Badging

[bryant]

I think I’m the first Ingress player in the Bay Area to hit platinum specops, which means I’ve done 200 missions. (Missions are player-generated mini-quests that can be as easy as interacting with 4 portals or as hard as figuring out a set of passphrases over multiple miles.) This was not super-hard to do, but it did require a lot of persistence and some planning.

My 200th mission was Climb Mount Davidson by Agent hiryu; it was a nice walk up to the top of Mount Davidson, which was not terribly strenuous but which rewarded me with a great view nonetheless. My longest one — probably Hike Mt. Wanda, in Contra Costa County, which was a couple of miles of hiking up a nifty trail.

I completed eight missions at Walt Disney World a month before Niantic opened up mission creation to almost anyone. If I had taken that trip two months later, I’d have been able to do 100+ missions in that week with minimal effort. No regrets! I did 17 Disneyland missions on our last trip there. I have 16 missions from business trips to LA, and four airport missions (one of which overlaps with the LA mission count). I did more annoying “hack every portal on this downtown San Francisco street” missions than I want to think about.

I completed 45 missions in Contra Costa County in one weekend, thanks in large part to a very busy mission creator in Martinez. I completed 26 of those missions on Saturday, a personal record that’ll stick until my next Walt Disney World trip. I then knocked off another six missions in San Francisco on Sunday, thanks in complete part to my own obsessiveness.

I completed a set of missions whose badges spell out “RESIST” and I completed a set of missions whose badges spell out “SMURF TEARS.” I was careful to do neither of them in order, because I think that kind of thing is a bit silly. My badges spell out “SISTER” and “MTRESAURSF,” instead. I didn’t take the time to figure out something clever to do with sad smurfs at the time, but if you need a good anagram, I’d recommend “FASTER RUMS” or “TSAR’S FEMUR.”

I don’t know that I’m going to hit onyx specops — 500 missions — any time soon. However, I’m not going to stop doing missions just because I got this badge, so we’ll see.

I will chatter on about any aspect of missions on demand, regardless of faction.

Mirrored from Population: One.

Comments

[mneme]

Congrats!

I finally did my first mission a few days ago. I'd mostly been avoiding them since the feature was obscure when I first started playing (back in the summer) and since they usually take more time than I necessarily want to spend, but I should do a few (and maybe write some missions, particularly in areas I spend a bunch of time in that have -no- missions nearby, like Sunnyside in Queens).

[bryant]

Thanks!

It's kind of an oddball game feature, since it has no mechanical impact. On the other hand, it's been a good driver for me to keep playing because they provide constant variety and a nice way to check off goals on a reasonably frequent basis. Once I finish a mission, it's done, and it won't get flipped back to undone.

Around 25% of my local Agent Stats group have done a significant number of missions, including three of our very serious players, so I'm inclined to suspect it's a good feature for enough people to be worth the effort.

I cheer on anyone who adds missions in areas that have none. Be ready for poor ratings if you do anything with passcodes or hidden waypoints (but you should, you'd write good puzzles).

[mneme]

I'd say little mechanical impact, not no, since it grants a badge and the limiter on levelling after a certain point is badges (and while levels don't provide a lot of mechanical impact, they do grant some. They could deeply increase this without significant mechanical load by just giving people an inventory limit that went up by level).

Thanks for the side-compliment. I do have the advantage of knowing what a puzzle is supposed to look like, although not the practice that the Hunt and Interactive Fiction communities have (not that there isn't overlap there). I might if I write more than two missions, but there's also a need for more basic ones, and I'd want them to be worth the effort.

[bryant]

True. I don't think you can get to 16 without putting some effort into at least one badge -- Trekker and Recharger aren't hard, Sojourner isn't bad, but after that you need to work some.

[bryant]

Much later: I did hit 500 missions, and later I hit 1,000 missions. To the best of my knowledge I was the first West Coast player to hit that milestone. Then I slowed down, but it was a fun grind.