Is it possible to create a paid service for OPR?
Hello Niantic
First, sorry for my english (Google translation inside)
I am Henri. I live in Abidjan, economic capital of Ivory Coast. There are not enough players here due to the lack of portals. Nevertheless, I finally got level 10 but none of the 30 submissions for new portals have been validated or rejected for 7 months now.
I tried to find out why, and I read on some forums that the submitted portals arriving in OPR were analyzed by the level 12 players IN THE AREA where the submissions were made.
So reaching level 10 with few portals is not enough, but there must also be level 12 players in the same area to validate or reject new submissions. THIS IS LOGICALLY NOT POSSIBLE.
And I think that those who put this system in place did not think about cities that don't have enough portals or even not at all. I think maybe, I don't know, but maybe the players you have are enough for you. Because, with this logic no city with few portals can have Ingress players.
So now my question is: Is it possible to create a paid service for OPR? We could call it OPR+.
What do I mean by OPR+ :
- OPR+ will be paid, by subscription per month or by submission of portals.
- OPR+ will have to be managed by Niantic employees and will not have to go through the normal OPR.
- OPR+ will have to be fast since it will be paying.
- Limbo must not exist on OPR+.
- Give more information about the process of the OPR+ to avoid that some people waste their time and money. (For example, until today I have seen nowhere on Niantic's websites that creating photosphere improves the chances of validating a portal.)
- OPR+ will have to give more information in case of rejection of a submitted portal.
Thereby everyone wins. Niantic will earn money, players like me will no longer see their portal submissions ignored by subscribing to OPR+, and other non-interested players will continue on OPR.
Let us pay for better service.
Cordially
Best Answer
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msz21
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So this exact scenario has happened before in Morroco to be exact and how they resolved it. There are a few ways to tackle it and you won't like these options since you won't have immediate results. Could be up to 6 months before you get even 1 approval
First thing to do is aim for level 12, even though it seems impossible in a low dense portal area, maximize your AP gain and get all the badges you can get. A submitter does not necessarily mean that you know you are submitting inadequate candidates. The higher the quality of candidate the faster it gets approved. The second reason is upgrades. My normal portal response for my area had turned from 3 months to 7 months now because they allowed submitting from both versions of the scanner. The only reason I get approvals now is Upgrades. You can choose your bonus location to a high dense portal area when reviewing so you can get constant upgrades as a result of reviewing.
Second thing you can do is request other reviewers to choose your local area as a bonus location. You can make a plea on the OPR subreddit where they have a massive thread with plenty of people in your exact same scenario.
Third thing, get other players from your community to 12. The more reviewers you get, is the only sustainable way of getting portals approved in the long term.
Last but not least is actually the paying option that you are talking about. Most players do not know this since no one advertises about it but there is one way to prioritize your candidates and get them reviewed from Niantic. It is called OPR Live. You can only partake in this if you go to an anomaly and basically your last 14 submissions get decisions on and it's a paid service. There's limited spots to partake in this but this is if your willing to fly to another major city to participate for the actual event for this to be option.
Unfortunately at the moment these are all the options you have available to you.
8
Answers
Sorry but no because this can be used to make the game P2W.
Say you have one area dominated by one fraction, they can then pay to have more portals they submit be processed further therby increasing their donination of the area.
Dont get me wrong if they made a submission and it goes through normal OPR then yes their area will still increase, but not at the detriment to the opposite team who choose not to pay.
It could potential create to much of an imbalance.
Thats without considering people who would happily pay money to try and get an invalid couch portal through
@Theisman assumes that more portals mean more control. My experience is that control comes from couch/desk portals, throwing large, layered fields and leaving portals under the fields uncapped. More portals means more opportunity for a derp or blocking link. If a faction is aiming to maximise MU/regional score they'll want strategic portals but not necessarily more.
Bad Idea. Just ask high lvl players from the community to help
My thinking isnt necessarily more control but that can be factored into it, i was more thinking
Village A has one portal and one agent, agent X subs 10 portals, in meantime has to wait for OPR to complete which can take weeks (months in some cases still unfortunately ) and can only hack the one portal
VIllage B has one portal and one agent of the opposing team, Agent Y subs 10 portals, the same day as Agent X but pays for them to be fast tracked, they then get 10 new portals within a couple of days. They now have access to a lot more gear because they have paid for their submissions to be processed.
thats what I was meaning by P2W
On a side note, i dont know what area you play but both factions around my way routinely capture and field ALL portals in an area, and control areas by making lots and lots of small fields layered with bigger ones etc, to maximise MU and area donination
How about no, but I just set my bonus location to there?
So this exact scenario has happened before in Morroco to be exact and how they resolved it. There are a few ways to tackle it and you won't like these options since you won't have immediate results. Could be up to 6 months before you get even 1 approval
First thing to do is aim for level 12, even though it seems impossible in a low dense portal area, maximize your AP gain and get all the badges you can get. A submitter does not necessarily mean that you know you are submitting inadequate candidates. The higher the quality of candidate the faster it gets approved. The second reason is upgrades. My normal portal response for my area had turned from 3 months to 7 months now because they allowed submitting from both versions of the scanner. The only reason I get approvals now is Upgrades. You can choose your bonus location to a high dense portal area when reviewing so you can get constant upgrades as a result of reviewing.
Second thing you can do is request other reviewers to choose your local area as a bonus location. You can make a plea on the OPR subreddit where they have a massive thread with plenty of people in your exact same scenario.
Third thing, get other players from your community to 12. The more reviewers you get, is the only sustainable way of getting portals approved in the long term.
Last but not least is actually the paying option that you are talking about. Most players do not know this since no one advertises about it but there is one way to prioritize your candidates and get them reviewed from Niantic. It is called OPR Live. You can only partake in this if you go to an anomaly and basically your last 14 submissions get decisions on and it's a paid service. There's limited spots to partake in this but this is if your willing to fly to another major city to participate for the actual event for this to be option.
Unfortunately at the moment these are all the options you have available to you.
What makes me smile is that Niantic should pay us, since we are all working for them for free, building their POI database.
I have reviewed 17,000 portals so far; let’s say I took one minute per portal, that means 17,000 minutes or 283 hours. If I was a Niantic employee I would be paid at least 10$/hour, which is 2,830$.
Instead, players (who are customers, let’s not forget that) are begging Niantic to take their money for something they should already do.
@StefanoMatra You have to understand how OPR developed. Initially Niantic did reviews manually but do you know what happened? Half of the candidates were purposely sent as bad candidates where selfies, rude comments and other clear abuse would be hurled at them.
It was right before Pokemon Go was released that they shut down the manual reviewing and submitting capability because they probably couldn't keep up with the demand and a new game. OPR was the solution where if the players wanted new portals they have to review their own candidates they submit and as a result the quality drastically improved because it wasn't an email to Niantic anymore.
Now it is unfortunate that because it is a cycle of dependent on local reviewers to get portals approved but eventually as time progresses, areas that were portal-less will get portals and Niantic keep up with all these submissions since even Pokemon Go players can submit in many countries now.
@msz21 I understand your point, even though it’s not completely correct, since I had Niantic manually edit a few pokéstops until a year ago, so they kept doing it after Pokémon GO was released. The point is, like it or not, that with the excuse of making the game better for the community, we are doing their job. And I would be fine with that if they helped me out when I have some submissions/edits pending for months or even years. But no, they tell you to just wait. That’s the part that I hate and it’s unacceptable for me. Not only I am doing something that I shouldn’t be doing, not only I have analyzes thousand of portals on their behalf, but they even refuse to help me with ONE request? Unreal.
I just wrote a post on how we should be able to get one of our submissions manually reviewed every a certain amount of analysis or agreements.
@HenriTiny You can try to publish your coordinates and ask for help. Some L12 agents may be kind enough to choose your town as their bonus location to help you push through your nominations. I suggest a separate post here, not an edit to this thread.
Google Maps link would work best as it makes it easier to see your location on the map and then zoom down to it in the OPR bonus location interface.
Location does not have to be very precise. I get portals for review within 10-20 km radius from my bonus location.
Too bad, I was waiting for an admin to give me a clear answer, possible or not possible.
I accept your answer @msz21 because it is quite detailed and I did not know bonus location.
@Theisman I think the P2W already exists in Ingress through the shop even if we do not really feel it.
@StefanoMatra If Niantic had to pay reviewers they would have closed since the submission of the portals is free. But if a paid service existed the participating reviewers will necessarily gain something in return, such as MCU for example (I saw a post somewhere about it).
It's not the perfect solution but I'm going to look at bonus location
Thank you all and sorry for my english.
@HenriTiny You can also choose a home location where there a lot of candidates too since it also gives a very large amount of candidates to review however you won't be able to ever change this location. A bonus location you can change yearly.
I also forgot you can contact Niantic Support system however I don't think they will address your situation since I don't know if your candidates are already Upgrades. They apparently fast track upgrades which are in limbo if Niantic has been informed that they are in limbo.