Posted on by Michael Hartley

Yesterday I reached level 16 as an Ingress Agent.

Yesterday I reached level 16 as an Ingress Agent. I made sure as many of my badges as I could were nice round numbers. As well as my AP, of course!

About 17 months ago, I reached 33,333,333 AP, and simultaneously got my Mind Controller badge to 9999 and Illuminator to 999,999. Wondering what to do next, I tentatively started the slow climb to level 16, and thought – wouldn’t it be nice to push those badges both to Platinum exactly on 40,000,000 AP?

That idea grew, completely out of control. When I reached level 16 yesterday, 14 of my badges were on nice round numbers.

For Mind Controller and Illuminator it was a matter of waiting – play without fielding until I had enough AP to hit level 16. This was easier said than done, since my Connector badge was only about 9700 or so. I had to make about 300+ links with no accidental fields.

During the Perth anomaly, I attempted only one link, to move a shard. The link failed. My team was okay with this. Thanks, guys, I made it!

Illuminator: 1,000,000

Mind Controller: 10,000

Connector: 10,000

Mission Day, however, meant that my explorer badge was closer to the target than Pioneer. I needed to carefully scour old play areas for portals I’d touched but not captured.

Explorer: 5000

Pioneer: 3000

These two badges had to approach their targets in an uneasy dance with Liberator and Builder. I needed to alwasy be sure I had enough deploys left to make the captures, and enough captures to build up Pioneer – but not get Pioneer or Explorer on target too early, in case I accidentally bumped them while working on the others. In the end, it all worked out.

Oh, and my smash/deploy ratio is exactly 1.000

Liberator: 10,000

Builder: 50,000

Purifier: 50,000

Before I could finish Purifier, I had to finish Translator. AP for Glyph hacking is unpredictable, and then I’d need to break a carefully chosen number of ENL links to make sure my AP would finish on a multiple of five. Carefully chosen deploys would make sure it was destined to be a multiple of 100, then the right balance of clean and dirty hacks would ensure I’d reach 40,000,000.

Translator: 30,000

Hacker: 30,000

Agent @ekg submitted a carefully designed mission (with a beautiful sunset picture) so that I’d be able to get the mission badge to Platinum as I completed my last link and field. Engineer also clocked to gold on that last portal.

Engineer: 5000

SpecOps: 200

My contributions to the portal network are also round numbers. Eighty is a round number, isn’t it?

Recon: 100

Seer: 80

The hardest badge to make into a round number is Recharger. First, I found combinations of portals I could fully recharge so that I’d be a multiple of 150XM away from 40,000,000. Then, combinations of naturally-decaying portals to put me within a multiple of 4500XM. Finally, I picked out an isolated fully-deployed portal, and just recharged that exact 4500 every morning.

Tragically, the last recharge, with 4500 XM put into the portal, failed to update the stat. My profile now shows

Recharger: 39,995,500

with the missing XM somewhere on Niantic’s servers, waiting for my next recharge. I did submit a support ticket, but the support staff – helpful, friendly and responsive – were nonetheless unable to do a force-update of my recharger stat.

More than making up for that, the icing on the cake is found in the “Defense” section of my stats. There, you’ll see something amazing.

Max time portal held: 383 days

Maximum Link Length x Days: 383,000 km-days

It doesn’t get better than that.

If you want to see my stats for yourself, you can ping me in Comms @57Cell. Tell me your favourite Sci-Fi author, or tell me why I should read your favourite book in some other genre. Or just say Hi!

Video: https://youtu.be/Xt8Tvz1E9uI

More Images: https://imgur.com/gallery/atOuTb3

Reddit Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ingress/comments/9es5sk/im_super_happy_with_my_stats/

43 Replies to “Yesterday I reached level 16 as an Ingress Agent.”

  2. Elegant. If I can ask — how did you get the even numbers on Sage and Recon? I can imagine only reviewing 100 OPR submissions, but it seems like some would get lost in limbo denying you the even number. Sage seems like you must have just gotten lucky, which is still pretty amazing.

    This is on my list of great Ingress feats, I’m tremendously impressed.

  16. You are the kind of person I aspire to become. Awesome!

    I once had my agent level and agent name depicted in my AP score, that’s the most creative I’ve gotten.

  27. That’s just flat out impressive, not hitting 16 but doing it in total nerd style !! I don’t have the patience to have calculate and perform badge levels like that. Awesome work Agent.

  43. Samson LAU I tried to figure that out myself, and couldn’t find a reliable pattern. The closest I got was if I long-press recharge once daily, it would update 2 times or if three. That still didn’t help me get the nice number I was aiming for.

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