A while ago I made a YouTube video about guardian etiquette because I was slightly tipsy and a little angry with how an agent on my team had mistreated me and my guardian.  It’s all resolved, I have my onyx, but included in the video was a detail that agents need to have a resonator on their oldest portal in order for their guardian stat to continue ticking up.  This has been a game mechanic for a couple years.  In true internet-anonymity form, someone said I was wrong.  This kind of bothers me because in person, I feel like there’s a greater chance of a follow-up of “and this is why and here is proof,” along with a little friendly discourse or plans to find proof if there wasn’t any.

Instead, there was a back-and-forth kind of like:
him:  you’re not right.
me: sure I am, this is how it has been.
him:  no, you’re not right.  I’ve seen it.
me:  do you have any proof?
him: so-and-so has also seen it and there’s this g+ post of a bunch of other so-and-sos who have also seen it.
me:  yea, but that’s all hearsay.  Do you have any proof?

At some point he said, “Science it!” as a command.  This REALLY bothered me, because it came off as rude.  In science, when someone challenges an established mechanic, the burden of proof falls on the person presenting the new idea (and hearsay isn’t adequate proof).  This exchange bothered me SO MUCH that I was like, “dude, I will do your work FOR you and this is how you do it in case you also want to do it.”

Figure out a controlled environment and repeatable process.

Current holes in the hearsay “proof”:
1) They are active accounts that probably own many portals.  How do you know for sure which portal is the one increasing the guardian stat and how do you prove it to strangers?
2) Some players say they had a jump from a low number to a high number in the stat.  Formerly, this would happen if the guardian portal didn’t have the players resonator, but then they added one.  Beyond their word, what proof do we have that they didn’t do this, and beyond that, we don’t have proof that’s their oldest portal either.
3) One player said their guardian stat went up after a faction change to an age that was older than the date of their faction change.  This is just wacky.  When I faction changed approximately 7 months ago all of my resonators were erased.  This will take a whole lot more thinking and planning to play-test, but WOULD be possible (if what we are testing turns out to tick up the guardian counter without needing your own resos) since after a faction change, a player can still be the owner of a portal so long as resonators on the portal belong to someone else, keeping it alive after the faction change.  To PROVE this, though, would take a lot more planning and testing that I’m not willing to do.

Play-testing this guardian stat increase without owning a resonator on the portal is very simple, it just requires a little arm twist of a friend.

I played ingress for about 16 months.  I quit a couple weeks ago.  My friend Jay has known I’ve been pretty engrossed in Ingress, but he never really got interested in it.  He let me install it on his phone for this one purpose, providing an agent profile that will only ever have one captured portal because he is so completely uninterested in playing.

Jay likes FPS games and doesn’t want to play ingress.

Fortunately, our office is on top of a portal so inconvenience is minimal.  I helped him create his agent profile, hack the portal, capture the portal, and then fully deploy it.  I promised that I would be back in a few days to hack it again and then delete the app from his phone.  Unfortunately, when I didn’t complete training for him and I think this created a weird bug, because when I captured the portal for him I got an error message that said it was unable to complete the action.  I backed out of the portal, went back in and saw the owner was newbiepooper and there was, indeed, a resonator on it.  I filled it out and made sure the AP matched a fully captured and resonated portal before I added my own resonators.  If at the end of this test his guardian counter doesn’t go up, I will twist my roommate’s arm and conduct a re-do because of this weird error.

newbiepooper portal

Fully upgraded.

I upgraded all the resonators and put a couple shields on it about a minute after Jay claimed it.

Day 1, newbiepooper stats

These are the stats for day one, taken a minute or two after portal capture.

Before I go on with results after a few days, I noticed something else that’s worth mentioning.

What the!

The alert at the bottom is telling me that Jay used my recruit invite!  Stupid iPhone cuts off some of my longer alerts, so that’s annoying, but this is the first time I’ve seen this.  I have only sent out recruit invites once, about twenty of them, over a year ago.  It’s nice to know that 1) Jay didn’t need to access the recruitment email or links within it to activate it on my side, and 2) it seems like there isn’t an expiration date on recruitment invites.

Also:

Dem Invites!

After twice through level 16, I have a lot of fucking invites (yea, I’m totally humble-bragging here).  They carried over from my faction change.  I got a prompt after the alert that Jay accepted my invite, telling me that I now have 2 more invites to use.

Ugh. More?!

DOES IT LOOK LIKE I NEED MORE FUCKING INVITES, NIANTIC?!  Ugh.  I guess every time someone uses an invite, you get two more.  Sweet.

So I checked newbiepooper’s profile every day by going to the portal key I have for the portal and long-pressing his name.  There was no change until after the third day of recharging, Thursday afternoon.  He has not logged in at all.

Progress! But it’s kinda wrong.

This progress reflects that he only owned the portal for two days.

sad newbiepooper

It also conflicts with how many portals his “now” stats says he owns.  This has always been a wonky stat, though, so no one should take it seriously.

On the forth day (Friday), before recharging is needed, this is his profile:

Still weird progress.

Congratulations, newbiepooper!  You got your first badge and are also experiencing the weird server lags and jumps in guardian counting!  Maybe it’ll say 4 days if I log you in and hack the portal.

So there’s the proof.  You can get your guardian badge without needing resonators on the portal.  Sure wish someone woulda told me that months ago before I went out of my way to get someone on Res to go into a park and re-deploy on one of her old portals to get her the badge, and so I could have tested it back then.