active player for a while. She got hooked into Ingress when I told her about the anomalies and she wanted to participate. Tried as we may to get her to 8 before Darsana, we just couldn't get there.

Since Darsana she has played a little here and there, mainly coming out with me when I want a little help taking out a particular portal. A few weeks ago I was hitting a few targets of opportunity while running some errands with her and she said she was going to play. She told me she was now so close to 8 she wanted to make a push for it.

We began heading out a few times, unfortunately time wasn't on our side. My typical playing time is generally from 10:00 pm to 1:00 am and I wasn't going to keep her out that long, so we went out in 1 hr bursts. One of our local Resistance players even kept tabs on her progress (Mainly because it was his portals we were hitting.) One night he sent a message on the COMM saying he was waiting up for her to hit again and level up. It turned out to be a little while before we could go out again.

This past Friday night. I was loaded with nearly 1000 L8 XMPs and was ready to do some damage to the Resistance dominated areas. I on the intel map I found a nearby portal with dozens of links and many, many fields coming and going from it. I estimated that portal alone would give her the AP needed.

We headed out and that portal was number 1 on our list of targets. We get there and I drop a handful of L8 Ultra Strikes on the center of the portal to kill the shields and then tell her to spam it with XMPs. Well I see the portal is going down as the field starts to look weak. Then next think I know it is full blown recharged. The resistance was recharging on her, and by the look of it several people were recharging. So I decide to help and fire off a few L8 Xmps. When it started looking weak I would stop as not to steal the AP from her, but they were relentlessly recharging.

So I then decided to spam it with L8 Bursters. It starts to get weak again. I back off to let her take it out, but they brought it up again. I start spam bombing again. Between the two of us we got it down to 4 resonators. By this time we'd each used probably 100 XMPs. But I back off again and again they are able to keep it fully charged against her. So I start firing again and what do you know one of my XMP bursters took out 3 of their resonators and I got the over 28K AP. I went ahead and took out the last remaining resonator too, but let her claim and fully deploy to.

In hind sight I would have walked to reach resonator and fired Ultra Strike to more strategically taken them out, and save on Bursters, then once it was down to 3 have her do the same. Oh well live and learn.

We went out and she did level up later that night and we were out until 4 am (and the wife was not happy about that).

So I am happy to now have a second powerful player in my family to help me.