Disparity of contribution distance between Ingress and Pokémon GO
HaramDingo-ING
Posts: 1,499 ✭✭✭✭✭
There is currently a disparity regarding contributions of the two games:
- For Pokémon GO, all contributions (except submissions, which is 10km) can only be made within interaction range of the wayspot (i.e. no more than 80 metres). If one is outside said range, all contributions will be greyed out.
- For Ingress however, the ability to remotely contribute is possible, and the agent does not have to be anywhere within interaction range of the wayspot they want to contribute to, i.e:
- For nominations, it's 25km
- For location edits, it's 50km
- For title/description edits and photo additions, it's 100km, AND
- For invalid reports, it is infinite range. Yes, infinite. I can report something in Canada from my bed. It's this we're going to look into within this thread today.
Half a year ago, the topic of whether to actively heat-seek the removal of ineligible wayspots was brought up in the Wayspotters Podcast. However, this has been something way before that. Below are three situations where remote removals have occurred in particular.
1. The Mars Rover
In February 2021, a portal key to the Mars Rover was distributed via a passcode in Ingress. In that town was a fire station. Within a day, that fire station portal disappeared and it was noted in the Portal updater on Telegram.
2. Did you just send me a fire station as a gift in Pogo?
This is a reference to the discussion below. Long story short (in one variation or another) Person A in Australia saw a fire station from North Carolina, United States while reviewing, and used the Wayfarer app to report it. A similar congruent situation in which this point refers to is the paraphrased statement of "if you send me a fire station or a hospital or police station as a gift in PoGo, I am going to get the dynamic link in Ingress and report it for obstructing emergency services."
3. Nuketown (or the nuking of Newtown)
An Ingress agent from the other side of Australia has decided to report an abundance of portals 3,300km away from the other side of the country. Through the use of dynamic links via the Intel map or otherwise, the thread below was spawned and thus, a clash of ideals. To be honest, I've probably contributed maybe a fifth of wayspots throughout Marrickville, Newtown, Enmore and that area. Since Niantic has instead decided to fast-track its removals because of someone's silly PRP power trip, I argue that Niantic's Lightship database is severely handicapped by not featuring these spectacular artworks, and I would instead foster components of the State Control Survey as wayspots throughout the suburb instead. They can't be removed, right?
So the questions are as follows:
- Do Ingress agents, who have this additional remote privilege deserve to be observed as "holier-than-thou" for such? Are they really less prone to misuing their power?
- Should remote reporting even be a thing or potentially reduced? Should invalid wayspot reports via Ingress be imposed a distance limit of say, 100km?
- Or maybe Pokémon GO players should have their contribution limits evened up with Ingress. You know, meet in the middle with 25km radius.
- And just for the lulz, can you get rid of the 40 nomination slots that everyone gets just for passing the test? Not everyone deserves it off the bat.
I don't think anyone should have any ability to remotely report wayspots from the other side of the country, let alone the world.
...
P.S. I have attempted to report wayspots using the Wayfarer app numerous times. Either Niantic is continuing to auto-reject all my reports (even the deafeningly obvious duplicates) or it just doesn't work.
P.S.S. In the most recent episode of the Podcast, I declared 2023 as the year of coal. I really don't care about the quality of the wayspot database anymore. If you can't remove coal that is erroneously accepted as easily as fantastic wayspots that unfortunately meet a removal criterion, why do we even bother when you don't allow us to report things that did not meet any acceptance criteria in the first place and just leave them there for the masses to succumb to?
P.S.S.S. Submissions and contributions in the games will dié eventually when everything is moved to the Wayfarer app, but can you please fix it? Feels like nothing (edits or nominations) submitted via the app don't even flow downstream into Wayfarer or the map anymore.
Comments
Any report still has to be looked at by Niantic, and reviewed by them, so I don’t think it’s an issue for anyone to be able to report anything.
Surely everyone will be able to once we have the Wayfarer app available for all (and you’ll have more reasons and notes to add to the report too).
I heard your coal comment, and agree it’s stupid that if something does come live that’s coal but doesn’t meet the rejection reasons such as K-12 etc., the only option is that it stays in game.
I’d love everything to be equal as it relates to Wayfarer, such as Ingress getting a dupe map and location category choices. Maybe even the same interaction distances?
40 nominations is A LOT and some users shouldn’t have that much as soon as they hit 10/37 for sure, but someone higher up at Niantic said it was a good plan and I don’t think that’ll be reversed.
I have one counter-argument to this, and that's that a portal 6881 km away from me can be part of my active gameplay in Ingress, while a Pokestop that's 25km away from me is unlikely to be interesting.
Errr…. Have you never kept a gym in another State or country berried up?
Three cheers for this thread @HaramDingo-ING - couldn’t have put it better.
Why would I remote reporting through the app, when I can use Wayfarer support chat instead?
I regard myself as a wayfinder.
I explore, research and look for potential.
I do not regard myself as wayspot or lightship database quality control service. In other words I don’t see it as my role to report stuff especially if it was in areas I had no knowledge of in terms of local cultural significances. Something might look like PRP but actually not be PRP.
My well intentioned actions could be wrong and it could seriously damage another community, and I would be the remote person that caused distress with no come back on me if I was wrong.
I also see this as an area for the potential abuse of power if someone wants to act maliciously. Yes Niantic has to approve a removal but given my own experiences, what others have reported and that they are human it will always have some inconsistency, and they could easily be fooled by a malicious act.
So should this wide ranging power be available on the basis it currently is? It’s a no from me.
Should there be parity of Acton no matter how you access wayfinder? Yes
Will we be told the app will solve the disparity soon ™️? Yes
I think distance should be based on Wayfarer history. We should have Trusted Wayfarers, who can do more.
For example, Niantic might give Trusted benefits at, say 5,000 review agreements (prescedent: half an Ingress onyx medal) and 100 nominations accepted. But inactivity should degrade the rating. So, add requirements like must have gotten 1000 of those review agreements in the past year (or six months), and 10 of those accepted nominations.
All praise the mighty Wayfarer App.
@LadyofSwanLake-PGO Sure, and I've recharged portals up to 4000 km away. I consider those maintenance rather than active gameplay, and other than recharge efficiency/potential the location is essentially irrelevant. In Ingress the precise location of a portal can be critical, and it can also have a fairly high tactical/strategic relevance to the game. My meta point is that those two games use wayspots very differently and location can be a much larger component in one than in the other.
Which is exactly Dingo’s point - that the dynamic links use to remove portals from thousands of kilometres away can create a second-string strategic advantage to some games - to the vast detriment of players across multiple others - through the Wayfarer system. It’s basically an incentive to abuse power.As per the Nuking of Newtown.
I don't think anything should be tied to accepted wayspots. That is a function of how densely populated your area is, how much POI worthy stuff is near you, how fast your submissions get through the process, and how much ability you have to travel outside your area (to faster/less dense areas). To some extent it also depends on you not being near a cabal of evil reviewers who 1* everything.
The discrepancies between what is accepted and what is acceptable to remove I have a feeling is to combat malicious actors that are removing PoI for strategic purposes.
Unfortunately this also means that if something gets through the voting procedures that shouldn't have been accepted its almost impossible to remove. In preventing one form of abuse, they have opened the door to others. The guidelines have opened up enough that really you can just about accept many things that used to be a no-no.
We here in the forum are the 5% who for the most part try and keep up on guidelines. The other 95% are more likely to use what's already in game to justify what they vote on and what they submit. Unfortunately those of us who "care" are getting out numbered. Control has been lost. The "mor stops" people are getting what they want. At least in my area it does seem that there has at least still been some control over PRP and school grounds as they don't show up too often. And if they do often get removed quickly, and not by me. I've seen complaints in the local groups about them showing up and getting removed in the same week.
Niantic should release a vision for the PoI network. It's the one thing that makes Niantic games unique. User submitted points of interest. Problems arise with this approach, areas where no one plays can't get any PoI to entice people to play. Somone has to travel to those areas that are high enough level to submit. It's a double edged sword. Does Niantic want quality over quantity? Do we want quantity over quality?
As long as reports go through Niantic I think it's fine to have the current situation, or to bring Pokemon Go into sync with Ingress. All the conjecture in the posts in this thread about motivations isn't really helping sell the argument either. Reports aren't a given, many require appeal and even once a wayspot is removed that too can be appealed. There are adequate safeguards in place in my opinion.
why is it strategic advantage to remove ineligible waypoints? Why does abusive advantage have to take precedence? A town/city.community that doesnt follow the guidelines should not have an advantage over the rest of us that play by the rules. Like tehstone said, ultimately, Niantic is the ones taking action, should not matter who reports it. As far as why give Ingress this power and not PoGo? Give it to PoGo too then.
I disagree . For the ‘average’ submitter/player, who Niantic want to encourage to wayfind, the appeals process is difficult to find and massively bureaucratic. It shouldn’t be for an elite club.
The whole point of the waypoint debate in Nuketown is that it is not clear that the guidelines have not been followed by the community. Niantic have approved appeals of ineligible wayspots in many areas, and they’ve incorrectly removed eligible ones too. The point is that local communities should make decisions absent clear abuse, and people thousands of kilometres away should stay out of it.
Downside to the nomination idea of that is
1. Mught take a year to get your nominations through
2. Your nominations might get a bad batch of reviewers who mistakingly reject
3. You mught just run out of nominations to make.
Wayfarer community approval is flawed. I have a mountain that has a metal el vation disk near the top of the volcano. Mountains are measured by survey instruments from remote locations i.e. not measured on the mountain. The metal disk is a $15.00 souvenir for walking to the top. And placing the disk on the snow and taking a picture.
Volcanos or Mt. Hood is a big rock pushing up out of the ground.
But since an agent can spoof their location or simply use a computer to simulate walking. And play ingress on top of a mountain without walk to the top and playing ingress. The agent who is the only one "up there" has used a battle beacon on the portal. So Niantic is listed as the mod owner.
But we don't play with the other team as this cheating behavior is prevalent on the other team.
They also have a location behind a security gate on a marina where only their friends can get inside the gate. But that has been there for years and is still a valid portal.
I was a highway engineer and have used false points to represent locations on the earth surface beginning 25 years ago.
Niantic's staff is letting agents cheat. And it is a systematic issue here the community is allowed cheat.
So why bother playing against a small group of cheating idiots... To be a cell leader?
There is a constant mismatch - tension by different elements.
I’m not sure that, what I think was a commercial decision, to create a separate and create Lightship as a distinct entity, has helped.
As a commercial database, Lightship is available for other organisations and you would want to reassure buyers that it is of a certain quality.
Although under the Niantic umbrella, how the games use that database is up to them and can be very different (as we are seeing with the basketball one).
For the most part in game play such as Ingress and Pokémon Go they are simply points on a map. Missions in ingress often ask you to pay attention to that point but otherwise you are not required to find something at that point in order to progress. If you are physically in that spot you may get something out of the interaction of the wayspot but other factors become important - it’s a lovely artistic mural, but can I stand somewhere out of the rain and wind whilst I interact?
But the system is that players, whose main driver is to improve game play through more chances of interaction, are the ones who contribute and expand the database. That element for all its faults is fairly well thought through.
A question is has Lightship woken up to the potential need for ongoing maintenance and quality checks on what is in thier database. It’s all a bit late and hasn’t had enough thought put into it. They have simply opened it to the same people that add to it on a voluntary basis. I’m not clear what Lightships expectations are of wayfarers.
Sorry this is a bit of rambling train of thought.
This 1000s times yes.
There should be players appointed just like Vanguards or Ambassadors who already have dedicated a lot of time and energy and maintain rating for extended periods of time, who are knowledgable and do the research on Wayspots they review, stay up-to-date with acceptance criteria and can both provide feedback both to fellow players and to Niantic and clarify ambiguities and help the Wayspot networks to improve.
There are way , way too many Ingress players hellbent on Gatekeeping new POIs that are totally eligible from ever getting accepted, no matter how good the write up, just from being power mad and following out of date 2016/17 criteria that didn't have any of these new additions to the wayspot family.
I've been subjected to it becoming personal, as my technique and nomination tells are easily spotted. This has meant numerous wayspots of mine have been rejected as "Abuse", abuse apparently so I'm told that I use forum links to this new criteria corrections , that someone reviewing may not be aware of or just someone stuck in the past...
What is more DISTURBING is that these people are in massive groups on various chat based platforms running a deliberate attempt on Gatekeeping anything they find "Impure" to their tastes or not worthy being in any game/app.
Is this something new?
Is this something that has always existed underground?
I'm having to appeal, perfectly good waypoints now to get them being accepted past these gatekeepers.
It is Rife!
If you have a portal key or dynamic link, you can see the area around it in Ingress, but that is simply due to the nature of the game.
In Ingress, you can link up to 6881 km and see Intelmap on a global basis.
And in the global shard game, you can contact players thousands of kilometers away and link them up to transport the shard to the target.
Surely we could see such a game in Pokémon GO if such a game existed.
These decisions are not the decisions of the Wayfarer team but the respective game teams.
It is better to request this from Michael than to talk to Tintino.
And there would be no problem if Pokémon GO, like Ingress, allowed people to report the removal of Pokémon gyms and Pokéstops thousands of kilometers away.
It is only the Wayfarer team that decides to remove the wayspot reported by the respective game app.
And if Pokémon GO can report deletions thousands of kilometers away, it would be nice to see the current status of Pokémon gyms and Pokéstops, just like in Ingress.
But I believe that many Pokémon GO players and Niantic would disagree with this.
@DracFury-PGO You do realize that Ingress players are a tiny percent of the total population of Wayfarer reviewers and have very little influence over the outcome of submissions, yes? And you also realize that you have no way of knowing which players reviewed your submissions?
I'm aware of chats full of PoGo players working to manipulate the outcomes in their areas. I seriously doubt that Ingress players could pull this off because a) there aren't enough of us, and b) we are generally quite hard on multi-accounters, as opposed to PoGo where that form of cheating is the norm.
I don't think so. Looking at this forum, I believe both games are equally represented among reviewers. There are way more players and nominators on the Pokémon Go side, but not among reviewers.
The reason for this may be that Ingress caters more to exploration, and Pokémon Go caters more to exercise and being social.
Wayfarer also caters more to exploration. You can't exercise or be social while reviewing. That why proportionally more Ingress players review.
@TWVer-ING I don't think that users of this forum is a good representation of the overall population of reviewers. However, I'll also point out that the most commonly asked question on this forum by a mile is "Why didn't my stop appear?" I can also tell you that the Facebook forums I've seen are nearly all PoGo players, though some also play Ingress.
I don't think you can identify someone by -ING or by -PGO in their handles here, as many people play both.
Why didn't my stop appear?"
That is a nominator question, not a reviewer question.
The problem are people that actively search for stuff to report that no other person really has a problem with
You should only report fake and non existent stuff.
The not eligible stuff is sometimes still discussable, especially for ingressplayers (roundabouts, school areas, escpecially directly in front of it).
There are legacy portals that were perfectly fine but were reported by some people and made playing less fun just because nia decided to change the criteria for future submissions.
Now the initial example with fire station etc.
First: a fire station, policestation, hospital never was a good candidate. There is no reason to submit it.
Second: if there is art/special info/memorials/parks/etc....that are the candidates to submit
Third: i never had to reject with the obstruct emergency service reason because if a statue is placed in the driveway of a firestation than that piece of art is already obstructing......usually that stuff is somewhere placed in an safe area.
At least as far as i can remember (reviewing since the first night of OPR launch)
Pokémon Go caters more to exercise
with the increased interaction distance and many requesting couch stops?
Many Pokémon GO players I know won’t go far at all for the game.
No difference to a PokéStop they can park next to and one on a cairn up a hill, whereas the hill Portal may be strategically useful in Ingress so an Agent is more likely to exercise and explore that way
I mean, I think both go and ingress encourage exercise. I'll actively go for walks if the events in go are good and has a shiny I want. While ingress I've gone hill walking a couple of times to get pita portals.
@kamikatze07-ING I believe Niantic's removal criteria are currently: Does not exist (fake, or has been removed), obstructs emergency services, on K-12 school property, does not have safe pedestrian access. I may not be precisely correct on that but I believe I'm substantially correct.
I'll also note that Niantic seeded Ingress partially with imports of fire stations, though in some cases the data were inaccurate.
Locally Ingress players do travel further…..in their car.
Pokemon Go players tend to stay within a more confined area and walk around that area more as there is a lot to do not at stops.
So Go players clock up more walking mileage whereas Ingress are not so confined - different concepts of distance.