Commercial Portals

I've been noticing quite a number of what I will call "Commercial Portals" popping up near me. What I mean by commercial portal is one that is there seemingly to promote a business. Heck, the company I work for created a portal for their main building.

Also, near where I work a billiards hall put up a portal, a T-Shirt company did one and many others.

I'm not sure what I think about this. On one hand I love that there are more portals available, but on the other hand I feel it cheapens the game, especially the more blatant ones. Think how watered down the game will become if every strip mall has half a dozen portals.

I already have issues creating control fields because my link would intersect another link. it will only become more difficult with extreme quantities of commercial portals.

What are your thoughts?

Happy Hacking

Great Source for XM

So have you ever been out hacking portals, and your XM levels are too low to do anything? That last portal you recharged took the last of your XM and you can't wait the 20 minutes for the portal to recharge?

Well I stumbled upon a great place to get a fair amount of XM. It may even be as good as an unclaimed portal or a level 1 portal.

What is this great source for XM, you are probably asking?

Your neighborhood cell phone retailer. Add to that every strip mall seemingly has at least one. Each retailer has hundreds of XM there for the picking.

Just a quick tip that may help you.

Happy Hacking!

Ingress Version 1.28.1 Released

I haven't been following +Ingress  as much lately for a variety of reasons, so this release caught me by surprise. But this was a very welcome surprise.

I woke up this morning, and my scanner showed it had automatically updated Ingress. (By the way if you haven't set your phone/scanner to auto upgrade this is an app I definitely recommend allowing the auto upgrade). Initially I didn't think much about it, but when I launched Ingress on my way to work I was really impressed.

The first and most noticeable upgrade is Portal Vectoring. This is an awesome tool. If you have no portals in view on your scanner you will get pop ups with direction and distance to nearby portals. You can also immediately see the portal level and which faction controls that portal.

This solves one of my major complaints about Ingress. If you were in an area with you are not familiar with, it could be hard to find portals. I am really excited about this portion of the upgrade.

Other important features include the release of 5 new portal mods.

• Multi-Hack - Now there are "blackhat" methods of multi-hacking a portal. Now it appears that you now have the opportunity to "legally" multi-hack. But the number of multi-hacks will be limited before the mod burns out.
• Turret - This is another long awaited mod. But I am not quite certain of just how powerful they are going to make this mod. What we do know is that it will increase the number of defensive attacks on an enemy hacking a portal. But will it increase their strength? Will it automatically attack enemy faction players who get within range even if they do not attempt to hack? These are  some of the rumors out there.
• Link Amp - As the name implies this will amplify the distance between points of possible links
• Force Amp - This mod boosts the force of an attack on a portal
• Heat Sink - When hacking a portal you must wait 5 minutes between hacks. If you try to hack again too soon you get a message telling you the portal is in a cool down period and you must wait. This mod greatly reduces this time. The question remains: will this prevent portal burnout?

Happy Hacking