Camp Navarro portal removed due to ignorance of Wayfarer team
@NianticBrian @NianticThia and @ace
I appeal this urgently.
The following was recently posted on the Wayfarer forum.
'There is a mysterious Pokestop in Antarctica.'
Many insightful Wayfinders who saw it wrote: "That is the portal used for the event we held at Camp Navarro. After the event, it was legally moved to Antarctica where it is least accessible by the Ingress team" in response.
Similarly, some wayspots have been moved to Antarctica for various reasons.
The most recent example is Ito-En's XM-Profiler.
However, the Wayfarer team, completely ignorant of Niantic's history, suddenly removed the Camp Navarro portal.
https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=-82.8623643%2C134.9700593&z=17
The only correct solution this time was to copy these wayspots from the Lightship database managed by the Wayfarer team to another location database managed by the Ingress team. After making sure that all portal keys, etc., were preserved, copy them to the Lightship This method is to remove them from the database.
But that method was not taken.
I don't participate in Camp Navarro.
However, I know Ingress agents who attended Camp Navarro, kept this portal key and were looking forward to Camp Navarro being held again.
And there has been a significant decline in the quality of the Ingress portal network over the past few years.
It can be said that our game is teetering on the brink.
Ingress cannot be a game without a high-quality portal network.
We are motivated to go to great places because of high-quality portal networks.
However, the current situation is terrible.
The message board is like a game of neurasthenia that is completely indistinguishable from the others, the chain stores of Niantic's sponsored rivals, the mere road signs, rocks, etc. None of these things make our visit worthwhile.
But the Wayfarer team is trying to destroy everything, starting with last year's heavy-handed import of the Foursquare database.
I don't like Ingress being destroyed by the Wayfarer team.
The Ingress team should forcefully protest the Wayfarer team for this outrage.
And I hope they will show the utmost sincerity to the participants of Camp Navarro who have been harmed this time.
Comments
This is outrageous! It's unfair!
Those wayspots should have been at least converted to Ingress-only portals, instead of being removed entirely. Something similar to Pokemon Go's sponsored locations perhaps could work? Hopefully those portals are restored in this way or another...
I hope this gets fixed because our teams worked our butts off on these portals and were told we would always have access to them for events in the future. I am terrified to move my teams key from the keylocker I have it in as it now says scanner communications error as the name.... this needs to be handled.
This is pretty bad. The Navarro and Kaltenberg events were important landmarks for ingress and the agent-made portals was such a unique an amazing experience.
This is terrible. Such a beautiful thing that fully embodied the community involvement and creation part of ingress is being deleted just because people from other games don't know any better.
And how does this bother them? Those portals are inaccesible so they shouldn't bother anyone (yes, yes, they could be spoofed, but is that a reason to ruin this for anyone else?)
I think that this sends the wrong message. This makes it seem like ingress events and ingress players are not important and that we can just be victims of wayfarer. Isn't there any staff to look after this sort of thing to prevent it from happening?
We need this portals be restored as soon as possible and have some method to ensure this doesn't happen again.
Wayfarer team couldn't even see the trolls cell connection on the top bar showing he spoofed there to take the pics
From the trolls post, bars right there at the top
https://us.v-cdn.net/6032079/uploads/25V4K0L8K5X7/screenshot-20221215-182106-maps.jpg
Wow. I am actually lost for words.
I'm also worried that the action Niantic took against the wayfarer's that approved such obvious fake wayspots has resulted in the whole ingress team being banned from their own games /s
This incident makes me keenly aware of the need to separate the location database from certain games that catch fictional creatures.
Unlike their games to us, a low-quality portal network is a fatal blow to gameplay.
It would be better to stop location syncing as in NBA and Pikmin.
And I like an idiot took mine out just now to look at it. My TS Morphius key went poof. What the heck???
It is thought that many of your associates, including yourself, are victims of this incident.
Therefore, please contact your community and voice your protest to the Wayfarer forum, including making sure that you do not move your capsules or key lockers if you have them in your lockers.
I am an outsider myself, although I was the first to notice it as I was browsing the Wayfarer forum.
Therefore, the voices of those involved are important.
so sad how was these portals not firewalled there and protected? 🤔 hope niantic investigate and restore this asap
Wayfarer team staff: “Okay, we’ve had a report of an invalid Wayspot in Antarctica.”
Other Wayfarer team staff: “Antarctica? How did they get there?”
WTS: “Hiking they said. I’m sure they’re not spoofing, it’s fine. We are all good to remove these right?”
Pokémon GO team: “Yeah, go for it.”
Ingress team: “…” (just kidding, they were not asked)
Now is not the time for us to hear Cool English Jokes.
Please wait until after this issue is finished.
Point taken. I’ll refrain until it’s sorted.
The Ingress Team have been made aware of this and looking at addressing it.
We'll have to wait on them to discuss what exactly can be done in terms of keys which we completely appreciate is a very emotive subject (I was a creator for Surrealist Dreams at Kaltenberg).
Preventing this happening in the future for other significant Ingress portals is also being discussed.
Add a little flag in the data for "special game specific waypoints". By rights, those particular portals really are relevant to Ingress only and don't belong in any other games.
Days since latest huge Niantic ****up: 0.
Bet the keys won't be recovered.
"Why are we still here? Just to suffer?"
Please, I know the urge to act quick but you should calm down. They are aware of the situation, trying to fix this mess. If you want to blame someone, blame that trainer who spoofed at that location and lied.
Blame? He should automatically get a ban on all accounts in all games. After all, he showed screenshots that he was playing as a spoof.
They should of been like the old portal gem. Where it basically can't be deleted.
I agree with you, he should have all their accounts banned. We don't know if this is a mock up account too
This is not a problem for Niantic, check the forum logs and which game accounts are running on the same device.
Even if it is a spoofer, that is an issue that should be dealt with later.
The priority now is to get the portal and keys back to where and who they belong.
The next thing is to get the Wayfarer team to submit an apology and a plan to prevent this from happening again.
Look, we can be downers about everything that happens because it's Niantic but Ethan has deleted the NL 1331 van portal in the past and Niantic got keys restored within the same weekend.
I saw this common when TS-Morpheus had a name change to "Painting of a woman looking up at the moon" and was told by Niantic that Magnus Portals had no built in mechanism to protect them from troll edits besides "moving them to the graveyard."
But I guess that option doesn't protect them now.
Seeing this screenshot and seeing that our Meditation Garden of Saint Jarvis was nuked felt like a physical blow. This is, quite frankly, crushing to myself and many of the other agents on our team. The memories made at Camp Navarro are some of the most precious in our lives, and my living room is quite literally decorated with artifacts from the project.
Please, @NianticBrian and @NianticThia, reverse this as soon as possible - and restore all the keys that were lost, as I've spent substantial time growing and distributing them to others. I'm currently terrified to open the game lest mine all get nuked.
I've often (jokingly) criticized Camp Navarro as a rich Agent summer camp. And yes, the whole Navarro experience seems alienating to those of us who never got to go. The whole experience has an Us vs. Them mentality.
That being said, I'm going to have to agree with the Camp Navarro fans here. Let Them have their keys/portals so they can cherish their moments.
I was able to hack and collect keys from these at an anomaly (Sacramento if I'm rembering correctly) and went directly into my souvenir key locker. They are now gone. 😢 I hope this is remedied.
Theoretically if the keys can't be restored they could distribute them in codes
Pic for the curious
My main complaint... nobody on wayfarer team read the comments explaining what they were or even thought, "hold on a sec, this is a bit odd we better check".
Pretty poor.
Unfortunately, that is the quality of the current Wayfarer team.
The Wayfarer team managed to maintain the quality of the portal network until around 2021 when Casey and Giffard were mainly managing it.
However, the understanding of the current manager, who took over in August 2021, and the staff we have seen since later this year is pretty poor from my point of view.
The past year, and especially the last few months, have been terrible.
If this continues, Anomaly and Mission Day will no longer be able to be held due to the poor quality of the portal.
Because they cannot understand what is important.