Level 5 - 245920 AP - 54080 to level 6 Body stats: Still fat, still unweighed.
Just over 20,000 AP today, most of which was while walking around. I'd have had more, but my play style sort of limits my AP gain. I have yet to locate a scale sufficient for my needs. It's somewhat unfortunate being so overweight sometimes. My method of playing Ingress often involves friends. The first two people I arranged to start playing after I started up were my two roommates. I, and one of them, decided to go on a "Downtown Patrol". We left around 7:30 and ended up returning about 10PM. With a few stops and slight wandering that's 2.5 hours of walking. I don't remember the exact last time I walked for so long... I used to walk a lot on Friday nights with one of my other high school buddies (did I mention said roommate is another high school buddy?) I am confident that my "Ingress Weight Loss Program" will have noticeable results soon.
Level 5 - 224086 AP - 74918 to level 6 Body Stats: Fat. Unweighed.
Every journey has a beginning.
I decided to start this blog to chronicle what effects that doing a lot of walking with the secondary goal of playing Ingress will do to me. I've been overweight most of my life. So, this might be doing some good for me.
I've been walking around a bit, with some occasional farming of a few portals so I will be scurrying around the block a bit. However, this evening I decided to put together a big route allowing me to hit a grand total of 48 portals. 48 portals, however, if I were to burn them all out would take me a grand total of 17 hours to do in a single day. And that doesn't even factor in travel time!
The plan, dear Internet, is that I intend to figure out a "sweet spot" of portal farming. Something that'll give me a few places where I can rest if needed, and maybe hit some portals 2 or 3 times.
What exactly IS Ingress?
For those who do not play Ingress or have no idea what I'm talking about, it's a pretty interesting geocacheing game for Android devices. You basically need a relatively recent Android device, capable of assisted GPS, as well as a data plan. There are many portals far from free Wi-fi, so you won't get the most of the game if you don't have mobile data.
Watch this YouTube video for the basics of the story:
It concerns the world around us - invisible to the naked eye are portals and exotic matter. Think of Exotic Matter, or XM, as power, needed to do things. There are two factions, the "Resistance" who are opposed to what these portals are doing to the world around us, and the "Enlightened" who I am a part of - who think it's pretty neat what they're doing.
Resistance is the "Blue" team. We call them smurfs.
Enlightened is the "Green" team. My team. Dunno what the smurfs call us.
First
thing you need to do is gather XM and go to a portal. As I live in
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, I'll use a simple example that anyone here
will know: The Golden Boy atop the Legislature is a portal.
So you go
down to the Legislature and zero in on the location of the portal.
Regardless of who owns it, you can "hack" it, and get some items. If the
portal is controlled by your team, you have a higher chance of items,
but get no Action Points - think of it as experience points. If the portal is controlled by nobody, you have a somewhat lower chance than if it was part of your team's assets, and you still get no AP. Controlled by the opposing faction? Lowest chance to get items, but you get 100 AP for the hack.
At the time of this post, the enemy faction owns the Golden Boy. So, let's pretend right now that I am lucky, and got a resonator, a XMP burster, and a portal key from the hack. Yay! At Access Level 1, you can't do much. You need 10,000 AP to get to the next level, so if you do nothing but hack enemy portals, you will level at your 100th hack.
XMP bursters are used to destroy enemy resonators, which are used to capture portals. It gives somewhat less for destroying than putting down your resonators, but unless you're like me and are helping others get to higher levels (I smash, they take) you're going to take down an enemy portal and then take it yourself.
Google "ingress" for more details, and you can also check out http://www.ingress.com - it is in closed beta right now however, so you'll need to sign up for an invite if you don't know anyone currently playing.
So what's it all mean?
The important thing is that you have to physically get to all these
places to hack and smash and such. I do typically hack six or seven
portals on the way to and on the way from work. However, I have found
that I often run out of items when I try to take over enemy portals and
such. So, it's time for two birds with one stone. I have too much gut and not enough XMP bursters and high level resonators.
I'll try to commit myself to at least one blog entry per week here, and progress pictures at least every two weeks. No promises.
