Does the XM famine affect the game play or not?

Originally shared by Sigbert Ingress

Does the XM famine affect the game play or not? My personal prediction was that we will have soon more neutral portals. But after one week it seemed to me that the players could handle the new situation more or less well.

An analysis based on nearly 22.000 portals in (and around) Berlin shows after two weeks still an inconclusive picture. The percentage of neutral portals till XMLess varied between 9.5-14.5% (horizontal gray dashed lines = 95% interval under normality assumption) and none of the data collected since XMLess are outside this interval. However, we observe  a significant (p-value ~ 1%) upward trend (black dashed line). Considering the average portal level (neutral portals are included as level 0 portals) we get the same picture, only the downward trend is now not significant.

Statistically speaking: we can not be sure if the XM famine really affects the game, but we have some hints for it. Additionally it is said that the power cube drop rate has been increased (a short test last week showed that with 100 glyph hacks we could get approx. 120 power cubes plus some Lawsons), but unfortunately I have no data for comparison.