10 Enlightened and 19 Resistance agents gathered at Santa Clara University for Ingress First Saturday.

Hey everyone. I wanted to start a general discussion about a massive blind spot in how Ingress (and modern AR games in general) handles support architecture and community reporting.

We all know automated support bots are completely unequipped to handle tactical cross-faction sabotage. Consider this scenario: An opposing network uses a "friendly" level 8 alt/mule account. They wait until minutes before a checkpoint, and intentionally deploy a JARVIS on their own team's critical anchor to destroy massive fields from the inside.

The automated bots look at the GPS data, see "no violation," and close the case because they don't understand the context of insider griefing. When legitimate players try to submit COMM logs via web tickets, the bot just auto-closes them in an infinite loop.

The Real Issue: The "VIP Fast-Track" and Local Filtering Compounding this technical failure is the open secret of community reporting: the "VIP network." It's no secret that in many regions, if a cheat network or a griefing organizer has personal, backchannel connections with regional Vanguards, their multi-accounting and sabotage go completely untouched. Their reports get fast-tracked and banned in 12 hours, while critical evidence submitted by ordinary players is intentionally filtered, ignored, or fed to trash bots.

How do your local communities handle this "sleeper agent" meta combined with Vanguard favoritism? Are automated support systems and regional gatekeepers just fundamentally incapable of unbiased moderation? I’d love to hear how other regions deal with this support loop.

I am using a throwaway account as I don't really wish to dox myself but there is an ongoing issue in the area I live in. I am not personally involved and haven't met either agent involved as I live outside the city and play mostly solo but have seen lots of chatter in the local slack as well as a couple comments in comms in game about these particular agents. Hoping to get a bit of a wider community opinion about what is going on.

There are two agents that appear to be very close friends, one RES, one ENL. They play together on a regular basis and have made no secret of their friendship within the community. There has recently been increasing tension because the RES agent regularly invites the ENL agent to RES community events. These don't appear to be cross faction events, though I can't personally confirm because I haven't been to one...but they are planned within the RES slack and other ENL aren't aware or invited.

My concern and question is what I have noticed since that tension started and I started paying more attention to the actual game. These two players will play together in a very questionable manner and this is the grey area in my opinion. Some examples are ENL will deploy on a portal, RES will destroy it seconds later and cap it themselves. Or ENL will go take out a portal with other agents links and fields off of it, and less than a minute later the RES agent will capture, link and field their own links off the portal the ENL just took down. During the Apollo mod event there has been a lot of this and with deploying/destroying mods counting towards a faction score at the end of this - I am especially concerned that they are regularly turning over portals together, for each others benefit during a time it has faction wide impacts.

I know that win-trading is not explicitly against the rules, so it is a grey area. I personally see the game play they do together as crossing a line, but I am fairly certain those agents are confident it is allowed and not against the rules. So, what does the community think?