As others are saying it’s not the people saying it wasn’t them making the request that matters, it’s the requester that is key. So your suggestion about letters is not going to hold water.
I think attempts to track down the source are going to take time. It will take a lot of effort too, so make sure you have support. You also need to be optimistic but be ready to accept that you may get a firm refusal against change.
I do think that as a community you need to adapt and identify new areas to develop as hubs. There is nothing to lose in doing this. You have a community goal to improve things in the short term and if you get some rollback in the long term you have an overall better play area. Try and consider how the wider community may react to this, you need their buy in.
Wayfarer can help with looking for new eligible wayspots and making good submissions that will be acceptable, should help develop those areas. As observations have shown that powerspots can be unused wayspots do consider submitting not just for pokestops and gyms.
Perhaps when talking to the wider community if you can develop support, local groups may be receptive to improving the areas for everyone. Ideas around information boards, biodiversity, public location for little free libraries, community art projects, health walking running trails.
This community will be happy to help if you need it with nomination support.
If this happened to me my first thought would not be that I need to spend more time creating waypoints and hope they stick around this time but instead that maybe I should find something else to do entirely.
i feel bad for all the folks who purchased global gofest tickets with no idea their play area would be demolished. i think how the pokemon go team handles this would determine whether i continued to play or not.
It’s interesting to say the least that what powers have over a larger area.
I don’t think going business to business and asking about it is going to change much because this is probably a military request. They probably feel that the community/town/businesses next to where the military operates is sensitive as well. Maybe they think that members of the military can be tracked through the game or something? The idea of scanning public areas in town could be a red flag for them too. Especially with the ownership of Scopley tied to the government of Saudi Arabia. I don’t know if it’s possible to make wayspots ineligible to be scanned but I don’t think anything is going to get reversed.
I have to say it sucks, as others have said, especially spending all the money on GoFest bundles to find out your entire area is gone.
Updated 7/1. We had 6 gyms and a dozen or so stops reappear downtown and another area in town got a few restored too. I reached out to everyone I could during this process with facts and data. There were atleast 3 of us very actively pursuing getting these back. Not sure what the final tipping point was. But thank you soooo much. Also thank you to everyone on this post with all the feed back, admin team and Niantic employees. You are the best!
That’s awesome, it would be great if you could give an outline to your actions from area wipe to area restore. So in the future someone with a similar problem might search up this forum and see your success story.
I wonder if your experience might be a part of the new normal, where something inspires The Company to remove some things and then perform a ‘reset’ on their map.
Are the gyms all same name, same location, same status (gold badges, etc)?
Either way, I’m glad to hear things were restored!
I think Wayfarer would still have to be contacted by the PO to have the Wayspots restored, not for Wayfarer to just restore then without the consent of the PO. That could lead to possible legal action if they were restored without the consent of the PO.
I think this is more the work of the players in these areas asking around and seeing who could help get them restored. That’s what was recommended: to try and find out who may have requested the removals as a PO, and if base command didn’t do it, they may have reported it to the correct personnel to work out some kind of compromise.
Also, just looking at some of the reports from others online (see the Reddit thread below), it seems that this is mostly at Marine bases and installations. There are others that were reported as being removed, not just the 4 I had originally found. Seems like it’s more worldwide instead of just the US, as the base in Okinawa only has a SoftBank sponsored stop and nothing else.
Just a thought, is it possible that Niantic play safe when they are asked for a Geo-Lock and increase the radius.
When this has come to their attention someone has checked the original request and narrowed the Geo-Lock which has allowed “some” waypoints to be re-instated.
So, it seemed like it was areas that were both on and off-base that were removed, and so it’s possible that some of the off-base locations have now been restored. L15 cells are typically used to block military zones, and it could be that these were a little too large, and blocked the off-base sites. They may have also asked the PO if the off-base sites could be restored, and if the PO agreed, removed the blocks in those areas.
Staff would most likely still have to work with the PO that requested removal in any case, to make sure there’s no trouble with restoring any off-base Wayspots.
Staff says property owner(s) made the request, and I seem to recall some cases where they found upon investigation that an original geo-fence was placed on the wrong side of the road or something and was later adjusted.
It makes a certain kind of sense that there could be some give-and-take when multiple property owners are involved.
It also could be a bit strange if the U.S. Marine Corps were to tell the operator of a Sonic fast food restaurant that customers could not use the Sonic app due to national security concerns. So, they can use that app, but they can no longer spin a PokeStop?
It’s all assumptions but I could see that if a Geo-Lock is to be put in place, find the middle point, find the distance to the furthest point, add a bit to be safe and create a circle.
This would the easiest way but would include some area that shouldn’t be.
Someone has taken a look and altered the boundry so it doesn’t include as much of the “outside of the limit” as it did giving some of the waypoints back.
Again, this is all assumptions but I am hoping that it is down to someone at Niantic listening to its players and putting in the effort, if this is the case then credit should be given.
If not, then at least some thing as happened and the OP has got an outcome that is probably the best he could have hoped for. When I first read this post my original though was nothing would change…
