I used to play Ingress harder than I do now. I was very gung-ho in the early days. I progressed quickly, but I tend to do that in all the games I play.
I mentioned in part 2 that Ingress is a loner game. I'm a bit of a loner. I started off trying to meet up with other players, and even considered attending one of the game-wide Events, when Austin was a major site. The problem is that I have a bad back and two bad knees, so lots of walking is hard, and the events tend to involve a lot of walking, from what I've been told.
And then I got a bit disillusioned with Ingress.
My biggest problem with Ingress is that there is no permanence. You can spend hours hacking, capturing, linking, fielding, etc. and feel really good about what you have accomplished, then go back the next day, and it is all gone.
The proper way to look at it is that the other side has now given you the opportunity to do it all over again. And I see that, but it is still a bit depressing. Especially, when you have setup a good farming area, and someone has taken it down, and rebuilt nothing.
Ingress is a lot of repetitive actions. You go to portals. You hack portals. You link portals. You move on to another portal. It gets boring at times
My favorite way to play Ingress is to collect many portal keys. I have about 300 at any given time. Then, you sometimes get lucky as you move around hacking portals and attempting to link them, and that can be fun.
You can also go out with a specific plan about what you want to link. I used to go out in basically a big circle around where I live and try to field the entire area. I do not do that as often anymore, after one day when I headed out on the circle and created field after field, linking back to a portal by my house. I had spent weeks collecting keys for that portal, as well as others nearby. In the middle of my circuit…maybe more like three quarters of the way around, I was suddenly unable to link back to my home portal. I found that someone had come along behind me and taken down that central portal and destroyed most of my work.
Now, you need to understand that this really had little effect on me…game-wise. I had still earned all the points for creating all those fields, but basically, after hours of work, I was left with nothing to show for it…well, except the AP. It was frustrating.
The game giveth, and the enemy taketh away.
I still play, but not with the fervor of the past.
