Thursday Ingress

I realized I forgot to blog on Thursday that I spent the evening over at Doolittle's at an Ingress gathering.  I've been playing for about 9 months, roughly since just before I went to San Antonio last year.  Our team is pretty cohesive and social, so we got together - 12 of us, although there was at least one other one hanging in the bar with his girlfriend not at our table - drank beer, ate dinner, and "fracked" the double portal.

That picture is generally what fracking looks like.  We all dropped resonators on the portal until it was Level 8, the max level portal you can get, so you get the highest level gear out of it.  You can only put one level eight resonator on a portal, so you need to have at least 8 people around to max it out.  Then we added multihacks - you can hack more than four times - and heat sinks - the time between hacks is reduced - and used a fracker.  Fracks cost real money, but usually a few people have some of them on hand.  They effectively double every single hack.  So if you'd normally get a few weapons and a few energy cubes (batteries), you get twice as many.  Looks like that picture on the left.  Out of the 2000 possible items you can have, I was at under 1000, so I had a long way to go.  I burned out my ability to hack both of them fairly early on, but bumped myself up to about 1800 items.  Mission accomplished.  Gear to get through the next week or so.  We talk about our team, about good places to throw a field (a way to score points and compete by linking three locations), trading keys and items, and where to attack next/strategy.  A strange little hobby, but I enjoy the folks I play with and they're a good time when it comes to beer, dinner, and shooting the breeze.