Update to Wayfarer Criteria regarding Outdoor Basketball Courts - Discussion
NianticTintino
Posts: 876Niantic › admin
Hello Explorers,
As you’re aware, the current Wayfarer criteria doesn’t allow Wayspots on K-12 school grounds. As part of our launch plan for NBA All-World, we will be making a limited exception to this policy to allow outdoor basketball courts on school grounds.
We’re excited to be expanding our global game board to include real-world basketball courts – it’s where players can go 1v1 and compete to become Ruler of the Court. Our goal is to have NBA All-World include as many courts as possible - both real-world and digital - because we think a diverse set of locations will enable the richest experience for our players. NBA All-World will feature real-world courts and also digital courts that we’ve designed based on other interesting real-world locations.
Note that outdoor courts are the only exception to this policy. Basketball courts inside a gymnasium or other school building will not be included.
Outdoor basketball courts on school grounds may be nominated, categorized, and will be reviewed internally by Niantic. While we will will do our best to review them all internally, if you happen to come across an outdoor basketball court on school grounds in your reviews, you can 1) review it as you would any other eligible Wayspot nomination or 2) skip it if you're unsure how to review. If you’ve nominated an outdoor basketball court on school grounds in the past and they were rejected, you’re more than welcome to nominate those again and add the basketball category. Approved outdoor basketball courts on school ground Wayspots will only be added to the Map in NBA All-World.
Check our the original post HERE
Comments
So these are supposed to be pulled by Niantic, and anything that is in regular voting should continue to be rejected as K-12?
When you say "Approved basketball court Wayspots will only be added to the Map in NBA All-World. " - does that mean all new basketball courts, or only new courts that are on k-12 grounds?
So just submit through Ingress and Pokemon Go then? How are you identifying and pulling these candidates specifically? Especially since Ingress doesn't let you suggest categories yet.
So will basketball courts show up in Ingress and pogo? Lmao the courts of the world imports aren’t in Ingress at the moment, and even when dupes happen, they never get synced to Ingress.
And what happens when a basketball court/mixed use court on k-12 property gets into community review instead of being pulled for Niantic review? Are we supposed to accept them? Because this seems like a great way to open the gates for people claiming a field at their school is a basketball court just to get it in pokemon go.
Did Niantic think this through at all?
Approved basketball court Wayspots will only be added to the Map in NBA All-World.
That's a bit gross. So a new basketball court Wayspot in say, a public park won't appear anywhere else but NBA All-World? Unless you're only referring to basketball courts in schools to only be added in NBA All-World and filtered out of other games?
Alongside the fact that many supermarkets and generic businesses appear in the game that can be picked up bottles of water, this is actually terrible. Oh, but if that basketball court at the school is a wayspot and it appears in the check for duplicate screens, can I also submit that historical plaque about the founding of the school? The annoying beautiful murals that happen to be in the school? The school playground?! Does that not give an impression to non-savvy reviewers that any wayspot in a school is now a-ok?
I would rather shute a basketball into a dog waste basket.
School wayspots are gonna come. Even high school students play pogo, given the immense number of students submitting themselves and the many things in school that people wouldn't have explored. Moar wayspots equals moar monies, amirite.
I am pretty sure they just mean approved K-12 ground basketball court will only appear in NBA.
Excuse me, but is there any gameplay snapshot on how the game would be? Why allow such courts on K-12 to be added only for one game?
Anyway I would stop Wayfaring if I meet at least 3 K-12 courts in a row while reviewing because of this.
Personally, I am concerned having wayspots for NBA on K-12 grounds. Is it possible if the wayspots can be inactive during school hours? I feel that is the fairest compromise.
Honestly, you will probably start to see a large amount of them being submitted.
Outdoor basketball courts may be nominated, categorized, and will be reviewed internally by Niantic.
Okay I've missed this part, but @NianticTintino-ING how would you guarantee the courts will be sent into Niantic review and not general reviewing queue?
Tags = "basketball court" -> Niantic voting?
They want us to go out and nominate something that won’t appear in the game we are nominating from. No thanks.
Not only that. I always thought the reason for not allowing school wayspots was because they didn’t want random people on school grounds playing phone games. But what’s the difference between playing Pokémon and playing NBA? I could switch back and forth between games while on my phone while I’m on school property.
As 29andcounting brought up, why is only NBA special? What changed with this game that allows it to use different company policy/ law interpretation in relation to use on school grounds? If the issue is low number of legit basketball courts then that is a game design problem and allowing this exception will only cause greater legal and societal issues if this game gets popular. This is not the answer to this problem.
In my country, if you trespass on school property without a valid reason, you are arrested, but is that not the case in the US?
They'll have to only be active on weekends and holidays. (Niantic already has that code for parks.)
And use zoning maps to tell what's on school grounds, to pull noms off for review.
They could add the category selection to Ingress nominations - but I wouldn't trust nominators of any game to admit they're nominating on school grounds.
I think each school is different. I think back to when my son was in high school. You could drive into the property and the sports fields were open to the public after school hours. But to get through the gates into the school itself you had to have an office pass. But we were also allowed in to watch concerts/plays, etc.
In glasgow (and i assume scotland/uk) a lot of the school grounds basketball courts also double as soccer (feel sick calling it that name) pitches, so mugas, do we submit/accept these as well or do they need to be strictly basketball courts?
I assume we should *never accept* anything K-12, because the "special" nomination will be pulled by niantic reviewers, who will accept and make sure that "Approved basketball court Wayspots will only be added to the Map in NBA All-World". There is no way for us reviewers to do this magic. Unless Tintino wants to clarify this further.
As for "submit", depends on the school I guess. Don't want to trespass to take a photo etc.
Yes, and how would they going to do that? To filter these "special" nominations out into Niantic voting from general queue?
Considering it's Niantic, I think they didn't have any workable solutions yet while people are starting to nominate courts on K-12.
I want an answer to this too. I have nominated basketball courts before that are NOT on school grounds, and I'd like to have some confirmation on whether this update means they won't appear in-game if Niantic yoinks them for review. Also, what will be the appeal process when a non-school-grounds basketball court gets wrongly classified as being on school grounds by Niantic? How are we supposed to appeal a "successful" submission?
@NianticTintino-ING
I don t think this decision is an excellent way to go about it.
Scammers will try to trick us in many different ways, which will result in a large number of spam nominations.
It would then be faster to open POI nominations from the beginning in the NBA-AllWorld application, as Ingress did from 2012 to 2015.
That way, all nominations from NBA-AllWorld can be isolated from Wayfarer reviewers by adding a special tag.
This will accomplish your goal correctly.
If you want speed, just extract the relevant data from the Foursquare database, review it, and import it.
Please don't bother us with more spam.
Tintino, you are too innocent.
@NianticTintino-ING
There is more games out than NBA All world.
It is super creepy for adults to be on school grounds outside of school hours.
And is ILLEGAL in many countries.
Not to mention that some Ingress players will use excuses to use those wayspots as field anchors that no one can reach
This decision has made a terrible precedent, and should be IMMEDIATLY overturned
We're going to need a LOT more clarification on this one...
Do all basketball courts get excluded from Ingress & Pogo going forward, or just K-12 ones? If only K-12, how will that be determined?
Are these courts getting added solely by niantic, or are people allowed to submit them like normal?
If people are allowed to submit them, how are we supposed to review such submissions?
Will any action(s) be taken to try and reduce the inevitable flood of other types of nominations within K-12 school grounds?
And how does niantic plan to deal with the backlash from angry schools / parents about kids playing at school? As funny as I think that would be, such a move is almost certainly going to cause issues...
it is super creepy for adults to be on playgrounds, too. and still playgrounds are the easiest thing to nominate and get it approved.
Sounds like a terrible idea, I doubt there’s many that are open to the public, and we will see stories about weirdos trespassing on school grounds.
However, it’s Niantic suggesting it and them reviewing it apparently so if they want to clog the system and game maps up with stuff they have to remove when they close NBA down in a year, it’s up to them I guess. 🤷
Well this has woken me up this morning. 😂
we know/assume there are trigger words that force new submissions to Niantic direct, so would be right to assume basketball will become a trigger word?
We also know/assume from the way that some approved posts have been handled especially by the app mess, that Wayfarer can review accepted spots in lightship and tag them so they don’t appear in one or more games - probably a tag for each game needs activated. So part of the review would involve setting a tag that would block ingress and pogo but allow syncing into basketball.
@NianticTintino-ING is this how it would work?
and can you clarify this tag would only apply to courts on school property and that those in other public spaces would be ok?
As @Gazzas89-PGO says although we do have some basketball areas (usually half courts - I have one in the system) an awful lot of play areas in U.K. are termed
Multi Use Games Areas -MUGA- where basketball is one element along with football ( refuse to call it soccer) cricket, netball, tennis etc These occur both in public and school property. Will this term be picked up?
I submitted an edit to remove one of the basketball imports as it was a duplicate of an approved MUGA in a park. Will this be affected?
This is a major shift and will make it harder to explain to submitters why one point in a school is eligible and others are not.
Better start drafting some explanations ready to respond to questions.
something something….. KS12 absolutely not allowed,
something, something …..safety concerns
something, something….. unless paid for 🙄
Most schools I'm aware of that have the mugas you can get to them without trespassing or at the very least can take a picture from the side (though that one is a bit more worrying tbh)
And when I say accept, I hadn't read the bit about naintic doing it, but even them, might slip through to us so that would be good to know as well
This seems like the usual from tintino, this might come off as a bit many and it is to an extent. Don't talk for ages in the forums, pop up to do 1 or 2 things, then do something massively important with not a lot of explanation, then maybe answer a question or 2 a day later then silence again
Either way, I'll go gest it this weekend, I'll go submit the muga at a school near me, see if niantic review it, hopefully not get jailed lol
Also wanted to ask, currently the NBA All World import you did using Courts of the World, those Wayspots appear in that game and Pokémon GO but not Ingress.
Will these be removed from Pokémon GO/added to Ingress when the game globally launches?