Prime Brooklyngress
We've been under the weather for the past two weeks, and Julie will be away on business travel for the next few days, starting tomorrow. I've been pretty exhausted.
We managed to get in a brief trip to NYC for an Ingress Anomaly last weekend, and that was very fun. The first Ingress event we took Erica to was also in Brooklyn. This game there were four mechanics: The standard territory control mechanic (cluster battle), a game of having team members cover the most ground during the event on average (unique portal hacks), a game of making longest non-overlapping paths with a maximum number of segments (longest path), and a Mystery-Hunt-like code-breaking puzzle game (decoding).
Unique portal hacks was scored winner take all, and since it's about average performance, it's not affected by the number of participants on site. Decoding also allowed a lot of remote participation. So our opponents apparently had a plan, presumably going all in on those and trying to keep the rest close enough to squeeze out a victory. Was enough to make me worry about a repeat of the upset in Chicago.
But it turned out our operators had the right of it and the ones stuck on what worked in the past were our opponents. They lost on every mechanic. Even my subteam, in the "on foot but slower" category, managed to cover quite a bit more ground than our average opponent.
This was the first event run entirely on Ingress Prime, the new version of the Ingress app ported to the same engine as Pokemon Go. Unifying the game engine isn't a bad idea for Niantic, and the Prime app even has some real UI improvements. But it has a few major pervasive problems: It's slower, crashier, and very visually noisy. The game display tries to give a much more live display of what's changing in the game state nearby, which is good in some ways, but contributes to all those problems, especially when a bunch of people are all playing in the same area at once. So we experienced some crashes / freezes / lock-outs during the event. Definitely less smooth than previous events, and even on the old app you generally got a fair amount of lag during the Anomalies, with the general impression that somewhere the servers were on fire.
The Sunday Ingress Mission Day event was pretty fun and relaxing, too. The weather was perfect all weekend, which was really nice. We all enjoyed some good food, and Erica did get some time at various playgrounds. Domino Park was pretty cool, and we took a nice ride on the ferry to get to our hotel when we arrived Friday night.
This entry was originally posted on Dreamwith.
comments are there.
We managed to get in a brief trip to NYC for an Ingress Anomaly last weekend, and that was very fun. The first Ingress event we took Erica to was also in Brooklyn. This game there were four mechanics: The standard territory control mechanic (cluster battle), a game of having team members cover the most ground during the event on average (unique portal hacks), a game of making longest non-overlapping paths with a maximum number of segments (longest path), and a Mystery-Hunt-like code-breaking puzzle game (decoding).
Unique portal hacks was scored winner take all, and since it's about average performance, it's not affected by the number of participants on site. Decoding also allowed a lot of remote participation. So our opponents apparently had a plan, presumably going all in on those and trying to keep the rest close enough to squeeze out a victory. Was enough to make me worry about a repeat of the upset in Chicago.
But it turned out our operators had the right of it and the ones stuck on what worked in the past were our opponents. They lost on every mechanic. Even my subteam, in the "on foot but slower" category, managed to cover quite a bit more ground than our average opponent.
This was the first event run entirely on Ingress Prime, the new version of the Ingress app ported to the same engine as Pokemon Go. Unifying the game engine isn't a bad idea for Niantic, and the Prime app even has some real UI improvements. But it has a few major pervasive problems: It's slower, crashier, and very visually noisy. The game display tries to give a much more live display of what's changing in the game state nearby, which is good in some ways, but contributes to all those problems, especially when a bunch of people are all playing in the same area at once. So we experienced some crashes / freezes / lock-outs during the event. Definitely less smooth than previous events, and even on the old app you generally got a fair amount of lag during the Anomalies, with the general impression that somewhere the servers were on fire.
The Sunday Ingress Mission Day event was pretty fun and relaxing, too. The weather was perfect all weekend, which was really nice. We all enjoyed some good food, and Erica did get some time at various playgrounds. Domino Park was pretty cool, and we took a nice ride on the ferry to get to our hotel when we arrived Friday night.
This entry was originally posted on Dreamwith.
comments are there.