Ingress FAQ for not quite beginners
Once you're been playing Ingress for a few months you begin to see things that are confusing. Here are some common questions.
This was a great mystery to me the first time I saw an L8 portal with resonators all owned by the same agent. This happens as a result of applying a virus. If you are Resistance and Jarvis a portal, the portal turns green and is owned by _JARVIS_, but if you're blue and Ada a portal you will be the owner of the portal and all resonators and mods.
L8 is the maximum level for portals, resonators, and bursters. Each time you level up you get gear that is more durable and more powerful up to L8. At L8 people will want you to come add your L8 resonator to portals in order to upgrade them to a higher level and you'll be invited to more events. Often a group of 8 L8 agents will take a van or several cars through as area and destroy the other team's portals and create many L8 portals for their side. L8 players usually play more in teams to create multi-layered fields and some of the most exciting aspects of the game begin to unfold for you.
I hear about people getting together to create farms? What are these? How do I get invited to join one? A Farm in Ingress is a collection of portals that are fairly close together. An ideal Farm has 4 to 5 portals all reachable within a 30 meter radius. Usually Farms are created by L8 or above players creating L8 portals. This is because it's difficult to get L8 gear from lower level portals. Once the portal is level 8 mods are added to it to make the time between hacks become smaller and the number of hacks become larger. An ideal farm portal will have a very rare heat sink and a very rare multi-hack.
Both Jarvis and Ada are fairly rare and aren't hacked that often. You'll want to be careful how and when you use them. In order to successfully deploy a virus you'll need to know a few basic facts.
- You can only apply a virus to a portal that is at most one level higher than you are. So if you're a Level 4 agent you can jarvis or ada Level 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 portals. Not 6, 7 or 8 level portals.
- You need to have enough XM in your XM bar. This depends on the level of the portal you're trying to apply a virus to. You need at least 1000 * (level of the portal) XM. Best to just make sure you bar is topped up to max and you'll never have problems with this.
- Once a portal has been virus'd it cannot be virus'd again for one hour. If you try you won't succeed and you'll lose your virus. Check the COMs for the time when a virus was applied.
In most areas the higher level players will have chats set up for people in their area. There's often a chat for the lower level players to get to know one another and for the leadership of the local area to be sure the player is genuine. Once you're reach Level 7 and have been met in person by a higher level player you'll be invited to a different set of chat groups. In New Mexico the Resistance faction has a Google Hangout for the beginning players and a Slack group for the more advanced players. To make contact you can fill our the form at verify.nmresist.com.