Mass Abuse of Wayfarer
Breenzy-ING
Posts: 24 ✭✭✭
Survey markers are a dime a dozen and need to meet minimum criteria of at least one of the following:
- A great place for exploration
- A great place for exercise
- A great place to be social with others
Looking at the area pictured below (-34.024265,150.770693) it is obvious that none of them meet the above criteria. They are 3cm disks and located on random roads. The people submitting and approving them are abusing the Wayfarer system.
A quick search of "Survey Mark" in the mission author tool brings up over 6000 of these portals with most of them being in the Sydney, NSW area. 99% would not be meeting the minimum criteria. In my travels I have found 1 survey marker which meets the criteria, and it was at the top of a hill on a hiking track. Not on a random residential road.
Niantic please act! These low grade submissions are clogging up the system and diluting the pool! The submitters and approvers need to have action taken against them.
An example live in the system right now:
Middle of the road. Very nice.
Comments
wow... they look not really portal worthy... too generic and boring.
In my opinion, these do not invite you to explore the world. These are cheap wayspots on your own doorstep that don't look good and all represent the same mass-produced goods. These wayspots should be removed from the system. The people who submit them and those who accept them should think again what the point behind Wayfarer and the rules. Quality over quantity.
Fully agree with OP,
While yes it says Survey Marks are Eligible I believe these sorts are definitely an exploit to the system.
I'm a Surveyor by trade and these sorts of marks are mass-produced and are required by law to be placed every 500m maximum in a newly developed area's. Found in the Cadastral Survey Requirments
All a person really needs is the Cap which can be sourced very cheaply then place on the ground and take pictures. Guaranteed no reviewers are actually looking up the government websites to cross-reference numbers to see if the point is a duplicate somewhere else in the state.
Also, these sorts of marks in my opinion do not fall under any of the 3 main categories, "Great place for exploration" "Great place for exercise" or "Great place to be social with others".
Exploration; Seen it in supporting info many times submitters claiming it helps people find their way around the local area. No, it does not. They are used for a very specific industry. The average person would never look up the information on these survey marks.
Excercise: hardly.. Just means more people can sit at home and play from their couch.
Social: If your one that likes having lots of people around to your house then maybe. But you are not going to go out with mates and sit by one of these marks in a random street.
As you can see in this image below, this is just a random estate in NSW Australia. These are very common and form a grid pattern over the estate. (Looking at this one they have missed a few still.. properly in the queue)
Another note is the majority of these fall within the 40m of a private residence. (Black rings around each POI is 20m for reference)
Only survey marks I happily approve are ones with the proper history behind them. or ones at say the top of a mountain peak. Not ones used by civil construction.
It would be great if there was some sort of clarification on Survey marks before survey marks like these are approved all over the world and it becomes too hard to remove them all.
They're on the Automatically Approve list per NIA. Just like Little Free Libraries...
These should definitely not be approved in residential areas, just like Little Free Libraries, and the information above that they are mass produced is pretty convincing.
That said, they’re still higher quality than the front doors and garden gnomes that I have to reject en masse.
There is no such list.
Hello @Breenzy-ING! We took another look at the reported locations and decided that the Wayspots do not meet our criteria for removal at this time. However, the other wayspot which you reported in the middle of the road, we have taken action on the Wayfinder in accordance with our policies. Thanks for helping us maintain the quality of the Wayspots.
@NianticGiffard is this a simple case of not meeting removal criteria or a nod to eligibility?
Given how many of them there are already, i'd say the second option.
If these were truly invalid, Niantic would remove them. "Oh but it doesnt meet removal criteria" - It DOESNT MATTER. Nia is the owner of the IP, they can remove any and all POIs for whatever reason, including without a reason.
I'd be pretty discouraged if I saved up money and time to visit Australia, and felt like all the game showed me was these things.
Maybe you could make Ingress mission banners of them, lol.
There are many cases of grandfathered wayspots that don't meet the current version of eligibility criteria but haven't been deleted. I imagine deleting 6000 portals or pokestops in a single city all at once would be pretty disruptive, so it's not surprising they'd be cautious if the survey mark wayspots aren't causing problems in the real world.
That's quite different from endorsing the creation of new ones though.
Other threads about these markers talk about the high number of them that are constantly nominated, and that number will keep on growing even further given the latest response by Niantic.
This is a big mistake that Niantic has made.
At the start of Operation Portal Recon, they gave specific examples of candidates for approval, instead of the rough criteria that had been used until then.
However, by simply stating "trail markers," "survey markers," and "gazebos" without adding words such as "originality" or "unique," players with no sense of decency expanded the criteria in a malicious manner, and the judges feared that the wording would lower their own rating if they rejected the candidates, resulting in this stupid field.
Furthermore, such a field is further abused and grows like a cancer.
This should be changed as soon as possible.
It would be a great asset for us and for Niantic.
I get that it may be hard to delete all the ones currently live but, instead of doing that make an official post listing them as no longer eligible so people can actually start rejecting any further submissions.