Ingress Leveling and Badges (long)

In the first and second installments of this series I talked about all the operations players can perform in this game, and this final installment will give some details of how players move up through the sixteen levels of the game.

Player Level Requirements All players start at Level 1.  Getting to Level 2 is very easy, a few portals captured, a couple of fields and you're there.  Level 3 is a bit more of a climb but by getting to that point you can finally start to use some Bursters that do a bit of damage, and you're also probably hooked on the game by then.  So you move on.

L1 = 0 AP L2 = 2,500 AP L3 = 20,000 AP L4 = 70,000 AP L5 = 150,000 AP L6 = 300,000 AP L7 = 600,000 AP L8 = 1,200,000 AP

Hitting Level 8 is an important milestone because you can now use every item in the game.  Also, your XM bar capacity has gone from 3,000 at Level 1 by increments of 1,000 to 10,000.  Beyond Level 8, the increases will be in jumps of 1,500, not 1,000.  This tops out at 22,000 for Level 16.

In order to move up levels beyond 8, you need to start accumulating advanced levels of the various badges awarded for cumulative action in the game.  The requirements are:

L9 =  2,400,000 AP + 1 gold, 4 silver L10 = 4,000,000 AP + 2 gold, 5 silver L11 = 6,000,000 AP + 4 gold, 6 silver L12 = 8,400,000 AP + 6 gold, 7 silver L13 = 12,000,000 AP + 1 Platinum, 7 Gold L14 = 17,000,000 AP + 2 Platinum, 7 Gold L15 = 24,000,000 AP + 3 Platinum, 7 Gold L16 = 40,000,000 AP + 2 Onyx, 4 Platinum, 7 Gold

A word or two about some of these:

• Seer: When I started playing the turnaround time from submitting a suggested new portal to getting an answer from Niantic was fairly steady around three to four weeks.  Sometime in the months leading up to the iOS version of the game releasing (May-July '14), the lead time started creeping up.  It's now highly erratic and in the area of five to seven months.  Also erratic is the quality of review.  Junk portals are being approved while excellent public art is being rejected.  Sometimes the rejection reason is given, but more often it's a simple boilerplate "does not meet our criteria."  You can read the criteria in vain for anything that your portal submission misses.  To deal with what was obviously an unmanageable backlog, Niantic has stopped crediting new submissions (as of 2015-01-01) toward this badge.  Perhaps that is preparatory to canceling it or mothballing it entirely.  TL,DR; I do not recommend submitting new portals until the review process is improved.
• Illuminator: When you make the third link completing a field, you get credit toward this badge for all the MUs enclosed by that field.  If you make several layers of an onion field, the MUs really add up.  I advise finding the active group of your team in your area and pitch in on some team operations that will make multi-thousand-MU fields.  Even Platinum level in this will be accessible to you pretty quickly.
• Recharger: Another badge that's very accessible to get to higher levels even for novice players.  Spend a rainy afternoon somewhere warm and dry with a hundred or so keys and power cubes from your travels.  All the XM points you expend recharging friendly portals count toward this badge, and it's not at all challenging to rack up a million an hour.
• Guardian: There is indeed one badge in the game that creates more complaining than Seer, and here it is.  This is the only badge where succeeding in making higher levels of this badge is almost completely out of your control.  What happens here is, you capture a portal, you become its owner, you place your resonators, you keep a key and you hope for the best.  If your portal gets attacked and taken down, you start all over.  Some players (who clearly need lives) monitor the comms using scripts that filter for news of a portal being taken over.  If it stays in one player's ownership for close to 90 or 150 days, they send out alerts to other players like themselves who will then go out specifically to deny people the Guardian achievement.  Mind you, this accrues no benefit to them other than knowing it has caused someone else frustration.
• SpecOps: A relatively new feature of the game is called Missions.  These are little side-quests created by other players that string together four or more portals (and possibly Field Trip waypoints (about which the less said the better, but if you must know start here)) into a kind of scavenger hunt that you can travel around and play.  Finishing a Mission you have never done before gives you a count toward this badge.  If you're out playing anyway, the Portal card now has a Missions button that shows you any Missions of which the portal is a part.  Highly recommended.
• Translator: Another side-game you can play as you hack portals, if you have time.  By long-pressing the Hack button instead of tapping it, you are brought into a new screen where you are shown a grid of 11 dots and then anywhere from one to five patterns of lines connecting the dots.  In the game's story, these patterns are called Glyphs, and they represent the Shapers' attempts to communicate with us.  Our task is to repeat the pattern(s) we have been shown to acknowledge the message. Successfully replicating even one Glyph gets you bonus items on the hack, while replicating all the Glyphs offered gets you points toward this badge.  The higher-level the portal, the more complex the Glyph-Hack and the more points it's worth to succeed.  There are practice apps to help you get good at catching the Glyphs and reproducing them.  Apparently the idea is, each Glyph stands for a word or concept, and the sequences are "sentences" expressing ideas that the Shapers wish to communicate to us.  Well, the fact is, once you associate each pattern with a word it becomes easier to produce it again from memory.  Whether you think you have been "enlightened" or not is a separate matter.
• Sojourner: Hack every day, never let 24 hours go by without hacking.  That's all there is to this.  I think it was introduced to get people calmed down somewhat about the Guardian situation, since there's clearly nothing Niantic can (or is willing to) do about the scummy characters described above.  I have found that the best and safest pattern to keep your progress going toward this badge is to make sure you hack sometime in the morning and sometime late in the afternoon.