Hello everyone,
I wanted to bring to your attention an important announcement from the official Ingress Telegram channel on July 31, 2024. The message revealed that Foursquare portals in Türkiye will be removed. Here’s the announcement:
Attention Turkish Agents –
As you may have deciphered, Machina is currently disabled throughout most of Türkiye. The NIA is working to update the Portal Network there to include only Portals approved by Agents and Wayfarers that have been accepted by Niantic Wayfarer, like we do in all other regions. Additionally, we’ve intercepted Signals Intelligence with just one phrase: machina veniet.
Additionally, there’s a relevant discussion thread posted by @PkmnTrainerJ here.
For over three years, the Ingress community in Türkiye has worked hard to improve these Foursquare portals by adding photos, updating titles, and enhancing descriptions. These efforts have transformed many portals from their original state into well-developed ones.
However, the removal of Foursquare portals raises several concerns among the Ingress players in Türkiye:
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Loss of Improvements: Many players have invested time and effort to upgrade these Foursquare portals, effectively turning them into “normal” portals. Losing these would mean losing all these enhancements. (For example see below)
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Significant Portal Reduction: If all Foursquare portals are removed, it could mean the deletion of over 300,000 portals. This would significantly impact gameplay and portal density in the region. (For estimates see below)
To address these concerns, we have a couple of suggestions:
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Increase Submission Limits: Given the potential loss of portals, is it possible for Niantic to allow more waypoint submissions in the Türkiye region to help rebuild the network?
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Include Türkiye in Wayfarer Challenge Events: If feasible, adding Türkiye to the next Wayfarer Challenge event could encourage more submissions and support the community in restoring portal numbers.
We hope these suggestions can help mitigate the impact of these changes and support the Ingress community in Türkiye. Thank you for considering our concerns, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Example:
Hamitköy
Hamitköy was one of our destinations when were playing Ingress. It was a small village with a nice entrance sign. We’ve added photos while we were on the location. It got removed later but we were able to bring it back with the help of Wayfarer forum. See thread here.
Estimates in numbers:
In Ingress there is a feature called Missions which can be created by the players after hitting certain level threshold. In order to create Missions for Ingress you need to select them in a map. If you zoom out you are able too see the numbers of portals live in the game. Right now in Türkiye it’s over 800.000 portals. (I stopped after counting to 791.000). As we know the history of Türkiye and overall agent numbers and the portal count on Mission Creator Page before the import we can give an estimate of minimum 300.000 portals will be deleted from the Ingress.
