It has been about 4 months that I’ve been playing ingress. At the beginning, I thought that I’d never progress to more than level 2 and so I’m kind of surprised that I managed to reach level 9 somehow.
Anyhow, last weekend, I participated in my first live combat with a huge influx of Enlightened players from all around Europe. I suppose that the event was meant to be an ambush but we got a trickling of an idea when there were an increase of attacks in our neighbourhood by unfamiliar names.
The other hint that something was up was when the places that we usually go to, to farm for resources gets attacked one by one – a countermeasure to make it difficult for us to fight back.
With this in mind, Cart and I decided to farm as much as possible in the places that we can think of which are not yet attacked and stocked up as much as possible and waited in anticipation.
We managed to meet other resistance members. There were about 20 of us participating as there were a number on vacation. From what I heard, there were more than 150 members from the Enlightened team all across Europe. Their mission was said to capture and create 1000 Level 8 portals.
20 versus more than 150? Yikes.
We quickly got together and divided ourselves into groups to do a clean sweep in different areas. Saturday, we were deployed to Piazza del Popolo and Piazza Mazzini, while on Sunday we went to San Giovanni in Laterano.
It was extremely crowded and there were so many interesting things to be seen, but we had a bigger task at hand.
How we communicated with the rest of the team was quite amusing to be honest. Cart was going around with a walkie-talkie app to coordinate with other players and every few seconds, his device would buzz loudly and it would it make it seem as if we were policemen.
I have to say, that I’ve never seen so many L8 portals from the opposing team in one place, and it was overwhelming to see a sea of green, but good thing is, being in a team made it much more bearable and we cleared our area one at a time.
It was a tough battle :
- Physically challenging as we had to walk a lot under the hot summer day, to cover our designated area, and it was especially tough for Cart and me as we were both fasting.
- Mentally challenging as I kept having technical maladies such as my battery draining too fast or unstable GPS, making me not able to play effectively.
And surprisingly, I saw my resources starting to trickle. From about 600 bombs, I was left with only about 100 at the end of the day. On a normal day, I’d have to chase after people to take them so that I could have more space in my inventory.
Nevertheless, with our collective efforts, it feels like such an achievement when we managed to stop the Enlightened from reaching their one thousand goal.
During the two day fight, I’m sad that my “portal helds” were destroyed. In Ingress, you could get medals depending on how long you keep it alive. I managed to reach 40 days for the ones in Rome and it didn’t increase after that. But the thing that made me feel better is that there are other resistance players who sacrificed their “helds” so that they could create this huge field that lasted for over an hour.
If they willingly gave their portals up all in the name of creating this field, I shouldn’t feel too bad about mine.
Overall, I thought that it was a good game from both teams and in the end, from what I see, it was really heartening to see players coming together all in the spirit of the game – readily helping out to improve a portal, so that we could farm, some sharing their resources such as bombs and power cubes to others, some lending out their battery packs and so on.
Also, it was really motivating to see cheers from all over the world from fellow members. It probably sounds cheesy, but that did give us more spirit and drive. 🙂
All in all, I had a really good weekend. But lets not do this again too soon, I think we all need some well deserved rest for now. 🙂
Sidenote : Look at how sunburnt Cart looks like after being out for two days!
Moral of the story. Wear sunscreen.
