Mission Rejection: "Inappropriate Image"

Mernie9Mernie9 ✭✭✭

Warning: Questionable Image Attached 😄

I submitted a 6 part banner a few weeks back. Missions 1-5 approved straight away. Mission 6 was rejected. From the email ...

"Thanks for submitting Retail Therapy 6 of 6. Unfortunately, we were not able to accept your Mission. Your Mission may have one or more of the following issues:

  • Defamatory text or image
  • Primary intention of trolling, harassment, abuse, attack or ridicule
  • Inappropriate images (including curse words/obscenity)"

After scratching my head, I came to the conclusion that the image must have been considered objectionable. The reviewers appear to be from Asia, and maybe their standards of decency are different than what is acceptable in the West. Thus began my attempt to clean up the image.

The original image showed a navel, so in the second submission I lowered the shirt and cleaned up the collar. I resubmitted and it was rejected for the same reason. OK, maybe the skirt was too short, so I gave her a modest dress length. That was rejected too. On my fourth submission I guessed that there was too much leg showing on the secondary girl, so I added some leggings. That was rejected.

Rumor has it that when a banner is submitted, it's split between 2 approvers. And the standards for different approvers vary. So it's not unusual to have rejections and acceptances for missions from the same banner. If you resubmit a mission, it's sent to the same approver. It's been suggested that if you have an issue, an option is to totally withdraw the submission and resubmit as a new mission. There's a chance that a new reviewer will evaluate the mission. I did that and it was approved overnight.

https://bannergress.com/banner/retail-therapy-4582

I belong to an online community of Mission enthusiasts (double onyx Spec ops), many of which are mission content creators. We often talk about mission rejections and provide suggestions on how rejections can be edited in the hopes of getting an acceptance email. And yet, many times, the seemingly nonsensical rejections can't be fixed. The mission creator simply gives up, after spending hours on the effort. Without an appeal process, it's discouraging.

Comments

  • Otrera35Otrera35 ✭✭✭✭

    The mission banner above does not look inappropriate, unlike the Bikini Girl banner in Munich, which looked like a sleazy ad for a **** club or Cialis. Yet Niantic approved the sordid Munich mission banner. It only shows how low Niantic's standards are.

  • AkakunAkakun ✭✭✭

    This game has already 10 years old and Niantics keep expecting us to be fortune tellers.

  • ZeroHecksGivenZeroHecksGiven ✭✭✭✭✭

    It's almost like you came to the forums expecting someone from Niantic to read this, respond and better yet, do something about it.

    I have a few popular banners in my area and have had agents reach out asking when I can add some more. I just tell them the review process is too tedious and time consuming and I've got better things to do with my time at this point.

  • MxxMxx ✭✭✭✭

    Not even too tedious, but too arbitrary, random and inconsistent. You can look at BG and see blatantly copyrighted images, yet they go through. You can see banners that have nothing to do with the location or portals, yet they are obviously approved.

    After niantic kept rejecting my banner following 6 rounds of adjustments to appease their capricious reviewers I gave up and completely deleted my submission. I'm not going to submit any more missions until Niantic changes this review process. And I LOVE doing missions...

  • grendelwulfgrendelwulf ✭✭✭✭✭

    I have the same problem and help chat hasnt been helpful at all in pinpointing the rejection reason. Just keeps telling me to review the rules.


  • VenomousToadVenomousToad ✭✭✭✭✭

    I've made many banners over the years and I've taken every one of them down except one. Once I complete it I'll take it offline too. Niantic doesn't seem to respect the amount of time people put into making them. We, the players, are only trying to make the game better. For all this effort we have put into it and Niantic just ignores us. The last banner I have online right now took three years to get accepted. That's ridiculous. Niantic doesn't make missions, they aren't trying to help us understand how to get them accepted either. I'm not making any more and refuse to put any of the ones I've made online. I tried to make things for players to enjoy but Niantic become the roadblock. So Niantic, if you want missions in the game fix the system or make them yourself. I'm done wasting my time on them.

  • XK150XK150 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Honestly, I think some of the reviewers are using the defamatory/harassing template when they just don't like the topic of the mission.

  • XK150XK150 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Refusing to make missions isn't going to bother anybody at Niantic, because that just reduces the amount of thankless work they have to do.

    I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't think anybody at Niantic has "missions" as their primary job -- mission reviewing is probably just something customer service reps and interns do when they're not too busy with other stuff. And missions in general are a legacy feature -- they're not as popular as Niantic expected them to be, they're not really contributing to Niantic's income, and they're probably not going to get any improvements/enhancements for a long, long time.

  • MorganzaMorganza ✭✭✭✭✭

    There is no practical way for Niantic to monetize missions, even though many players have asked for the ability to spend money to increase their mission limit. Frankly, we are lucky they are still paying people to review missions at all.


    But something as simple as "please update the published mission guidelines to match the criteria the mission reviewers are using" shouldn't be technically impossible.


    (And yeah, I'm still salty about the rejection of my tomato at the Sunnyvale farmers' market. I can only assume it's because a tomato on a plate looks kinda like the letter O and players sometimes anagram mission letters into rude phrases so all single-letter mission images are banned but rejected citing other reasons and this ban used to be in the mission guidelines but was removed.)

  • grendelwulfgrendelwulf ✭✭✭✭✭

    Definitely done by some overseas rent-a-call center type office. All my missions are approved or denied between 12am and 5am eastern

  • grendelwulfgrendelwulf ✭✭✭✭✭

    I made a mission in my home city Oviedo using landmarks that look like the letters that spell out the city's name

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