Are Jarvis Virus/Ada Refactors useless to the other side?
If an Enlightenment player picks up an ADA Refactor or if a Resistance player picks up a JARVIS virus, are they of any use? (Apart from recycling!)
Each appears to be a weapon that can only be used by one side.
Solution 1:
The refactor viruses can be used by either sides. If you use the virus to switch the control to your faction, you become the owner of the portal and all of the attached resonators, destroying any link and fields attached to the portal itself, but getting no AP from the action. If instead you use your opposite faction's refactor, the portal becomes owned by "Jarvis" (or "ADA").
Switching the portal to the opposite faction can be useful to destroy links that are in the way of the construction of a big field. Using both kinds of refactor on a portal can also let you create a L8 portal without the need to have eight L8 agents available.
Solution 2:
Here is a variant of "campfiring".
Wherever the resonators are deployed (correctly or not), an undefended portal is no match to a high level player.
But an increasing number of players have their "home portal" or "work portal" directly accessible from their couch or their desk. These home portals usually have a combination of heat sink and multi-hack mods in order for their "owner" to be able to farm efficiently on them.
To prevent them from doing so, one can deploy a portal, add four link amps on it (which are no use either for defence or farming) and then convert it to the enemy faction. The link amps will be unremovable, and the owner will be stuck with their regular four hacks per 4 hours, unless they use a refractor/virus to convert-destroy-rebuild-upgrade.
Solution 3:
You can also use other-team refactor viruses as a portal denial weapon. Here's how:
- Take down the enemy's portal by normal means.
- Stand directly on the portal's location and deploy eight level-1 resonators.
- Flip the portal into your enemy's hands.
This leaves them unable to space the resonators properly without using a refactor of their own, but makes the portal so vulnerable to attack that they can't wisely invest much in upgrading it or linking it. I've heard this called "campfiring" the portal, since the eight L1 resonators look like a fire at the base of the portal.
Solution 4:
Edit: As of 2013-11-07 there's a one hour penalty until another virus can be used on the very same portal again (source). However the technique can be used to easily gain the same amount of MU for (big) fields up to 4 times by flipping the anchors.
The other faction's viruses can be used for quick-levelling.
One can gain very much AP in a very short time span from otherwise not-so-useful viruses of the other factions type.
Needed:
- Area with many dense portals (not yet fully linked)
- A number of Jarvis viruses or Ada refactors
- Plenty of keys of the area or a group of players (to hack keys on the fly)
How to do it:
- Area needs to be in the own hand, but not linked yet (best)
- Pick a special portal to be the root portal
- Link every portal in reach to this portal, then make as much fields as possible
- Now flip the special root node portal
- Destroy it, rebuild it, re-link everything
- Repeat
We did this once and one L7 player made L8 with an AP gain of around 250k in less than one or two hours. Let there be n portals to connect to the root node each round, then you can gain
n*313 + (n-1)*1250 = (n-1)*1563 + 313 AP per *round*
E.g. if you have 15 portals, this gives you 23.8k AP per Jarvis/Ada and round.
Solution 5:
On the Comms channel, a team-member suggested another use.
A high-level user can help a newbie by destroying a portal, allowing the newbie to (poorly) place low-level resonators on the portal, convert the portal to the enemy's side and then destroy the easily-demolished portal. It will earn them some easy AP, especially if they have enough keys to establish fields twice.
In fact, the newbie could do this directly, without the higher-level player.