An Ingress Update

MCWTLG Stats 2

Now that I have reached R16 and no longer need to earn badges to level up, I have been pondering what my next course of action should be.  I had given some consideration to changing factions (joining the toads) since this can be quite a challenge (collecting 40 million AP again...ouch) and it forces you to work solo.  Few agents in your new faction will trust you since you have changed sides. 

However I have finally decided that I am going to work on badges next. I have gotten much better with Glyph Hacking lately but not as good as Bryan was when he was playing. I hope to earn my Platinum by end of October.

The guardian stat is not accurate because it only goes from your last active streak up to the point the streak ended, no matter how long ago it was and even then it is not accurate. The Onyx Guardian badge is uber hard to get around here.  Many players (both sides) use web site "scraping" scripts to find potential Guardians of their enemy and hunt them down.  I refuse to do that. I have had a couple of my previous candidates picked off at 90-100 days or so and the person who did it all but admitted they were hunting my Guardians.  People I know who have successfully earned this badge have done some pretty extreme things to do so.

All the rest of the badges/estimates look accurate however "Seer" is on hold from Niantic. Point of clarity, I did not start using Agent Stats until August 2016, two months after I started playing Ingress so the stats are a little skewed.

I also hope to get my Onyx in SpecOps (missions) eventually but with 241 more to complete I will need to travel a lot more. Sherman and Garland have several I have not done yet.  That is one place to start, as well as some of the portal farms in Dallas/Addison which have a lot as well.

I would love to have at least GOLD in every badge but some like "Recruiting" and "Mission Day".  Mission Days are MEGA events for Ingress. I don't have the time, funds, or desire to travel in order to do them.  Recruiting is harder for me since I am an introvert.  Oh well.

MCWTLG Stats 1

It appears that I will earn my Via Lux badge for exploring 300 or more new/unique (to me) portals in the 30 days of September (the contest ends tomorrow at midnight UTC).  This is part of the latest Anomaly going on world wide. I managed to get the portals I needed by driving South down the service road of the Dallas Tollway starting in McKinney, hitting portals just off the tollway and then turning around at IH-635 and doing the same thing on the way back North.  That was Sunday, Sept 25th since traffic would be lighter on the tollway service road.  

On Saturday (Sept 24th) I drove up to Anna, Melissa, Van Alstyne, Howe, Tom Bean, and Sherman on the back roads and explored 167 new/unique (new to me) portals.  I actually used less gas and explored more unique portals on Saturday than I did on Sunday.  I also managed to complete a couple of missions on Saturday but avoided them on Sunday since I had a quota of unique portals to fill.

MCWTLG Stats 3

While you don't earn badges for the stats on this graphic and therefore cannot be used to level up, they are still interesting to me none the less.  Most notably are the "Smuggler" and "Controller" stats for maintaining links and fields respectively.  This particular field was in Cumming, GA created in July 2016 shortly after I started playing Ingress in June 2016.  I did not keep any of the keys to the portals that comprised the field, but nonetheless the field and link(s) stayed up for almost a year without any help from me.  Someone (possibly my old high school friend whom I was visiting at the time) did me a solid. I did not own any of the portals that made up the field so no Guardian badge was earned from this.

The other noteworthy stat is the "Collector"  I drive around with my scanner running most the time and I try to use as much XM as I can to keep the XM tank less than full so it can collect more. "A full XM tank is a wasted XM tank".

The "Link Master" stat surprised me as well.  If I go by my longest link ever, that would mean it lasted almost a week and I am sure that the 74 km link only lasted a few hours.  Before that, the longest one was something like 30-40 km but I am sure it did not last very long either.

As you can tell from the "Country Master" stat, I don't work on large fields.  I have never made a BAF (Big Ass Field) or been part of an Op that has created one. That might change in the future but it is not a goal right now.  I have much more fun tearing down the ones the toad create...right before checkpoint, if possible.

If you were not aware,  the screen shots are from Agent Stats, an app for Android, maybe iOS as well.  It takes a screen capture of your phone and uploads it to the Agent Stats web site where OCR turns it into data to give you the charts.  It is great for helping you decide what medal to chase when you are leveling up.