This is the fourth post in a series detailing the experiences that my girlfriend and I have had playing Ingress as new players, casual players, and as suburban players (where the nearest “Portal clusters” are 30 minutes drive away – we have to rely on Post offices and Libraries for our Portals)
After our initial interest in, and success with, Ingress, TheAudball and I had quite some difficulty, detailed here.
This I posted that review on the Official Ingress Community, and got rather a lot of good feedback, and a large number of suggestions.
One of the suggestions was “You should give your buddy your lower level XMP Bursters, and you should use your higher level ones.” – We were doing that. The problem we encountered had a lot more to do with the terrible drop rates we suffered through AFTER we had already burned through ALL of the XMP Bursters we had. So sharing or not sharing our resources wasn’t the issue that caused us so much grief. The fact that we weren’t getting ANY resources was a very large portion of our frustration.
Many, MANY people suggested that we ask for help in our Local Secure Faction Chat. Many other people suggested that we find a location where there was a relatively weak portal, with a LOT of links and fields hanging off of it.
In the end, we took ALL of that advice for our third major outing.
We managed to arrange a meetup with one of the highest level players in the area – Jake5280, who had hit Access Level 6 on Sunday, December 2nd. He was very helpful, and more than willing to help us burn down a local Level 3 portal (33334444) to a level that Audrey could take out the last piece, and claim all that delicious AP for breaking 6 links, and collapsing 5 Control Fields worth almost 5000 AP.
So, we got help from the highest level player we could find, who was more than willing to assist us in getting Audrey to Level 2 by picking out a super juicy target that is just one mile down the road from us. I traded him a number of L6 XMP Bursters that I won’t be able to use for quite some time for some Level 3’s. He gave Audrey essentially ALL of his L1 Bursters. Eighty Five of them, in fact. I was stunned. Eighty. Five. She should be set for a good long time.
How did our adventure actually work out?
We worked out a plan. With careful positioning and with careful selection of which level burster to use, Jake could work the Resonators down so that they had just a sliver of health left on them, so Audrey could pop them with the L1’s in her inventory. Some of the L3 resonators fell to collateral damage from the initial salvos of heavy hitters that should have ground them down without popping them, or from a lucky critical hit. Jake popped 3×3’s and 2×4’s, and ground the remaining 3 down to a small sliver for Audrey to clean up.
That said, it turned out that 2 of the remaining 3 Resonators were in the locked parking lot where they store the mail trucks. Burning down the last little bit (no more than 5-6 percent) of those two resonators took THIRTY FOUR L1 XMP bursters.
When that last Resonator popped and we heard that little tinkly sound that goes with it, Audrey was ELATED!
…for just long enough for her to realize that her AP bar hadn’t moved, she was still Level 1, and that she’d spent 34 L1 XMP Bursters to gain only 225 AP.
For some (unknown) reason, the credit for breaking the links and fields went to Jake and not Audrey.
So, for the readers at home – Having a high level player come assist you on a high value target DOES. NOT. HELP.
At all.
For Audrey to have been assured of dealing the last bits of damage to all 8 resonators would have taken over 100 L1 XMP bursters – i.e. more than the COMPLETE inventory of L1 Bursters of a L1, a L3, and a L6 player.
So, in the end, all of the issues that I have raised about the New Player Experience in areas where there are higher level players established have not only been confirmed, but all of the suggestions that the player community have brought to the table have proven have been tested, and found to be of no value at all.
CONCLUSION:
L1 XMP Bursters, even when used in the DOZENS, are of little to no value – but they are the ONLY Bursters that new players can use. Additionally, L1 XMP Bursters absolutely do not drop in sufficient numbers to be routinely used dozens at a time by new players in areas that have significant numbers of existing players of either faction.
With more invitations going out every day, there will definitely be players (on college campuses, or who have access to downtown areas or art districts with TONS of portals) who have a smooth and easy experience getting to Level 3 or 4 and beyond.
However, as I’ve pointed out before, the U.S. Census says that more than 50% of Americans live in the Suburbs where Portals are thin on the ground, and it’s exceedingly easy for a small handful of players fighting over them to make progress anywhere from very difficult to impossible for new players via the simple (and sensible) act of upgrading (probably without a trace of malice or consideration for the New Player, just a simple “take and hold for my side” mindset) a single Resonator on a Portal to an L4, 5, or 6.
Audrey’s experience with Ingress as a brand new player with a very simple goal (Get to Level Two) in an area with established players has been so demoralizing that she is not, and will not, participate any further.
Her quote as we got into the car to drive home last night was, “This game seems like it would have a LOT of potential, but it’s SO difficult to accomplish anything when you’re the lowest level. Even WITH help. All I want to do is get to Level 2, but it’s like Niantic is doing EVERYTHING IN THEIR POWER to make this as fucking un-fun as possible.”
This is a significant problem.
Why?
Because she was signed up for the beta before I was. She was the pathfinder, and the one who was interested. I scored her an invite, and she was genuinely interested in going out and playing together. When I mentioned that I was looking at a USB GPS receiver for the laptop, she was stoked. When I asked if she wanted to go out on Thursday night and have our Date Night portal hunting, she was all “FUCK YEA!”
And all of that enthusiasm is completely, totally, absolutely…gone.
If the existing New Player Experience can turn THAT on its head, imagine how someone who’s comes in being on the fence about Ingress will react.
It seems you misunderstand the game mechanics: The fields and the links break when you destroy the FIRST resonator, not the 8th.
This is also not true. This is from a successful attack I executed this morning. The Portal had two links and a field attached.
8:57AM (My Username) destroyed an L1 Resonator on (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
8:57AM (My Username) destroyed an L1 Resonator on (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
8:59AM (My Username) destroyed an L1 Resonator on (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
9:01AM (My Username) destroyed an L1 Resonator on (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
9:11AM (My Username) destroyed an L1 Resonator on (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
9:11AM (My Username) destroyed the Link (Remote Portal Name 01) at (Remote Portal Address 01) to (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
9:11AM (My Username) destroyed a Control Field @(Remote Portal Name 01) at (Remote Portal Address 01) -1 MUs
9:11AM (My Username) destroyed an L1 Resonator on (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
9:11AM (My Username) destroyed the Link (Portal Name) at (Portal Address) to US Post Office (Remote Portal Address02)
9:11AM (My Username) destroyed an L1 Resonator on (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
9:12AM (My Username) destroyed an L3 Resonator on (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
9:12AM (My Username) captured (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
9:12AM (My Username) deployed an L1 Resonator on (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
9:12AM (My Username) deployed an L1 Resonator on (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
9:12AM (My Username) deployed an L1 Resonator on (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
9:12AM (My Username) deployed an L1 Resonator on (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
9:12AM (My Username) deployed an L1 Resonator on (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
9:12AM (My Username) deployed an L1 Resonator on (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
9:12AM (My Username) deployed an L1 Resonator on (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
9:12AM (My Username) deployed an L1 Resonator on (Portal Name) at (Portal Address)
According to the ‘lore’ or backstory, portals are places where human creativity and inginuity is shown, such as public art, museums, parks, etc, and as such, attract human activity.
Although it would be nice if there were portals in the suburbs, it simply doesn’t follow the story at all, the suburbs are rather boring, with nothing in particular to draw people in.
The goal of ingress is to draw people to places of interest, such as city cores, and then collect data on their activities and new places of interest.
Also, as a side note, as the other person said, a portal takes 8 resonators to create a field. If one is destroyed, the field drops, so the person who first took down a resonator gets the points for taking down a field. Your girlfriend, who took down the last resonator of a portal, would have gotten the points for destroying a resonator, and if she placed a new resonator on the (now neutral) portal, she would’ve gotten points for the capture.
Anyways, that’s my 2¢
There is a funny part of the story that I left out, since it wasn’t particularly germane to the issue at hand.
She didn’t get a chance to cap the portal.
For her to pop the last resonator, we had to be outside the area where they park the mail trucks (as described before). The Portal itself was only accessible from the east side of the building, and there was a fence between two adjacent properties that kept us from just going east, then south to get to the Portal. We had to walk the long way around the west, then south sides to get back to the front. As we were walking around the last corner of the building to get back in range of the portal for her to capture, an old Honda Del Sol came hauling ass into the parking lot.
It was Punchanello, the guy whose portal we’d just popped. He recapped it with an L1 Resonator before we got back within range of the portal.
On the flip side, we stood around for about 20m swapping stories. =)
To quote from http://ingressportal.com/research/links/, “When all eight resonators have their XM health reduced to the Critical level, then the Link will fail.” So he probably brought the last resonator a bit too low before he turned things over to Audrey. I’m going to also guess that the portal in question may have been rather heavily shielded, which may have added to the problem. (You can see how shielded a portal is using http://www.ingress.com/intel and clicking on the mods tab when looking at the details of a portal.)
That being said, I’m not sure it changes your main issue, which is if you’re not willing or able to go into a highly populated area for a few hours on the weekend or in the evening, it’s really, really hard to level up. And if all of the portals are being guarded by high-level player, it definitely does get more difficult. I get what you are saying about lots of people living in the suburbs, but I think the statistics you are quoting includes the more highly populated and dense suburbs that are close into the city. But yeah, if you lives in the exburbs, the game is definitely not going to work well for you.
We covered “Highly Populated areas” in the second part of the review.
The short version: We spent 5-6 hours in the central core of Denver, and burnt through an entire week’s worth of the stockpiling we did¹ in about 30 minutes. It was an uphill battle after that. We could cross our fingers, and drive around hacking clusters of enemy portals for ~400 AP each x however many were in the cluster (2-3, usually) for the long, slow grind to L2 for her – OR – we could go downtown and go -walk- around (in weather that wasn’t much above freezing) hacking friendly portal clusters hoping to accelerate the ‘gearing up’ process.
Neither option was ideal, and I’m still of the mind that launching this thing now, instead of just sitting on it until April or so, wasn’t the best idea that Google’s ever had.
¹ We went out several nights and repeatedly hacking all the close in friendly portals within about 15 minutes travel from our place. There are (were) some good clusters nearby (Broomfield City Center)