Niantic is Making Location Edits to Improve Map Quality
NianticTintino-ING
Posts: 1,016Niantic › admin
Hello Explorers!
We wanted to let you know that we are embarking on a project to improve the location accuracy of up to 15K Wayspots in total, between several major cities. These Wayspots will typically be smaller objects and discrete places such as statues, sculptures, signage, murals, and entrance locations to help improve existing and future gameplay experiences that rely on good location accuracy. This will help improve future AR game experiences at these locations across Niantic games.
Location edits are expected to be 20 meters or less. Once we modify the locations, they will be locked from being player-edited until further notice. Other types of edits and reports will still be possible via Pokémon GO or Ingress.
The work is expected to begin the first week of April through to early May across the following cities:
- New York City, Tokyo, & London UK - Early April 2022
London UK, San Francisco, and Seattle - Late April 2022- Los Angeles and select smaller US cities - Early May 2022
The order of the cities is subject to change, but we’ll let you know if/when that happens.
Expected Impact
- Neighborhoods with a healthy density of Wayspots may see a modification or removal of a PokéStop or Gym. This is a normal rebalancing of the gameboard as Wayspots shift to more accurate locations.
- Portal links and fields in Ingress may drop.
- It is difficult at this time to specify how exactly the gameboards will rebalance since your submitted location edits are also being processed simultaneously. The world is constantly changing and so too is our map!
- If you’ve submitted a location edit that was similar to the Niantic location edit it will be auto-rejected once we correct the location and lock it. We cannot return the submission quota used at the time of submission, but you can easily accrue more location edit quota the next day. Your Wayfarer rating will not be impacted by the rejection. These also don’t impact your Upgrade earnings.
Support
If you feel you are experiencing any issues in the game during this period as the gameboards rebalance, please utilize existing support channels to reach us. We will let you know when the work commences and ends!
Check out the original post here!
Thank you & Safe Exploring!
Comments
That's interesting!
What data are Niantic using as a source of truth for these edits?
Wow this is quite the announcement. Are the wayspots being moved ones which have been identified as having had incorrect or abusive edits in the past or just ones that are not currently located in an obviously correct location?
Neighborhoods with a healthy density of Wayspots may see a modification or removal of a PokéStop or Gym. This is a normal rebalancing of the gameboard as Wayspots shift to more accurate locations.
I'm glad we can all remain calm and neutral about this.
I'm curious about this as well, and also more generally, why these specific places?
Are you hiring somebody for this? I'll get my resume ready! ;)
“It’s typically gonna be smaller objects and discrete places” that wording doesn’t seem like it’s not gonna be based on reports.
Interesting. As I read it, I was expecting/hoping to see a list of the cities most impacted by the Foursquare debacle. I wonder why those wayspots weren’t prioritized over these cities.
Curious as well. They said it’s gonna be mostly smaller objects. Do u think their gonna have a Niantic ground team in these select major cities doing verifications? I feel like relying on google street view alone won’t be sufficient
It seems like it is likely to result in a fair number of removed Pokéstops and gyms where people deliberately slightly misplaced pins to be in a different cell.
Are we, as Wayfarers, not doing a good enough role in making locations accurate in these places?
Very interesting idea. But how are you going to do that? Most of StreetView is out of date.
I would like to nominate my current town, Moscow ID, for the "smaller cities" slot.
Agents (of both factions, and especially the Resistance - shout out to our local RES Agents!) as well as Trainers have currently done a wonderful job with providing a high density of Wayspots for this tiny town. We do have some Wayspots from early on which could use some adjustment - it seems like the folks who submitted them had good intentions, but due to our rural location, they seemed to have experienced major drift. In addition, as a town with an active college campus, we had items (such as public art) that have been moved to other parts of campus, but have not already been moved yet in Ingress (and PoGo).
By recommending a small rural town with a high portal density, I want to inspire others who live/work in rural areas to use their knowledge of their town to submit a solid slate of quality Wayspots for their town. Many times, our towns are overlooked and assumed to be places with sparse Wayspot density. I want to show others that it is possible to have a great quality Ingress and PoGo experience in their favorite rural towns.
Eskerrik asko!
Bihotz (PNW ENL)
XM Ambassador
Sounds like an audit for Niantic. Though I don't agree with this as a "normal rebalance" - if I submit anything new in those areas, it would be rejected due to the 20 meter rule. It's just odd the focus is on if a wayspot gets deleted versus having an additional wayspot.
I bet the ones misplaced in the city have hundreds of location edit submissions and so now it is impossible for there to every be a majority choosing just one of the edits to approve. They are also dropped to the bottom of the reviewer queue since they are in dense cities so edits just go unresolved.
With this, I can’t believe there’s still people who believe that scans get stops removed.
Excellent news !!
I submitted a lot of location edits recently in New York, I will be really happy if the location are fixed, they are really messed sometimes.
Thank you for that news
I also really hope they have people on the ground to verify locations, but they probably won't. If they move things just using Google Maps photos, they really are risking a debacle. Mapping satellite photos to actual lat/lon coordinates is unreliable within a few meters, depending on the location.
It would be interesting to see how accurate the AR scan position data is for scans that aren't people's shoes. They might try to use that, but I wouldn't guess there is enough coverage of all the stops in those cities.
I hope NYC "Early April" isn't too early - I'm headed there for Second Sunday to do a banner mission set I've wanted to do for a long time, and I hope the portals remain so that my target missions remain intact. I already have hotel reservations and big plans!
Hopefully Greater Sydney will be next to get rid of all the worthless survey markers that means nothing signficent.....
Neighborhoods with a healthy density of Wayspots may see a modification or removal of a PokéStop or Gym. This is a normal rebalancing of the gameboard as Wayspots shift to more accurate locations.
That's a long time coming. I'm sure some communities will be furious to have their hard work of exploiting the location edit system to create high-density fields of gyms and spots undone. But it shows that one shouldn't take "game balance" into one's own hands.
Please make more progress in improving location accuracy.
If possible, this could be the next Wayfarer Challenge.
What on earth do survey marks have to do with location edits in the United States, London and Tokyo?
On the other hand, I've noticed people also appealing said survey marks and Niantic has approved them.
I don't know what to make of anything anymore.
As a player of several Niantic games that I am, I hope that these changes are to improve our experience in the field of play, good luck and that everything goes well! 🤓
It is difficult at this time to specify how exactly the gameboards will rebalance since your submitted location edits are also being processed simultaneously. The world is constantly changing and so too is our map!
If you’ve submitted a location edit that was similar to the Niantic location edit it will be auto-rejected once we correct the location and lock it. We cannot return the submission quota used at the time of submission, but you can easily accrue more location edit quota the next day. Your Wayfarer rating will not be impacted by the rejection. These also don’t impact your Upgrade earnings.
The bolded parts seem to conflict.
Also, what's with these?
As I understand it, Wayfarer rating and upgrade earnings relate only to reviews - not to anything the Explorer nominated.
Maybe that explains why some people go from Great to Poor unexpectedly - they had some submitted nominations and edits declined??
Neighborhoods with a healthy density of Wayspots may see a modification or removal of a PokéStop or Gym. This is a normal rebalancing of the gameboard as Wayspots shift to more accurate locations.
If I may ask, what's the definition of "healthy density"? Is this something between low density and high/overpopulated density? And why mentioning only Pokestop or Gym?
Didn't modification or removal via Ingress counted here? Or will it be available later?
If a portal gets removed, the missions that included the portal would just be skipped.
Very interesting! I am guessing that the 15k being picked are not random. It is probably based on whatever portals that Niantic has sufficient AR scan data for, and they probably want to ensure that the locations are correct for when they test whatever feature they will be using that scan data for. I believe this specifically because of this sentence from the announcement:
This will help improve future AR game experiences at these locations across Niantic games.
Don't quote me on this, but if the starting portal for a misson gets removed, doesn't the whole mission go away?
I wonder if agreements for edits are earned regardless of vote and immediately? this would explain the weird offset of numbers we see also.
HAHA Tino, that was an epic Aprils Fool Joke!