Slice of Chaotic Life

The daily life of a celibate middle-aged man.

Ingress journal: The home front

Posted by Itlandm on August 14, 2013

While I was hacking the church portal, I received notice that someone was attacking some of my portals down in central Mandal. That’s the town I live in at the time, and what bothered me was that the attack did not actually take down the portals, just scratched them. This made me think at first that it might be a newbie, in which case he (or less likely she) was probably living in Mandal. That would be a bit of a drag, since a new player would eventually be able to tear down my portals, but not be able to build something high enough level for me to use.

Conversely, starting in a city “owned” by the opposite faction is actually great. You get 100 Action Points for hacking an opponent portal, no matter whether you are successful or not. Even in Mandal, that would amount to 2400 AP every 4 hours, if you biked around and hacked them all. (4 hours is the burnout time. Actually I had burnout insulation on one portal, which a new player might not notice, so they would probably only get 2000 AP, but it is still decent.) In Kristiansand you could bike around hacking until your legs give out. So the first couple levels could be gained simply from hacking, without getting detected, while building your inventory.

It wasn’t a newbie, quite the opposite. I noticed when he (?) attacked again: The attack actually hit three portals simultaneously. Even though they are fairly close, that kind of blast radius is only available at the couple highest levels, 8 and perhaps 7. I doubt I could have done it at level 6. So it wasn’t a newbie, lucky for me.

But it is probably only a matter of time before the south tip of Norway hatches its first little “smurf”. (The Blue faction is called smurfs and the Green faction is called frogs, mostly by the opposing team. Classic old war rhetorics, dehumanizing the enemy!) The name Resistance (“Motstand” in Norwegian) has a heroic sound to Norwegian ears, due to the decades of praise for the few and scattered resistance fighters in Norway during World War II, also known as the Home Front. They actually made very little difference to the outcome of the war, even locally, but they did gather some useful information for the Allies and they did remind the German occupation army that Norwegians did not welcome them. This was news to many of the German soldiers, who had been told that they were sent to protect Norway from a British invasion. Scandinavia was after all the Urheim – the original home – of the Aryan race and the Germanic people in particular, and purer Übermenschen than the Germans themselves. The Resistance kind of demoralized the soldiers a bit, but their role was rather less than we liked to pretend during the first decades after the war. Compared several other occupied countries, for instance, Norway did almost nothing to protect its Jewish population, which was quickly eradicated.

Be that as it may, it stands to reason that the Resistance faction in Ingress is likely to have a heavier presence here in Norway than many other places. The Enlightened take a slightly different approach, drawing inspiration from the Viking age, where the Scandinavian peoples were fearlessly exploring the unknown. Now that portals are popping up all over the place and the mysterious XM particles are spreading into our dimension, we are exploring the greatest mystery of our age. At least as seen from inside the game … In real life, there are a lot of things still left to explore!

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