Questions about taking action on a Wayfinder
Hosette-ING
Posts: 3,470 ✭✭✭✭✭
I know Niantic won't go into a lot of specifics about this, but I'm hoping that they'll be able to satisfy my curiosity at a general level. I assume that the penalties range from a warning to a temporary suspension of submission/review privileges to... I have no idea what. Let's say being locked in a room for a week listening to Baby Shark 24/7.
My questions:
- Is the first strike punishment always the same?
- If the answer to #1 is no, does the severity of the punishment vary according to the severity of the offense? Could the person who submitted a move request and a description of "please pick the north pin" get a lesser punishment than the person who doxed someone?
- If the answer to #1 is no, does the severity of the punishment vary according to the magnitude of the offense? Could the person who submitted one fake get a lesser punishment than the person who populated an entire town with fakes?
Why do I ask? I see a lot of abuse reports come through here and I've posted a few myself. It's satisfying to see abuse reports result in the abuse being cleaned up. It's also good to see that actions have consequences, but it would be more satisfying to know that penalties scaled with the severity and magnitude of the malfeasance. I'm also more likely to invest time researching fakes (ala Roseville a couple of months ago) if I feel like I'm putting a stop to the behavior and not just cleaning up the product.
Comments
Last week on Sunday February 6, I had this conversation with Niantic support.
Later that day at 6:26pm, I was informed that they took action on the Wayspot and 2 Wayfinders. However, a week later on 14 February 2021 at 10:57am, I got the same abusive location edit again.
I cannot trust in their "taken action" because they never seem effective. I put a lot of effort into making these reports, but they are always thrown to the wayside or presumably "taken action" but it is never visible. If you wanna ask about survey marks and their eligibility, that's for a whole other conversation, but when you move something that is highly verifiable with an official government website (i.e. NSW Spatial Services), that is sheer abuse. And that is abuse that is not cared for considerably.
For those wondering, (B) is the correct option. Rejecting survey marks used to be my go-to for this, but the least I can do now is cross-reference its location on the official government website if the mark has a good enough photo to not mark it as a low quality photo (seriously, no one knows how to take good photos).
But yeah, I barely trust the "action taken". Turramurra abuser is back to his antics spamming ineligible gunk. I will see a post that says "we have taken action on x amount of Wayspots and Wayfinders", yet I will see it when I review again, it's just the same thing over again.
The problem is the actions taken rarely seem to involve taking away the ability of abusers to nominate (even if they get suspended from Wayfarer) or better yet to benefit from any abusive wayspots they managed to get in that were not removed. If people knew that if they get caught submitting fake wayspots they will be banned from their game they would be less likely to risk it.
Sometimes I think that, after Niantic take action against the Wayfinders for blatant abuse, they should manually review all their nominations and edits so they won't clutter the queue.
But again, that won't be very effective for many reasons, y'know.
One of the problems is that so many players are multi-accounting that they can make their abusive edits on secondary accounts. I know it's not a popular opinion but I wish Niantic would do their best to enforce one-account-per-person rules.
Yes please, I am glad that Giffard responded and (hopefully) took action against certain Google Street View image abuser(s) which I notified few weeks ago. https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/comment/139165#Comment_139165
However, I still stumble upon nominations with same exact picture abuse method, and few accepted nominations are intact.
I've also taken action against abusive nominations, reviews, and abuse of wayfarers for the benefit of certain games before, and they seem to be penalized, but most of them seem to be ineffective.
Almost 100% of them are multi-account cheaters.
So even if one account is banned from wayfarer login, they will use other accounts one after another.
Then they start abusing again when the previous abuse is forgotten and the penalty is lifted.
This is a timely topic.
I have confirmed that the abusive players I reported on earlier have started nominating again.
This would not have happened if his account had been completely suspended.
I have also seen players who were penalized just today show no remorse or shame for their wrongdoings.
This is why you need to discuss with the team in charge of each game, and penalize them with logins for each game.
A wayfarer login ban won't hurt them too much, but if they are banned from the games they play, and their main account can't communicate with Pokémon or Jarvis, they will think twice about the consequences.
I would propose:
In the 2021 Playback and Roadmap Update, Danbocat mentioned this following dotpoint:
Once a wayspot (like the example above) starts to get a trend of recurring abusive edits, only trusted users who back up their evidence for such moves should only be permitted to make such suggestions and contributions.
Until then, real action needs to be done.
To the first question: If your Account gets marked as an alt Account, Niantic might permanently ban it instantly and remove all of your approved POIs.
At least that happened on one of my abuse reports.
Also, there are differences. I recieved a (wrongly sent and hopefully fully withdrawn) warning Mail once. When there was a bigger Wave of strange warning Mails, they Container a warning with a 30d Wayfarer ban. So a different punishment.
Additionally, wayfarer bans only impact the usage of the wayfarer Website. You can still submit, or edit. That makes a warning quite useless to fight abusers having a high priority.
I’ve often wondered about this when looking though the Invalid Wayspot Appeals channel. There are multiple threads where Giffard states the team has taken action on the wayfinders only for the op to report seeing the same abuses a short time later, then Giffard swoops in again saying action has been taken but again, the op comes back with more of the same.
It seems like a never ending cycle from an outsider’s eyes and I always wonder if @NianticGiffard gets tired of having the team take action on reports that have already been dealt with multiple times.
I think the abuse team has got a big deterrence issue. Punishments given on abuse aren't severe enough to effectively deter abusers from returning. (And that's also dependent on whether abuse is reported at all, which is another issue)
For instance, I personally know of a complex abuse case spanning months, for which Niantic have punished the abuser with a 10 day Wayfarer suspension. The abuser bragged in a local group that once the 10 days are over, they were gonna resubmit all of their abuse.
2 additional points:
Yup thats the issue. It only affects you if you are dependent to Upgrades.
Here's what I don't get about Niantic's refusal to take cheating seriously. They want to be known as an AR company, but they've somehow decided they'd rather take the short-term money from abusive players that buy 50 raid passes for all their 8 accounts than have a high-quality, AR database. Seems short-sighted as Pokemon Go will inevitably wane in popularity and they'll be left with an AR database they can't sell to anyone because it's polluted with fake stops and incorrect locations.
If they want to protect their long-term investments, they need to start by actively banning abusive multi-accounters in all their games who easily use their extra accounts to evade penalties and approve fake spots. They also need to put in the work on their side to investigate fakes when they are reported. Members of the community spend hours and hours doing the work of Niantic staff, and in the end it's all pointless because the abusers face no consequences.
Again, not going to be happened. If they can't effectively prevent every @BleedBoss-PGO accounts visiting this forum, then don't expect them to do the same against the abusers.
Even the abusers have the power to oppress whoever against them, see the Vietmam abuse as an example.
Yeah. A lot of abuse reporters give up because abusers have got more power to "punish" them for their reports on the local community level, compared to the abuse team's apparent (in)ability to quickly an efficiently punish abusers and protect reporters.
Look how long it took Niantic to present an anonymous reporting system (which is still flawed and restrictive).
I think Niantic has given up on this. With every account they "punish" there are 10 new accounts making miles in a spanish town. Niantics reaction? "."
It seems to me that the views of wayfinders in this thread are almost identical.
The current ban on logging in to the wayfarer system given to offenders is not enough to deter recidivism, and unless the offender is banned from logging in to games that are tied to their email address, it is unlikely to have a deterrent effect.
Many wayfinders and players have also suspected that Niantic has decided to give up on cracking down on these violations, including cheating in games, and leave it at that.
In fact, I also believe that reporting cheating in Pokémon GO to the help chat is not working. You can't attach images as proof, and they won't issue a report number. (Ingress and wayfarer do issue report numbers, and Ingress has confirmed that several cheaters' accounts have been suspended, so it does work.)
Therefore, the wayfarer team needs to work across the board with the Ingress and Pokémon GO teams to improve the current penalty, which does not deter repeat offenders, as soon as possible.
Currently, Niantic has a 3-strike system, so this is one example of how it could be done.
Strike 1: 7 days game login ban and 30 day wayfarer login ban.
Strike 2: 30 day game login ban and 120 day wayfarer login ban
Strike 3: forever login ban
@tp235-ING I kind of agree with you, although I would hope that would be for the more egregious offenses. If someone gets reported for abuse for moving one pin to put a wayspot in a different cell then that should start with a Strike 0: Warning.
It certainly depends on the degree.
If a wayfarer is abusing the wayspot display rules of a particular game to cheat, a warning may be all that is needed for a first offense.
However, if the wayfinder has already been used in a false or disguised manner, you may need to take action, regardless of the degree of maliciousness.
I hope that the wayfarer team and the upcoming ambassadors will seriously discuss the details of this matter.
Hi folks!
I see most of you are having doubts about the punishments we impose on the accounts that are involved in abuse cases. I'll shed some light on this subject while we're at it.
In some cases, you must have noticed (it is also mentioned by @Stephyypooke-ING) after we take action on a Wayfinder, the fake Wayspot reappears after a while. The happening of this incident doesn't always mean the same punished Wayfinder is involved but a different Wayfinder is seen in the picture after our investigation in most of such similar cases.
Most importantly, the action we take on an account(s) whether it be a warning, suspension, or impose of bans is dependent on the frequency (history record) and severity (how grave the situation is) of the abuse. I hope this clears up the air!
In the cases where the same abuses resurface under a different account, is that treated as a first time offense? Or a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or whatever applicable offense?
I'd like to know that too.
In the example I reported, the player in this link was punished multiple times for repeatedly making fake nominations using multiple accounts.
https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/15112/fake-wayspot-removel-appeal
https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/19201/about-abusive-re-nominations
https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/26053/fake-wayspot-and-abuse-community
But, I recently found evidence that he may have started using a different account to make nominations.
And then there is still the abusive community behavior where they intentionally make the same cluster of playground equipment live individually to gain the number of Pokestops, and then flood the wayspot they want to turn into a Pokémon Gym with an unusual number of photos and Likes in a short period of time.
@NianticGiffard Thank you for confirming what I hoped to be true.
Wait, how is it "abusive" to submit photos and likes to try to get the Pokemon gym in a cluster of waypoints to be the ideal one for that purpose? Please explain, I genuinely would like to know. I see it around my community as being pretty standard practice.
Thank you for your insight. I really have to say that Niantic cannot do much about the whole kerfuffle. It is also very problematic to report a spoofer that terrorizes the local community by placing pokemon 24/7 in the gyms. Niantic prolly wont do anything about it, as there is a) no way they can find out if there are really 6 persons going to the gyms in personae / feed berries b) the 6 accounts are the same person.
They just cannot. Sending Niantic a message via the Ingame-Chatmons is pointless, Niantic already gave up reading or answering them. You just will get automated responses.
Niantic should just try and tell the thruth about this, just like Giffard just did. There is no way to control the system if accounts are made like chicken.
@RockyLizard-ING Here's your answer, from NianticCasey: https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/comment/67994/#Comment_67994
A few notes about this situation. Firstly, this is working as intended. It has never been an intention to be able to manipulate the in-app map to ensure a certain Wayspot becomes a Gym (or other in-app equivalent). Any attempt to do so is actually considered to be Wayfarer abuse and could result in your Wayfarer account termination.
If you suspect that a player is engaged in malicious or behavior that otherwise violates the Niantic Player Guidelines, you should report it as abuse in-app.
Here's a similar statement from NianticAaron: https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/comment/68124/#Comment_68124
It has never been an intention to be able to manipulate the in-app map to ensure a certain Wayspot becomes a Gym. Any attempt to do so is actually considered to be Wayfarer abuse and could result in your Wayfarer account termination.
We treat all in-game locations equally and they all need to meet our criteria. Our density and inclusion criteria determine which Wayspot should be included in our games and it should remain that way. Thanks,
@Hosette-ING
Thank you for telling them on my behalf.
I appreciate it.
If they don't really want us to be able to signal which one is the best candidate for a gym, why do they take into account the number of photos and votes?
Obviously I'm talking about one person one vote and adding unique photos, not spamming 30 photos to fight the community around you.
@WheelTrekker-ING I don't know why they designed the system they way they did. I can only point at the things that they've said... and those words are crystal clear.
Well, there is a recent example regarding photo spam for Gym manipulation. Just look at this thread below:
They system was designed by Niantic to work that way on the assumption that a) people would only actually upvote the Waypoints and photos that actually really do like, b ) The community would not be able to "reverse engineer" the methodology and figure out how Gym selection worked and c) Not abuse the system when it was discovered in order to generate Gyms at specific locations. These were incorrect assumptions.
Similar to the reasons we now can only have one Stop per S17 cell - too much abuse of the edit feature.