YMMV / Ingress

The Anime

• Awesome Music: The OP Tessellate by alt-J.
• Magnificent Bastard: Christopher Brandt, an altruistic scientist who wants to use the MX for the benefit of humanity is the creator of the augmented reality glasses used by the Collaborators. Brandt uses the Dark MX in himself and to revive his bodyguard Jack. Searching for Sarah, a woman with notorious potential to control MX, Brandt blows himself up in front of her to activate her potential. Encouraging Sarah from the afterlife, Brandt ultimately reveals himself as the real mastermind of the story, taking control over the augmented reality glasses from the Collaborators and killing their leadership by using their own bodyguards. Intending to save humanity by fusing all their souls into a single one, Brandt revives himself using the same method that saved Jack. Almost convincing the protagonists, Brandt forces Sarah to sacrifice herself before trying to force her to participate in his plan in the afterlife. Trying to devour Sarah in a last attempt to fulfill his goal, Brandt is defeated only due to Makoto's, the Ingress users' and Jack's sacrifice. Realizing that his best friend has chosen his own path, Brandt calmly accepts his defeat before vanishing.
• Unexpected Character: Kizuna AI would not be the first person you would expect to find in an anime based on a mobile game.

The Game

• Broken Base:
  • "Drivegressing", or the act of playing Ingress in a car (aka "cargressing", and "busgressing" for public transport). Some understandably view it as unsafe, and some see it as an unfair advantage over those who cannot or will not play while driving. The ones who are in favor of (safely) playing while driving point out that it is simply yet another variable that influences gameplay, alongside one's places of work, education, and residence, access to public transportation, among other things. This was fixed by introducing a mechanic that prevented all play if you are detected going above a certain speed. This is known as Speed Lock.
  • Version 1.76 introduces the Intention Filter. If the player tries to click on a spot on the map where there are many clickable objects in proximity, popups for objects around that spot will appear and the player will be prompted to select which object they intended to click. Some view this as an Anti Frustration Feature, especially as trying to pick up keys around a recently un-linked Portal has historically proven to be hassle. Others see it as a Scrappy Mechanic that slows down the game flow and is prone to Damn You, Muscle Memory! for those used to older versions.
  • Ingress Prime: The new interface and enhanced graphics have the community divided on whether they love or hate the changes. However many of the detractors are critical of the slower gameplay and buggy release.
• Cult Classic: Compared to its Killer App younger-sibling game Pokémon GO. It is not the stupendously-popular phenomenon that Go is, due to being an original property rather than carrying a world-famous brand name, but it still has a dedicated following around the world, with players citing the emphasis on the "bigger picture" (Links, Fields, regional and global scoreboards) and the collectiing of Portal Keys and Mission badges as a major reason to go traveling and to stay invested in the game. This is perhaps for the better, as while Pokémon Go players are infamous for doing unscrupulous or unsafe things to catch rare Pokémon or take control of Gyms, with some physical properties (especially cemetaries and museums) banning the game and in-game assets from them, it is comparatively rare to hear of Ingress players get in similar kinds of trouble (the in-game lore designating players as "agents" who operate in a more subtle manner helps).
• Difficulty Spike: Levels 2 through 8 are simple to obtain: Simply earn the required AP. Past that, however, not only do the AP requirements for each successive level continue to increase exponentially, but new levels require badges to earn, and depending on portal availability even getting from Level 8 to 9 may take several times as long as it did to get from 1 to 8.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Some Ingress fans are not terribly fond of Pokémon GO due to having a much bigger and louder fanbase; their large numbers at Ingress hotspots (due to Go piggybacking on a lot of Ingress infrastructure) does not help. This has led to concerns that various properties will ban the use of all location-based games, even for the Silent Majority. The rivalry is mostly one-way, though. Most Go players don't even know about Ingress.
  • To a smaller extent, Ingress fans had a heated rivalry with those of Portal fandom, due to both sharing similar themes and both are kind of similar in gameplay skills.
• Fan Nickname
  • Players from the in-game factions have nicknames for their opposing numbers: Resistance players refer to the Enlightened as 'Toads', 'Frogs', or 'Kermits', while Enlightened players refer to the Resistance as 'Smurfs'.
  • An incident where a significant quantity of item-generating passcodes was discovered after the Niantic Labs team partnered with ZipCar was referred to as "Zipcarmageddon".
  • Resonators placed very close to the portal are known as "Rings of Shame" since they can be destroyed more efficiently than if the resonators were spread out. They are also called "Pineapples" or "Campfires".
  • Portals reachable from a player's home are called "couch portals" or just "couch"/"sofa" for short; portals reachable from the workplace are called "desk portals", or "desks".
  • BAF - An enormous field made of links kilometers long, worth massive amounts of Mind Units and requiring lots of transport to set up. Known as "Big Augmented Field", but colloquially called "Big-Ass Field".
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: The response from some players when they introduced higher tiers of the "Innovator" badge and again when they introduced the "SpecOps," "Trekker," "Recharger", "Translator", and "Engineer" badges, as they make leveling to 16 easier than it was before
• Memetic Mutation: Link Amps^Explanation Link Amps are largely seen as Joke Items by Ingress communities; the general consensus is that unless you are part of a group operation that explicitly calls for the use of Link Amps, you have no reason to install a Link Amp on a portal, ever.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • "Portal online. Good work."
  • "Establishing portal link. Portal link established; field established. Excellent work."
  • "Resonator destroyed. Good work."
    • The accompanying sound of a resonator exploding.
• Paranoia Fuel: Trying to hold onto a "Guardian Portal" is this. You will end up checking its respective Portal Key several times a day to make sure it is not being attacked, and if you are at or near the portal you will very likely Freak Out every time you see someone else playing near the Portal or even just using their smartphone. Many players' hearts have skipped beats because their Guardian Portals came under attack at 19, 89, or 149 days^note 20 days for Gold Guardian, 90 for Platinum, and 150 for Black.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Most players simply ignore the lore and dive straight into the whole GPS-based territory control gameplay. Several players during the #13MAGNUS conclusion in fact outright left during the finale performance, citing it to be an embarassment.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Discarding items, especially when you need to do so because of hitting the item cap, was colossally annoying until a June 2014 update allowed the mass-recycling of items. However, keys can still only be recycled for one portal one at a time.
  • There is now a quicker way to recycle keys - load them into a spare blue capsule (no more than a couple of taps if you are getting rid of 100 keys from one geographical area, slightly longer if you want to pick and choose) and then recycle the capsule.
  • There is no way to turn down the portal special effects, which can be a problem for battery-conscious players and devices that struggle to render them. If your device is sufficiently underpowered, dropping a level 8 XMP Burster on top of a large cluster of Resonators can even crash the entire game or your device.
  • Speaking of battery, that combined with the constant use of the screen, data connection, and GPS receiver means the game can take a heavy toll on one's battery. Most dedicated players invest in portable chargers (usually with at least 10,000 mAh) as a result.
• Scrappy Weapon: Link Amps, which boost the maximum link range of a portal. Unless you are at a portal in the middle of nowhere that has no neighboring portals, there is almost no reason ever to deploy a Link Amp, as a high-level portal generally provides enough reach to connect to other portals, and deploying Link Amps wastes mod space that could be spent on more valuable items, sch as Shields. In fact, Link Amps are more frequently used to sabotage portals used frequently by the other side, by filling them up wasting mod space and then flipping to the other side's faction to make indestructible by them, rather than for their intended purpose.
• That One Achievement: This being a GPS-based game, some medals can become easier in certain geographical locations, some harder or outright impossible. With the release of the Level 16 update in May 2014, medals are now mandatory to level up.
  • The "Guardian" medal requires you to maintain continuous control over a portal for an extended period of time.^note "Control" as in "the portal stays aligned to your faction"; you are considered still in control of it for Guardian purposes if all of your Resonators are gone or upgraded, as long as it does not turn gray. The lowest tier is at 3 days, and the highest tier is at 150 days. If you do not live near, work near, or regularly visit a portal, or if enemy players greatly outnumber players you are allied with, getting the medals for 10 days or more, or even just 3 days, can become extremely difficult. If the Portal gets grayed out, your ownership streak ends, which can prove infuriating if you were going after the highest-level Guardan badges. A common strategy is to have multiple Guardian portals in completely separate locations, in case one of them gets wiped out. And even then, this does not help; certain players will put hits out on enemy guardian portals out of spite or revenge, and some players will even go the Super-Persistent Predator on just the oldest portals to screw you over; it does not help many of these use third party programs to scour the Intel Map for Guardian portals to bust. Due to these factors, this medal was retired as of early April 2018.
  • "Sojourner" is similar to Guardian in that it relies on a streak; this one involves consecutively hacking portals within 24-hour intervals.^note The specifics are kept hush-hush, but players have observed that there seems to be a "check" every 24 hours for Sojourner streaks; if you hacked a portal in the last 24 hours as of the check, you are considered in the clear, even if there is actually a gap of more than 24 hours between hacks. Theoretically, you can go up to 47 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds without hacking, but because the Sojourner check is intentionally not announced, it is safest to just hack once every 24 hours or less. The badge starts at 15 days and tops out at 360, i.e. nearly a whole year. Forget to hack for the day, or end up in a situation where you cannot play (such as a long-term medical emergency, losing or damaging your phone, or travelling someplace with no local portals)? Hope you were not almost at black! And unlike the Guardian badge, which at least allows you to save face by having another player recharge your portal if you are not available to do it or have multiple Guardian portals in case one goes down, there are no safeguards for Sojourner.
  • "Seer" required successfully submitting new portals; 10 submissions got you the first tier, and the highest tier is at 5000. Depending on where you lived, most portal candidates already had become portals, so unless you were a world traveller of sorts with a way to have Internet on your smartphone no matter where you went, or happened to live someplace where Ingress is unheard-of, getting the final medal tier was pretty much impossible. If was not impossible, then the manual portal review system certainly slowed things down, as it took as long as half a year for a submitted portal to be processed. Due to huge number of poor Portal submissions, the ability to submit portals was disabled temporarily between September 2, 2015 and re-enabled on November 25, 2017 with a new crowd-sourced review system. However the badge was permanently retired, so even if you were relying on this medal for a level up you'll have to go for a different one now.
  • "Pioneer" and "Explorer" require capturing and hacking unique^note e.g. doing the same action on two different portals counts as 2 unique portals, but doing that particular action on one portal twice only counts as one unique portal portals, respectively. Simple enough if you live someplace populated with portals, hard if you live in the middle of nowhere.
  • "Recruiter" requires using the email invite feature to invite new players to Ingress and get them to Level 3 at the least. Depending on your social connections and skills this medal can either be easy to level up or a nightmare.
  • "Translator" requires completing Glyph sequences. What makes it particularly frustrating is that although the number of Glyphs to memorize varies with Portal level, you will only get points towards towards the Translator medal if you correctly replicate every Glyph in the sequence; there is no "partial credit" if you miss so much as a single Glyph.
  • Several of the badges have massive difficulty jumps between two different levels. For example, the Bronze "Engineer" badge only requires 150 deployed mods; the Silver requires 1500. Similarly, Gold to Platinum Translator requires a player to more than triple their already substantial glyph point count.
• That One Level:
  • In general, any region where the enemy faction greatly outnumbers the faction you belong to. It is hard to accomplish anything meaningful, even with a well-sized group of players, if enemy players are constantly breathing down your neck and destroying any farms you create on sight.
  • Portal farms in amusement parks and other locations requiring a non-trivial fee to get into. They fall under portal submission guidelines as they are technically open to the public (unlike military bases, for example), so they unfortunately cannot be removed, and if an enemy player works there, it'll be hard or at least somewhat costly to seize their portals. What makes this even harder, is that many such amusement parks are only open for certain seasons and/or weekends only. Meaning if the player that works there also has access on days the place is closed to the public, it is only a matter of time and patience before they sweep away the other faction's resonators. Either via brute force with a near limitless supply of items and XM, or by resonator energy decay before it is back in their control.
  • That one portal. The one located in the middle of nowhere. In that one valley where only one cell phone user in 100 is able to get a useful signal. That person is a member of the other faction and visits that one portal every other day to recharge it and to harvest more portal keys. Portal keys they eagerly and freely share with their opposition faction friends who all keep that portal remotely charged and linked with other cross-aligned portals.
  • To a lesser extent, thick clusters of abandoned portals claimed by the Machina. Mainly because Machina portals climb to Level 8 very quickly, are decently hardy (if not as much as regular portals), and seem especially zap-happy when attacked, so setting off even a single Diffuser can get your XMP bar cooked to nothing. Be ready to chew through your Power Cubes like popcorn. And you have to deal with them if you want a farm worth squat, because Machina portals yield only Level 1 garbage when hacked. At least you'll get more Level 8 items than you'll know what to do with once you've busted them up.
  • Regarding missions:
    • Missions with a focus on fielding off of Portals. While the "hack a Portal", "visit way-point", and "capture or upgrade Portal" objectives can be done even if enemy players are present (in fact you want an enemy attacking a Portal you need to cap or upgrade since that opens an opportunity to replace resonators), missions where you have to make fields rely on having Portal Keys, which do not always drop every time you hack a portal, requiring you to do a lot of prep work in advance so that you do not spend the majority of the mission time trying to farm keys. On top of that, you are screwed if enemies start hitting the portals you are trying to make fields from and you do not have an abundance of shields to protect them with, especially if you've already started making the relevant links.
    • Missions for "driving farms" (that is, Portal farms/clusters that effectively necessitate being in a vehicle due to being spread out over a large area and making walking impractical) can be this for those who do not drive, or do but do not want to deal with the risks of playing and driving at once.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Hoo boy... When Niantic released Ingress Prime, aka Ingress 2.0, it drew the public ire of a lot of Agents from both factions for numerous reasons, mainly it's buggy nature, the changed UI, and the massive battery drain it had on a lot of devices. While Niantic's release of Scanner [REDACTED] (Ingress 1.xxx) about a week later helped to mollify a good number of players, there are still a few who are quite sore about it. Then, some months later, Scanner [REDACTED] was shut down.

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Hack acquired no items.

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