So for the last days I hear of L-8's headed to OK city from no less than 5 states

So for the last days I hear of L-8's headed to OK city from no less than 5 states ! we'll the story's just starting to leak out and its epic! #nianticproject   #ingress  

Originally shared by Michael Kendle (doeiqts)

Re-posting this as public, as some people are having sharing issues.


So I get a message from some high level Enlightened players early last week. They want to stage a L8 portal event in Oklahoma City. L8 Enlightened operatives are already coming from Dallas, Wichita, and Tulsa, not to mention the ones that are in Oklahoma City already.

I'm honored to be asked to be a part of this event. This will be the first time that I'm able to hack a portal higher than L6. I make plans to come down Saturday morning and pick up the operative from Tulsa as I pass through. Since I'm coming from Springfield, MO, it's approximately a 5 hour drive.

I wake up about 6a on Saturday and gather up my supplies: 3 10,000mAh battery packs, 2 sets of capacitive touch gloves, plenty of micro usb cords, and my Chromebook. I stuff it all in a 3,000mAh backpack. A little after 7a, I'm on my way.

What I forget though, is that there are many toll roads along my path. Google Maps mentions this in my directions, but since I know my starting route I don't look at the directions very carefully. I'm well into my journey when I realize that I don't have any change for the unmanned toll booths. If the booths were only equipped with Google Wallet then I wouldn't have had a problem. Alas, this was not so. (Still have to call the toll operators to figure all that out, >_<.)

Anyway, after I got past these hiccups, I was able to pick up our L8 Tulsa operative and be on our way. We arrive at our meeting point a little after 12p. We grab a quick bite to eat and say hi and meet everyone, then it's time to start making some L8 portals.

We start with the areas around downtown Oklahoma City and burn out an entire group of L8 portals before the Resistance notices what's going on. About 1:45p though, it's no secret anymore. We start to get notifications of resonators going down at the farm that we just created. We're not even finished with the rest of downtown at this time. Not a great start, but at least we already burned that area out. We manage to salvage some of those portals through some quick recharging and then continue with our building efforts in the rest of downtown. We don't hear anything more from the Resistance for a while.

Eventually we get downtown done and burnt out and it's time to move onto Edmond. Edmond is interesting because there's a street lined with statues on either side. So about 25 or so portals are all very tightly packed. We build this street up and burn it out without hearing a peep from the Resistance.

At this point it's looking much better. We had some struggles with XM drain from hacking so many L8 portals by so many people all in the same area, but we were all starting to go net positive on our resonator counts, and we hadn't been attacked again by the Resistance. We break for dinner and rebuild some of what was taken down while we wait for everyone to assemble. It's approximately 6p or so and some of the operatives have to head out. This puts us at under 8 L8 operatives, but we made just over 50 L8 portals in this time.

After dinner, we talk about going to Norman to help out the L7 operatives on campus. Dinner was long and Edmond was a short drive away, so by the time we were ready to go out again, we realized that we could burn out Edmond once more, as the 4 hour mark would be up once we got there.

Let me tell you, hacking 25 L8 portals 4 times each yields a lot of high level items. At this point a few of us are hitting the item limits while farming. We don't have anyone with us to take extra items from us so we just start dropping them in between farming hacks and as we're driving around for XM. The streets were littered with items. By the time the night was over, I had dropped every XMP that was below L6 out of my inventory. Luckily, Enlightened players were able to periodically come by and claim the items that they could use.

Once we get done with this farming run we split up and half of us go back to downtown and half of us go on to Norman. The Resistance has started attacking downtown again and so our operatives go to put a stop to that. I'm with the group that goes to Norman.

We meet up with some of the campus operatives that are L7 and level up the entire campus to all L7 portals. We farm as we go, but it's getting really cold out and we're trying to keep our inventories open for L8 items, so we don't burn it out. We do spend some time dropping a ton of items for our L7 operatives though. I really hope we can get a "package drop" or NFC transfer that allows us to set the quantity of items that we want to drop. This took a very long time.

Long enough in fact, that between the driving and building and item trading it was nearly time to be able to farm Edmond again. We make a stop back in downtown to regroup and then head back up to Edmond to burn it out once more. The amount of items we all got were insane. I had some of the lower counts, and I've got screenshots of what I ended up with in this album.

By the time we were done with this it was 3a Sunday morning. Time for myself and our Tulsa operative to head home. It was a long, but very fruitful day for the Enlightened.

The Dallas operatives were especially in need of these high level items as pretty much the entire city is controlled by the Resistance. Hopefully this boost in inventory can help them take it back, though I'm sure more recruits could also greatly help.

The last L8 portal was taken down earlier today. So we had L8 portals in Oklahoma City for about 48 hours. Not sure if this is the longest a group of L8 portals have stayed up, but I know most of the reports I've seen have them going down within hours. To keep them up for 2 days is something we're proud of. A little planning goes a really long way.