New Glyph Hack Control Channel

BREAKING NEWS – Ingress 1.90.1 now allows you to have a Glyph Control Channel before actual glyphing where you can change the key hack behavior!

Just released in 1.90.1 the latest version of Ingress allows you to enter “control” glyphs to influence the hack results just before normal glyphing begins.

Niantic Project released a post here that covers the lore behind this modification.

Version 1.90.1 release notes:

NEW FEATURES
Choose “Hack No Key” on long pressing a portal to not receive keys after hacks
Glyph Command Channel now available when you start a glyph hack:
– Use the LESS glyph to request no key
– Use the MORE glyph to request more keys

Thank you Agents for an exciting #Abaddon Anomaly series. See you in 2016 for the next set of Anomaly events.

Upon starting a glyph hack the agent is now presented with a screen that says COMMAND CHANNEL OPEN with a hint as either ENTER “MORE” – GET MORE KEYS or ENTER “LESS” – GET FEWER KEYS at the top of the screen. This occurs while the glyph is loading from the server, so no additional time is taken.

The agent has 2 seconds to enter a control glyph for the command channel, and can enter in up to 8 glyphs in total (2 second delay applies after the previous glyph completed). Note that the amount of time it takes the agent to complete the control glyph is recorded and submitted. Unknown if this influences anything, but doubtful – they probably just reused the same code base for the main glyph hacking.

By entering the glyph for “MORE” you can request to receive a key even if you already have one, and conversely by entering “LESS” you can ask to not receive a key even if you don’t already have one.

glyph command channel anim

(animation courtesy of @DisasterCthulhu)

After this the glyph hack proceeds as normal. Note that this only applies for the one hack – the agent needs to do this for every hack that they wish to influence.

It is rumored that during the brief window when the command channel is open you have multiple attempts to enter the control glyph. If you do it wrong the first time, simply do it again. Note that all sequences that you enter are submitted to the server as-is, so it’s possible that the server may do something extra with this information that we don’t know about.

There are also changes to the menu accessed by long-pressing the portal from the main screen.

no_key

This pop-up radial menu stays the same regardless if you have a key in your inventory or not.  This gives you a quick ability to do a normal hack without a key, but note there is no ability to do a normal hack requesting an extra key.

Requesting an extra key does not always provide one.  The probability is most likely the same as if you hacked without a key in your inventory, but more testing will be necessary.

You cannot initiate a glyph hack to request an extra key, then bypass the glyph.  In this case the extra key request is not passed along to the server.