Legendary Events

Legendary Events Information Preview Based On Ingress

Their Anomalies are the main competitive events, with NL-1331 events being social meetups usually at bars hosted by a special Ingress branded Van that road trips across the entire country (USA, and briefly in Europe and Japan as well) and gives away and sells ingress merch at each city they stop at. IngressFS being Monthly (FS=First Saturday) community cross faction grind events to help low level players meet their teammates and level up. Mission Day being events sponsored by tourism boards that are essentially just "look what this town has" kind of adventuring challenges. You have to do a certain number of missions throughout the city. Missions usually being just visiting specific landmarks. All of these events involve a pre-meeting with the organizers for information and instructions for the event, then play time, then a post-meeting with the organizers for result announcements

Anomalies being the most fun and engaging of all of them, they completely change the normal game mechanics for the cities they're being hosted in. Not only that, but these events are hosted simultaneously/sequentially (depending on time zones) in multiple cities across the globe. They've got set framework that I'll explain now (*there are more advanced events as well called flash shards, but they just add a layer of complexity onto the normal event described below)

First I want to be clear, these events are always free. They do sell merch packs at the events, but attending and getting the badge credit for attending is free

1. Hour -1: Everyone meets up with their team to go over strategy. These are not arranged by Niantic and are purely community driven. Usually planning and going over strategy starts happening as soon as the event is announced via the internet by joining private team exclusive chat rooms specifically for the event. Once you join your team's chat you start sharing basic info about themselves to help the operators/team leads to gauge where each person would be the most useful (bike team, foot team, car team, offensive team, defensive team, dispatch/strategy team etc) and they assign you a team and to another group chat for just your sub-team teammates. Ideally everyone should be assigned to their sub team before the day the event starts, but the pre-meeting with your team the day of and/or the night before handles any last minute organization problems. This is also all done in secret from the other team(s).
2. Hour 0: Everyone meets up with the Niantic Officials for pre-game announcements, actors giving speeches in character for the lore of the game/event, and finally a pre-game group photo. This is usually done at a big park right next to the event's scoring regions.
3. Hour 1: Right after the group photo everyone leaves the meetup spot to start playing/competing.
4. Hour 2: Measurement 1, every portal (gym) within the 1st measurement region gets scored and each team gets awarded points based on who owns what at the exact point the measurement passes. These portals (gyms) are marked in game with special ornaments. 4 colors of ornaments each representing which measurement they're being scored in.
5. Hour 3: Measurement 2, same as above, but these are a different set of portals (gyms) being scored. This keeps the game moving.
6. Hour 4: Measurement 3, same as above, new set of portals (gyms).
7. Hour 5: Measurement 4, final measurement, new set of portals (gyms)
8. Hour 6: Meetup at Afterparty/final score announcement location. This is usually different than the first meetup location but still close to it, Niantic usually rents a venue of some kind out. Usually a bar, sometimes it's a club or even a stadium. Depends on the expected turnout. It's also worth noting that there are actors that stay in character for the lore of the game. "The resistance fought strong, but ultimately the Enlightened have decided humanity's fate after this battle."
9. Hour 7: After-After-Party. These are not hosted by Niantic, but by the teams themselves, by this time the kids have been taken back home/to the hotel and the adults stay out to play a little more. It's where the winners celebrate their win, and the losers accuse the other team of cheating while usually drinking their cares away.

It's worth noting that what I've described is for the Primary events. Primary events are the ones where Niantic is directly organizing and paying for everything involved. There are also lots of satellite events that take place at the same time/day as the primaries where Niantic reaches out to the local player communities and the event is handled by the local players appointed event organizers. They still have the same 4 measurement periods dictated and scored server side by Niantic, but all the people and location organization is handled by players.