October AMA Discussion Thread

2

Comments

  • AgentB0ssAgentB0ss ✭✭✭✭✭

    Honestly, I was shocked as well. I wasn’t concerned either direction. I think I may have have 2 or 3 I can submit in about 25 KM radius of me. 2 of them I know for sure are on trails without any markers so that will be nice.

  • kholman1kholman1 ✭✭✭✭

    That is my thing. I asked him that question specifically via private message recently when I saw two murals locally get approved in OPR at liquor stores that were on the side of the building and didn't have anything to do with the business. One was a willie nelson mural and the second was a moonshine mural which honestly is a part of american history nothing at either mentioned the stores at all. Glad he clarified it.

  • MicksterMickster ✭✭✭
    edited October 2019

    You may already know this, but just in case :

    In the US , we have 3 groups for schooling Primary / Elementary schools for students in grades 1-5 (Age 6-10) , Middle / Junior Schools for in grades 6-8 (11-13), and High Schools that are 9-12 (14- 17). Any education past the 12 Grade are Colleges / Universities. ( The K is for those 4-5 ish)

    So for us in the USA any school building that has students under the age of 18 are are not allowed.


    If you knew all of this, my apologies!

  • Just because it is used in a now old rejection reason doesnt mean it is still a valid reason to reject something

  • kholman1kholman1 ✭✭✭✭

    I just submitted these two bridges as points of interest. One is basic but it fits the answer krug mentioned and it connects a park with an activity center owned by the city. The second is a river crossing.

  • Interesting. Just based on these photos, prior to this AMA, I’d have likely rated the first poorly (from the picture it appears very generic). The second one looks pretty neat and even appears to have some writing (a name?) on that arch so I’d have probably given it higher marks.

  • kholman1kholman1 ✭✭✭✭

    This is why I use 16:9 photos for things like this to show better representation of objects as well.

  • KliffingtonKliffington ✭✭✭✭✭

    Its very hard to apply this globally but I think their intention is to ban all mandatory education centers? Plus preschools/daycares. In the US k-12 are compulsory campuses whereas going to college/University is a choice for continued education and is primarily made up of an adult student body.

  • I was also hoping for an answer to 'parks without a sign'. Maybe next time..

  • RostwoldRostwold ✭✭✭✭✭


    Quite possibly, but I think a really simple way for Niantic to communicate what their intention is would be to actually tell us!

  • KliffingtonKliffington ✭✭✭✭✭

    Yeah but they're very bad with words so I wouldn't hold my breath

  • kholman1kholman1 ✭✭✭✭

    I am just tired of bad voting. 3 portals in my area have gotten bad rejection reasons this week alone since prime reasons came online, Just had a plaza rejected as generic business when the sign is in front of a college basketball arena and on streetview. It is like people can vote in OPR without consequence if they don't have poor status.

  • GearGliderGearGlider ✭✭✭✭✭

    Even worse, the people who reviewed those properly now took a hit to their rating

  • KliffingtonKliffington ✭✭✭✭✭

    Yeah my community is already preparing to tank their ratings when reviewing swimming pools now that everything changed again

  • kholman1kholman1 ✭✭✭✭
    edited October 2019

    Eh same token goes for people voting properly on things like traffic circles with no pedestrian access and the majority of people refuse to deny it due to the sculpture inside it etc. I have an average of 69.5% of agreements from what I have voted on. I understand I am not going to be 100% but niantic probably knows there is going to be some percentage of skewing the numbers from what should expected if everything was done right. So they might have a lower threshold for great status than most of us think to compensate for the majority taking the agreement. My thing is it seems there is no gray area when voting and it seems people don't even give the submitter the benefit of doubt in some cases. I don't vote to earn the badge. I do it to help others and the upgrades are nice to push things through months ahead of time of what they normally would go through.

  • grendelwulfgrendelwulf ✭✭✭✭✭

    My trails have a bunch of wooden handmade Bridges in varying stages of disrepair after hurricanes and floods. I toyed with submitting one as "Trust-Fail Bridge" because you have to trust it won't fail you. The plank literally lifts off the ground on one side or the other depending on where the majority of weight is.

  • grendelwulfgrendelwulf ✭✭✭✭✭

    How wordy are your submissions? I've only run up against the limit once and that was trying to describe the story for the grave of one of the Lincoln A$$a$$ination co-conspirators and why only his head was buried in the grave.

  • GearGliderGearGlider ✭✭✭✭✭

    Sounds like you should not submit them because of unsafe pedestrain access.

  • For a lot of submissions like playgrounds and parks it is fine, but it is really limiting for ones that rely on establishing historical significance. I use the state heritage register to identify candidates and then submit things, explaining the background and history of the POI. This can be difficult to do clearly in 256 characters, and if not established enough then could cause an approval to become a rejection.

  • JSteve0JSteve0 ✭✭✭

    They really need to make a wayfarer map based on the intel map but with POIs from all three games and without the Ingress gameplay information.

  • 0X00FF000X00FF00 ✭✭✭✭✭

    I personally reeeeally want to see,at minimum, other POIs' locations during the submission process.

    On the one hand, that has the major benefit of removing duplicate submissions just because something isn't visible.

    On the other hand, Niantic is likely thinking that this WILL be abused, allowing bad actors to game the system by picking and choosing a spot based on other locations' map spots, instead of on their actual locations.

  • OchemistOchemist ✭✭✭
    edited October 2019


    To be clear, this only affects maybe 15% of my submissions, primarily historical buildings and interesting local businesses. Unfortunately, some of those are my favorite portals and I truly *love* doing these kinds of submissions. I've learned a ton about my community and its history from researching them (particularly historical buildings). Just walking around I've noticed small things that with digging have led to interesting portals.

    Unfortunately, a lot of these would never get accepted without detailed descriptions. For example, I just got a complex of buildings that's on the National Register of Historic Places accepted the other day. There is no sign and no particular feature that pops out to highlight in the photo, but the site is historically important and quite interesting. It was rejected the first time, and I was super-lucky in that it came back just a few days before the end of September so I was able to do another Redacted submission. That description was 713 characters, or a bit less than three times what Prime would allow. Might I have been able to trim some of it and still had success? Maybe, but not if I'd cut it down to a third.

    I've experimented with splitting the description to continue it in the submission statement, but that's a lot of work (it would ideally be done ahead of time in Word or a text editor to make sure the character counts work). It also means that all of the information is not available to players who come across these PoIs later and wonder about them.

    At one point I started trying to get hard statistics on the number of characters I've used on successful submissions in these categories, but got caught up with other things. I'd guess it's an average of at least 500, though.

    This is even more of a problem for those writing in certain other languages. French, for example, takes a lot more characters to say the same thing as English does.

    Anyway, at the moment I feel very fortunately in that this is much less of an issue because the Wayfarer edit box is much larger, thank goodness, I shouldn't say it too loudly, though, or they might "fix" that...

  • Regarding the title rating: In Finland we see titles and descriptions in many different languages, Russian, Belarusian, Latvian, Estonian, Swedish, Finnish and English. I can only give 1* or 5* ratings in Finnish and English. Google Translations are only approximate, so I usually give 3* for titles and descriptions in other languages.

  • TheFarixTheFarix ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited October 2019

    Q: There has been a sharp increase in the number of appeals involving wayspots located in restricted or limited access areas, such as gated communities, company properties, condo or apartment complexes, military bases, private islands, private clubs, etc. Despite many attempts to inform individuals that wayspots do not need to be accessible to all players or at all times, even going as far as citing previous AMA answers on the issue, they insist that the wayspots should be removed because it is fundamentally unfair for wayspots to be accessible only to a small group of players (particularly if it favors one team) and that Niantic should change its stance. What do you think Niantic can do to further educate players about waypoint accessibility and should restricted and limited access wayspots be covered by the Wayspot Acceptance Criteria?

  • KliffingtonKliffington ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited October 2019

    He's probably going to skip this because he's answered their complaints a hundred times but yes, why can't they actually write this into the guide.

    Also military bases are still only in the obstructs emergency services section. If they want people to not submit/reject them they should say so.

    (This is the old October thread, there's a new one for November)

  • kholman1kholman1 ✭✭✭✭

    Tell these people it isn't just about ingress? Only people I have seen complain are agents who feel it isn't fair because they can't go take out a secure portal. My only beef with portals on military bases is most don't want them and people are dumb enough to submit missile defense military bases which I have seen recently.

  • KliffingtonKliffington ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited October 2019

    You're still wrong about military bases. Lots of people live on bases and are allowed to play games freely. It should be on case by case and not a flat ban but rules are rules. It doesn't make sense for them to not put it in the ACTUAL rules though.

  • To be honest, your "question" is not a question, it's a request. I'm not surprised Krug decided to give it a non-answer.

    This is also not a proper AMA question. He will always avoid questions like this, read the previous AMAs and you would know that he will not give an answer. There are already some research on whether 2* is accept or reject, if you're interested. IDK where was it, though.

  • OGMagusOGMagus ✭✭✭

    There are 3rd party tools that give you one-click access to Google translate, but I agree that since Niantic designates POIs across borders translate support should be built in.

    "Q: Since many reviewers have foreign language portals (from neighboring countries) in their feed, could we get direct links to translation tools? As an aexample, in Finland, they get nominations in no less than 7 languages."

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