Niantic messes around with their community...business as usual.
KoriNoDokutsu-ING
Posts: 41 ✭✭✭
The situation:
Niantic first disabled portal edits in Ingress and in Pokemon GO to stop abusive submissions and edits. Then, after the downtime, players could move Waypoints again in a 10-meter-range. This is, what Niantic announced to the community. Players then noticed, that gyms, which were moved in a S2 lvl 14 cell, which already had three gyms, will disappear. And now, stops, that get moved in a S2 lvl 17 cell, will delete all stops except of one in that cell.
I have several problems with those specific steps, that Niantic took to stop the abuse, Niantic's definition of "abuse" and the way Niantic communicates with their community about all that:
1.) The "abuse"
First things first, Niantic wants to stop the abuse, meaning they want to avoid the situation, that there are more than three gyms in a lvl 14 and more than one stop in a lvl 17 S2 cell. Why?
Why shouldn't be there more gyms and stops, that fit the portal criteria, in a certain area? Is it a danger to the game balance? Theoretically, everyone could profit from cluster areas. Everyone has got the same chances to use them, as they are not in a restricted area. And what about home-gyms and -stops? Everyone could visit them either. Their "owners" have just the advantage, that they profit more permanently from "their" clusters. Are there more home-stops to a person, that person can get more items, than others in a certain period of time. But, there are already limitations ingame. No one can carry more than 3000 items at a time and there is always a weekly item limit. If someone reaches that, one cannot spin Pokestops anymore. In addition the items have no end in itself, e.g. you can't catch more Pokemon at home, just because you have more balls. This is just determined by spawnpoints and spawntimes. Only if that player is willing to spend money on the game to use more inscenses, he really would have an advantage. But what about a player, who "owns" more than one gym? He can't get more coins from them either. Theoretically there are more chances to him for raids, but again, only if he spends money on premium raid passes. Concluding the biggest danger to the game balance are ingame purchases.
Is it an abuse to have more gyms and stops in a cell than usual then? It was a trick to the system, that Niantic uses, yes. But it can be considered as an improvement of the local community's gaming experience, as long as the Waypoints fit the portal criteria.
Now, Niantic wants Pokemon GO trainers to discover interesting spots in their area...but only as long as these have a distance of 20 meters to each other and as long as they are not in the same invisible fantasy cell, yeah.
To make one thing clear: This are my thoughts on Waypoints that fit the portal criteria. If you want to trick Waypoints into the game, that doesn't fit the criteria, this would be an abuse for me as well.
2.) The steps that Niantic took to stop the "abuse"
You can only move Waypoints within a 10 meter range. You want to move a Waypoint to its correct point, but you can't. 10 meters are nearly nothing. You can move it 20 times to a location, that is less incorrect until you finally reach the correct position. Or you can submit the Waypoints deletion in a form. When this is rejected, you can beg in this forum for the movement. Easy!
You move a Waypoint into a full cell, bad luck, all stops and gyms are gone. No Pokemon GO player wants ever to move a Waypoint to its correct position again.
But do we need these steps to avoid a real abuse, e.g. moving a gym 5 km to a totally incorrect position, right into a clusterfield? No! The wayfarer community has to verify this submission. Good reviewers will see the fraud. Bad reviewers will accept it, but in the end, it is Ninatics job to get those out of the system, e.g. they should implement a harder test at the beginning, or do random inspections on reviews. The fact, that Niantic has worked on the current steps instead, shows, that they cannot or don't want to rely on the wayfarer community and that the community isn't worth the effort to change that situation.
But speaking about abusive edits:
Whenever a trainer doesn't want another player to have his home-gym or -stops he can put another Wayspot in the full cells. Don't care about the correct position, revenge is a dish served cold!
3.) The communication
Niantic brought games to a massively huge community. Their games are great and the game system is...interesting.
But Niantic did never ever inform their players about those systems!
The transition of portals from Ingress to stops and gyms in PoGO depends on S2 lvl 14 and 17 cells. So many PoGO players don't understand this system, they don't even know that cell-thing at all, because Niantic doesn't tell them a bit about that. These cells are invisible! They might be a useful mapping structure, but they are totally imaginary in the end. Ingressplayers instead, they can give a **** about the cells, their game is not affected by all this. Even the new mechanic of disappearing gyms and stops in PoGO was not communicated by Niantic, it just were the players, who noticed the changes (when it was already too late).
Overall, Niantic runs three games (Ingress, PokemonGO an Wizards Unite). Every Wayspot submission and movement counts for all three games...but not in the same way. In Ingress there are no cells, in PoGO, there are lvl14 and 17 cells and in Wizards Unite...I don't even know what cells there are...but they are, of course, different from those in PoGO.
It would be good to inform every player about what Niantic is doing, before they are doing it. In this way, Niantic could get some feedback from the community and the players finally know about the extend of their actions in their game and about the implications in the other games.
Niantic, you may talk to us!
Conclusion:
To me, stops disappearing, because of a Waypoint movement, is an example of missing expediency and a lack of communication.
The newly implemented restrictions punish PoGO players as they must fear to loose stops and gyms as well as Ingress players, who could not edit Portals for month and cannot move them further than 10 meters, even if it needs to be more to be correct; and all this just because Niantic doesn't do a thing against the real submission abusers as well as against unreliable reviewers; and the community in it's entirety will realize it when it is far too late to make things undone (notice: every discussion in this forum is a discussion set in the ivory tower, 99% of the players out there won't read this ever.).
Comments
I think your ire is at least partially misplaced.
Why not direct your outrage at the groups of people who broke the rules by submitting all of the illegitimate moves and using their local reviewer cabals to get them approved? Why not direct your outrage at all of the people who are submitting fake wayspots and pushing them through? The people who are submitting fake photospheres to Google to get fake things approved? The people who are stealing photos from existing wayspots and replicating them all over?
Wayfarer worked very well for years until people started cheating the system. if it wasn't for cheaters Niantic wouldn't have had to restrict the system. Don't get me wrong... I think that some of their adjustments are sub-optimal and poorly thought out, and I wish they would have been done differently. The bottom line, though, is that cheaters are the reasons we can't have nice things, not Niantic.
Niantic did indeed:
sayin’
The only things Niantic announced in this forum regarding location edits are:
Notably, Niantic has not announced in any way that a location edit of a pokestop or gym can cause it to disappear from PoGo. The only thing they clarified was that a location edit of a gym can potentially convert it to a pokestop.
So OP was exactly right in saying Niantic has not communicated with the players about the change on October 9 (PDT) at all.
Real fakers deserve all the rant in the world. Everyone in this forum would agree to that. You are totally right.
I didn't adress them directly in my post, because they wouldn't give a **** anyway. That would be pointless.
The fakers also didn't sit in the Niantic Headquater for a month or two and didn't disable a formerly well working tool for Ingress- and for PoGO-players just to come to the conclusion, that the key to all is to make portal movement nearly impossible (10 meters is nothing) and to remove all stops and gyms, that once fitted the criteria (I mainly relied to those and not to the others that have never been legit Waypoints, according to the criteria), just because, there are too many of them in a cell. This was Niantic. I hope they will read one or two lines of these posts here, that refer to these changes (there ate a few around by now :D) and rethink them a bit. That was the reason why I addressed to them.
Again, fakers should be banned from submitting Waypoints and edits. Bad reviewers should be kept away from the reviewing process. Niantic should therefor listen to the reviewers rreported abuses on the one hand and have a harder test for potential reviewers and random inspections on the reviews on the other hand.
In my eyes, this would be the key to stop the abuse once and for all and we would not need these new restrictions to all players.
We’ll just gloss over the loooong conversations going on here while location edits were disabled altogether, while the Wayfarer Team was explicitly working on ways to castrate its ability to overcrowd cells with stops and gyms then, k
But the location edits were disabled because they were being abused to overcrowd cells with stops and gyms, and the only possible solution to that is to make sure that, when a location is edited, it would then be impossible to overcrowd any cell.
What annoys me most is that only PoGo got hit with this. What about position violations in Ingress? Greatly ignored. Yeah thank you, that's tooootally fair...
And now people can accidentally delete Waypoints from PoGo because often they completely don't know about the whole cell & distance system. They just wanna help to put stuff to the correct location and -poof- it's gone and they don't know why... Great.
And yeah, fakers should be banned and that fast! There clearly is no action being taken or by far not fast enough. We in germany have a huge problem with them because of the lack of streetview. Fakes are getting reported and reported, often the same towns every couple weeks and it doesn't stop. Some people have created 50+ fakes and they are still able to, giving fair players and Niantic an avoidable pile of work. They once made a blogpost that such people are taken care of, the german Wayfarer corner can state the opposite.
I as a fair player really don't wanna carry the consequences of the unfair ones. This just makes me angry.
The stop limitations made sense for the state of the game when it was released in 2016 - you would walk for a few minutes, encounter a Pokemon or 2(3 would be a cluster), and once in a while would need to re-stock on items. Since then we have much more spawns, much more ways to get items, and the premier goal of stops and gyms changed completely. Stops are there to guide you for sightings, challenge rocket grunts/leaders, give you research tasks and being placing lures. Gyms ae primely there to host raids.
More Pokestops and gyms mean you can do more of all of that, and especially - do more of that by foot. If you are looking for a specific type rocket, a rocket leader, Giovanni, a specific raid(especially if it's not the legendary), or a specific research quests - you want to hit have access to as many stops/gyms as possible, so you either have to switch to Pokemon DRIVE or Pokemon SIT(i.e. spoof), or to get a far inferior experience to those that do. This is doubly so with the very time-limited events, have more and more of, where you want to hit as many raids/rocket grunts/research tasks as possible in very few hours.
More pokestops and gyms means players are less inclined to drive/spoof instead of walk to play the game.
Also, a point where there are many interesting things should be reflected as one in the game. Instead, a city center with city hall, city square, several religious and cultural centers, a theater, a museum, and several monuments fountains and playgrounds, can end up being 3-4 stops; while painted electric boxes can fully greed entire cities to get the same density.
The only justification for the stops limit is that it allows their spreading in a way that makes it easier to interact with them. But this doesn't really work - you can have 4 stops in 10 meters radius from one cell corner without any moving tricks and that's already not really usable(not to mention they can all be gyms if it's a level 14 cell corner), and the game can become unplayable during rocket hours/days in places that have just 1 stop per cell. Also, this "fix" is not really needed - there are other ways to handle this, inluding one Niantic already implemented in Ingress: make the points themselves smaller, and if a players clicks on the cluster, it opens a popup with icon for each of the points in the cluster to let them choose.
As for gyms, the main downside might be that it breaks the balance of fighting over gym control(which is already broken), but that can always be adjusted with re-balancing of cp decay(both "natural" and after each battle) and effectiveness of berries. All the issues about few pokestops are multiplied when it comes to gyms, because they are so sparse, and you can have many of them "wasted" on a location that while it's a perfectly fine POI, it's not a place you would want to go to all the time(here we have 5 gyms that are in parks, that located at the very top of steep hills, and the community is so used to ignoring them that even remote raids didn't change that).
The 1 stop per level 17 S2 cell and 3 gyms per level 14 cells just don't make sense for the game as in it's current status, but like with many other things, Niantic works on something until it kinda works, releases it, and pretty much never changes that again.
I agree it's very frustrating for people that were correcting wrong locations in earnest. But the biggest reason Niantic resorted to this was because a lot of communities were purposely submitting things in the wrong (empty cell) location, then editing them after to the correct (already occupied cell) location. Most of my irritation is aimed squarely at those people. When people in my community talked about manipulating the system to try to get an extra gym, I specifically argued against it. Reason being that Niantic can change up their system at ANY moment. Doing something like this just gives them more reason to change it, and can come back and bite us in the arse later.
I really dislike the L17 cell system, honestly. But I saw this coming from a mile away. (I'm ok with the L14 cell set up for gyms). I really wish they would implement some added feature to utilize those invisible POIs in PoGo. If they made it something desirable it would largely end the abuse that goes on.
Somehow my comment didn’t post so I will try again.
Niantic’s Wayfarer Team had shut off location edits for an extended period of time, that was posted and discussed here in these forums. They had them shut down explicitly because of repeated abuses by players attempting to overload cells with wayspots, and that was discussed here in these forums over an extended period of time.
The only possible solution was to make certain that upon any location edit, the movements wouldn’t overload any cells, and THAT was discussed in these forums.
And to belabour the point, their initial attempts at fixing it also had the unfortunate side effect whereby sometimes a gym might be demoted to a stop, and yet again THAT was also discussed in these forums.
None of what you said are relevant to the topic. Just because some people are discussing these topics here don't make it an announcement.
Can you present one example where an Niantic employee explicitly announced that pokestops that move into an occupied L17 cell (or whatever code phrase they use like "too close to other pokestops") will disappear?
That topic being, that there’s been no discussion about “how changes to how location edits function” hasn’t been discussed?
That's not what you said. Your initial claim was:
"Niantic did indeed:
These are not true.
I would not expect Niantic to document in detail the anti-abuse mechanisms that they implement. In my seven years of playing Niantic games I have never seen them do that, and in fact they are extremely tight-lipped about how their internals work. That is for a very good reason-- being specific makes it easier for people to find new ways to cheat.
Niantic very clearly announced the location edit changes here. There was extensive discussion about it after they did, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. They also asked people to report examples of deliberately-manipulated clusters of Pokestops.
Based on what I know about Niantic, I would fully expect that they would create a mechanism by which they could programmatically identify manipulated moves and correct them. If they were deliberately created in the wrong location and then moved I would expect Niantic to remove them. If they were long-standing wayspots that got illegitimately moved then I would expect Niantic to revert the moves.
I sincerely hope that's what's happening. Cheaters should not be rewarded for their cheating by being able to keep their spoils.
And yes, I know that sounds harsh. I'm pissed. I'm angry that the selfishness of small groups of cheaters caused the edit restrictions that we have right now. Those cheaters are why the rest of us can't have nice things (i.e. legitimate wayspot moves of more than a tiny distance.)
Do you know how much announcment they have to make for any changes to any of their games ?
Zero
Zip
Nada
Nix
None
Zilch
Etc.
Thet don't have to give any notification if they want to change an aspect of the game.
The self entitlement of people crying "waaa they've removed POI's without telling me" or "Waaa they didn't tell me what would happen if I moved things" is truly pathetic.
The fact is they did, out of courtesy, tell people in advance what was going to happen, they didn't have to.
People need to get over themselves and realise the world does not revolve around them.
Simply no.
Removing wayspots out of the game, especially gyms which have progress bars and medals in your profile, is a hard change of the game mechanic and far beyond "changes in the edit system". Changes in the edit system is the distance limitation, the need for moderation to check for abuse and stuff like that. Nia could force the people to submit proof like supporting text and picture for location edits ..... but not clearing wayspots automatically. That's group punishment based on hard prejudgements, and wasting the work of honest unpaid workers.
They dont have to give anyone any notification.
If something is removed and someone doesnt like it, tough, they just need to grow up and accept that the game doesnt revolve around them and their own self important view of the world.
As to wasting unpaid workers time, its done on a voluntary basis, no one is forced to do anything, if you dont like the end result of what happens with your voluntary work, then just stop doing it.
Crying, I did this work that no one asked me to do, which I happily volunteered for, knowing they can do with it what they want, but now I don't like what they have done, is a pathetic level of self entitlement.
People need to get over themselves and realise they are not the center of the universe, despite their deluded sense of self importance
What do you mean with "they don't have to"? Legally? No of course not. But it's common for game devs to communicate with their players just as any other industry would communicate with their customers. Communication will generally help you not to lose customers. Should be in everyones interest because I'd doubt that without their PoGo profits Niantic would be able to maintain certain "Niche" games
Niantic has never stated anything at all about how density rules work. Nothing at all.
They have never acknowledged the usage of S2 cells, limits for L14 and L17, they only talks about "too close", "density", and other vague statements,
Everybody knew about those rules and that by using location edits it was possible to bypass them
Some people abused it too much, Niantic finally realized that it was getting out of control and applied a fix to stop the loophole and then removed the portals that were moved recently and did break the location rules.
They didn't change the rules, they only fixed the loophole that allowed to bypass them.
Give me a pint of water, this was salty!
Niantic has not to say anything about what they are doing, you are totally right. Nobody can force them to do so.
Niantic didn't say anything about the S2 cells overall and they didn't warn us about vanishing stops and gyms. "Ooops, one gym gone, must be magic". "My submitted stop was accepted, but it doesn't appear on the map, must be a bug. Let me try the same thing three more times." These things, endeed, happened to be said by members of my local community. Is this good?
Niantic doesn't need to say anything about their gamechanges as we have to play to their rules or otherwhise delete the game, yes.
But do we need to sit there and may not question this policy of non-information? Is Niantic a higher unquestionable being, that we cannot grab and whose actions can't be followed by our limited minds? Is Niantic God in your eyes?
Or is Niantic a company, that normally depends on the players satisfaction to gain another billion of Dollars?
Seriously, I think, no other company could implement such a gamechanger without giving any Information to its community. Imagine Toni Kroos fouls Christiano Ronaldo 10 meters before the penalty area in the World Championship Finale and the referee gives him a penalty, because the FIFA did change the radius of the penalty area in a secret meeting, two weeks ago. Every German fan would totally outrage.
I think, in our case, there is no shitstorm incoming from the PoGO players, just because Niantic kept all the S2-cell-thing as secret as possible. Most of them are not able to reflect, what Niantic is doing. We shall respect Niantic's rules, Niantic gives us restrictions to force us to respect the rules, and in the same way, it's up to every single player to find out for himself what exactly the rules are...or not. And I think, this is heavily wrong. And I think, call me center of the universe, it is my right to give Niantic an advice to change these policy.
You may not agree with how much of an announcement there was, but there was indeed communication from @NianticCasey-ING that the Wayfarer team was tweaking the “density” rules on an ongoing basis. That this was “only” as commentary in some relatively minor thread and not as its own separate Niantic-made announcement thread doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
There have been many threads with regards to gym/stop overcrowding due to abuse, and in short Niantic got fed up with it and are on an ongoing basis continuing to find ways to automatically combat that abuse.
Frankly I am personally irritated about the level of engagement Niantic-the-company has about internal mechanisms in their games, but am resigned in understanding that they basically consider them akin to “trade secrets”. This affords them the opportunity to CHANGE those mechanisms as they see fit, in particular when those mechanisms prove to be problematic.
Some of those internal mechanisms include but are not limited to:
* how the Sojourner badge actually ticks up in Ingress
* how S2 cells relate to ingame POIs
* which POIs become inns/greenhouses/fortresses
* all policies/criteria related to when a wayspot that never met criteria in the first place can be removed
The ONLY reason players even know that S2 density relates to stop/gym placement in the first place was due to player “citizen science” — experimentation and observation. Now that “something” has changed, unfortunately our only future path forward again is the same — more experimentation and observation.
But in all likelihood, Niantic STILL won’t ‘fess up to “S2” cell usage. And perhaps some day in the distant future, they WILL find another way. I don’t expect that to happen, and I definitely don’t expect Pokémon to ever get more density — their current efforts on their advanced AR by way of wayspot “scanning” belies that.
Do feel free to grump about Niantic’s general lack of direct communication. But YES they have told us that internal work on wayspot density is ongoing.
Well said, this damages niantic brand. Today many people in the pokemon go community go to play in their previous fun areas to play only to have a negative experience . there is posting all over social media about this. a low percentage of players cause about or even know about wayfairer. normal players just see all their stops gone and blame the company
dude ....
Lots of the hard fake examples are from Germany. Our German social media community decided to bring the towns of our black list of towns with lots of fakes into this forum. So hard examples like Meppen, Seevetal and so on already had their thread and their mass fake clear here. Lets say ~5 of ~60 .... so the people got now used in how to report those stuff, so there could have been an end, when Nia takes actions against those fakers. So we wanted to support Nia to hit the hard faking peoples accounts. This shouldnt be any motivation do prejudge all players and do group punishments.
These changes are now a kick in the a*s. Removing stuff, without communiction about any kind of why (they could nevertheless be silent about their cell rules), is totally demotivating.
As far as I know John Hanke always tells the people about his fluffy dream to map the world. Nice. With this rules now he gets only half of what one would call completion, looking at my hometowns. He has to modify his dream - mapping the world based on S2 cells rules because noone wants do do more. Congratiulations.
When I see people blaming the company, I'll be sure to explain the player abuse that lead to it.
If you're gonna compare it to the rules for a sport game, you should compare it to Lance Armstrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong
The rules about anti-doping existed while he won the 7 Tours de France, but he managed to avoid detection. Afterwards an investigation found out that he didn't deserve those titles so he was stripped of them.
In the same way, people has managed to avoid the distance rules by using edits and now Niantic has removed a lot of those pokestops that broke the rules.
So goal should be to use new rules that can benefit more all the players by taking into account other factors.
@DobleJJGM-PGO It's certainly true that some Ingress players don't like it when PoGo players move wayspots that are already correctly positioned. If you're moving something that is correctly positioned to an incorrect location then I consider that cheating. I also think it's wrong to move something if both the old and new locations are correct.
When you move things to change cells in PoGo you are impacting both Ingress and HPWU, and probably also CWE. In Ingress a move will cause existing links and fields to be destroyed, and it can mess up future fielding plans. In HPWU you can change which things are inns, greenhouses, and fortresses. I don't think it's fair to the players of other games when you alter the playing field to your personal liking. I'm pretty sure PoGo players would be upset if I started moving their stops around so that I could make a better spine for fields in Ingress.
The Wayspot database is for all games, not just yours.
My qualifications: Recursed L16 in Ingress, L40 in PoGo, L47 in HPWU.
So now is ok, when some Ingress player will be mad at PoGo community in their location and he will decide to move some portals, so pokestops and gyms will disappear and portals will stay in the game ? Take for example a football field with athletic oval, with playground, exercise machines, historic statue and some historic plaque. All not far from each other in real world, all in own L17 cell. An Ingress player can move portals from correct location to still correct location (you are also think this is bad), but he can move them STILL ON CORRECT location but closer together and it will probably be accepted. What will happen in these games ? Well in Ingress nothing, HPWU probably still nothing, BUT in PoGo he can destroy a place where could be 2 gyms and 4 pokestops to only 2 pokestops. And this is just ridiculous, player of different game CAN affect a gameplay of another game. I don't see a reason to have different S2 cell rules in these games. Just leave the 20 metres rule, it make sense to me and everybody will be happy AND it will reduce a location edit so much more than anything what Niantic did so far.
Ingress players aren’t against Pokémon GO players as you imply. I don’t know of an instance where an Ingress player has maliciously moved a POI to mess with Pokémon GO.
I play all three games and enjoy them all, I don’t see myself siding with one game over the others.
The edit location system has been abused. This is Niantic amending that. That’s all.
You are play all three games, but there may still be cases as I have described by someone who doesn't play all three games.
@KissakCZ-PGO I'm not aware of any cases of Ingress players deliberately moving portals in order to interfere with Pokemon Go. In a population this large I'm sure there are a few isolated incidents of this but it's definitely not a widespread/systemic issue.
I am strongly of the opinion that there is only one reason to move a wayspot: It is currently in an incorrect location. There might be a couple of other outliers, like a building where part of it is under construction and is no longer safe to access, but those seem relatively rare. I don't think "I want this in a different place even though it's already in a correct location" is a legitimate reason to move something.
That seems like a very theoretical thing and it's probably good to remember that the stops and gyms that just were removed from PoGo was removed because of actions PoGo players did to abuse the S2 cell system, not because of actions other players did. The things that got removed were never meant to be there in the first place, and wouldn't have been if it had been created in the correct place originally instead of in the wrong place and then moved.