Best Of

So. Long thread, no progress. Here's my general take.

Niantic's one and only "money maker" is their single proprietary database, of a collection of points of interest (now collectively known as "wayspots"). These wayspots are NOT "portals" nor "stops" nor "inns" nor whatever Catan will be calling them -- they are gps-located maps of "interesting" things, FSVO "interesting".

They license this database to other IP holders. Ingress is a special case, in that Niantic itself holds all those IP rights themselves, and can do with it as they will. And they leveraged their Ingress stewardship into growing that database, demonstrating that people wanted and liked to play (relatively) mindless and simplistic games out in the real world, interacting with their peers. AND they use Ingress in order to prototype new technologies, like all the upcoming things with their "portal scanning".

But NOTHING in that database is ever going to be Ingress-exclusive or Pokemon-exclusive. Shredding it into little bits and pieces where nothing in one game ever has even a minor impact on the others? Ain't gonna happen. That dilutes their moneymaker, and makes it more expensive to maintain.

Of their games, I personally spend the most time playing Pokemon Go. Not because I prefer it over the others (I don't), but ... because there's more for me to do in it than the others. Yet I'm also the highest-level player in HPWU in my city, a well-respected member of all the xfac communities in my region, and a fairly frequent commenter in these Wayfarer forums.

I never learned to drive, just a personal choice, didn't care to exacerbate all the bonus weird life issues when your job entails sitting at a desk 8-12 hours a day most days a week. Yet I've created 300+ wayspots in my area (and beyond!), more on the way.

There are Pogo-only locations in my city, such as one that must be from the relatively recent "support local businesses" sponsorship initiative. Am I mad or jealous? Meh. (Although I did ping @NianticCasey-ING at the utter ugliness of the chosen photo which not only included PII -- a license plate! -- but was, of all things, sideways. It'll get fixed or not.)

There are Ingress-only locations in my city, such as in the "sensitive locations" area, a historic cemetery. The city complained, and now everything in there is Ingress-only, no more mad storms of Pogo raiders bothering funerals. Am I mad or jealous? Meh. It's really the city's business (ie. the legal property managers) how they want their land to be used, not mine.

AND there are HPWU-only locations in my city! Due to the weird mechanics of wayspots, a playground was deemed "too close" to the previously existing Ingress portal of the park it was in. And when HPWU was initially seeded, the automated system picked the hidden wayspot, at the expense of using the Ingress/Pogo-visible one instead. So now nobody playing either game can effect any changes, including (should it ever be required) renaming it, removing it, adding updated pictures, etc. Am I mad or jealous? Meh. At worst I know how to contact people who can make those changes for me, via these forums and/or messaging poor overworked Casey.

But Niantic has a few fairly strict rules about placement and movement of wayspots, perhaps not explicitly documented, but certainly it's still "findable" information if you're willing to do deepdives of these forums, or (like some of us including @Hosette-ING), we've been paying attention to these forums (and their OPR predecessors) for quite a few years now. These include:

1. Only place a wayspot's GPS at its actual physical location; doing otherwise is considered abuse, which can lead to repercussions against your account(s)
2. A wayspot may be large enough that there is no fundamentally specific "correct" location. ie. place the gps at a church's front door? at its sign? at the cross/steeple? in the dead centre of the building? All are correct
3. Trying to move a wayspot from one correct gps location to a different "also correct" location is generally considered "shenanigans", and is also potentially considered "abuse"
4. Moving a wayspot from an incorrect spot to a correct one is encouraged. If you are unable to do that in-app (because the movement is more than 10m), then they have created a mechanism in these forums where you appeal directly to Niantic staff to move the wayspot for you. Their answer may still be "no".
5. Even if you cannot see a wayspot that is exclusive to a game you don't play, Niantic staff themselves have actually suggested that one uses an Ingress account. You don't have to play the game in order to see how other wayspots are physically laid out. And indeed, if you are using any of the never-publicly-acknowledged-as-"legal"-by-Niantic "IITC" apps, you are already doing just that.

At its heart, even with its immense-to-us "profits", Niantic itself is still a small development company.

Also like always you will do nothing. It was worth a try, now im 100% sure that Niantic doesn't care about the community. Even removing that too many photos would be something to help. But no, why should you do anything. Thanks for everyone who wanted too help and commented, liked my post, at least I now know that it isn't worth to try for getting anything done with Niantic. Let's let him to destroy the infrastructure in this city... I will post here from now only comments with new deleted wayspots. The list will probably get pretty long.

So remove all Pokemon Go POI and start from scratch? Why would anybody want that? Without agents, Pokemon Go players would have had no stops, aside from the initial seed portals.

I started playing Pokemon Go, and have many, many agents to thank for their efforts in adding portals. Even if all of them didn't make it into Pokemon, quite a few did, and it made my experience richer.

Now that I'm on the other side of the fence, playing Ingress, I just want to add as many valid portals to the network as possible. Not all of them will make it into Pokemon Go, but I hope the ones that do are thoroughly enjoyed by trainers.

Rejection reasons are kind of a secondary thing anyway. If something is legitimately rejected then I don't care what reasons were chosen by people. The underlying message is that enough reviewers failed the submission so it was ultimately rejected.

I understand that you want to make the games better. As for "Ingress should be equal to those of us who play Pokemon", that's a wonderful fantasy. It would be nice if Ingress got half as much development effort as PoGo does but that's a can of worms that doesn't really belong in the Wayfarer forum.

I don't think you're getting multi-accounters disagreeing with your comments. Rather, I think that there are quite a few players who legitimately disagree with what you are saying as evidenced by the pushback that you have been getting in the discussion. I'm sure you're looking at it from the best context from your point of view but other people have other points of view that are equally legitimate. I don't think it makes sense for PoGo players to make changes to things that don't appear in that particular game. Part of the reason that I think this is a bad idea is that PoGo players have a long history of trying to move wayspots in order to create advantages in PoGo without regard to the impacts they are having on other games. (Did you know that every time you move a portal you break any links that are connected to it? That may be no big deal in most cases but it could occasionally undo hundreds of dollars of investment in getting to a particular location to capture and link a portal.)

@Nadiwereb-PGO It's called Cargo Culting. Someone saw something work one time and they assume it's a general pattern.

I don't believe in the "misclick" theory, this issue is much, much too common and widespread for that to be the case.

Recently I've read both here and on local forums that people seem to think that the reason behind cooldowns is "voting patterns", and so they advise each other to avoid picking the same rejection reason twice in a row, even if that would be the correct thing to do. As an extreme example, I've even seen people say thay you must alternate between rejecting and accepting nominations to avoid cooldowns, regardless of the eligibility of the PoIs.

People will believe the weirdest things.

This is an old wives tale that doesn't hold any water given that there is enough Pokemon Go reviewers to significantly dilute any influence an ENL or RES voting block has over Wayspot nominations.