The IFS Inventory Dilemma

IFS group photo
Victoria BC Canada’s IFS – How many Fev Games team members can you spot?

Ingress First Saturdays have been a very successful avenue for gathering agents and helping to build X-Faction relations.

Good food, good friends, good gaming, good times. There are many positives that come from these events in my experience. The one challenge we keep running into is: Running out of gear before the event is over. I expect this is common at IFS’ everywhere as they tend to be in portal dense areas and the rate at which you use your gear tends to far outpace the rate at which it’s replaced, which leads to rapid gear depletion unless you really meter your usage (and who wants to play SLOWER at an IFS?). I’ve come to an event stacked with 1800 L8 XMP, 100 L8 PC and about 100 resonators. I farm everything I pass by and keep moving most of the time yet still can easily run out with 30+ minutes remaining in the event. Once you’ve done 4 laps of the play area, everything is burnt out and now there is no way to replace inventory, if you go dry at this point, you’re just done, there’s not much you can do.

screenshot_2014-12-05-16-47-50
Loading up my XMPs for IFS

The IFS codes have helped some, but for most, I suspect the contents are used within 5-10 minutes. Lets run some numbers here:

Starting inventory: 2000 items. IFS codes +60 items. Starting inventory max – 2059 items. 50 portal event space, 3 items per hack, 4 hacks til burnout = 600 items. Max items held through the event – 2659 items.

In portal dense areas there is no trouble deploying 1 resonator, on average, every 2 seconds (probably less but lets play it safe). You can easily fire a burster every second if you want, but again, lets go with 2 seconds. Events typically run from 12-2, 2 hours = 120 minutes = 7200 seconds. Divide this by 2 seconds per item = 3600 items. A very well prepared agent would come with 100+ keys and 10 capsules/media combined. Nobody is going to waste R or VR hack mods at IFS, so add another 30+ for all of those. Add another 50 power cubes they’ll need to keep going the whole time. This leaves them with a maximum of 2400 items IF they were at max inventory when they came, redeemed both IFS codes AND burnt out every single portal. This still leaves over 1200 items required to play at this pace until the end of the event. A less hardcore agent would likely show up with 1700 items, with 150+ items not usable at the event (so 1550 usable items), 50 power cubes (you can use them, but not for AP), most agents wont actually burn out the whole playing area so lets say they yield 300 items from farming during the event. That gives 1800 items out of the 3600 items needed to play at that pace. It is easy to put down 8 resonators in 5 seconds if you want, so 2 seconds per action is pretty leisurely on average from what I’ve seen.

To me, Ingress First Saturdays is a balls to the wall AP gain event and realizing that your inventory usage is outpacing the remaining time, your only choices are to go until you’re empty and end early, or reduce your pace, which is not fun for anyone.

What can be done? I guess this is the big question. I would like to suggest to Niantic to either boost hack returns for IFS days, issue more codes, or do something crazy like run IFS bots which randomly drop full capsules in registered IFS play areas. Does inventory depletion commonly happen at your IFS events? Do you have any other ideas how to deal with this common inventory deficit? We’d love to hear your thoughts!