Ingress: Many Many Teams But Only Two Global Teams

There are some basic premises.

(1) This is a game. It is supposed to be fun. This is not a corporate project. There is no boss. Much of the fun in the game comes from the human interactions and the human frailties.

(2) The number one rule in Ingress leadership is you can't tell anyone what to do. But with their consent you can suggest things and share tips and wisdom.

(3) There are only two global teams possible. That is just the way the game has been designed.

Both sides already have started with city teams. The city teams on both sides all over the world cropped up pretty much independent of each other. So the challenge is not what you do when more than one team shows up. The challenge is how do you bring about communication and coordination among teams across a country, a continent, perhaps to span the globe.

There is room for multiple Resistance teams in New York City. I think team building should be encouraged. First of all it is a scalability issue. A G+ group past 500 members does not make a lot of sense. Maybe 200 is a healthy number. Beyond that a group, any group, should do an amoeba split. When you move from 500 to 2,000 agents in the city, some neighborhoods will qualify to have their own groups. Borough groups will no longer be enough. I know I want a Greater Jackson Heights group.

I have met many agents whom I have told, "My team is not the right team for you, you should join the other team." The Squad is not for everyone.

There is a cross faction hangout that popped up in my Gmail yesterday, and most of the usual suspects showed up, chief among them the Keyser. Maybe there is room for a cross-faction squad, and there is room for The Squad to coordinate with the existing organized Resistance team(s) in the city.

At some point the city might graduate to having rival L8 farms sitting side by side, permanently, because we want to seek new challenges other than building and killing L8 farms. Similarly the teams in the city will perhaps graduate to thinking team building is a welcome phenomenon. It is just like farm building, or home territory building. The goal should be communication and coordination, not name calling on the COMM.

Related articles

• Ingress: Swatting Houseflies On The COMM
• Ingress: Reporting tomhuze
• Ingress: More Portals Are Needed
• Ingress: Portal Building, Field Building, Farm Building, Team Building
• Ingress: Portal Submissions Are The Bomb
• Ingress: State Of The Game: New York City
• Ingress: Temporarily Banned

Ingress: Temporarily Banned

Request to Niantic: Please please please introduce a Block User feature on the COMM so it is easier for me to get the miscreants out of my Ingress universe.  Until then I am going to try and avoid the COMM, but it is hard to not use the COMM when you are trying to build a team, which is what my next big push is. Some idiots of timtomhuze have actively been interfering by engaging in harassment, demonization and the like in the past when I have tried to talk to my local agents. I hope they also got your emails. 

Related articles

• Ingress: 7,000,000 AP
• Ingress: Swatting Houseflies On The COMM
• Ingress: More Portals Are Needed
• Ingress: Imagining 10,000 Agents In NYC
• Ingress: Home Territory: I Need My Green Agents
• Ingress: Tri-State Resistance Should Attempt Complex Fielding
• Ingress: The Cross Faction Squad
• Ingress: 5 Times More Players, 10 Times More Portals
• Ingress: Reporting tomhuze
• Ingress: How To Build A Home Territory

Ingress: Imagining 10,000 Agents In NYC

I think we are in an early phase of moving from 1,000 portals and 500 agents in New York City to 2,000 portals and 1,000 agents. And the pace is not fast enough for me. But it is only a matter of time when the game gets bigger and we will eventually end up with 100,000 portals and 10,000 agents in the city. I can see that happening. And I can see that happening by next summer at the most. I can't wait for the game to go public.

When there are 10,000 agents in the city there will be at least 10 blue and 10 green teams in the city. Each team will have a slightly unique character. The current crop of L8 agents will be largely irrelevant to those future generations of agents. Face it, this is not a complex game. You will still play the game with the Intel map and the app. Everything those 10,000 agents will do will get reflected in the Intel map, and you will still just be reacting to the Intel map. I think 10:1 is a healthy ratio. As in, there are 10 portals for every agent. Less than that and the game is hampered. Like right now. There are not enough portals in my home territory for me to be able to get into recruiting in a major way.

Most agents will choose to play solo, like now. Even those who join organized teams will mostly play solo, like now.

Complex fielding will remain the top challenge in the game. The game will turn New York into an even more of a walking city than it already is, and has been before the game, and that is awesome. The game also has a Neighborhood Watch element to it. Agents hungry for AP visit portals in the remotest locations at the oddest hours.

If you think of the game as a great way to explore neighborhoods in the city, this game is as interesting as the city, which is very interesting. If you think of the game as a way to meet people as I do, this game is a great icebreaker. You do meet plenty of people.

Related articles

• Ingress: Swatting Houseflies On The COMM
• Ingress: New Scanner: Version 1.30.2 Update
• Ingress: How To Build A Home Territory
• Ingress: Reporting tomhuze
• Ingress: More Portals Are Needed
• Ingress: 7,000,000 AP
• Ingress: Portal Submissions Are The Bomb
• Ingress: The Cross Faction Squad

Ingress: Home Territory: I Need My Green Agents

The Level 8 green agents on my home turf and some of the regularly visiting Level 8 green agents just so happen to be some of the very top green agents in the entire city. When I started playing Jackson Heights was 100% SRC turf. On Fridays that guy would just sweep through the entire area, and I wondered how he managed to do that. I just could not fathom. I later came to know about the power of L8 bursters.

Then on my way to L8 I started taking over, and once I hit L8 I wiped out SRC. And I thought I was done. I was not done. SRC had taken the game to a whole new level. Now he was working from behind the screen. He was playing a proxy war game. He was busy leveling up agents. Because he knew the one with more agents will dominate a territory.

I hit L8 before exussum but he went L8 not long after. And then chicory showed up. And once he hit L8, I was pretty much "outgunned," SRC's word. SRC and Henrock are out of Corona, but both are Jackson Heights regulars. Henrock I have been calling the King Of Queens for a while now. That guy has more resonators in the borough than anyone else. Lighthouse0 from Astoria and Zrozue from Flushing and RedJava and Avumede from Forest Hills also visit. Actually I know Avumede visited because Slomar visits within hours: such is the rivalry.

I would not want a home territory that was 100% blue and stayed blue. In short, I do not want a Forest Hills for me. That would be too boring. I want my home territory to stay competitive. So, no, I don't wish my local green agents did not exist, or disappeared, or went inactive. I want a game. Although I do want a much larger territory, as in, many more portals. And I do want a much bigger local blue team. I want do be able to organize L8 farm events just with local blue agents as necessary. And I want a constant inflow of new blue agents, so there are always people leveling up.

Over time I want the core of Jackson Heights to become like Battery Park, a zone that high level agents leave for low level agents who are leveling up. Easy come, easy go.

My home territory includes much of Jackson Heights, some of Woodside and some of Elmhurst.

Related articles

• Ingress: Jackson Heights Mysteries
• Ingress: Home Territory
• Ingress: Reporting tomhuze
• Ingress: Open Source Organization And Organic Leadership
• Ingress: Portal Submissions Are The Bomb
• Ingress: How To Build A Home Territory
• Ingress: 7,000,000 AP
• Ingress: Tri-State Resistance Should Attempt Complex Fielding
• Ingress: State Of The Game: New York City (2)

Ingress: Swatting Houseflies On The COMM

The COMM is the least well thought through element of the Ingress gaming app. It is just raw.

My top request right now with Niantic is to enable a Block User feature for the COMM. Minus that the COMM has a tendency to degenerate to the lowest common denominator kind of talk.

Also just having an All COMM and a secure COMM for faction chat is not enough. There is room for one more section, one called private COMM: there you only see people you allow.

There are only two global teams possible in the game and that is the way it should be. But every city in the world has at least one local team on each side. And the idea of making it possible to form many, many local teams is not an aside. Making that possible is central to bringing about complexities in the game.

The game has to be kept simple in its basics like it is now. But most of the new complexities and challenges will come from enabling easy creation of new teams. Just like you graduate from building portals to building entire farms the ultimate act in the game is when you build your own team. You don't have to, and most people will not, but that is the ultimate act in the game.

I have a global team in mind. I am going to build the top Resistance team in New York City. And in doing that I am going to build a blueprint with which to build a global team.

The number one thing that has been hindering my team building efforts is a sheer lack of portals in the city. I need my 1,000 portal submissions to go through before serious team building can start. There are people who have been astounded by how prolific I have been at submitting portals, and their reaction is to the 60 or so portals of mine that have gone live. Well, to them I say, wait until I start recruiting people. My portal submissions will pale in comparison to the team building I will do.

In the mean time I get to go on faction chat around 5 PM and swat houseflies. There are about five members of timtomhuze who like nothing better than to pull the conversation on faction chat to the lowest possible denominator. Like I said, I am new to Ingress, but I am not new to political warfare.

Related articles

• Ingress: Reporting tomhuze
• Ingress: More Portals Are Needed
• Ingress: New Scanner: Version 1.30.2 Update
• Ingress: The Squad: Racially Coded Language
• Ingress: Portal Submissions Are The Bomb
• Ingress: Portal Building, Field Building, Farm Building, Team Building
• Ingress: How To Build A Home Territory
• Ingress: The Cross Faction Squad