The struggle for Global Control between The Resistance, and The Enlightened continues, as the battle for the most mind units rages on with as much ferocity as ever in Niantic Labs Augmented Reality game Ingress. While the scores and leaderboards change drastically for each opposing faction on a daily basis, up until now the scores for Niantic Labs extremely popular Augmented Reality game was only measured on a massive global scale. Today that all changes, as Google’s Niantic Labs introduces a completely new feature into the game called a hyper-local regional scoring system. This new scoring system will allow for Niantic to measure the effectiveness of each sides control and power on a “regional” level, basing the scores off of the amount of controlled portals (and thus Mind Units) in neighborhood sections across the globe. The regions are broken down into 24,576 local individual cells, rather than looking at just the grand scheme of the two factions across the entire world.
In these individual regional cells, Resistance and Enlightened agents will vie for success in week long competitions where they use portals to capture the local population. To be clear, Ingress has always, at least in a way, been about capturing the local population through control of the portals around your local area, but now everything is being measured locally as well, through the participation of these week long battles. The measuring will be done at 5-hour scoring checkpoints in each cell as well as globally, so both sides will have key times and crucial planning that must be done to ensure their sides victory in battle.
The entirety of these weekly competitions are comprised of seven 25-hour long cycles, at the end of which Niantic will measure the Mind Unit count in each regional cell, and then recognize the victorious faction for each region, as well as the globally victorious faction of the two. Niantic also wants to throw some recognition to players on an individual level, so they will also be awarding top players in each cell with a spot on the leaderboards so you have some bragging rights. The control of Mind Units is a core part of the story behind Ingress, and serves to further engage the player in the game that is threaded deeply with rich narrative and exciting plots. If you want to join the fight and compete for global dominance, you can download Ingress from the Play Store. You can also catch up in the story by watching the Two part retrospective video series below. The struggle between The Resistance and The Enlightened is far from over. Which side will you choose?
http://youtu.be/uhp2awQYLos http://youtu.be/PN_GP1aENSA