Persepolis Anomaly, Portland

This weekend, we traveled to Portland, OR for the Persepolis XM Anomaly.  Confused about what I'm talking about?  Go read this post: My introduction to Ingress.

As you know from my previous post on Ingress, Ingress is a game of virtual capture the flag or whatever that goes on all the time, all around you.  As the tagline says, "The world is not as you know."  However, four times a year, Niantic organizes special worldwide events that consist of a month of super intense gameplay, all at once, with hundreds and hundreds of other players.  Think of it as a sort of "world series" for Ingress, where both factions compete for MAJOR points, and for the opportunity to heavily influence the storyline of the game.

The series consists of a variety of games and events.  The Persepolis series had two "XM Anomalies" where players from around the world gathered in specific cities to fight over control of portals at specific times.  In addition, there was the "shard game," a sort of global soccer game.

The shard game started 2 weeks before the first anomaly.  In the shard game, special "shard" objects simultaneously appear all over the world.  Specifically, there are about 16 or so of them.  These shards represent fragments of the consciousness of one of the Niantic researchers analyzing the alien Shaper creatures.  Lore stuff.  The objective is to control this person's consciousness by directing the shards to your team's "goal" portal.  Players throw links to move the shards around, travel to remote locations, and do other wild stuff to gather the shards into their portal.  I actually got to help with one of the shards, helping to recharge the portal it was in while it was around.

The red thing is the shard.

It's fun, and we wound up winning the shard game 9-3, getting 9 of our shards into our goal, while the opposition only got 3 shards into their goal.

The "XM Anomaly" we went to is specifically an event involving hundreds of players all competing over portals in the area.  When I say it was big, I mean it.

I'm way off to the left.

The way this game works, 4 sectors are designated as "anomaly portals."  Every hour, on the hour, each sector is scored, once, in sequence.  So at 2pm, sector 1 is scored.  At 3pm, sector 2 is scored.  And so on.  The scoring works by basically counting how many portals are controlled, and how many fields are controlled.  Players battle it out for control of the portals so that, when they are scored, they own it and get the points for it.

Of course, Niantic doesn't let things be that simple.  First of all, the scoring doesn't happen exactly on the hour.  Instead, it happens at a random time between the hour and 10 minutes later.  So players have to fight hard for control of the portals for a full 10 minutes in order to maintain control and get their points, since you never really know when you've scored.

Did I mention LOOOTS of walking in between sectors?

Second, Niantic designates some portals are "volatile portals."  These special portals give the team 6 times as many points as a normal portal.  But which portals are volatile is secret information that teams have to work hard to find.  This time, there were 3 ways to find out which portals were volatile.  Apparently, in the middle of the night, on the Intel map, some of them would flash onto the screen for a moment.  The second, more standard way, of finding volatile portals is a series of deaddrops.  Each dead-drop is a hidden folder whose location is revealed by vague clues provided over social networks.  The third and final way of finding volatile portals is the "GoRuck" team.  This team of "special forces" engages in strenuous physical challenges, (think Tough Mudder type stuff.)  Once they complete these challenges, they get a listing of volatile portals to give to their teammates.

This creates some really interesting opportunities for counter-intelligence and intelligence.  Creating fake dead-drops and misinformation is a great way to confuse the other team and cause them to put too much effort into the wrong portals.  So all of this information has to get routed through special intelligence agents that have studied the information and can discern good information from bad.

That whole intelligence thing makes the game really interesting.  It really felt like we were some sort of virtual "troops on the ground" while there was this very large thing going on around us.  We were grunts in a single battle amidst a larger war.  We had generals, intelligence agents, covert operatives, etc. etc.  This really landed home when, just minutes after the game began, a huge field was created over the entire city, crossing over several states.  Players were not only battling it out there in portland, but in remote wilderness sites throughout the entire west coast.  Additionally, players all over the country had been given "keys" to our portals to allow them to help defend our portals from home. It was an incredible and wild experience to feel wrapped up in the middle of all of all these players operating all over the world to help us.

We called it operation "suck it"

At first, we were a little confused about what we were supposed to do, and how to do it, but it didn't take long to get into a groove of attacking, converting, and defending portals.  We were monsters at it.  At the 4 scoring (or "measurement") periods, we won half of them.  The first and second ones were ours, we lost the third, and the fourth was a tie.  Mind you, we were just one squad amongst over a dozen.  While we were focusing on those 3 little portals, other squads were focusing on their portals.  Overall, we wound up winning every single scoring period, coming to victory 4141 to 3196.

Alas, while we crushed it in Portland, we lost the overall Persepolis series by a mere 400 points, losing 22575 to 22146.  How?  Our satellite sites didn't do as well as we had.  That means that the Resistance gets to influence the storyline, and we don't.  Poo.  Ah well. :)

But seriously, congratulations are in order to both teams.  Enlightened and Resistance both did an amazing job, and I seriously had a metric ton of fun.  We might even end up on the Ingress Report, our Ingress news service!  :)  

But for now, we are sore and exhausted, but very very happy.  See you next time!