Wow, what a year it has been…
On November 4th 2013, I read an article on flipbook that talked about an Augmented Reality Game. It sounded kinda cool so I thought I’d download it… Heh, famous last words…
I started up the app and chose green because it was my favorite color… Also because embracing alien technology for the progression of mankind sounds pretty freaking awesome.
My goal was to hit level 8 before December 13th, 2013 – the day the Founder’s Badge is released and the game goes “live”. I hit my goal… barely. On December 12th, 2013 at 9:34 PM I made a field from the portal Dark Rocketship Onus Crashes pushing me to level 8. The portal was “secretly” named after the local smurf of which I had declared my nemesis, Darkonus. I was so proud to have leveled to 8 off of his portal!
Fast forward to June 20th, 2014… My flip goes through and I lose the 8,072,009 AP I had gained over those past 6-7 months.
The grind begins… I kept my badges so I was only hunting AP until level 13… when the real wait begins. I hit 13 within a few months and then my momentum started to fade. Using stat tracking apps it said I still had months to go till the next badge…
Fast Forward to November 4th, 2014… My one year Anniversary in-game, Ingress posts that they are releasing an #IngressYearTwo badge that WILL count towards leveling. Onyx is Level 15… I pull up my stats and check how close I am. Only approx 3,800 captures and I only have 11 days to get that last platinum. Doable…
Wow, what an amazing team… People dropped everything they were doing to help farm me bursters and I had someone running Ops for me telling me where dense green clusters were almost 24/7. The support was amazing. That is what true teamwork is and I really think it defines this game. I had someone tell me that if I was dropped gear and if I was given help that those aren’t real stats. I didn’t earn them fair and square. I disagree, I earned the stats. I still fired the bursters and captured the grey portals… No matter how technical you get! Stats don’t lie. The game is much more about the community than it is about the game. I didn’t realize this until recently.
By November 15th, 2014 I was Level 15 and earned my Onyx Innovator badge. I was still short about 4 million AP and didn’t end up hitting L16 that day… But the hard part was behind me. The badges were earned. It was just an all out AP grind.
On December 4th, Ingress announced that Links and Fields were x2 AP for a week.. Unfortunately due to procrastination in school… I had to study for finals instead of capitalize on huge AP gains.
That brings us to today… December 12th, 2014. One year exactly after I hit L8 on the Enlightened side at Country Village using the portal named after my nemesis. I didn’t know the dates lined up until I got home and starting looking through my pictures to write this report or else I probably would have waited 4 hours and 22 minutes to install that link amp on the exact same portal (now renamed to Rocketship Crashes) pushing me to exactly 40 million AP. I am not sure if 40 million on the dot L16 has been done in Seattle yet or not… but this was always a goal of mine and I am finally able to cross it off the list.
-PaidtoDecimate – RES – L16
P.S. Shout out to everyone that helped me through this journey…
Thanks to @beefrog, @amethina and @theBana for being true friends that stuck with me and didn’t change the way they acted around me just because I changed sides.
Thanks to the crew that helped me to get almost 4k captures in just under 2 weeks
Thank you to the Resistance for accepting me into your communities and helping me every step of the way
Thank you to the Enlightened for making this possible. Without green to smash, I wouldn’t have gotten to where I was today. Especially those of you who hit CV religiously
Thank you to anyone I may have missed that has helped me along this.