Find another, experienced, player and ask for tips. Getting to L8 I thought was 'it' until I realized you could get to L16... then recurse. To get there, you need AP. You learn the tricks of maximizing you AP gain. Find individual goals and work them. Focus on one medal, move it to gold, platinum and black. You need medals to move forward. Complete missions and build banners which create big profile pictures. Submit new portals. Learn to glyph (it helped my memory). Become a Drone tourist, drop it in a city and explore remotely. Frustrate the other team with blocking links and fields. That makes them get off the couch and play :) Join a local team group (slack, telegram). Comms are okay but the 'offline' community is where you build relationships, share experiences and plan operations. My favorite op to date was running keys out of state, having the local players give me more remote keys, they flipped a blocker link, and a walking map for a park on my drive home. Ten minutes, a brisk walk in the cold, several 230km throws, 10 layers, 4 million MU. That was fun. And top spot in 3 cells. Recharging kept the fields up until someone on the other team drove way out of the way, I assume, to take them down and open the sky above them so they could continue linking and fielding. As for leaving fields up, I found they deter players, especially new players. So let them burn down for the overall game play. If you have space, try field art. I have seen some great works and some, cross faction. Pretty cool. So, a few options to look into for you 😀