Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Ingress: Could The Squad Be Cross Faction?

Last night agent BxBomber (green) put forth an interesting thought. How about having a cross faction Squad? I had not thought about it, but the idea makes tremendous sense.


A cross faction Squad would be a mark of good sportsmanship. I can think of few secrets in this game. This is a simple game. I am a blue agent. When I see a green L7 farm my first instinct is to hack. I get the same AP for capturing a L3 green portal as I would a L7 green portal, but L7 portals are harder to capture.

To me the most exciting aspect of this game is complex fielding. And so what I have been most excited about for the past few months now has been making portal submissions.

What would a cross faction Squad do? It would come up with best practices in the game to publicly share. It would organize cross faction events. That would include L7 and L8 farms. It would make major efforts at portal submissions and player recruiting. It would come up with a set of values.

I am open to the idea. Let the brainstorming begin.

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Monday, June 24, 2013

Ingress: 5 Times More Players, 10 Times More Portals


I believe the game has reached that point where it is ready for five times as many players. Niantic not long back sent out five invites to each agent. I believe it has also been approving more requests made directly to it through its site for membership.

When you have five times more players, you can not have the same number of portals. You can not even have five times more portals. You want 10 times more portals - at least 10 - for those five times as many players.

All that increases the velocity of the game. The game changes as you keep adding more and more people to it. Just like the Internet changed as more and more computers got connected to it.

There are agents today who feel like they pretty much know everyone who is playing. That will soon no longer be true. You ride the subway, but you don't know everyone who is on the train. You hardly know anyone who is on the train. Ingress has to reach for those scales.

I think Niantic should approve more portals faster. One should not have to wait two months to get a portal approved. The wait should be more like two weeks.
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Ugh, Finally


Hotmail Has Come A Long Way


I have been aware of Microsoft's overhaul of its email service, but I only today tried to log in and use it. (I am a comfortable, happy user of Gmail) And, gosh, it is so impressive. It is a cleaner experience than Gmail. Although I don't see me switching. I still have my hotmail address from the late 1990s before Microsoft bought it. And it still works fine.

Yahoo Mail, on the other hand, continues to be confounding. It still is so very loaded. It is like having at least three different televisions on in your living room, at least two of which were turned on by others. I logged in there as well this morning. After trying to delete 25 messages at a time for over 30 minutes I gave up. Can I please have the option to delete all 12,000 messages in my inbox at once? Please? Maybe the feature exists, but with three televisions on, it is hard to figure out. With Hotmail on the other hand I was able to delete all 180 messages in the inbox at once. Okay, that is a hint. Yahoo's spam filter is sub par.
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