Clarification on WHY US Military bases are banned?

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Comments

  • SSSputnik-INGSSSputnik-ING Posts: 109 ✭✭✭

    Bases ARE banned for new submissions, old waypoints were allowed to be kept.

  • CipherBlakk-PGOCipherBlakk-PGO Posts: 309 ✭✭✭✭

    What says bases are banned? Not according to current criteria, unless Niantic is pulling a fast one and blocking them out somehow.

  • Theisman-INGTheisman-ING Posts: 1,001 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Welcome to the wondeful world of Niantic inconsistency.

    They were clarified as all being banned in previous AMAs and then also on these forums by Niantic Casey.

    However they never ever, even when it was OPR or subsequently when it was Wayfarer bothered to update the criteria on the offical website.

    So you have it being stated on an offical forum that their policy is to reject all new POI's on military bases, yet only the minority of reviewers who use the forums would actually know this, as the Wayfarer website only states if interferes with operations.

  • CipherBlakk-PGOCipherBlakk-PGO Posts: 309 ✭✭✭✭

    There's a big red banner at the top of the Ingress page that says: "Any clarifications regarding portal/wayspot criteria is outdated. Please refer to the official Wayfarer criteria for all current criteria," and then it links to the actual criteria on the Wayfarer site. So Ingress even states that everything there is outdated and not to be used.

    The criteria related to military bases (and hospitals and such) is explicitly worded to allow POIs in those locations as long as they don't interfere with operations. There's a very recent discussion on hospitals, and if you agree that hospital POIs are ok, then military base POIs must necessarily be ok too, because the criteria wording for both is identical.

    It's one thing to get a clarification, as we've had on other things, but any forum statement that bases are banned is not a clarification, but directly contradicts the criteria, and is also contradictory to everything else in the same passage. Maybe at the end of the day, this is an agree to disagree issue. It makes no sense that bases are banned. Per the criteria itself, you would be absolutely correct in submitting POIs on base as long as they don't interfere with operations.

  • Hosette-INGHosette-ING Posts: 3,469 ✭✭✭✭✭

    @CipherBlakk-PGO And yet the some of the AMA are more recent than the criteria documents. Also, the help link on Wayfarer links to the July, September, and November 2020 AMAs... I would consider those links as suggesting that those documents still apply. There are also more recent clarifications on this forum that are in neither the criteria nor the AMAs and can only be found by combing contents of this forum. The text you mention seems to suggest that those clarifications are not official doctrine and that the AMAs aren't either.

    (Infrequent plug: I have an unofficial search engine for Wayfarer content that indexes the public versions of Niantic's wayfarer documentation, old AMAs, and this forum. Anyone is welcome to use it. I get no benefit from it beyond using it myself.)

    I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again. It's impossible for a user to figure out what the current criteria are without a JD in Niantic Law and time to methodically comb every post on this forum for clarifications. Even if you had the time to do that, sequentially, applying layers of updates and changes to get the current news you still wouldn't have the answers since there are contradictions and ambiguities. Of all the flaws with Wayfarer I think this is the biggest one-- it's literally impossible for anyone to be certain about what all of the criteria are.

  • CipherBlakk-PGOCipherBlakk-PGO Posts: 309 ✭✭✭✭

    Sure. But when some forum post directly conflicts with "THE" rules, what are we supposed to believe? I guess I'm going to point right back to the criteria and say, if they want to ban bases, they better start by updating the criteria. You can't really get much more official than that. Otherwise, they'll get zero traction. If there is a conflict with the criteria themselves, the criteria will win because that's what's official. One spokesman on a forum can clarify, but ultimately does not supersede official criteria when there's a conflict. He can't; practically no one ever will see anything that he says, just as you pointed out.

    Even if the help link is there, I'm not even inclined to go looking for a clarification on the base issue, because if I read the criteria as stated, I have no reason to. It's clear enough to me. Anyone else reading it the way it's intended to be read will also feel like they know what's up and have no reason to seek out anything more about it.

    But that's besides the point that there's no reason to ban bases anyway. The people who live there deserve to play there too.

  • Hosette-INGHosette-ING Posts: 3,469 ✭✭✭✭✭

    @CipherBlakk-PGO I agree with you in principle but disagree with one of the details. Niantic absolutely and unquestionably should be diligent about updating the criteria documents when they make amendments and clarifications-- submitters and reviewers need a one-stop-shopping experience for learning and referencing all of the current criteria. That is mandatory for Niantic to communicate clearly and unambiguously[1] with its users, and not having that leads to a lot of uncertainty, conflict, errors, and it seriously degrades the user experience.

    My small disagreement is with your statement, "You can't really get much more official than that." Niantic is the final authority on the criteria for wayspots and they can make any rule they want to about what is official and what isn't. Niantic can declare that only the criteria documents are official, or they can declare that those plus the most recent AMA are official, or they can declare that all AMAs plus anything that a Niantic employee says ex officio on the forums is official, or anything that they want. It's their game, and they get to make the rules. That doesn't obviate the need for them to be clear and to ensure that information is easy for users to find and understand.

    I've never seen a statement from Niantic about whether comments in forum posts are official doctrine or not. I sure hope not, because I've seen Niantic accounts make conflicting rulings.


    [1] Things will never be truly unambiguous because language is imprecise and the world is a messy place. There will always be places where the criteria are unclear about a certain class of things. People should still have one place to go to get The Source Of Truth as it currently stands.

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