Woo hoo! Today I finally levelled to L16 – again! I’d taken a hiatus from the game to focus on some other personal matters that had been set in motion after the Magnus anomaly series in 2017. COVID wasn’t such a bad excuse to get out and play either, hell – we even added a new item to our bucket list – road trip across a continent during a mass extinction event (remind me to add a badge to the thing for that) and it’s been pretty fun re-learning the game from a freshened and “new players” perspective.
Some of our local clusters are fairly x-fac friendly/aware, with regulars from both factions smashing and building fairly often. This great passive x-fac play made it a lot easier to level up, as well as apex spends from my C.O.R.E. subscription. Needless to say I’m pretty stoked to finally level up again, and am grateful to the various players who helped by playing at the cluster!
Today there was a bit of a negative experience though – I think it worked out, but it reminded me of how much we tend to invest ourselves in the activities we opt to involve ourselves in. One of our resident black belt guru ENL had dropped a quantum capsule in the area I was working in and without much thinking I picked it up to check it out (I figured maybe it was cluster keys or bursters – sometimes these things get left around for the next player; I know I certainly will do that if I know someone is working on an objective) – but no – it was full of Ingress First Saturday portal mods.
I quickly realized the capsule was not meant for me – and thankfully the agent came back when they realized the capsule was still dropped. I felt pretty sheepish about it – because frankly – it’s pretty lame to be picking up capsules full of gear where someone may have simply dropped it temporarily to make room in their inventory.
Back in the olden days (especially around anomaly season) it wasn’t unusual for agents to roam around meetups to pilfer opposition team capsules. Whether for Intel (oh what keys are they distributing and to what groups of agents) or simply to render the contents unusable – it was certainly a viewed as a strategy by some. I doubt that would ever change in highly competitive events, but as a general rule – yeah – stealing a capsule can be a pretty un-classy maneuver.
