New portals without wayfarer?
Wayfarer is very time consuming. Is there any scope to add portals without going through wayfarer?
I really enjoy the mental task of complex microfielding. I've added many POIs through wayfarer.
My play area is in the suburbs so the density isn't that great.
There are big parks with many POIs not yet added. Which would be fabulous opportunities to have pockets of increased density.
Yet I don't want to waste reviewers time to get POIs into the game which will not be accessible by most Niantic players. As these in fill portals exist in cells that already have poi that exist in those games.
Seems selfish to add pois that will likely only be visited by myself or a few other agents for uniques.
I really like walkgress but locally to me so much cargress to make fancy homogeneous layer fields due the low density.
Is there any opportunity to submit portals to lightship outside of the wayfarer system.... A special project?
Comments
You’re not wasting anyone’s time by adding quality portal submissions into the game. I for one would love to see more high quality submissions in wayfarer, and people who like visiting and exploring in any of the Niantic games will appreciate there being more points of interest.
Submit from your Ingress Scanner using Circle button>Nominations
TLDR; Submit them in the game to go into Wayfarer review
Unfortunately, the quality of nominations and reviews on Wayfarer today is rapidly deteriorating.
For example, there are a large number of portals in some cities in the world, such as Spain, that can be considered false.
Also in Japan, due to Wayfarer staff's nonsense and arbitrary translation into Japanese, a message board that exists in an alley every 100 meters and is no different from the one next to it has been turned into portal after portal by Pokémon GO trainers.
There are even places where there are 15 message boards in an area called Level 14 of the S2 cell that they are often concerned about.
It's not very much, but anomaly or mission day would be impossible in such an area because the value of the whole area has disappeared.
And unlike us Ingress agents whose main goal is to visit portals, they don't care at all because their main goal is to catch imaginary monsters.
They don't question getting items and continuing to give trash can gifts to their friends, even if they are worthless trash cans.
Because it is best to receive it from home.
Well, in this situation, importing portals from the foursquare that the Wayfarer team has done in some countries may still be of better quality.
Most spots in foursquare are not worth a portal.
However, if we examine the location and quality, we can create a much better portal than the current situation in Japan.
Opening wayfarer to Pokemonners was a mistake.
I know about false submissions. A few suburbs to the west of me someone has added a number of POIs 60 to 80metres out I know they have done it for pogo. They are 4 cells off a 3rd gym... I don't like it but it's not my business to police other nominators. - I reserve my move and removal requests to critical edits ... Childrens' faces in portal pic or portals without safe pedestrian access.
I don't really care so much about "quality" POIs I'm an agent my job is to go to places not assess their interest value.
I really like fielding complicated fancy fields. Did a H5 for last first Saturday.
Adding the additional playground that was built 40m to the south of the old due to wheelchair access requirements, the 3 foot bridges along the bike paths, the half court, the separate full basketball court, the gardening group sign, the 4th park shelter would be awesome.
These aren't finest quality POIs but they are there.
I had a car accident last year and I really just want to make fancy micro fielding patterns by walking ... Not so much car.
To Niantic, they go through the same test as other Wayfarers. Don’t think Niantic expected abuse of cells and multi account Wayfarers and now it’s probably too late.
They even lowered the level for Wayfarer access on Pokémon GO lately.
Wayfarer review and submitting waypoints are two separate entities. You can submit waypoints all you want (by how many you have of course) and not review a thing in wayfarer. But you lose out on a small bonus you get, the per 100 agreements you achieve in wayfarer which is the "Upgrades" that make a submission more visible.
As for you comment on, "don't care about "quality" POIs" can get you into trouble as you should care for the quality if you want more waypoints. While I think there are waypoints that shouldn't be or those that can't be, you have to at least follow the criteria even when submitting. The more low quality submissions you do the more likely they are to be rejected. Something to think about.
Slightly off-topic, but with how many bugs there have been with lightship so far, I've lost interest in seeking out new wayspots/portals. Twice now, probably more, I've had wayspots never make it to Ingress, the one game I mostly play, even when following "rules" that should make sense for their inclusion.
@PkmnTrainerJ It's not too late. I can think of multiple ways to systemically stop the multi-account abuse, but Niantic needs to have the will to do it.
I don't care about "quality" yet the examples I gave were all eligible. Just are perceived by most as boring POIs as they are not fancy artworks or historic statues - that's what I meant by 'i don't care about quality'.
Have nominated for almost 5 years. 284 portals discovered. I do have an understanding about eligibility.
Yet if I could share my field to link ratio. 22380 fields to 19404 links - clearly very passionate for microfielding.
My question to Niantic is still: is there any possibility I can contribute portals to lightship without wayfarer? Would love to add the eligible portals in large parks my side of the city specifically because the POIs are there
I wish to reserve my wayfarer nominations for POIs that everyone can access.
is there any possibility I can contribute portals to lightship without wayfarer? Would love to add the eligible portals in large parks my side of the city specifically because the POIs are there
Simply put, Wayfarer is the only method.
Niantic would prefer you utilize the vast pool of reviewers to add POIs that are worth adding, than make a small underfunded group of Niantic employees take time out of developing the tools and software for the games to review "boring" submissions.
If a submission is of sufficient quality, Wayfarer is the best and effective method of having that submission come online. It's not a case of not wasting Wayfarer reviewers time, if the submission is sufficient quality to be accepted, because those volunteers are choosing to spend their time reviewing.
The only way you'd waste anyone's time is to submit POIs that aren't worthy of acceptance, but as long as they're normal things like Park signs, playgrounds etc, then they should go through Wayfarer.
You'd be wasting Niantic employee time by using an alternative path, and the whole point of the CSPRS->OPR->Wayfarer products is to allieviate the Niantic burden and stop wasting their time on something that the playerbase can support without significant intervention.
Wayfarer is literally volunteer work to help Niantic not waste time.
As a side note, I'm still surprised that PoGo hasn't implemented the disambiguation menu, and then increased the resolution of what POIs they accept, such that they're getting the same numbers as Ingress. Just seems like a wasted opportunity.
@Perringaiden That addresses the misclick issue (which exists now... half the time I tap my couch gym I get a nearby stop instead) but it doesn't address the visual clutter. The things in PoGo are much larger than Ingress portals and stuff on the ground, and increasing the density would almost certainly create too much visual clutter. I've seen screenshots of the fake clusters that were created by spoofers and there's no way I'd want to play PoGo at even half that density.
There are areas that have ridiculous numbers of spawns in PoGo... I think they're areas where people don't go very often and the spawns somehow build up? I'm not sure. Just trying to see everything in that area to figure out what I wanted to tap was nigh on impossible.
We told Niantic about this, flat out told them.
So junk wayspots get nominated, and approved.
Quality wayspots often were rejected.
Eg The project lead for Wayfarer has decided that tiny survey pucks, are acceptable. But are junk and can't be scanned for being too small.
Memorial benches still remain as ineligible.
I know. Pokemon submissions are main reason I no longer do reviews- I just can not be bothered reviewing when 90% are useless submissions of no value.
Many pogo players do make fabulous contributions to POIs I don't really want this thread to be derailed. Because pogo submissions are perceived as lower quality.
The portals I would want to add are eligible park POIs.
Yet make no mistake my desire to add these portals is because I want to play ingress the way I want. Walking in a park making complex patterns.
I'm a long term wayfarer contributor I see no offence at least asking if there were ways to make additional contributions.
In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with nominating eligible wayspots to enhance your possibilities in your favourite game. Many players do this, including PoGo players. In the end, your nominations will find other good uses, for example as part of a mission banner, or as anchors for a complex op.
I must admit that I benefitted from my own nominations for building HCF5s, and a planned future HCF6.
One of the reasons that PoGo submissions are perceived as lower-quality is because the player base is so huge. There was plenty of absolute rubbish in the queues before submissions were open to PoGo players. It's certainly gotten worse since PoGo players started submitting but it's not like Ingress submissions were a master class in excellence.
The bigger problem is the rampant abuse of Wayfarer. Multi-accounting is the norm in PoGo, and there are areas where a few players collaborate with all their accounts and basically make their own rules. I've personally found hundreds of fakes and had quite a few removed, though many still remain. There's an area within my local review range where all of the parks are filled with blatant fakes. I found a town in Vietnam that I knew was filled with fakes simply by glancing at the map... Niantic ended up removing more than 80 wayspots as a result, though I'm quite certain they missed some of the fakes. There are also areas where review bots dominate. I haven't followed that story too closely, but my impression is that the bots accept anything that was submitted by the bot-insiders and reject everything else.
Yep which is why I cannot be bothered submitting against Enl wayfarer scraping vanguards who are more interested in manipulating the portal network to the advantage of their faction than playing the game.
I even complained direct to Niantic Wayfarer admin with evidence. (Screenshot with wayfarer vanguard name with scraper output). Not even a reply.
Again, submitting portals has no impact on your time with wayfarer. You still have to fill out all the necessary information when submitting. It needs to go to the wayfarers to vote on it. That is why wayfarer exists. If it went back to the old way where NIA reviewed the portal submissions then we would not get any for half a decade. History lesson, NIA could not handle the amount of portals being submitted so they shut down the submission system for about two years (or more, it was quite some time for it being down) before coming out with OPR that is now known as Wayfarer.
When OPR went live I remember seeing tons of horrible submissions from Ingress players, used to have a chat group just for those long ago!
You can go through the same test, but when a majority approves **** poi's that are against the rules, those poi's still go live.
If Wayfarer can't police what goes live, then rules or who gets access really doesn't mean ****. Just a polluted database of portals.
I rarely see anything that is, oh that's awesome, I want to go there and see that. Usually its just, oh look a park that used to have 2 portals, now has 20-30+ junk portals (soo many 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 ect posts indicating the 0.1 mile from the last one). I will go once for the unique captures.
@EvilSuperHeros I still encounter many "Oh COOL!" submissions each week. The majority of the queue is a combination of bread-and-butter boring stuff like playgrounds and tennis courts plus a lot of neighborhood entrance signs, really generic businesses, and desperate attempts to get a couch stop.
The last wayfarer criteria update shifted the emphasis away from awesome high-quality portals towards places for exploration, places for exercise and places to be social. This lets people enjoy Niantic games also in places that are not cool and where no tourist ever sets her foot.
That was backwards, opr should of started with fresh nominations first then introduced the mess that was seer.....
@KarM3L IIRC there were no new submissions being taken when OPR went live because the backlog was so huge, and they only opened submissions again after OPR chewed through some of it. My memory may be wrong, though.
You are correct.
Portal submissions stopped, and we players berated Niantic for their slow turnaround times on reviewing submissions, even asking for us to have the ability to review them.
OPR came out, but it still took almost a year before (it felt like a year) until Niantic were comfortable with the quality of the reviews and the backlog down a considerable amount.
The reject rate I got was over 75%
Then submissions came back.
Slowly the quality improved.
Little did we know that OPR was already being rewritten and a separate dev team created to create this new system. Wayfarer.
Egged on by Niantic execs to make it open to pokemon go players got to nominate, then review.
It's been over 2 years now, and the quality is still garbage.
Niantic has since got sponsorship deals to enable wayspots to appear as part of this deal.
The Wayfarer dev team are working on releasing the Wayfarer App, to further remove Ingress from their portfolio, which enables anyone with an Ingress, Pokémon GO or developer account to nominate AND review nominations. Sometime in Q3 2022
The Wayfarer app would also remove Pokémon Go...a separate app should have been done from the start and as it's game agnostic - why would you even think Ingress should even get special priority for it at this point? It's been known since July 2016 that your contributions go through all of Niantic's games.
Lightship could be developing AI to pre-review nominations, and pass any obvious yes (where it has, say, 70+% confidence it's a yes), and reject any obvious no (where it has, say, 85% confidence it's a no). Anywhere it's not-so-confident could roll to humans to review. Maybe then we could work thru the backlog - LOTS of nominations are wait 6 months to 3 years for resolution.
AI is all the rage, and if they teach it Wayfarer, it might be adaptable for other purposes.
@MargariteDVille That sounds like an interesting idea! However, one of the things I always do with a proposal like this is ask, "How can this be gamed or abused?"
In this case I think it's very likely that people will test the system to see what gets auto-approved and then tailor their submissions to get past the automated review and never see human eyes. We'd wind up with a lot more fake wayspots than the already significant number that we have now.
OTOH, a while ago Niantic talked about putting systems in place to screen out obvious coal and I think they have actually implemented some of that maybe?