Announced on Twitter and Facebook, Niantic has informed Ingress agents of impending Dark XM that will be appearing in the scanner starting April 25th at 10AM PDT (UTC -7) and will last until April 30th at 10AM PDT(UTC -7). Dark XM will be causing the portals in the network to decay faster than normal.
With this event there will be a new tiered badge counting length of your links between portals. The tiers will be 5km, 50km and 250km.
If the Enlightened and the Resistance can capture a total of 400,000 portals together (over the current baseline) the Dark XM threat will be stopped and the bonus AP for June’s First Saturday will be increased to 3x. If agents fail, the decay will be a more permanent feature.
Update to the portal captures will be made twice a day.
Further clarification from Andrew Krug, Niantic’s Global Community Manager:
There have been some questions about the Dark XM event and I just saw an inforgraphic that isn’t exactly correct. So let me try to clarify:
1: A baseline measurement of the number of Portals owned by both factions globally will be taken at 10am PDT (UTC -7) on April 25th. Let’s call this amount X.
2: Players need to capture and own X + 400,000 more Portals to unlock the ability to be awarded the Dark XM medal.
3: X + 400,000 Portals do NOT need to be owned on April 30th. Whenever X + 400,000 happens that will unlock the medal. But must be achieved no later than April 30th.
4: We will provide twice daily snapshots of how close to the X + 400,000 goal the players are (times tbd)
5: There are three tiers to the medal that represent the cumulative length of the links you make during the event. These tiers are 5km, 50km, 250km.
6: The medals are bronze, silver, gold and will count towards leveling.
7: You can achieve the gold with one link or lots of links. Creating one 250km link is just as good as ten 25km links. Creating 100 links that are 2.5km long will also work.
8: You can start making links immediately at 10am PDT on April 25th. You do not need to wait until the X + 400,000 threshold is achieved.
9: Portal decay will be increased but slowly return to normal.
10: The metric to track your links will appear in both Prime and REDACTED I am told.
11: The link distance will not freeze or stop when the X + 400,000 threshold is achieved. You will have until April 30th to make as many links as you can get the largest cumulative distance.
12: I reserve this last bullet point to add something I forgot because I am old and likely forgot something. Has anyone seen my wallet or keys?
P.S. based on past similar events, you may have to take a game action or restart your scanner to see the new metric that will track your link distance during this event. Give it a little nudge.