So you’ve gotten your invite code to Ingress. You’ve gone through your training, and chosen your faction already. And have gone through our entire Beginner’s Guide to Ingress. Now it’s time to go out and find some portals to hack and collect XM. Now you want to connect with other Ingress players in your area to perhaps create a game plan to take over your city and make it either 100% enlightened or 100% resistant. Well we’re going to walk you through how to do that.
The best way to connect is on Google+, because on Facebook there is only the main Ingress page which won’t be much help. So if you’re on Google+ you can find both resistance and enlightened pages for most of the larger cities in the US and the rest of the world as well. Most pages will have you verify yourself as a member of the resistance, because they don’t want to be giving out strategies to the enemies. Which is understandable.
The verification process for each page is a little bit different, but for the Detroit Resistance you can verify yourself by doing the following:
- Take a screenshot from either the Ingress app or ingress.com/intel (it’ll show your username and whether your resistance or enlightened)
- Email the screenshot to the specified email address, usually specified in the ‘About’ section of their page
- Once they receive your email, they will usually circle you so they can share posts directly with verified users.
Chicago Resistance’s verification process is a bit different than Detroit’s (shown above):
- Load the #Ingress app, or Intel Map: http://www.ingress.com/intel
- From the main screen, click on “Comm” to open the chat window
- Click / tap the “Faction” headline within the chat window to switch from Global Chat to Faction Chat
- Post a message to Faction Chat that contains your First Name
- Share a Google+ post to the Chicago Resistance Google+ Page that includes your Ingress username and the ZIP Code you were in when you posted the aforementioned Faction Chat message
On Google+ you can also make a circle for both resistance members and enlightened members. That way when you want to share Ingress posts you can share them with that circle and not harass the rest of your circlers.
Connecting with others in your city is vital to this game. Without the help of others in your faction, it can be pretty hard to hack and acquire portals from the other faction. It’ll help you level up quicker, and grab more items to make links and fields later on in the game. Pretty soon we’ll be putting together posts with links to all the resistance and enlightened pages in parts of the US and the rest of the world as well, so be on the look out for much more Ingress content.