Kureze Effect - the Formation / Phase 1
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Consider a single pixel on your TV. On one channel, it’s the emerald green tie of Philadelphia’s unapologetic D.A. On another channel, it’s the mic held by a beloved singer performing a song from an unreleased studio album. On yet another channel, it’s the cobalt logo of a pharmaceutical company advertising new antibodies.
Every program and every channel is aired simultaneously, but you can only watch one channel at a time. Likewise, our reality is the reality channel that we’ve tuned into. That single pixel is still on every channel at the same time, but you cannot change the channel.
Some people, it seems, can.
Some people recall events that never happened. Some people remember events differently than they actually occurred. And some people, most notably Victoria Kureze, believe that this is evidence of many worlds, and what these people have experienced was simply the equivalent of tuning into a different channel.
From January through March, Agents will investigate the Kureze Effect and help explore how events are understood, affected, and perhaps even manipulated. A Resistance victory will influence Dr. Kureze’s research towards defending our reality from Shaper ingression. An Enlightened victory will seek to embrace and accelerate it.
- The Kureze Effect will contain 3 Phases; expected to take place each month in January, February, and March.
- Several dozen cities will be deeply affected by Phase 1 of the Kureze Effect, taking place on Sunday, 23 January 2022. Researchers are working to uncover all affected locations. The process of distilling the signal of city information from XM noise is expected to complete one week before the event date.
- Over a three-hour period in each city (1430 to 1730 local time), certain Portals will become extremely unstable due to the Kureze Effect. The XM Researchers may identify some of these Portals and ornament some of them in the Scanner during the 24-hour period ahead.
- NIASection14 will deploy Rare Battle Beacons on these said Portals whenever the degree of the Kureze Effect on them exceeds a detectable threshold, during the said three-hour period. Agents will work to seize control of these Portals while the NIA-deployed Battle Beacons are active. It is possible for a given Kureze Effect Portal to go beyond the threshold more than once within the said period.
- XM Sensitive Agents may subconsciously identify Portals under the influence of the Kureze Effect and take action to deploy any Battle Beacon on those Portals between Saturday, 22 January 2022 1100 UTC and Monday, 24 January 2022 1100 UTC. It is important to control those Portals while these Battle Beacons are active as well.
Scoring
The final score for each Faction will be the weighted total of all Rare or Very Rare Battle Beacons Point Values over all Checkpoints deployed between Saturday, 22 January 2022 1100 UTC and Monday, 24 January 2022 1100 UTC across the globe. Each Battle Beacon will be weighted based on the Battle Category, which is based on number of Agents and Agent activity. From CAT-I to CAT-VI, the weighted values are 1-2-3-6-7-8 respectively.
For example, if a given Battle Beacon Score is Checkpoint 1: ENL 2; Checkpoint 2: RES 3; Checkpoint 3: ENL 4, and Battle CAT-V, then the Enlightened earn 42 points (6*7) and the Resistance earn 21 (3*7).
Each NIA-deployed Battle Beacon within play zones will be further given a multiplied weight of 10.
Results Announcements
The final score for each Faction per city will be announced through in-app News Feed. The final score for Phase 1 will be announced within 24 hours through in-app News Feed and Ingress Community Forum.
Kureze Effect Medal
Any Agent who has interacted with at least ten (10) Battle Beacons scored at any of the three Kureze Effect Phases will be awarded the in-app Kureze Effect medal. This medal will be awarded as soon as an Agent meets such criteria.
For example, if an Agent interacted with 3 Battle Beacons deployed by XM Sensitive Agents during Phase 1 and interacted with 7 NIA-deployed Battle Beacons during Phase 2, they will receive the Kureze Effect Medal by the end of Phase 2.
To assist Agents in their efforts, a new metric will be added to Agent Profiles for the duration of the Kureze Effect to help you monitor individual progress.
As always, please remember to be aware of your surroundings. We encourage players to follow local health and safety guidelines when playing Ingress (such as wearing masks and maintaining at least six feet/two meters of distance from other people). For the latest on in-game events and feature updates, be sure to check COMM > NEWS.
— The Ingress Team
Comments
A Resistance victory will influence Dr. Kureze’s research towards defending our reality from Shaper ingression. An Enlightened victory will seek to embrace and accelerate it.
But we closed off outside influences to our world with the Tessellation, right? More importantly, why is it just Shaper ingression at hand here?
While I appreciate the whole "The process of distilling the signal of city information from XM noise is expected to complete one week before the event date." is nice and all, what you don't consider is this means if people want to travel, they are losing access to advance tickets, and in some cases will be unable to travel at all.
Please announce the list AS SOON as possible, to save players money.
For example, if an Agent interacted with 3 Battle Beacons deployed by XM Sensitive Agents during Phase 1 and interacted with 7 NIA-deployed Battle Beacons during Phase 2, they will receive the Kureze Effect Medal by the end of Phase 2.
What if there were no NIA-deployed Battle Beacons in the city and an Agent were to interact with 10 Battle Beacons deployed by XM Sensitive Agents during phase 1/2, will they still receive the medal?
hm 10 battle beacons sounds like alot for the badge ?
Since this post is in the Anomalies sub-forum, will the Kureze Effect medal count as an anomaly medal (shows up first in the profile) or a regular global challenge medal? Also the example in post regarding medal reception is unclear, do we receive the medal right after participating in 10 beacons during event period or are the medals awarded after each phase ends?
I'm really not sure why there are so many dislikes here. Please, do tell us as soon the cities as soon as possible. If you're holding them back because of Covid concerns and you're banking on not many agent coming together because of the hold back, please at least tell us that as well.
Its 3.333 per month.... how many would you suggest???
I'm surprised by the use of the phrase "XM Sensitive Agents", and not just "Agent". What makes an Agent specially "XM Sensitive", or do you just mean an agent like normal?
So agents who do not live in, or cannot travel to, one of the 40 or so cities where NIASection14 will deploy battle beacons have to pay to participate in this event by purchasing battle beacons to deploy themselves? Is that correct? Agents who want to earn a medal might have to purchase as many as 10 battle beacons if they are in an area with no other nearby agents who want to participate.
I'm glad that I'm not the one surprised about this.
2 or 3.... many will be leftout thats for sure and with 10 needed for badge thats not fair to many.
These 'during these three hours' Pokemon Go FOMO events are terrible, and this one is needlessly complicated.
In any case, who wants to actually battle over a portal with the current latency issues? What fun is that if you can't recharge the portal? 'whoops, my game is lagging, have to restart! Please don't attack the portal for 45 seconds.'
It encourages core subscription :D
Atleast unlike anomalies or mission days those agents are still able to participate, and it's likely cheaper to purchase beacons than travel....
So 1 battle beacon per month??? Why not just hand out the badge for doing nothing???
If you want the individual medal, purchase 10 Rare Battle Beacons, deploy them anywhere, and profit. There's no FOMO there.
This seems intentional. Objectively, as much as I enjoyed old-school anomalies, I can understand why Niantic might want to change the required amount of volunteer organization involved. This means less stress about hotel guarantees, less angry organizational committees, and so on.
It also reduces the effect of recharging. Might also be intentional, might be a side effect.
But I don’t think the travel argument is going to have much weight. Niantic doesn’t want us to travel for these.
But agents who live in 40+ urban areas will not have to pay to travel or purchase their own beacons. That's hardly fair to those agents who don't.
It doesn't benefit CORE agents either unless they've been saving their battle beacons from prior months.
Yeah, no. The whole point of events is to get the community engaged once again. These nitpick timeslots are terrible. So you are in fact missing out if you're not travelling to a previous MD city.
I filled out their questionaire, guess they don't do anything with that input either.
Because it's the Shapers who are trying to shape us, which is why what they are doing is described as an ingression.
"XM Sensitive Agents may subconsciously identify Portals under the influence of the Kureze Effect and take action to deploy any Battle Beacon on those Portals between Saturday, 22 January 2022 1100 UTC and Monday, 24 January 2022 1100 UTC. It is important to control those Portals while these Battle Beacons are active as well."
Important question: will these Portals under the influence of the Kureze Effect only be located in the several dozen cities deeply affected, or will they be world-wide?
Based on the introduction, it sounds like maybe this is one of those "pretend we're in a different universe where the Tessellation never happened" events like with Optima.
How "old-school" is "old-school anomalies"? Every anomaly I've participated in or followed in the past seven years has had more involved and interesting mechanics (rules) than this event.
If that's all that's required for this badge, to buy 10 battle beacons, deploy on ten portals and deploy a reso on each portal (edit: corrected from hacking), which could be done in less than 10 minutes at many large parks or college campuses, there's really no prestige or sense of achievement associated with the badge at all, is there? It's just a badge that indicates that an agent has and is willing to spend money on Ingress.
so is this a pay2win event where the faction that spends most money on battle beacons during those 48 hours wins? furthermore monday 11 utc is in many parts of the world a working day, so you need to take off from work. why not having just the 3 hours event on sunday where everybody can focus on?
also i support the idea of previous posts to announce the locations earlier to make travelling easier, especially in times of CoVid.
what will happen to announced cities where local authorities will announce curfews or lockdowns due to CoVid?
That's almost no different than the medal requirement for more recent anomalies: buy ticket, hack X number of portals (or hack a specific portal once). The main difference is not having to travel to a specific site.
It's often been up to Agents to decide the story they want to have behind each of their medals.
Pre-pandemic. I agree with you, this is pretty low interest for me even if I wasn’t mostly retired. Give me access to Ingress’ user retention dashboards and I’ll have a more informed opinion about whether or not it’s a good idea as a whole.
Not that I don’t have an opinion right now, it’s just not a very informed one.
Fair point. But the vast majority of agents who show up to an anomaly site will do more than the bare minimum. I doubt that will be true of the majority of agents participating in this event. And in any case this is more of a global challenge than an anomaly---as you noted earlier, the level of complexity and strategy is severely lacking compared to any past anomalies.
And I agree that there have always been issues with travel and the limited number of sites and the ability to participate in anomalies in general. Niantic should fix that. I just don't think globally distributed pure pay-to-win events solve that problem, even if there is incremental improvement in the cost to participate.
Wonder what exactly counts as "interaction with battle beacons", does hacking portal count? does remote recharging count? sending drone to the portal?
Do I understand that correctly:
If my city is not affected, I have still a 48h time window to deploy battle beacons to participate. 10 beacons, 10 different portals to get the individual medal, or?
Since my city is not affected, I have to buy beacons. Costs could be reduced, for example if two agents team up. Then, it would be 5 beacons per agent, right?
I still have mine from when I was subscribed, wasn't using them because of the latency issues.
As far as I understand it, it's not like a single agent has to do these battle beacons, put a call out and split the costs. Or one person buy them and someone else bring a couple six packs of....beverages. You're making this way more difficult than it needs to be.