These stops and gyms never meant to be there, yes. But what, if they deserve to be there, let me give you an actual example just from totay:
I submitted a movement of a Pokestop, a historical chimes (is that the right word for "Glockenspiel"?) months ago. It was in that place from the beginning of Pokemon GO and it was in the wrong place. There was no abuse, as it must have been an ingresser, who created that.
I wanted to move it into its correct place. In that cell, there is a historical building and a beautiful graffiti. The graffiti was "tricked in" there, yes (bad bad), but only because it was in the wrong place, before, again, since the beginning of Pokemon GO. But the historical building was there from the beginning on and it was in the perfect right place. The graffiti was liked in our local community overall. People even went there to send gifts from that stop, as it theme is really nice (it's a bride).
So, two of these three stops will vanish now for the Pokemon GO community:
1.) There was no abuse, there were just two corrections for the right location.
2.) All of these stops fit the Waypoint Criteria perfectly.
3.) Pokemon GO players got used to these stops, as they were there from the beginning on. And they liked them a lot.
4.) I wouldn't have even moved the Waypoint, if I knew, that it will vanish now. I submitted the edit, when no one from Niantic even thought of taking these steps against the "abuse". Now, everyone in my community will be mad at me, if I would confess, that these stops disappeared because of my action (so, I will not do that). I, now, just feel bad about doing the right thing in correcting the map.
Don't see just the abuses, there are other cases of stops and gyms, that simply don't deserve to be deleted from the map (just for PoGO-players). And if my little example from my small German city is not enough, look to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I hope, no one will have the idea of moving "Philippe Petit Tight Walk Rope Memorial" or "Monsieur Eiffel - **** Musch" in its cell (what might be possible, as it should be in that great 10 meter range. We all might say goodbye then to one of the most iconic buildings in the world. But perhaps, it also doesn't deserve to be there, because the Memorial was in the game first, but was in the wrong place all the time?
Yes, you're caught in the fallout that was caused by the people doing these kinds of edits in bad faith. That's unfortunate but also why we can't always have nice things. In Ingress we're left with a broken and largely unusable edit system now, for the same reason. I wasn't saying all PoGo players have been doing this or that all location edits have been done in bad faith, I was simply saying that this was caused by players who gamed the system and the fact that there was enough of them for Niantic to eventually crack down on it.
It's never fun to be caught in the effects of something you didn't cause but the game was after all designed with a certain pokestop density. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the rules they created for themselves are enforced, although I agree that it would have been better if it had worked like this from the very beginning.
Yeah, it's all about the abusers, doing things in bad faith and trick the good system (I write this without the intention to defend Portalfakes, that's just ****):
There must be a signifacantly high amount of abusers, who trick the system. There must be, as Niantic is "forced" to impelement these steps.
Why do they abuse the system? They want more Pokestops and gyms. As I wrote in my first post, personally, I don't see a danger to the game ballance to these clusters. Overall, Pokemon is not that competetive. For the most competetive part in PoGO, PvP, you must catch a bunch of Pokemon, or hatch them, to get the right ones. You have to go out for this, anyways. Staying in a Cluster won't help you. The real danger to the gamebalance is just the possibility to buy 1000 inscenses and raidpasses. More stops and gyms mainly are a quality of live improvement, as you don't need to spend 3 hours for spinning gifts and buy 100 Pokeballs in the ingame shop. I would say 95% of the normal PoGO players wouldn't complain, because there is a cluster of Waypoints, that totally fit the criteria, except of the distance between them. In my community, there was not a single one, until now. The hardliners here (this is not meant as an insult, but only as a short description for those, who insist in every "rule" Niantic has ever set up) are surely not the majority.
According to this situation, Niantic can do two things:
1.) They can stick to their S2 lvl 14 and 17 system, that separates the games PoGO, Ingress and Wizards United from each other, whilst let them be bond together by the whole wayfarer-process; and they can overhear the PoGO-players whish for more points of interest in their game by branding them as "abusers", just because they are the few ones, who knew about the "rules" of the game and used them to get a more playable game-environment for them.
2.) Niantic could see this widespread cheating as a wish for more Pokestops and gyms. They could have used the time to rethink the cell-system. They could implement the possibility, to have two Stops in one lvl 17 cell, or more. They could even forget about the whole cell thing. Everyone could have more stops, no "abuse" is needed anymore, yet thanks to the smart people, who challenged a stupid system.
In the end, it's all a matter of the point of view. I know, this is a polarizing mind game, and, of course, this is just a shortened story of all this.
But, I really can't see a reason:
1.) Why there are different "rules" for the three games. PoGO-players should be able to see the same portal-worthy wayspots, as Ingressplayers may, just because they are portal-worthy. I mean, this is the whole point of the wayfarer-thing. Explore your environment!
2.) Why there are these specific rules for PoGO and Wizards Unite. Why S17 cells. Why not S18? Someone in my community tried to explain me, that Niantic thought once, that players would do more steps, the fewer stops there are, and that they want to make the players move. But can they prove that point? Have they done any studies about that? Do Ingressplayers move less than PoGO-Players, because they have more portals? I made more steps, when I played Ingress, than now in PoGO. Is it even good to do more steps outside in the time of Corona?
3.) Why Niantic doesn't give a **** about the players opinion and gives us no information about the actual rules.
There obviously is a cry for more stops and gyms in the community. Niantics reaction is to delete more stops, now. 80-90% of the normal PoGO-players doesn't even know why this is happening, because Niantic never said a thing about their "rules". They are secrets to a wide amount of the community. How can a player can knowingly act within the "rules", when he doesn't even know them?
Niantic even never called portal-movements an abuse straight to the head. We all know now to 100%, that this is an abuse to Niantic, but just because they took steps against it.
.........................
Another polarizing thought in the end for all those, who like the "a-rule-is-a-rule"-point:
What if Niantic impelements the cell-system of PoGO in Ingress and Wizards Unite from one day to another? They, of course, don't need to inform the community, before they do that, right? Everything is fine? A rule is a rule? We put a bunch of time and work into our game-environment. All gone. Bad luck now, or would one question that?
(In the end, I say that as a PoGO- and Ingressplayer, this would overall be a fairer system, than we have it now.)
For what it's worth, I think the S17 stuff isn't a very good system. I played to 40 and for a long time after that in PoGo and I was deleting inventory daily. Adding more stops wouldn't have shifted the balance of anything for me. Since I only played in a city I don't know how it would affect play in rural areas to just drop the restriction but I doubt crowded cells is much of an issue there anyway. This would probably also avoid the situations where PoGo players keep submitting duplicates because they have no way of knowing the object they found is already a waypoint without checking Ingress intel.
The only somewhat sensible argument I've seen for it is the size of things on the PoGo map and the risk of clipping/overlapping and crowding the map itself too much. In Ingress POI are tiny and can cluster more without cluttering the view. I've no idea how it is in the wizards game, never tried it.
Yeah, I thought about your last point, as well; and I really hope, that this isn't Niantic's reason to do all this.
Clipping/overlapping and crowding should be just a problem of the right game design and should not affect these crucial game-mechanics, that are set up, now. It would be shameful for a game developer to solve such a problem in that rather complicated way.
In the end, it's just a matter of practice to hit the right stop in a cluster.
Honestly, speaking of a crowded map, a Kyogre-buddy, Go-Rocket Grunts standing besides the stops and balloons following the trainer are much worse, than two stops cuddeling. :D
To digress from the main topic slightly, they have already stated previously during a dev talk that PoGo was a very rushed project, that combined with the size of the sprites, design of the user interface led to their choice in how POI's would be distributed in game.
So clipping and game mechanics were taken into account right at the start. Its not overly complicated as you say, it was a conscious choice to make the game that way.
What everyone seems to forget is that PoGo whilst being fun and very playable, suffers from being Niantics second real ARG game. They only had Ingress prior to that which was, and still is, on an entirely different code base, so while they may have had ideas on things they could have improved on from Ingress, they were still starting from scratch on a new game.
For a different gaming perspective imagine DICE and the Battlefield games, Battlefield (now) runs on the Frostbite Engine, imagine they had ideas on a new game they were doing, but instead of using Frostbite they were now going to use Unreal Engine, they may well have had ideas on how to make a good game, but they are now using a different codebase and so have got to learn how to implement as much of what they can, learning as they go, against, in pogos case, a very very tight deadline.
Now look at HPWU, how that is compared to PoGo, same game engine, but it shows the practice they have had with it, variable changing sprites to interact with, better distribution of objects and foundables on the ground, better distribution of POI's than PoGo.
If HPWU had come before PoGo then I have no doubt HPWU would have ended up being worse than it is and PoGo would have all the bells and whistles, unfortunately that wasn't the case
PoGo has the unfortunate issue of being the second game and first of its kind on a new engine and suffers from it.
I perceive a cultural disconnect between Pokmon Go players and Ingress players.
Ingress players depend not just on there being wayspots around them, but also on the specific geography of them. We connect wayspots together to make links and fields. Because of this Ingress players are more attuned to precisely where a wayspot is located and what it is named, and thus are more connected to the wayspot as an independent entity. We keep track of our portal keys, we draw fields and links on the map, and we sometimes go to specific out-of-the-way portals for tactical/strategic purposes. There's really no reason for a PoGo or HPWU player to trek several hours to an obscure ghost town in a remote location or hike up a mountain, but Ingress players do this regularly.
PoGo players, for the most part, just want to have lots of stops and gyms around them. I think many of them would be happy if Niantic just covered the entire surface of the earth with numbered wayspots every 20 meters, or at least one randomly placed in every L17 S2 cell. I'm not putting down PoGo players when I say this-- I'm just commenting on the way the different game designs cause players to see wayspots differently.
Of course it did PoGo players, but that doesn't mean it must be placed in wrong position (for example that football field etc.), but that is NOT what I'm talking about in that post. It's not a theoretical thing, it's a fact. Ingress players can affect and DESTROY gameplay for PoGo players without any disadvantage for them. I would be very happy to see the reaction what would happen if the rule of S2 cells will switch between Ingress and PoGo.
A huge proof that most Ingress players are here just to spit poison and not to contribute anything useful to the discussion is what at last seems to be the problem. The disappearance of the Pokestops and Gyms seems to be only VISUAL. The disappeared pokestops still can be spinned by a Go Plus, a Pokeball Plus or a Gotcha, get items, get a present with the picture of the disappeared pokestop, even a Quest from that Pokestop. Also, the specific Pokestop still counts towards creating new gyms in the 14 S2 cell. From all of these, this shows that it is indeed a BUG and not a vindictive new feature and specifically a VISUAL BUG. Now, Niantic needs to become aware of this and fix it.
Of course I do, but firstly, you wouldn't understand a game you don't play so there is no reason to show them to you, secondly, I won't even bother to post it to convince you, because I don't care about convincing you. Facts are facts. I only care to bring this to Niantic's attention, to accumulate more data and to help other PoGo players with the new info. They know how to test the validity of my claims. If Niantic employees ask me or anyone for new proof, I will happily give it to them. But it won't be needed, simply because they never intended to erase Pokestops, so they have their hands full trying to find out what was messed in the code.
Nethertheless this Thessaloniki example is over the top. There is balancing needed. This is really abuse and there shoudnt be this huge amount of stops. Further your style of "argumentation" is as underwhelming as the style of your "opponents" here. Both points together make this whole discussion here neglectible. Do it better.
As I have already told, i don't care to convince any player, you call it abuse, I don't, but that is not the point. Niantic asked about the info of the invisble stops and we provided them with the infos. Now, we have realised that the Stops were not removed, they became invisible, except for the Go Pluses and Gotchas. Noone is here to defend himself or argue about POIs, only to solve the mystery.
I play both games little friends, maybe you should stop trying to make this a us vs them thing and look at your own actions leading up to this situation.
Besides, I already stated elsewhere that I don't think the S17 rule makes much sense as long as the overworld map can work with the more clustered waypoints. If it stops people from abusing the system then I don't care if Niantic does it. But untill they do the rules are the rules and if the rules say 1 pokething per S17 cell then stop making such a giant fuzz about them enforcing it and stop misusing the wayfarer system by having every new waypoint need to reviews by first creating it in an empty S17 cell and then moving it to its correct location in another. And stop complaining when you get called out for doing it. Own your actions, it's part of the grown up world.
I can confirm, that one can still intetact with the vanished Pokéstops, when using a GO+. (The day, the first stop disappeared I played there without using a device. Yesterday, it seems, that I simply didn't get a gift from the vanished stops, as there were no guaranteed gifts from stops anymore.) But today, I went to three of those vanished stops in the city and could get gifts, items and quests from them.
Unfortunately the pink needle, showing what stop is aimed to be interacted with by the GO+, won't show up for the "ghost-stops". This makes it even harder to realize, that the stops are actually there, but simply not visible.
I have to apologize now, as I started the discussion with a wrong premise.
But in the end, there are a few points resulting in all this, that are still actual, now:
1.) The information policy of Niantic
1.1.) The rules
Niantic never declared the rules to their players. To most of the PoGO-players out there, the S2 rules are still a secret. Even if one wants to follow the rules, one simply cannot do so knowingly, if one doesn't know them.
1.2.) The so called "abuse"
Even to those few members in this forum, there is no clear definition to the "abuse" within the Wayfarer-process. The only thing, that once was officiallycalled an abuse by Niantic was the movement of Wayspots from their correct location up to a total incorrect location "at the detriment of the community at large" (see last last post in the announcement "Temporarly Disabling Location Edits" from Niantic's Casey).
1.3.) The current issue
Are vanishing Pokéstops a new feature? Noone knew it certainly for a good amount of time. As it seems now, it's most likely a bug. But there was no official information about it about days. The first people in my local comnunity start to get angry about the persons, who "deleted" the stops. A early little post on twitter, or even here, for those who really care about the wayfarer-system in the ivory tower would have been nice.
2.) The S2-cell-system
The dicussion showed, that most of some people here, who know the S2-cell-system, accept it as part of the game and some do not. But noone could give a concrete reason, why this is used to determine the Pokéstop-density in the way it does. During this discussion, this system seemed to be arbitrarily to most of us.
3.) A look to the future
3.1.) The last steps against the, so called, abuse and the style communication about these led to the actual situation, that everyone thought, that the Pokéstops were gone permantly. It seems, that Niantic could do anything without any warning in our eyes. Niantic doing Niantic-things. Is that good? I don't know. This is truely a game but would like to rely on my game-environment and on the decisions the developer makes. One should tell about the steps one takes. Clearly, not cryptic.
3.2.) If Niantic consideres indeed to make Pokéstops disappear, as long as they are in a crowded cell, in the future, they should keep in mind, that even here in this forum, many people would heavily dislike that. Normal PoGO-Players, without the wayfarer-background would totally outrage, I think.
3.3.) Most of the participants of this discussion want to see steps directly against Portal-fakers and underwhelming reviewers instead of steps against the whole community.
The most egregious cases of abuse within games cannot take place without some sort of community organisation. People report abuse all of the time. Now, rather than ban the abusers of the system or take reports seriously, Niantic would rather take crude measures and upset people who have put many long hours into making the games genuinely better for everyone.
EDIT: and add to that they didn't account the recent major changes. Really need to work on their communication. I really hate the lack of transparency from Niantic.
Very good post. Yes, there is no clear definition of abuse and people have different standards. Some are more forgiving than others. Since Niantic has obviously not publicly acknowledged the cell system that makes a lot of cases ambiguous.
The recent changes make it clear to me that Niantic does acknowledge they use the cell system but do not want to admit it in public. There are a lot of cases with no right or wrong answer and in many cases, Niantic haven't explicitly defined what they do consider abuse. A lot of the time I consider moving Wayspots to be perfectly reasonable and okay.
I don't condone folks who want to move a Wayspot many KMs away so they get a home Wayspot but I definitely sympthasize with people who would move a Wayspot a few metres in order make a new Wayspot appear in the game they play, so long as it's still on the object that it pertains to. To me, Wayspots have a greater function than merely their in game utility: they can educate people about an area, especially the historical ones.
As thorough and insightful as it can be. That is the core of the issue, that the "ghost" pokestops are still there, just invisible. But you can still interact and use them with a Go Plus.
I am really curious to see what happens if a gym disappears. Most probably, no new gym will appear, as the old one will still be there and the pokemon inside the gym won't return to their owners. But it would be huge feedback if it happened to anyone.
Niantic needs to step up and take this matter seriously. We generally need much information about S2 cells, but for now, we want them to acknowledge the problem and fix it, at least say what they are planning to do. My guess would be that they don't even know what has gone wrong, so until they found out what is messed in the code, they don't have much to say. But if their intention was to remove only pokestops, they would simply remove all of them that are in an already occupied cell and not wait for an edit to happen. @NianticCasey-ING@NianticAaron-PGO
Niantic is indeed aware of the problem, that one still can interact with those stops, that should have been totally deleted from PoGO:
"Hi folks,
Thanks for surfacing this. I understand that you’re concerned about changes to available PokéStops in your area.
I have discussed this with the Wayfarer team and the Pokémon GO team at length to ensure that there is no issue at play and can confirm that this is expected behavior. In this specific case, there was a rule within Pokémon GO that was meant to be implemented that wasn’t functioning properly, which caused overly dense clusters of Wayspots in some areas. This will not be reverted.
Across all of our apps, the game board is expected to change regularly. While it may not always feel like it, these changes are made in the interest of the player experience across all Niantic apps. Additionally, I want to remind everyone that not every Wayspot is eligible to appear in every Niantic app. Each has its own density and inclusion rules to optimize for that specific app.
Finally, to address the issue that a few of you have raised about these “missing” Wayspots still being interacted with by the Pokémon GO Plus and Poké Ball Plus devices, this is actually a bug that will be fixed in an upcoming release of Pokémon GO. The Wayspots in Pokémon GO should be considered the source of truth and the “invisible” PokéStop is incorrect.
Thanks for understanding!"
So far from Niantic's @NianticCasey-ING in the discussion, named "Pokéstops are disappearing from PoGO only (Ingress is fine)".
Your answer to what is happening with the stops is hidden within in a discussion, that 500 people have read until now; this within a forum, in that your announcements reach about 8000 people for most. You made a gamechanging decision for every PoGO-player out there, 100.000.000+ people, who downloaded the game, and your way to communicate this, is to let the few people in the ivory tower know it, only if they explicitly seek for an answer.
2.) The rules
Your rules, the S2-cell system, that fully affects the denistiy of stops and gyms, now, is a miracle for most of the "normal" players. 8000 people in this forum may take it as granted, but, as you never ever mentioned anything about this officially on any of your platforms for the wide community, you can't expect every single PoGO-player to act perfectly fine according to this.
Additionally, noone in this discussion could name a proper reason, why exactly there must be specifically this density-rule in PoGO. Why not Lvl 18 cells for stops?
3.) The effects
3.1) Stops magically vanishing, when you edit them. What PoGO-player will ever submit an edit (abusive or even totally correct) after this? To an ordinary PoGO-player, there is NO positive effect in improving the the map, and loosing one or more stops or gyms for that. There is also no reason for players to submit new waypoints either, as they might be easily deleted by an edit of a Stop nearby. And there is finally no need to review any submissions or edits for PoGO-players as this might destroy the game-environment for others. Why in the world, should one spend a lot of time and work for something, just to get punished?! Wayfarer is dead for PoGO-players.
The real abusers and Waypoint-fakers can still submit their fakes. Bad reviewers, who don't lnow the criteria or simply don't respect the criteria can still review submissions as they want.
Overall, by making stops vanish from the map, you didn't do a favour to the whole wayfarer-system.
3.2) "These changes are made in the interest of the player experience across all Niantic apps." Well, this is truely not in the interest of the player experience in PoGO alone. Why did so many people "abuse" the system? Because they are just bad to the bone? Or do they simply want more stops? There are some clusters in my city as well. In more than 1000 active players, there was noone, who complained about that stop-density. Everyone was happy to have a stop more, than usual. This is surely not an improval to the PoGO-experience. You simply overheard the PoGO-players' whish for more stops and instead, you take a bunch away. (Right in the time of the pandemic, so that everyone must go even more outside, just to do the daily ****, like spinning gifts and getting balls. Totally misplaced!)
3.3) As it is not an improvement to PoGO-players to take their stops away, it must be an improvement to Ingress- or WizardsUnite-players, according to your statement.
Don't you think, that this will enlarge the gap between PoGO-players and the others? Previous posts in this discussion already showed, that there is particularly no understanding for the interests of each brands' players. Saying, that one has to enforce these rules in PoGO, just to make Ingress more playable, could cause a huge rant from PoGO-players towards the other players.
In the end, you didn't design PoGO for Ingress-players, you didn't design Ingress for WizardsUnite-players and you didn't design WizardsUnite for PoGO-players. When you decide to make a game-changing decision in just one game, I think, you should consider the whishes of specifically that game's players, at first. You simply can't sell such decisions to players, who have to suffer heavily in their own game, just for the benefit of making the other games more playable.
It would be fairer to each players' communities, to implement the same cell-rules (as they a crucial for the game-environment) in every game or cut of the bonds between the brands in total, so that we can have different cell rules on separate maps.
I think the outrage is rightly placed in Niantic. Reason? Niantic does NOTHING ABOUT ABUSE REPORTS. when players were making the blatant description edits telling ppl where to move, got reported, and then Niantic did NOTHING.
Niantic needs to step up and actually take action when there are countless reports made against one single player that consistently abuses the local region.
@Agent563937595-ING Point of order: Niantic did do something. They deleted a whole bunch of pokestops and put rules in place to keep it from happening again. That was a better long-term investment for them than handling each case by hand.
We don't know if any of the players got directly punished or not, but the results of their cheating disappeared.
Very much agree with the sentiment of the original poster. Hard core players who got involved in nominating moving stuff made the communities game play better by creating new stops/portals for the enjoyment of the player base . Some areas (including my had many new POIS and many new and existing players come back to the games and socially enjoy.
Now a month or so after these "new rules" many communities have been devastated. This has caused much trouble in various social media chats and discord groups, with people pretending to be virtuous in these forums by escalating their removal requests instead of improving the quality of the POIS and enjoying the games.
The new more vague rules on criteria should now tip the balance back to the community i hope with more things being elligible.
So you are saying that cheating should be allowed because "it makes the game(s) better"? Sorry that you lost Wayspot do to player's cheating the system, but "makes the game(s) better" is no justification for cheating.
Niantic made the informed decision to limit the number of gyms and pokestop per S14/S17 cells. And while you may consider that POI density is all that matters for a better gameplay experience, they're the one with a complete picture of the game architecture and functionalities. They have to take into account stuff like interface user-friendliness, technical performances in terms of battery and cpu consumption for instance, the way assets interact with each other... Maybe too many spots at the same place makes the game laggy, or they did some tests and concluded that cells and radius limitations were the easiest conditions to implement to limit assets overlapping so that players can still tap precisely on any element on the screen. Whatever their reasons are, that's what they decided. So maybe us at the other end of the app may disagree with that. We can think, and tell them, that a higher POI density would make the game better, but at the end of the day they're the ones who see all the moving parts and if they decide that no, more gyms/stops per area won't make for a better gameplay experience, we have to respect their decision.
So if you choose to ignore their rules and go against official guidelines to exploit a technical loophole to circumvent Niantic's decision, you have no right to be upset when they close it and clean up the mess you made afterward. As much as we can argue with them about guidelines through the lens of different cultural point of view or shortcomings of the review experience, when it comes to technical stuff, they knows their products better than us.
How the Go developers choose which Wayspots to include or exclude from their game is not a Wayfarer issue and is thus off topic for the Wayfarer forum.
Comments
These stops and gyms never meant to be there, yes. But what, if they deserve to be there, let me give you an actual example just from totay:
I submitted a movement of a Pokestop, a historical chimes (is that the right word for "Glockenspiel"?) months ago. It was in that place from the beginning of Pokemon GO and it was in the wrong place. There was no abuse, as it must have been an ingresser, who created that.
I wanted to move it into its correct place. In that cell, there is a historical building and a beautiful graffiti. The graffiti was "tricked in" there, yes (bad bad), but only because it was in the wrong place, before, again, since the beginning of Pokemon GO. But the historical building was there from the beginning on and it was in the perfect right place. The graffiti was liked in our local community overall. People even went there to send gifts from that stop, as it theme is really nice (it's a bride).
So, two of these three stops will vanish now for the Pokemon GO community:
1.) There was no abuse, there were just two corrections for the right location.
2.) All of these stops fit the Waypoint Criteria perfectly.
3.) Pokemon GO players got used to these stops, as they were there from the beginning on. And they liked them a lot.
4.) I wouldn't have even moved the Waypoint, if I knew, that it will vanish now. I submitted the edit, when no one from Niantic even thought of taking these steps against the "abuse". Now, everyone in my community will be mad at me, if I would confess, that these stops disappeared because of my action (so, I will not do that). I, now, just feel bad about doing the right thing in correcting the map.
Don't see just the abuses, there are other cases of stops and gyms, that simply don't deserve to be deleted from the map (just for PoGO-players). And if my little example from my small German city is not enough, look to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I hope, no one will have the idea of moving "Philippe Petit Tight Walk Rope Memorial" or "Monsieur Eiffel - **** Musch" in its cell (what might be possible, as it should be in that great 10 meter range. We all might say goodbye then to one of the most iconic buildings in the world. But perhaps, it also doesn't deserve to be there, because the Memorial was in the game first, but was in the wrong place all the time?
Yes, you're caught in the fallout that was caused by the people doing these kinds of edits in bad faith. That's unfortunate but also why we can't always have nice things. In Ingress we're left with a broken and largely unusable edit system now, for the same reason. I wasn't saying all PoGo players have been doing this or that all location edits have been done in bad faith, I was simply saying that this was caused by players who gamed the system and the fact that there was enough of them for Niantic to eventually crack down on it.
It's never fun to be caught in the effects of something you didn't cause but the game was after all designed with a certain pokestop density. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the rules they created for themselves are enforced, although I agree that it would have been better if it had worked like this from the very beginning.
Completely agree with the author of this post. There has been ZERO communication from Niantic regarding the issue of pokestops vanishing due to edits.
Sure, they CAN do that but that just implies they don't care. They don't care about their reviewers' time and effort.
If this is indeed an intended anti-abuse feature, this will DESTROY entire communities eventually.
Perfectly valid stops and gyms will start disappearing, even those that are 100% legit and were part of the game since day 1.
This feature needs to be undone and the changes need to be reverted.
The best way to counter abuse is to simply remove the cell limitations altogether and let people play the game.
Yeah, it's all about the abusers, doing things in bad faith and trick the good system (I write this without the intention to defend Portalfakes, that's just ****):
There must be a signifacantly high amount of abusers, who trick the system. There must be, as Niantic is "forced" to impelement these steps.
Why do they abuse the system? They want more Pokestops and gyms. As I wrote in my first post, personally, I don't see a danger to the game ballance to these clusters. Overall, Pokemon is not that competetive. For the most competetive part in PoGO, PvP, you must catch a bunch of Pokemon, or hatch them, to get the right ones. You have to go out for this, anyways. Staying in a Cluster won't help you. The real danger to the gamebalance is just the possibility to buy 1000 inscenses and raidpasses. More stops and gyms mainly are a quality of live improvement, as you don't need to spend 3 hours for spinning gifts and buy 100 Pokeballs in the ingame shop. I would say 95% of the normal PoGO players wouldn't complain, because there is a cluster of Waypoints, that totally fit the criteria, except of the distance between them. In my community, there was not a single one, until now. The hardliners here (this is not meant as an insult, but only as a short description for those, who insist in every "rule" Niantic has ever set up) are surely not the majority.
According to this situation, Niantic can do two things:
1.) They can stick to their S2 lvl 14 and 17 system, that separates the games PoGO, Ingress and Wizards United from each other, whilst let them be bond together by the whole wayfarer-process; and they can overhear the PoGO-players whish for more points of interest in their game by branding them as "abusers", just because they are the few ones, who knew about the "rules" of the game and used them to get a more playable game-environment for them.
2.) Niantic could see this widespread cheating as a wish for more Pokestops and gyms. They could have used the time to rethink the cell-system. They could implement the possibility, to have two Stops in one lvl 17 cell, or more. They could even forget about the whole cell thing. Everyone could have more stops, no "abuse" is needed anymore, yet thanks to the smart people, who challenged a stupid system.
In the end, it's all a matter of the point of view. I know, this is a polarizing mind game, and, of course, this is just a shortened story of all this.
But, I really can't see a reason:
1.) Why there are different "rules" for the three games. PoGO-players should be able to see the same portal-worthy wayspots, as Ingressplayers may, just because they are portal-worthy. I mean, this is the whole point of the wayfarer-thing. Explore your environment!
2.) Why there are these specific rules for PoGO and Wizards Unite. Why S17 cells. Why not S18? Someone in my community tried to explain me, that Niantic thought once, that players would do more steps, the fewer stops there are, and that they want to make the players move. But can they prove that point? Have they done any studies about that? Do Ingressplayers move less than PoGO-Players, because they have more portals? I made more steps, when I played Ingress, than now in PoGO. Is it even good to do more steps outside in the time of Corona?
3.) Why Niantic doesn't give a **** about the players opinion and gives us no information about the actual rules.
There obviously is a cry for more stops and gyms in the community. Niantics reaction is to delete more stops, now. 80-90% of the normal PoGO-players doesn't even know why this is happening, because Niantic never said a thing about their "rules". They are secrets to a wide amount of the community. How can a player can knowingly act within the "rules", when he doesn't even know them?
Niantic even never called portal-movements an abuse straight to the head. We all know now to 100%, that this is an abuse to Niantic, but just because they took steps against it.
.........................
Another polarizing thought in the end for all those, who like the "a-rule-is-a-rule"-point:
What if Niantic impelements the cell-system of PoGO in Ingress and Wizards Unite from one day to another? They, of course, don't need to inform the community, before they do that, right? Everything is fine? A rule is a rule? We put a bunch of time and work into our game-environment. All gone. Bad luck now, or would one question that?
(In the end, I say that as a PoGO- and Ingressplayer, this would overall be a fairer system, than we have it now.)
For what it's worth, I think the S17 stuff isn't a very good system. I played to 40 and for a long time after that in PoGo and I was deleting inventory daily. Adding more stops wouldn't have shifted the balance of anything for me. Since I only played in a city I don't know how it would affect play in rural areas to just drop the restriction but I doubt crowded cells is much of an issue there anyway. This would probably also avoid the situations where PoGo players keep submitting duplicates because they have no way of knowing the object they found is already a waypoint without checking Ingress intel.
The only somewhat sensible argument I've seen for it is the size of things on the PoGo map and the risk of clipping/overlapping and crowding the map itself too much. In Ingress POI are tiny and can cluster more without cluttering the view. I've no idea how it is in the wizards game, never tried it.
Yeah, I thought about your last point, as well; and I really hope, that this isn't Niantic's reason to do all this.
Clipping/overlapping and crowding should be just a problem of the right game design and should not affect these crucial game-mechanics, that are set up, now. It would be shameful for a game developer to solve such a problem in that rather complicated way.
In the end, it's just a matter of practice to hit the right stop in a cluster.
Honestly, speaking of a crowded map, a Kyogre-buddy, Go-Rocket Grunts standing besides the stops and balloons following the trainer are much worse, than two stops cuddeling. :D
To digress from the main topic slightly, they have already stated previously during a dev talk that PoGo was a very rushed project, that combined with the size of the sprites, design of the user interface led to their choice in how POI's would be distributed in game.
So clipping and game mechanics were taken into account right at the start. Its not overly complicated as you say, it was a conscious choice to make the game that way.
What everyone seems to forget is that PoGo whilst being fun and very playable, suffers from being Niantics second real ARG game. They only had Ingress prior to that which was, and still is, on an entirely different code base, so while they may have had ideas on things they could have improved on from Ingress, they were still starting from scratch on a new game.
For a different gaming perspective imagine DICE and the Battlefield games, Battlefield (now) runs on the Frostbite Engine, imagine they had ideas on a new game they were doing, but instead of using Frostbite they were now going to use Unreal Engine, they may well have had ideas on how to make a good game, but they are now using a different codebase and so have got to learn how to implement as much of what they can, learning as they go, against, in pogos case, a very very tight deadline.
Now look at HPWU, how that is compared to PoGo, same game engine, but it shows the practice they have had with it, variable changing sprites to interact with, better distribution of objects and foundables on the ground, better distribution of POI's than PoGo.
If HPWU had come before PoGo then I have no doubt HPWU would have ended up being worse than it is and PoGo would have all the bells and whistles, unfortunately that wasn't the case
PoGo has the unfortunate issue of being the second game and first of its kind on a new engine and suffers from it.
I perceive a cultural disconnect between Pokmon Go players and Ingress players.
Ingress players depend not just on there being wayspots around them, but also on the specific geography of them. We connect wayspots together to make links and fields. Because of this Ingress players are more attuned to precisely where a wayspot is located and what it is named, and thus are more connected to the wayspot as an independent entity. We keep track of our portal keys, we draw fields and links on the map, and we sometimes go to specific out-of-the-way portals for tactical/strategic purposes. There's really no reason for a PoGo or HPWU player to trek several hours to an obscure ghost town in a remote location or hike up a mountain, but Ingress players do this regularly.
PoGo players, for the most part, just want to have lots of stops and gyms around them. I think many of them would be happy if Niantic just covered the entire surface of the earth with numbered wayspots every 20 meters, or at least one randomly placed in every L17 S2 cell. I'm not putting down PoGo players when I say this-- I'm just commenting on the way the different game designs cause players to see wayspots differently.
Of course it did PoGo players, but that doesn't mean it must be placed in wrong position (for example that football field etc.), but that is NOT what I'm talking about in that post. It's not a theoretical thing, it's a fact. Ingress players can affect and DESTROY gameplay for PoGo players without any disadvantage for them. I would be very happy to see the reaction what would happen if the rule of S2 cells will switch between Ingress and PoGo.
If you want both games to work the same way you have to remove all the pokemon from the streets as well as the gyms, and leave only the pokestops.
A huge proof that most Ingress players are here just to spit poison and not to contribute anything useful to the discussion is what at last seems to be the problem. The disappearance of the Pokestops and Gyms seems to be only VISUAL. The disappeared pokestops still can be spinned by a Go Plus, a Pokeball Plus or a Gotcha, get items, get a present with the picture of the disappeared pokestop, even a Quest from that Pokestop. Also, the specific Pokestop still counts towards creating new gyms in the 14 S2 cell. From all of these, this shows that it is indeed a BUG and not a vindictive new feature and specifically a VISUAL BUG. Now, Niantic needs to become aware of this and fix it.
do u have any screnshot or video or other reliable source as a proof for this?
Of course I do, but firstly, you wouldn't understand a game you don't play so there is no reason to show them to you, secondly, I won't even bother to post it to convince you, because I don't care about convincing you. Facts are facts. I only care to bring this to Niantic's attention, to accumulate more data and to help other PoGo players with the new info. They know how to test the validity of my claims. If Niantic employees ask me or anyone for new proof, I will happily give it to them. But it won't be needed, simply because they never intended to erase Pokestops, so they have their hands full trying to find out what was messed in the code.
dude ....
TL40x10, 310k catches, over 700 gold gyms. I'm not one of those spiteful ING-only guys, who troll here on their high horses :P
I'm totally with you that this rule change/bug is the worst decision ever, see my own thread on this:
https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/8433/alternatives-for-disappearing-pokestops#latest
Nethertheless this Thessaloniki example is over the top. There is balancing needed. This is really abuse and there shoudnt be this huge amount of stops. Further your style of "argumentation" is as underwhelming as the style of your "opponents" here. Both points together make this whole discussion here neglectible. Do it better.
As I have already told, i don't care to convince any player, you call it abuse, I don't, but that is not the point. Niantic asked about the info of the invisble stops and we provided them with the infos. Now, we have realised that the Stops were not removed, they became invisible, except for the Go Pluses and Gotchas. Noone is here to defend himself or argue about POIs, only to solve the mystery.
I play both games little friends, maybe you should stop trying to make this a us vs them thing and look at your own actions leading up to this situation.
Besides, I already stated elsewhere that I don't think the S17 rule makes much sense as long as the overworld map can work with the more clustered waypoints. If it stops people from abusing the system then I don't care if Niantic does it. But untill they do the rules are the rules and if the rules say 1 pokething per S17 cell then stop making such a giant fuzz about them enforcing it and stop misusing the wayfarer system by having every new waypoint need to reviews by first creating it in an empty S17 cell and then moving it to its correct location in another. And stop complaining when you get called out for doing it. Own your actions, it's part of the grown up world.
I can confirm, that one can still intetact with the vanished Pokéstops, when using a GO+. (The day, the first stop disappeared I played there without using a device. Yesterday, it seems, that I simply didn't get a gift from the vanished stops, as there were no guaranteed gifts from stops anymore.) But today, I went to three of those vanished stops in the city and could get gifts, items and quests from them.
Unfortunately the pink needle, showing what stop is aimed to be interacted with by the GO+, won't show up for the "ghost-stops". This makes it even harder to realize, that the stops are actually there, but simply not visible.
..................................................................
I have to apologize now, as I started the discussion with a wrong premise.
But in the end, there are a few points resulting in all this, that are still actual, now:
1.) The information policy of Niantic
1.1.) The rules
Niantic never declared the rules to their players. To most of the PoGO-players out there, the S2 rules are still a secret. Even if one wants to follow the rules, one simply cannot do so knowingly, if one doesn't know them.
1.2.) The so called "abuse"
Even to those few members in this forum, there is no clear definition to the "abuse" within the Wayfarer-process. The only thing, that once was officiallycalled an abuse by Niantic was the movement of Wayspots from their correct location up to a total incorrect location "at the detriment of the community at large" (see last last post in the announcement "Temporarly Disabling Location Edits" from Niantic's Casey).
1.3.) The current issue
Are vanishing Pokéstops a new feature? Noone knew it certainly for a good amount of time. As it seems now, it's most likely a bug. But there was no official information about it about days. The first people in my local comnunity start to get angry about the persons, who "deleted" the stops. A early little post on twitter, or even here, for those who really care about the wayfarer-system in the ivory tower would have been nice.
2.) The S2-cell-system
The dicussion showed, that most of some people here, who know the S2-cell-system, accept it as part of the game and some do not. But noone could give a concrete reason, why this is used to determine the Pokéstop-density in the way it does. During this discussion, this system seemed to be arbitrarily to most of us.
3.) A look to the future
3.1.) The last steps against the, so called, abuse and the style communication about these led to the actual situation, that everyone thought, that the Pokéstops were gone permantly. It seems, that Niantic could do anything without any warning in our eyes. Niantic doing Niantic-things. Is that good? I don't know. This is truely a game but would like to rely on my game-environment and on the decisions the developer makes. One should tell about the steps one takes. Clearly, not cryptic.
3.2.) If Niantic consideres indeed to make Pokéstops disappear, as long as they are in a crowded cell, in the future, they should keep in mind, that even here in this forum, many people would heavily dislike that. Normal PoGO-Players, without the wayfarer-background would totally outrage, I think.
3.3.) Most of the participants of this discussion want to see steps directly against Portal-fakers and underwhelming reviewers instead of steps against the whole community.
The most egregious cases of abuse within games cannot take place without some sort of community organisation. People report abuse all of the time. Now, rather than ban the abusers of the system or take reports seriously, Niantic would rather take crude measures and upset people who have put many long hours into making the games genuinely better for everyone.
EDIT: and add to that they didn't account the recent major changes. Really need to work on their communication. I really hate the lack of transparency from Niantic.
Very good post. Yes, there is no clear definition of abuse and people have different standards. Some are more forgiving than others. Since Niantic has obviously not publicly acknowledged the cell system that makes a lot of cases ambiguous.
The recent changes make it clear to me that Niantic does acknowledge they use the cell system but do not want to admit it in public. There are a lot of cases with no right or wrong answer and in many cases, Niantic haven't explicitly defined what they do consider abuse. A lot of the time I consider moving Wayspots to be perfectly reasonable and okay.
I don't condone folks who want to move a Wayspot many KMs away so they get a home Wayspot but I definitely sympthasize with people who would move a Wayspot a few metres in order make a new Wayspot appear in the game they play, so long as it's still on the object that it pertains to. To me, Wayspots have a greater function than merely their in game utility: they can educate people about an area, especially the historical ones.
I believe Niantic love schadenfreude...
finally a voice of reason @AScarletSabre-PGO
Wayspots are about educating people and allowing people to explore.
There's nothing wrong about "using" the system to create more pokestops. At least Niantic never said that this is abuse.
I think it's high time we got an actual answer from Niantic however.
As thorough and insightful as it can be. That is the core of the issue, that the "ghost" pokestops are still there, just invisible. But you can still interact and use them with a Go Plus.
I am really curious to see what happens if a gym disappears. Most probably, no new gym will appear, as the old one will still be there and the pokemon inside the gym won't return to their owners. But it would be huge feedback if it happened to anyone.
Niantic needs to step up and take this matter seriously. We generally need much information about S2 cells, but for now, we want them to acknowledge the problem and fix it, at least say what they are planning to do. My guess would be that they don't even know what has gone wrong, so until they found out what is messed in the code, they don't have much to say. But if their intention was to remove only pokestops, they would simply remove all of them that are in an already occupied cell and not wait for an edit to happen. @NianticCasey-ING @NianticAaron-PGO
Niantic is indeed aware of the problem, that one still can interact with those stops, that should have been totally deleted from PoGO:
"Hi folks,
Thanks for surfacing this. I understand that you’re concerned about changes to available PokéStops in your area.
I have discussed this with the Wayfarer team and the Pokémon GO team at length to ensure that there is no issue at play and can confirm that this is expected behavior. In this specific case, there was a rule within Pokémon GO that was meant to be implemented that wasn’t functioning properly, which caused overly dense clusters of Wayspots in some areas. This will not be reverted.
Across all of our apps, the game board is expected to change regularly. While it may not always feel like it, these changes are made in the interest of the player experience across all Niantic apps. Additionally, I want to remind everyone that not every Wayspot is eligible to appear in every Niantic app. Each has its own density and inclusion rules to optimize for that specific app.
Finally, to address the issue that a few of you have raised about these “missing” Wayspots still being interacted with by the Pokémon GO Plus and Poké Ball Plus devices, this is actually a bug that will be fixed in an upcoming release of Pokémon GO. The Wayspots in Pokémon GO should be considered the source of truth and the “invisible” PokéStop is incorrect.
Thanks for understanding!"
So far from Niantic's @NianticCasey-ING in the discussion, named "Pokéstops are disappearing from PoGO only (Ingress is fine)".
...................................................................
I address explicitly @NianticCasey-ING now.
Here are my concerns:
1.) The information policy
Your answer to what is happening with the stops is hidden within in a discussion, that 500 people have read until now; this within a forum, in that your announcements reach about 8000 people for most. You made a gamechanging decision for every PoGO-player out there, 100.000.000+ people, who downloaded the game, and your way to communicate this, is to let the few people in the ivory tower know it, only if they explicitly seek for an answer.
2.) The rules
Your rules, the S2-cell system, that fully affects the denistiy of stops and gyms, now, is a miracle for most of the "normal" players. 8000 people in this forum may take it as granted, but, as you never ever mentioned anything about this officially on any of your platforms for the wide community, you can't expect every single PoGO-player to act perfectly fine according to this.
Additionally, noone in this discussion could name a proper reason, why exactly there must be specifically this density-rule in PoGO. Why not Lvl 18 cells for stops?
3.) The effects
3.1) Stops magically vanishing, when you edit them. What PoGO-player will ever submit an edit (abusive or even totally correct) after this? To an ordinary PoGO-player, there is NO positive effect in improving the the map, and loosing one or more stops or gyms for that. There is also no reason for players to submit new waypoints either, as they might be easily deleted by an edit of a Stop nearby. And there is finally no need to review any submissions or edits for PoGO-players as this might destroy the game-environment for others. Why in the world, should one spend a lot of time and work for something, just to get punished?! Wayfarer is dead for PoGO-players.
The real abusers and Waypoint-fakers can still submit their fakes. Bad reviewers, who don't lnow the criteria or simply don't respect the criteria can still review submissions as they want.
Overall, by making stops vanish from the map, you didn't do a favour to the whole wayfarer-system.
3.2) "These changes are made in the interest of the player experience across all Niantic apps." Well, this is truely not in the interest of the player experience in PoGO alone. Why did so many people "abuse" the system? Because they are just bad to the bone? Or do they simply want more stops? There are some clusters in my city as well. In more than 1000 active players, there was noone, who complained about that stop-density. Everyone was happy to have a stop more, than usual. This is surely not an improval to the PoGO-experience. You simply overheard the PoGO-players' whish for more stops and instead, you take a bunch away. (Right in the time of the pandemic, so that everyone must go even more outside, just to do the daily ****, like spinning gifts and getting balls. Totally misplaced!)
3.3) As it is not an improvement to PoGO-players to take their stops away, it must be an improvement to Ingress- or WizardsUnite-players, according to your statement.
Don't you think, that this will enlarge the gap between PoGO-players and the others? Previous posts in this discussion already showed, that there is particularly no understanding for the interests of each brands' players. Saying, that one has to enforce these rules in PoGO, just to make Ingress more playable, could cause a huge rant from PoGO-players towards the other players.
In the end, you didn't design PoGO for Ingress-players, you didn't design Ingress for WizardsUnite-players and you didn't design WizardsUnite for PoGO-players. When you decide to make a game-changing decision in just one game, I think, you should consider the whishes of specifically that game's players, at first. You simply can't sell such decisions to players, who have to suffer heavily in their own game, just for the benefit of making the other games more playable.
It would be fairer to each players' communities, to implement the same cell-rules (as they a crucial for the game-environment) in every game or cut of the bonds between the brands in total, so that we can have different cell rules on separate maps.
Is any of my concerns reasonable to you @NianticCasey-ING?
If yes, what are the further steps, that Niantic wants to take to cope with my concerns, @NianticCasey-ING ?
If there can't be no more further steps to cope with my concerns, why @NianticCasey-ING?
I hope to hear from you, @NianticAaron-PGO, in the will of transparency and communication.
Thank you!
I think the outrage is rightly placed in Niantic. Reason? Niantic does NOTHING ABOUT ABUSE REPORTS. when players were making the blatant description edits telling ppl where to move, got reported, and then Niantic did NOTHING.
Niantic needs to step up and actually take action when there are countless reports made against one single player that consistently abuses the local region.
@Agent563937595-ING Point of order: Niantic did do something. They deleted a whole bunch of pokestops and put rules in place to keep it from happening again. That was a better long-term investment for them than handling each case by hand.
We don't know if any of the players got directly punished or not, but the results of their cheating disappeared.
Very much agree with the sentiment of the original poster. Hard core players who got involved in nominating moving stuff made the communities game play better by creating new stops/portals for the enjoyment of the player base . Some areas (including my had many new POIS and many new and existing players come back to the games and socially enjoy.
Now a month or so after these "new rules" many communities have been devastated. This has caused much trouble in various social media chats and discord groups, with people pretending to be virtuous in these forums by escalating their removal requests instead of improving the quality of the POIS and enjoying the games.
The new more vague rules on criteria should now tip the balance back to the community i hope with more things being elligible.
So you are saying that cheating should be allowed because "it makes the game(s) better"? Sorry that you lost Wayspot do to player's cheating the system, but "makes the game(s) better" is no justification for cheating.
Niantic made the informed decision to limit the number of gyms and pokestop per S14/S17 cells. And while you may consider that POI density is all that matters for a better gameplay experience, they're the one with a complete picture of the game architecture and functionalities. They have to take into account stuff like interface user-friendliness, technical performances in terms of battery and cpu consumption for instance, the way assets interact with each other... Maybe too many spots at the same place makes the game laggy, or they did some tests and concluded that cells and radius limitations were the easiest conditions to implement to limit assets overlapping so that players can still tap precisely on any element on the screen. Whatever their reasons are, that's what they decided. So maybe us at the other end of the app may disagree with that. We can think, and tell them, that a higher POI density would make the game better, but at the end of the day they're the ones who see all the moving parts and if they decide that no, more gyms/stops per area won't make for a better gameplay experience, we have to respect their decision.
So if you choose to ignore their rules and go against official guidelines to exploit a technical loophole to circumvent Niantic's decision, you have no right to be upset when they close it and clean up the mess you made afterward. As much as we can argue with them about guidelines through the lens of different cultural point of view or shortcomings of the review experience, when it comes to technical stuff, they knows their products better than us.
How the Go developers choose which Wayspots to include or exclude from their game is not a Wayfarer issue and is thus off topic for the Wayfarer forum.