I've read some threads and it's really tiring to see how some people are always tagging NianticCasey for every little detail, trying to take things out of context and then request a yes or no answer on a single topic and then extract that answer for all the things that they want.
And I can't understand why the Niantic's employees don't step in to stop the discussions when people start calling "This is due to Ingress/Pokemon players"
This is the Wayfarer forum, people should stop being focused on who submitted or approved that, a person might have started playing one game, switched to another, stopped playing, whatever..., things have moved along the years, the approval process has changed so much, when all the really interesting PoI are already approved they might start trying to submit other things, they see things that are approved in other places and so they say "I should try that".
If we have someone to blame about the status of Wayfarer is Niantic, not because the rules about what's a good candidate could be better, but for the fact that they have been providing statements like "this is not a good PoI and shouldn't be approved" but all the existing waypoints remain in the map and when reviewers approve such a nomination it can be highlighted in the Featured wayspots gallery sending the message that it's OK. So Niantic is the only one to blame when wayfarers will approve similar nominations again and things go downhill very fast.
So Niantic can step in and try to stop the madness or the only ones that will remain in this forum and in the review process are the ones that only want their personal benefit.
The games are too different, so who submitted a portal is often relevant.
Fake clustered portals are a plus to all PoGo/HPWU players. Sofa portals and gyms as well.
But they are bad for ingress players.
Have I considered submitting a fake stop for my child - yes. Have I done it ? No. This would be unfair in Ingress, where I would be the only one to gain from it. In PoGo all gains from it. That is why multiple accounts is the norm, GPS Spoofing is not considered a problem etc.
To stop bad portals, there need to be more team competition in PoGo. So PoGo players can see how it skews the balance of the game, and how it is cheating. And it should cause bans.
It's a problem to cheat in Pokemon too... Is not authorised and seriouly, It's a game, it must be fun! What fun is there in cheating? What example for the children? What fun to succeed if finally the method to get there makes you have no merit????
I find it so sad to cheat for such futile things. It's ugly and it gives a sad image of the community that tolerates it, accepts it and worse still defends it?
Everyone plays as they want, with their own morals and conscience, but I would never understand the pleasure if there is no effort, no constraint to achieve a feat. Because it just becomes a game action that means nothing... It's a shame to spoil good games and demoralize honest players in the process.
Please can we have more active moderation in the Community, particularly the Guidelines section? With blatant use of multiple accounts, constant thread derailing etc. it's starting to make even Reddit seem a more useful place to discuss Wayfarer.
The guideline clarification threads are being dominated by a bunch tangential nonsense. Moderation in that forum is so minimal that it is hard to believe that Niantic is paying attention. I appreciate the nuggets we get from @NianticCasey-ING but I feel the whole tenor of the discussions over there discourages civil active participation and leaves people feeling irritated, annoyed and in some cases flat out angry. Some of the questions are not complicated and should be resolved with a half a dozen comments. Instead they drag on until there are a couple hundred minimally related comments and uncomfortable back and forth accusations. Please! We need more oversight!
I don't think they are always fake. Like I play both games (ingress a lot less) and what is annoying, is that in one sparsely populated area for example you may have 20 portals and two to three POI in pokémon go. What is infuriating is the people submitting dupes, who don't realise they are submitting dupes. There should be some way, when submitting in go that you can see existing wayspots that may not be in go (AFAIK submission isn't in HPWU). Then for gyms/raids, the "competition" part of Go, those are determined by how popular a portal is in ingress. Ingress has a HUGE bearing on PoGo. I totally see where you are coming from, and how annoying "fake" (or what seems as "badly placed") portals are. Bear in mind, a lot of people don't take it as seriously as we do, and even here there are varying degrees. Not everyone that submits uses wayfarer (I think they should, as it teaches how to put in a better submission), and therefore you get sloppy, often lazy things.
I agree with you that the games are vastly different, and there should be better algorithms for determining what converts to a POI in each game. As it stands, when a portal is removed from ingress, it could remove a massive chunk of playability, which isn't present in the other games. I know some people do it on purpose.
Also, seeing that I seem to be getting plenty of valid POI submissions rejected for banal reasons, I am not sure it would be possible to get a fake portal/stop through.
As a follow on from this, I think there should be a cooldown period per thread per user, to avoid them spamming the threads constantly with a series of comments that eventually stray off topic or deliberately entice people into arguing so they can then play victim.
Like if User X comments on Thread 1, they can't comment on that for another 5 minutes as a suggestion. It might help keep spam in the threads to a minimum.
Another suggestion similar to this. If a user posts multiple times in a row within a similar timespan, could it be possible to auto-merge the multiple posts into one? I know some forums have this functionality, but I don't know if vanilla does.
It gets tiresome when people post multiple comments in a row, especially when they're just repeating themselves but with slightly differently worded comments.
Not entirely related to these forums but the admins/members of a Wayfarer group on Facebook that Niantic Support is part of are actively encouraging people to not report invalid wayspots and making up excuses why they should stay in the games.
They also actively encourage K12 submissions (mainly scouts) to be submitted and not reported.
Any chance someone from Niantic could have a word with them?
Have also butted heads with admin of that group, arguing that Scout Huts and other places of childcare are acceptable in their country, plenty are already Wayspots and they won't flag them for removal because the players want them to stay. They also delete comments and even mute members who show them the guidelines and AMA clarifications proving them wrong. Very worrying how many members that group has, and the amount of misinformation and going against the ToS and guidelines the admin encourage.
The creator of the group is the worst. He has a terrible attitude with people who are just trying to point out the guidelines. I remember him once arguing that we should turn a blind eye to descriptions directly copied from sites like Wikipedia, despite the guidelines clearly stating this isn't allowed.
The admins of that group have muted and banned people for pointing out guidelines when the admins were wrong. It was brought up on the Ingress forum before here. It got so bad that Niantic Support had to step in and correct them on a lot of issues, and still do from time to time.
Basically, one of the admins of the global group promoting a third party app that some players could use for cell abuse and deliberate dislocation of submissions
Ah ok. I mean, to be honest I use iitc with the pogo tools plug-in also. There are plenty of cases where a marker has many options for where it could go such as a tennis court that spans 2 cells or a baseball field that spans 3 or 4. In other words, such plugins have valid uses but can certainly be misused.
There is a group of players (not sure of Ingress IGN but are PoGo players) who have been moving Wayspots to trigger pokestops and gyms and then moving Wayspots back after.
This is loading the Wayfarer system with unnecessary reviews.
I have been reporting the abuse in Wayfarer system but no action seems to have been taken.
Below are some of the locations. I am highlighting one of the Wayspot in each location as it gets crazy trying to list all.
Thanks for the report @Saltedeggfries-ING, I've passed this report along to my team for review. In the future, you can report Wayfarer abuse via these steps.
Hello I am new to this forum and I wanted to make a new discussion but it did not load, this message appears "Your discussion will appear after it is approved." Is that message normal?
Comments
I've read some threads and it's really tiring to see how some people are always tagging NianticCasey for every little detail, trying to take things out of context and then request a yes or no answer on a single topic and then extract that answer for all the things that they want.
And I can't understand why the Niantic's employees don't step in to stop the discussions when people start calling "This is due to Ingress/Pokemon players"
This is the Wayfarer forum, people should stop being focused on who submitted or approved that, a person might have started playing one game, switched to another, stopped playing, whatever..., things have moved along the years, the approval process has changed so much, when all the really interesting PoI are already approved they might start trying to submit other things, they see things that are approved in other places and so they say "I should try that".
If we have someone to blame about the status of Wayfarer is Niantic, not because the rules about what's a good candidate could be better, but for the fact that they have been providing statements like "this is not a good PoI and shouldn't be approved" but all the existing waypoints remain in the map and when reviewers approve such a nomination it can be highlighted in the Featured wayspots gallery sending the message that it's OK. So Niantic is the only one to blame when wayfarers will approve similar nominations again and things go downhill very fast.
So Niantic can step in and try to stop the madness or the only ones that will remain in this forum and in the review process are the ones that only want their personal benefit.
The games are too different, so who submitted a portal is often relevant.
Fake clustered portals are a plus to all PoGo/HPWU players. Sofa portals and gyms as well.
But they are bad for ingress players.
Have I considered submitting a fake stop for my child - yes. Have I done it ? No. This would be unfair in Ingress, where I would be the only one to gain from it. In PoGo all gains from it. That is why multiple accounts is the norm, GPS Spoofing is not considered a problem etc.
To stop bad portals, there need to be more team competition in PoGo. So PoGo players can see how it skews the balance of the game, and how it is cheating. And it should cause bans.
Screenshot of https://nianticlabs.com/terms/en/
It's a problem to cheat in Pokemon too... Is not authorised and seriouly, It's a game, it must be fun! What fun is there in cheating? What example for the children? What fun to succeed if finally the method to get there makes you have no merit????
I find it so sad to cheat for such futile things. It's ugly and it gives a sad image of the community that tolerates it, accepts it and worse still defends it?
Everyone plays as they want, with their own morals and conscience, but I would never understand the pleasure if there is no effort, no constraint to achieve a feat. Because it just becomes a game action that means nothing... It's a shame to spoil good games and demoralize honest players in the process.
Please can we have more active moderation in the Community, particularly the Guidelines section? With blatant use of multiple accounts, constant thread derailing etc. it's starting to make even Reddit seem a more useful place to discuss Wayfarer.
The guideline clarification threads are being dominated by a bunch tangential nonsense. Moderation in that forum is so minimal that it is hard to believe that Niantic is paying attention. I appreciate the nuggets we get from @NianticCasey-ING but I feel the whole tenor of the discussions over there discourages civil active participation and leaves people feeling irritated, annoyed and in some cases flat out angry. Some of the questions are not complicated and should be resolved with a half a dozen comments. Instead they drag on until there are a couple hundred minimally related comments and uncomfortable back and forth accusations. Please! We need more oversight!
EDIT: Thanks for chiming in on a couple threads!
I don't think they are always fake. Like I play both games (ingress a lot less) and what is annoying, is that in one sparsely populated area for example you may have 20 portals and two to three POI in pokémon go. What is infuriating is the people submitting dupes, who don't realise they are submitting dupes. There should be some way, when submitting in go that you can see existing wayspots that may not be in go (AFAIK submission isn't in HPWU). Then for gyms/raids, the "competition" part of Go, those are determined by how popular a portal is in ingress. Ingress has a HUGE bearing on PoGo. I totally see where you are coming from, and how annoying "fake" (or what seems as "badly placed") portals are. Bear in mind, a lot of people don't take it as seriously as we do, and even here there are varying degrees. Not everyone that submits uses wayfarer (I think they should, as it teaches how to put in a better submission), and therefore you get sloppy, often lazy things.
I agree with you that the games are vastly different, and there should be better algorithms for determining what converts to a POI in each game. As it stands, when a portal is removed from ingress, it could remove a massive chunk of playability, which isn't present in the other games. I know some people do it on purpose.
Also, seeing that I seem to be getting plenty of valid POI submissions rejected for banal reasons, I am not sure it would be possible to get a fake portal/stop through.
As a follow on from this, I think there should be a cooldown period per thread per user, to avoid them spamming the threads constantly with a series of comments that eventually stray off topic or deliberately entice people into arguing so they can then play victim.
Like if User X comments on Thread 1, they can't comment on that for another 5 minutes as a suggestion. It might help keep spam in the threads to a minimum.
Another suggestion similar to this. If a user posts multiple times in a row within a similar timespan, could it be possible to auto-merge the multiple posts into one? I know some forums have this functionality, but I don't know if vanilla does.
I absolutely agree with this suggestion.
It gets tiresome when people post multiple comments in a row, especially when they're just repeating themselves but with slightly differently worded comments.
Not entirely related to these forums but the admins/members of a Wayfarer group on Facebook that Niantic Support is part of are actively encouraging people to not report invalid wayspots and making up excuses why they should stay in the games.
They also actively encourage K12 submissions (mainly scouts) to be submitted and not reported.
Any chance someone from Niantic could have a word with them?
This is the group.
Have also butted heads with admin of that group, arguing that Scout Huts and other places of childcare are acceptable in their country, plenty are already Wayspots and they won't flag them for removal because the players want them to stay. They also delete comments and even mute members who show them the guidelines and AMA clarifications proving them wrong. Very worrying how many members that group has, and the amount of misinformation and going against the ToS and guidelines the admin encourage.
The creator of the group is the worst. He has a terrible attitude with people who are just trying to point out the guidelines. I remember him once arguing that we should turn a blind eye to descriptions directly copied from sites like Wikipedia, despite the guidelines clearly stating this isn't allowed.
The admins of that group have muted and banned people for pointing out guidelines when the admins were wrong. It was brought up on the Ingress forum before here. It got so bad that Niantic Support had to step in and correct them on a lot of issues, and still do from time to time.
They're still pushing their luck on certain topics, namely scout huts.
I've been muted once so far because I kept correcting them on the scout hut criteria.
I've noticed they encourage the use of 3rd party apps a lot as well.
In regards to the third party app promoting: this.
That link requires a login, can you share what it is in another way?
Basically, one of the admins of the global group promoting a third party app that some players could use for cell abuse and deliberate dislocation of submissions
Ah ok. I mean, to be honest I use iitc with the pogo tools plug-in also. There are plenty of cases where a marker has many options for where it could go such as a tennis court that spans 2 cells or a baseball field that spans 3 or 4. In other words, such plugins have valid uses but can certainly be misused.
.
IITC could mean the difference in having only 3 POI's in a park to having 8 or 10 VALID POIs in the same park just based on valid placement.
It was approved it was in the pending section
@NianticCasey-ING @NianticBrian-ING Can action be taken from Niantic's side on players who abuse location edits?
There is a group of players (not sure of Ingress IGN but are PoGo players) who have been moving Wayspots to trigger pokestops and gyms and then moving Wayspots back after.
This is loading the Wayfarer system with unnecessary reviews.
I have been reporting the abuse in Wayfarer system but no action seems to have been taken.
Below are some of the locations. I am highlighting one of the Wayspot in each location as it gets crazy trying to list all.
1. 3.136596,101.623126
2. 3.113318,101.574181
3. 3.112312,101.578793
4. 3.171368,101.665904
Thanks for the report @Saltedeggfries-ING, I've passed this report along to my team for review. In the future, you can report Wayfarer abuse via these steps.
Thanks @NianticCasey-ING I will do the reporting via the form as well then. Especially if I can't do it in-game.
Hello I am new to this forum and I wanted to make a new discussion but it did not load, this message appears "Your discussion will appear after it is approved." Is that message normal?
If your post has an image attached then yes.
Very Good!
Thank you for providing this information.
Hi @NianticCasey-ING , if we are aware of people cheating to pass the Wayfarer test, what is the best way to report?
Below is a screenshot of PoGo Player Momories from a chat showing that the player admitted to getting someone else to do the test.
Appreciate if there is a formal reporting channel and action is taken against players like the above. Thank you
Moderator edit: PII Removed from this post.
Might not wanna be posting PII like a player's real name and face...@FredChicken-ING