Question about a discontinued medal
I've been wondering for a while now why you can't get the Seer medal if you have nominated new portals in Ingress. I've suggested about 20 portals at this moment and it would be really cool to be able to get a medal for a profile related to the topic. And why has that Seer medal been taken away so that you can't get it anymore? It will be 7 years soon since that medal was removed. If it came back, newer agents (like me) would be inspired to suggest new portals.
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>If it came back, newer agents (like me) would be inspired to suggest new portals.
This is exactly why it was removed. People started to submit so much trash and clogged the queue that Niantic had to disable Portal nominations for almost 2 years. They were only re-enabled once OPR (now Niantic Wayfarer) cleared most of the backlog. I assume Niantic doesn't want to re-enable it out of fear that the backlog will get clogged up again with trash*.
Fun fact, if you submitted a portal before Niantic disabled submissions and it gets approved today, you still get a point towards the Seer badge, which means that some people still get it even today.
*yes yes I know the next comment will probably be "but Pokemon GO"
I don't think the queue can have more trash than it does now.
The amount and quality of garbage in OPR was bad. I recall getting a number of submissions from one person in particular, trying to advertise his house for... less that legal activities. Pictures of his house, of himself, inside his house. What we have nowadays hasn't been as bad, but it's still so depressing to see so much garbage submitted that I have to be really bored to bother opening Wayfarer. People should be required to take a test, similar to the one you have to do to start reviewing POI in Wayfarer.
Heck, I'd actually like to see submissions removed from Ingress and PoGo completely, and have submissions come through a Wayfarer/Lightship specific app.
Pokémon GO players do now have to take a test to submit and review when they reach level 38.
However it’s only new players. Also, it’s the same test as for access to Wayfarer and provides submission and review access when passed.
Also, you can attempt the test every 15 minutes.
Also, you get unlimited attempts.
No issues there I suppose.
Because portals discovered stat has not been updated recently, which was working perfectly fine..
For anyone new to this have no context on the history.
Ingress came out as an alpha in November 2012, is players submitted wayspots, by email.
Niantic employees were reviewing every submission. Every single Niantic Employee at it the peak was eventually doing portal submission reviews, including John Hanke.
Started at thousands a week. And it was growing up fast each month. To over 50,000 per day.
Badges were introduced (Seer being one of them), and the problem Niantic faced was too great to keep doing what they were doing.
Coupled with the anger and hate from Ingress players, frustrated with waiting on average 12 months for their submission to be reviewed. Calling Niantic staff hateful things.
Eventually it got so toxic that players even began to beg Niantic to be able to review submissions, out of shear frustration at waiting so long.
So with a backlog of millions of submissions, and unable to keep doing what they were doing, they eventually halted all submissions and then eventually stopped reviewing them while they developed the tool OPR (Operation Portal Recon), available to a select few L16 players at the time reviewing the backlog of submissions.
Soon after, L16 players everywhere were able to review submissions. And the Seer Badge was locked.
The absolute shocking number of absolute garbage submissions we were reviewing that, calling them garbage is too kind of a word, unfortunately we can't use any stronger words in this forum to describe how bad they were. Little over a year later submissions were enabled again, we players eventually got to a point where we were reviewing quality submissions, ~80% were good.
About a year after that, Wayfarer was introduced as the replacement for Operation Portal Recon, and it was announced that pokemon go players would be able to review nominations.
Pokémon GO players who only play their game, used Ingress to nominate wayspots for their game, and reviewing them in such a way that even the absolute garbage was being accepted in all the wrong places. Niantic were forewarned about this abuse of the nomination system by Pokémon GO players, from us Ingress players, undoing all the hard efforts us Ingress players had done to educate other players on how to nominate quality wayspots.
Wayfarer has been in place now for a couple of years, and the quality is still bad, and the abuse of Wayfarer to bias for pokemon go is still evident.
At the end of this if you are still reading.
Moral of the history is this, Seer will never be unlocked, the only badge to aim for is Recon. Because Seer encouraged garbage!
Now that Seer is gone, does that stop people from nominating garbages? Na-da. With or without said badge, garbage nominations will always be there. Do you really think a digital badge that practically has no in-game benefit other than being a nice, little decoration in your agent profile is what encourages people to nominate those garbages? Wakey-wakey, grandpa, Ingress is no longer the only game that uses Niantic POI database.
What happened in this thread is just:
New Agent: Bring back old badges, we want them, too.
Old Timer: Nope! You are new. These old badges are the only thing that make us, old people, special! We are special because we play the game longer than you do!
Elitism at its finest.
The issue was the tiers of Seer were unrealistic for Onyx. None of the medals have a tier that multiples by 10 for the next one. People who were good with submitting items usually had around 500 approvals by the time the queue came to a halt. I think that should have been the realistic onyx tier. I only remember one person achieving onyx (which is 5000 approvals).
Not a problem anymore since people already submit trash anyway nowdays.
And now it's the community that reviews, so Niantic doesn't have to worry about that anymore.
I have always been in the Camp of No return of Seer. However, It could work, with changes.
First of, change the Onyx Target to 500, and adjust other Badge levels accordingly. Limit the amount that people have to get approved to get the Badge. The original target of 5000 is ridiculous. Having such a high target meant people would just nominate anything to see if it "stuck". Reducing the target may encourage higher quality nominations.
Secondly, make them review in Wayfarer to earn nominations. Maybe you get a very low amount of nominations every week (or whatever period you want to use month, quarter - whatever), and then to get more nominations, you have to earn them by doing Wayfarer "work". Of course, you have to maintain a Good/Great rating in Wayfarer to get your nominations. Maybe you get more for maintaining "Great".
The overall system needs to be improved though. I know some very dense areas nominations can sit for years without being reviewed, while other areas sail through in days.
Lastly, if you consistently nominate garbage, that gets rejected time after time, maybe there is a penalty. Not every reject is garbage, so I don't know how people get flagged for this. I also don't know what the penalty would look like, but we really need a carrot and stick to prevent people from just nominating their toilet, their x-box, their fire hydrant - whatever. (all real things I have reviewed)
They could make a new badge and all problems are gone. Have always CD on nominations and now i'm on 666 discovered.
Sadly, it wouldn't
It would have the effect that we had with Seer, in that it would encourage people to nominate garbage
People are already nominating garbage.
Seer doesnt change anything ppl still submit low quality submissions and I dont even review long ago since i have double onyx so i dont see why mention seer when problem still exist today
I See no problem with that. I See so much fakes and garage since pogo Player can submit. And since recon/wayfarer is online nia doesn't have more work.
Big difference between garbage nominations, and Niantic encouraging garbage nominations
Or Niantic skipping nominations altogether and placing garbage POI straight to the games…
Please tell us the number of next weeks lottery.
Wait, niantic tried to manually review EVERYTHING?
...No wonder wayfarer become such a train wreck.
Nope, Wayfarer is an evolution of Operation Portal Recon, which was for Ingress players only.
The train wreck is that there is a massive bias to specific games (pokemon go), which I very clearly stated would be a massive issue when it was going to enable pogo players.
Still is a massive problem and the Wayfarer community is incredibly toxic that I don't visit it often.
@NianticThia hopefully you can pass that information onto the Wayfarer team
problem is mainly that you don't have to earn nomination, and then can submit anything you want.
Nomination should be granted every 10 / 50 agreement, so people would see the rules and it would reduce the absurd queue in wayfarer that is now longer than before OPR.
I would like to see Seer returned or a new badge to replace it. The tiers need to drastically be addressed though. The badge won't change the quality of the nominations we are already seeing when reviewing.
If with the Seer medal, there were requests for low quality wayspots. The medal was withdrawn and continued requests for low quality wayspots and in addition Niantic itself created several low quality wayspots.
So why can't this medal come back?
It's been proven that requests for low-quality wayspots are not the medal's fault.
Not all pogo players are that bad with wayfarer. That’s also ignoring the players like myself that started playing ingress to get into wayfarer sooner. Don’t blame us, this all happened because niantic decided to use the same backend for both games, and didn’t polish the system well enough in advance.
Not all.
But there is still a very sizable group of pogo players deliberately and maliciously manipulating Wayfarer constantly.
Seeing good well established portals get deleted, in the attempt to get a gym, regularly shows how little disregard there is of other games and products that need that same wayspots, which do not appear because of this sizable pogo group.
My feed is constantly like this, I wanna gym here, how do I remove/move this portal?
The Wayfarer community forum is the same.
But for this medal to come back, I would have to review the medal levels, 10 - bronze, 50 - silver, 200 - gold, 500 platinum and 5000 onyx.
I think the demands to release a new level of medal were too high. that's why there were so many requests for crappy wayspots.
It's odd to place blame completely on Go when the issue is with Niantic. Gamification of wayspots will happen regardless of any app used because if there's a will, there will be some way to make it an advantage.
People will want a home or work wayspot if they can squeeze the criteria enough to make it fit the guidelines. The benefit is really regardless of the game as it's game agnostic. There's definitely a different level of play between the games.
Niantic is horrible with communication. I really don't think all Go nominations are horrible and they can be legit attempts at providing quality submissions. However, the feedback given on rejections has been on a range from a boiler plate template to very incorrect reasons. We're also dealing with about 5 years of POIs with different guidelines from time to time. If I had no idea what to submit and saw other POIs that were grandfathered in - it's really not clear as well.