You learn interesting things while on vacation.
I mean, it’s a pain in the butt when you get back and all those fiddly little habits of the day have to be relearned. “Wow, it’s been a few weeks — I almost forgot to do the dishes.” You know — that sort of thing.
But sometimes that’s a good thing to have happen. It can make you aware of habits you don’t want to re-acquire.
Like obsessively playing Ingress.
I decided, on returning, that I really don’t want to spend all my commute time on the train hacking portals at each stop. I don’t want to spend my lunches tracking down farms to harvest from or links to smash. I don’t want to have my phone on at my work desk hacking at the portals in the building below.
I’d rather read. And walk. And work.
Plus, I’ve gotten tired of the Ingress app’s big memory footprint — a footprint that ensures that if you do almost anything else on your phone, Android will swap out Ingress and when you go back in to play you’ll have to restart the app. A minute or two later …
When I’m reluctant to check Twitter — or answer an IM — because it will interfere with Ingress running on my phone, there’s a problem there.
Now, all that having been said … Ingress is still fun. And I enjoy the community, and enjoy talking about the game, and have been enjoying building up the portal infrastructure around the Denver area. I’m not quitting the game, or uninstalling it, or anything like that.
But, for now … I’m still on vacation from it. For the time being.
The community in Portland OR seems to be so insular that I could never make any inroads, and without anybody to play with Ingress is an effing slog for a newbie. Oh look, months later I’m still a level 2 because all I can really do is hack level 8 fully-eqipped portals for my 100AP per go. SO MUCH FUN.
I’m pretty much out at this point.
The Denver community, as a whole, has mellowed quite a bit, and is actually a decent place to play and advance. There are folks who play in teams and folks solo, and folks who do both. And there are so many portals here now that it’s not hard to find ones to take (holding them is another matter, even for high-level players).