When submitting a Wayspot Appeal, make sure to include as much of the following information as possible:
Wayspot Title: The Cliffs
Location (lat/lon): 39.9794,-75.194122
City: Philadelphia
Country: USA
Additional Information (if any):
This is a set of abandoned ruins of the burned-down home of Sarah Franklin Bache. I understand it is historic, but why is it a gym, let alone an elite raid gym?
To get to this, you have to walk through a disc golf course into a series of abandoned trails. There’s no lighting and no safe trail markers, and it is totally overgrown. The building is surrounded by trash and broken glass, and is frequented by drug users and the unhoused. It is also actively falling apart. This is not safe!
None of this is a problem for wayspot eligibility.
This is relevant, but you may need to provide evidence of this. However, you have acknowledged that it is historic and therefore of interest for exploring.
This Wayspot doesn’t meet our criteria for removal at this time.
While we understand your disappointment about the location of this Gym, based on our research, it does not require any adjustments currently. Our games are meant to augment reality, not replace it. If you’re not certain you have the right to access a location or are not certain it is safe to access, please do not make any attempts to do so. As a player or any other member of the community, you must respect access restrictions, never trespass, or in any manner gain or attempt to gain access to any property or location where you do not have the right or permission to be. Please review and follow the Player Guidelines at all times while playing our games to ensure a safe and enjoyable experience for everyone!
I wanted to address this issue. This is a public forum and every member is welcome to share their opinions. While I understand the difference of opinion, I strongly believe that @salixsorbus was trying to help based on their experience.
You can choose to disengage. You also have the option to report posts that you believe are in violation of the forum decorum and we will review the report in light of our guidelines.
I asked them to stop responding to me, that was all. Obviously that was taken as a problem. I am not trying to argue with strangers, I am only interested in the opinion of Niantic staff. Thank you.
I agree that I wouldn’t want to raid here, but there are plenty of gyms I skip for raiding. I focus my raiding time on gyms in parks or densely packed city areas.
To be clear, it’s a GREAT piece of Urbex and I have no problem with it being in the game in some capacity. In my mind, gyms should be safe places where the whole family or people with disabilities can go, whereas stops should have more leeway.
I do not disagree with you. Unfortunately, that’s not how Pokemon GO sees it. This is not an issue Wayfarer can control or manage. Pokemon GO sets the mechanism for how stops become gyms. They don’t apply any logic like that. And, to be fair, it would be really difficult to automate that kind of logic across the entire globe.
I agree with you regarding automation, I thought the point of appealing was to raise these types of issues when the automation process assigns a gym to something like this? In my mind, they would go, “hey yeah that doesn’t look ideal for a gym” and mark it for a change to a stop.
There are so many other safe stops in the area that could easily become gyms, so I’m a bit confused I suppose. Thanks for the explanation.
The reason I made all of these posts this morning is that my local raid group is large, parents bring all of their kids, etc., and we keep running into issues with 3 specific gyms that are just not safe to go to. It’s a shame that we seemingly have no remedy for this.
Is there anyone in charge of that property you could contact? I brought attention to the property manager that a statue deep inside a world class disc golf course (Diavola) had become a gym (and explained what that meant), and he contacted Niantic and had it downgraded back to a Pokestop. They will do that for property owner requests. I had honestly thought that he would have it removed, but left that up to him.
I guess it can be confusing. But we try our best here in the forums to explain that Wayfarer is only about managing the wayspots on the map. Each game (remember that the map also feeds Pikmin Bloom and Monster Hunter Now) is responsible for how they choose to use those spots, if at all.
I actually don’t know, I think the property it sits on is now city-owned, since it’s outside of the disc golf course. Maybe the city but I really doubt they would do anything about it!
Isn’t letting Niantic know that a gym is potentially unsafe or a liability, “managing the wayspots on the map”? Genuine question, I am not trying to be difficult.
It seems to me that Niantic automatically converted things into gyms based on some metric(s), and we should be able to say, “Hi, we are residents here and this is not a good gathering spot for our families to play this game.”
Thank you for your input regardless. I suppose this has been a pretty rough learning experience for me. I feel very beaten up by these forum responses.
