Invite Day - 5 : #IngressInvites and First Enemies

In those early days access to Ingress Invite codes was very limited.  There were several ways that you could get an invite the first was to put your email into Ingress.com which I had done but the rumors were swirling that it would take months to get an invite.  So I was doing my homework I found out there were other ways to get invites so I was going to get one as soon as I could.

It turned out I wasn't so could at Option 2 for an invite code, which was to follow +Johnathan Chung and decode his posts to get an invite code.  This was when I quickly realized that decoding was not my strong suit and I'd leave that to people with different skill set then mine.  Option 3 was to follow +Joe Philley non-stop and hope you could type faster then the 30-50 or more people that were trying to type in the same passcode at the same time.   The last option was something I hear was started by +Brandon Badger, post creative ingress related to #ingressinvite and you might be rewarded with an invite code from one of the known Niantic Project people.

I didn't feel particularly creative so I just kept watching +Joe Philley's stream and the #ingrressinvites to see if I could find any inspiration.  Finally I started posting pictures of my dogs with signs saying they needed to be rescued from the Enlightened.  Every day that week I would go to bed disappointed that I hadn't gotten an invite yet.

Well I went to bed disappointed every night except 1.  That was the night +Bryan Kroger came home and announced that the Post Office he had claimed the day before had been taken over by the Enlightened and it was a Level 3! And there was a MASSIVE control field that went from Kent to Tacoma!  In hindsight we were probably a little over dramatic about the scope of the CF or the portal level.  But it didn't matter that was our portal and we were gonna take it back!

In those early days even I succumbed to attachment to portals, but that attachment didn't last very long.  I become more attached to the people then portals.

When we got to the Post Office it took some trial and error to figure out how to fire off XMP Bursters.  At the time there were very few sources of information especially help on how to do things, so you just had to do a bit of trial and error.  After Bryan fired off all of his L1 XMP we realized that a level 3 portal was tough and we needed to find lower level portals to take and more resonators.

At the time I didn't know who that Enlightened player was but he was a high level (At least 4) and I wondered how we'd ever be able to compete with him.  There's been a lot of names over the last year but I think the name on that very first portal was @dessyx (I might be wrong though).  Either way after that night I had an enemy I didn't know who @dessyx was but I wanted that portal back and I was going to get that portal back as soon as I had my scanner.

 Luckily it was the week of Thanksgiving so there were other distractions.  It was time to stop thinking about Ingress and spend time with family.

Here's one of the weird things +Bryan Kroger and I tried to get an #ingressinvite