I was just playing Ingress for the first time and found it interesting to be able to visit real world places and gain information and experience.

It would be really interesting to see say major cities or random areas spread out across the US provide in-world information. Perhaps "Birthplace of X hero/villain" or "Site of the first Cyborg Rights protest", etc.

People could set various locations (perhaps limit them to 1 per character slot) for a hero villain birthplace or site where they first gained notoriety. Maybe an additional marker for every X levels you gain on that character with a minimum distance allowable between your markers.

PC location nodes would even provide bonuses, heroes that visit your birthplace gain a bonus to healing given and received to/from your character, villains gain a bonus damage to your character since they know some of your history. You could have nodes that you might make public so an ally can get bonuses for finding them and to help you when teamed with them but enemies, and NPC groups, might come across them as well giving them information on you. Perhaps rarely NPCs might have access to such info and they'll have it in their database and it unlocks a repeatable mission to remove personal information from enemy records.

You could have things like "Bruk'chi'th crash zone" where you get a very large radius, miles even, where you get not only an accolade on your in-game character but perhaps a chance to gain some special item or crafting material, maybe mailed to you by a contact you met at that location.

Since the city isn't real it could be it's own location you can tag and visit in-game to receive such buffs but perhaps bigger buffs or an XP reward, etc might be attached to visiting real world locations. Maybe related to how far you had to travel.

Obviously, way, waaaaay down the road. If ever.

Thoughts?

Oh, in a perfect world... I had thought it would be excessively cool to put real-life badges into Dead Drops all over the world and throughout the US. If someone doesn't know what those are: deaddrops.com
The project has grown exponentially over the years and there are thousands of drops absolutely everywhere. I mean *everywhere*.

How cool would it be to take your laptop and a USB cable with you on a vacation or something, lookup the Drops in an area, and go check them all out to see if there is a VO Badge there? Maybe check the local VO database and see if there is one where you are / are going.

Get yourself a password protected ZIP (or something to help mitigate 'false positive files' at least even a little) file off of the Drop that contains a sweet background or sound or something, along with some special lore about it and a key code. You enter that key code into the website / steam / client (whatever) and *poof* you have a new badge.

Do something crazy for the crazy person that decides to travel and get all the RL badges... like some serious gear and stuff!

BUT... something like that will probably never happen - just a cool thought