December 4, 2024

The Stats Around You Are Not What They Seem

Think you know what counts as a Unique Portal Visit?  Do you know what you have to do to get credit for “capture or upgrade a portal” on a mission? Do you understand all the different ways Mind Units Captured is calculated for different stats? Some of this may surprise you.

Mind Units Captured

Illuminator Badge and Lifetime/Monthly/Weekly Stat

This is the most straightforward stat. If you make a triangle, the scanner reports back to you how many mind units you just captured.  You always get a minimum of 1 MU for any triangle, and the amount of MU generally goes up the more population you cover. Add all those up, and that’s the “Mind Units Captured” stat, which counts for your Illuminator badge. On the “Month” and “Week” tabs, that’s just the sum of your mind units captured in the last month or week, respectively.

 

Cell Individual Leaderboard

Time in the Ingress world is divided into cycles, which are further divided into checkpoints. A cycle lasts a little over a week (175 hours to be precise) and checkpoints occur every 5 hours. At the beginning of each cycle, the scores are reset. At each checkpoint, agents are ranked according to the total amount of MU they have thrown in the cell since the beginning of the cycle. To count for individual ranking purposes, the fields do not have to be standing at a checkpoint, they just have to have been created at some point during the cycle. Fields created in the last cycle are irrelevant, and you can re-throw the same fields over and over again and keep getting more credit toward the leaderboard. If a field crosses a cell boundary, an agent will get credit for the mind units captured in each cell, and may find their-self on multiple cell leaderboards.

Cell Score / Global Score

This is what many agents consider to be the most important measure of which faction is leading. For MU to count toward the cell score, a field must be standing at the moment of the checkpoint. The current cell score is the average of the mind units each faction held within the cell at the moment of each checkpoint since the beginning of the cycle.

Since there are 35 checkpoints in a cycle, one 1 MU field that stands for all of the checkpoints contributes the same as a 35 MU field that stands for one checkpoint. If a field was thrown prior to the beginning of a cycle and stands for at least one checkpoint of the new cycle, it is possible to contribute to the cycle score without appearing on the leaderboard.  In contrast, if a field is thrown during a cycle but doesn’t stand for a checkpoint, it’s possible to appear on the leaderboard without impacting the cycle score.

The global cell score is the same, except aggregated across every cell in the world.

 

“Now” Tab

And here’s where it gets really weird. There is a “Mind Unit Control” statistic on the “Now” tab. This has absolutely nothing to do with fields you have thrown, but rather what resonators you have placed. Each field is anchored by 3 portals, each of which has 8 resonators, for a total of 24 resonators per field.

If you owned 1 resonator on an anchor of a field, regardless of who threw that field, you’d be credited with 1/24 of the MU of that field. So if it’s a 1000 MU field and you own 1 resonator on one of the anchors, your “Mind Unit Control” would show 42 (1000 * 1/24). If you owned 2 resonators, it would show 84, and so on. So you could have mind unit control despite never throwing a field.

Likewise, if you owned all of the resonators on all of the anchors of a 1000 MU field, but then another agent came by and upgraded one of the resonators so it was no longer owned by you, your “Mind Unit Control” would drop to 958 (1000 * 23/24) despite your fields still being up. That other agent would get credited with the remaining 42 MU.

We have not studied what happens if one or more resonator is destroyed on a portal anchoring a field. For example, if you owned all the resonators on the 1000 MU field and instead of a teammate upgrading a resonator, an opposition agent destroyed one resonator, you’d own 23 out of 23 resonators anchoring the field. We don’t know if this would result in you having 958 Mind Unit Control (1000 * 23/24) or if you’d still have credit for 1000 Mind Unit Control (1000 * 23/23). If anyone can test this out we’d love to know the results.

Portals Owned

Since we brought up the “Now” tab, it’s worth pointing out that “Portals Owned” on the now tab doesn’t mean what you think it means either. That stat counts how many portals you have a resonator on.  So if you never capture a portal but you deploy or upgrade a resonator on a portal, you will have a portal owned.  In contrast, if you capture a portal, but a teammate later comes by and upgrades all of your resonators, or an opponent destroys the resonators placed by you, you will not get credit for owning that portal in the “Now” tab, even though the scanner and the Intel map will show this portal as being owned by you.

Unique Portal Visits

You probably know that hacking a portal counts as a portal visit – but what other things count as UPVs for the Explorer badge?
  • Deploying a resonator
  • Making a link from a portal
What doesn’t count?
  • Adding a mod to a portal Update: this counts as of early 2021
  • Using a virus on a portal (this also doesn’t count as a unique portal capture)
  • Discovering a portal  Update: this counts as of late 2020
  • Anything that doesn’t require you to be within 40m of the portal (destroying resonators, remote recharging, linking to a portal)
Area for further study – we suspect this doesn’t count but we’re not 100% certain:
  • Recharging while in range of a portal

Capture/Upgrade Mission

The directive says “capture or upgrade portal,” but did you know you can also get credit for deploying a mod on a portal? Of course the opposite doesn’t apply – if the mission tells you to install a mod, you can’t get credit for deploying a resonator instead.

Other Weird Stats

We’d love to hear from you. What other stats do you find counter-intuitive?

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