Intentional Wayfinder maliciously used multiple accounts to abuse Wayfarer system.
Qinglinenazo-ING
Posts: 2 ✭✭
Dear Niantic,
First, thank you so much for making such fun games and inspiring people to explore the communities.
However, an unfortunate thing happened which seriously impacted on our game experience.
In April of this year, an Ingress Agents in our local community found that there were bunch of ineligible Wayspots such as normal flowerpot, normal mailbox, and even nonunique shop began to appear in the game. It just looks like someone created multiple accounts to abuse Wayfarer system, intentionally approving Wayspots which nominated by himself. Therefore, he reported it on Wayfarer forum, and 37 ineligible Wayspots have been removed according to your reply.
(Original post on Wayfarer forum here: https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/16806/someone-use-multi-accounts-to-aduit-the-wayfarer )
Everything is reasonable so far, however the person whose Wayspots got removed took revenge on our community for this, he used multiple accounts to report almost all local Wayspots maliciously, according to the statistics made by local player from community, there are 83 eligible Wayspots got removal.
Our community made a list and map of removed Wayspots:
Map: https://omega-phi.github.io/removed-waysopts-in-Chiayi/
List: https://github.com/omega-phi/removed-waysopts-in-Chiayi/tree/main/doc
The person who uses multiple accounts even did the same way on Wayfarer forum, he used multiple accounts to “DISAGREE” any post about requesting restored removed Wayspots which post by our community player, and “AGREE” his post about “restoring ineligible Wayspots”
Proof here, original restoring-request post by the person who uses multiple accounts:
1. https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/19582/request-to-resume-poke-gym-appeal
2. https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/19583/request-to-resume-pokestop-gym
You can easily tell that people who echoed back blow is the same person, writing styles are similar as good as User IDs.
This kind of uncivilized behavior deeply destroyed game experience of normal players, we don’t know how or even where to expose unfairness, this is why we post this here, WE REALLY NEED HELP, PLEASE.
Comments
This is the reply by the person with multiple accounts. (OP here: https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/20486/appeal-portal-wrongly-removed-0715-2 )
As you can see, his logic is: You report my portal (even though
there were fake or ineligible Wayspots), so my revenge is to report back
against you, let's ruin this game.
He nominated flowerpots, pipe, normal shop, a piece of A4 paper on
the wall, and even nonexistent object as Wayspots, and approved these with
multiple Wayfinder-accounts. Because there are very few people reviewing now,
Wayfinder with multiple accounts could almost "CONTROLL" the Wayfarer
system.
It would be a hidden trouble to the community if people could gain
advantage with multiple accounts, it really need to be fixed.
I’ve had the same issue, but rather than it being one player with a bunch of PoGo accounts, it is multiple players with 2+ PoGo accounts and an Ingress account each. They are able to work together as a group of four or so (8+ accounts) to force their own submissions through, block or slow submissions of others, and keep their reported or fake nominations in game. How would Niantic be able to stop this though? They can’t even stop spoofers consistently yet.
This is bad.
The problem of multiple accounts prevalent among Pokémon GO players has had a profoundly negative impact on Pokémon GO, of course, but also on the other game, Ingress, and Wayfarer, which is the root of the problem.
And even among influential Pokémon GO players (bloggers, strategy site administrators, YouTubers), I see players with moral decay who say that cheating should be tolerated.
It's certainly not an easy problem to solve.
But please take strict action on this issue and make sure that every department at Niantic is working on this issue.
The problem with multi accounting is that Niantic rarely does anything, even when people provide evidence.
So even when the PGO community tries to do something about them, nothing happens.
It sounds bad, but what I don’t understand is who was he able to get your legitimate stops removed? Even if he reported them just to get even with you, Niantic removes only highly invalid points. If they were invalid, they shouldn’t have been in the game in the first place, and personally I find it hard to believe Niantic had removed more then 80 point just because. Anyway, if they’re valid, I hope someone here will look into it and restore them.
from the discussion here i do not understand the difference between a player with a SINGLE pokemon Go account doing this, or the difference between a SINGLE pokemon player with ~10 Accounts doing this.
Yes, multiaccounting is agains the TOS and will lead to punishment
On the other hand, you are trying to tell us that he submitted the things and "intentionally approving Wayspots which nominated by himself".
This isnt possible, i know the submitters here, and i know what stuff they submit. I seldom get theirs, and they seldom get mine. Niantic has made it so that you rarely get anything to review from the same places, so that this wont happen.
Personally, i think your accusations are a step too far.
I believe it's all about how active a reviewing area is and how active you are. I can say that half of the new poi which have appeared over the course of a year locally I have been also asked to review them. It is really easy to imagine how having a lot of accounts gives you a good hand in the review process. On the other hand, I am not sure if multiple accounts can help you remove stuff more easy.
I haven't seen Niantic do anything about multi-accounting even when provided overwhelming evidence.
This is one of the biggest (and unstated) problems that underlies many of the issues across the games and Wayfarer. For Wayfarer, how often have we heard complaints about coordination and people pushing through questionable at best nominations through their alts. Or committing abuse with their alts so that their main account doesn't get dinged. There are even reports of people using alts to request deletion of perfectly good wayspots to retaliate/bully other players.
Having some friends/family members that wayfarer and nominate stops where when a stop is uploaded we message about it..... even with home/bonus locations set.
I'd say the number of times we've done a review about 5-7 range, out of1500ish reviews so for a person to do like multiple multiple its highly unlikely unless they are doing tens of thousands of reviews.
In which case, it's possible the value of doing tens of thousands of reviews might even outweigh the manipulations disvalue.