Feature Request - Reliable way to designate (and potentially change) gym creation in Pokemon Go

McReesingtonMcReesington ✭✭
edited November 2019 in Wayfarer (Archive)

I had a new gym created yesterday, after months of consideration. I immediately realized the candidate I went with (and called in reinforcements to vote on) was a mistake. It's in a new city CBD construction zone that will be barely useful for years, but I was trying to think long-term. The local community is almost dead now. If I'd put the gym at the currently attractive and growing central shopping plaza, at a point with high novelty, it would have been somewhere people are far more interested in going, and pushed the mall up to a relevant amount of gyms to actually get people's attention, along with ~14 new stops I've made there.

As it was, I've made a bad mistake for my community.

There was a park where I populated several POIs. The one which I wanted to be the gym (a large skating ring near the entrance) was accepted last. Instead the gym ended up at a dark and creepy far corner of the park where people have to cross a little bridge over a drain. Nobody wants to go back there, they have said. The skate park would have been very accessible to the community. But there was no way to change it after the mistake was made, and the community is permanently put off.

There is a church which is a valid candidate, however it shares an entrance with a school which has a private property no entry sign on the street, which can be accessed by church goers on weekends of course, and the only other pedestrian path is through a retirement village which is also marked as private property no entry. It has a huge number of photos and photo likes on it. Even if I got another candidate accepted in the L14 S2 cell which it currently occupies alone, it's very unlikely I could get enough Ingress players to like the new candidate in time, presuming it even goes live early enough before the cutoff and I'm free / in the area. It would create a permanent problematic gym if that church converted. Meanwhile if I were to get another candidate accepted, it would likely be in either a big accessible stripmall or a park, a far superior option.

There is a portal/gym on a large bridge here. It is valid, the bridge has a good footpath and interesting artistic lights. The bridge is also many minutes' walk along busy motorways from where anybody could park their cars, and essentially unviewable from anybody's houses. Meanwhile, down the road, there is an enormous picturesque gymnasium with a big parking lot and tons of walking accessibility. Probably the most major raid organizer in our area used to go there regularly for family reasons, until he quit out of frustration with the state of the game.

I think at this point we need a way to locally designate gyms, and locally re-designate them. It could take a critical mass scaled for the local community. It could be something on review waiting for disagreements for a month before it goes live. Players could get a notification that a local gym in their area is up for review and they can login to Wayfarer to cast their vote. The old gym could revert to a stop - perhaps the badge information can be internally saved in case it ever becomes flipped again - and the community gets to designate where actually works for gym purposes. All accepted POIs should be valid, however not all are equally ideal as gyms, and there needs to be a smarter, more involved process for communities to survive bad gyms. It doesn't need to be fancy, just a nomination for a gym candidate swap, perhaps it takes 5 other players making the nomination, and then it goes on review for a month with an opportunity for anybody to cast agreements or disagreements, with a notification pushed to any players in the area.

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Comments

  • GearGliderGearGlider ✭✭✭✭✭

    Yeah, for Wayspot reviewing, specifically for Ingress Players. Pokémon Go has nothing to do with Ingress.

  • And PoGo players don't have a forum like this NIA never set one up. We have TSR but that isn't official. This is the only place that PoGoers can go that NIA might actually see.


  • grendelwulfgrendelwulf ✭✭✭✭✭

    Well oops 🤷‍♂️

  • McReesingtonMcReesington ✭✭
    edited November 2019

    This is Niantic's only Wayfarer forum, which as far as I can tell is a product mostly only used for pokemon go related stop and gym creation at this point.

    No. Misrepresenting what somebody said to sneer is anti-social and pointless.

    It was about what will work for the community, functionally, and how an upgrade to wayfarer could simply incorporate that. It has nothing to do with moving or not moving. I don't have a car and have to move hours to reach most of these. Furthermore there's nothing noble about suffering and inefficiency.

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    I believe the intent of Niantics games is to get out and walk and explore. Maybe try a game more suitable to you or go walk the eggs up getting there?

  • McReesingtonMcReesington ✭✭
    edited November 2019

    ? I just said I walk hours to play these games, and am trying to put the community meeting points in the more ideal locations for safety, accessibility, attractiveness, etc. e.g. Not at a church at a school.

    Some of you guys have weird needs to only bully and posture, and it's exhausting for anybody who comes here for constructive discussion.

  • What he's saying is that due to Niantics batch automation process used to generate gyms, sometimes it makes gym POIs in non ideal situations for large groups of players, and a peer review system may be a possible way to move them around.

  • McReesingtonMcReesington ✭✭
    edited November 2019

    Yep, and the community is almost dead under the current system. Saying "well people just need to hire boats and toughen up" is a good way to achieve a game as dead as Ingress is. Those of us actually creating the wayspots in Niantic's games are saying there needs to be more that we can do to make this game playable, we're on the ground seeing it die and not work and thinking of what simple tools might be workable to fix these problems.

    It's not helpful to suggest that there's some nobility in suffering to play the game, people are playing less and less and that's the reality of it. Those with masochistic desires over an AR game can go contribute to global warming by pointlessly hiring boats and planes over a simple phone app, and falsely imagining that they somehow represent anything like the economic average of real human beings.

  • slipsecslipsec ✭✭✭
    edited November 2019

    No. Misrepresenting what somebody said to sneer is anti-social and pointless.

    That would be escalation, I don't know what you're trying to paint this as but I said literally "If I understand correctly" which would give you a great opportunity to clarify instead of trying to put labels on me.

    It was about what will work for the community, functionally

    Forgive me, but I think you need to make a better case here around how "good for the community" is the furthered by what really looks to be something that promotes or at least facilitates sitting isolated. I guess the closest thing to a gym in ingress would be a farming meet-up where we don't really need anything but some clustered portals within reach.

    there's nothing noble about suffering and inefficiency.

    Different games I guess. There's not really as much value of a "sturdy" stop/gym, but there certainly is in a "sturdy" portal.

    It sounds like you have good intentions, with things like parking - but this is just a bit of a spot where the games don't translate directly across, so I guess it doesn't really matter from the ingress side what's a gym and what's a stop. I wish you luck with your feature request.

  • I have no idea what you're talking about with stuff like 'sitting isolated', All I've talked about is making sure that gyms are at places which are where people will and can meet up and aren't isolated.

  • "With great power comes great responsebility" I think we better use that power before Niantic take it away.

  • Another issue which just came to light - POIs accepted through PoGo's submissions don't reward an Ingress key on the attached account, which means remote areas can't have gyms designated by submitters after they're accepted. It's easy to argue either way for whether they should, but functionally, it's somewhat of a necessity when populating a blank suburb with POIs, and wanting to ensure the gyms are in the correct ex locations or of the least nuisance to the locals.

  • Here is another problem case that represents the kind of situation that players have to try to deal with when submitting.

    This has been one of the most popular playing areas for some time. There is a stop on an island, which is valid, but completely inaccessible to anybody except those with a canoe/kayak. If another stop is added to the L14 S2 cell and nobody catches it and votes on it before the cutoff time, there will forever be an inaccessible gym in visual range of the main playing area. A huge missed opportunity for both Niantic and the players, which would be an easy switch if we had the tools.

  • I think that the premise of this post is a valid discussion, but I think there are other places to have the discussion. The best place would probably be on reddit in r/theSilphRoad. As indicated by several folks in this thread, this is an ingress forum and wayfarer is a tool for creating wayspots. The better solution is to post to a PokemonGo community. Hopefully Niantic will see some value in creating a Pokemon Go forum similar to this forum or a non game specific community to discuss wayfarer and its implications for each of their games.

  • harkonnnenharkonnnen ✭✭✭✭

    While you are indeed correct, and if you play both pogo and ingress you will no doubt have seen a great many Gym that would have been far better had one of the other stops in the cell become the gym. It is one of a number of issues yet to be address the other major one being the HUGE number of duplicates coming into Wayfarer because those submitting have no way of knowing that they already technically exist.

    Currently there would have to be a significant change in how new stops are brought online for example, the new stop becomes active with a similar "like" button now placed on all stops, than come say on Mondays the new gym/s are created. Of course this is all irrelevant since pogo doesnt have anything like an intel map etc to be able to tell what stops are in what cells etc etc

    While eventually Niantic might address and do something about these issues you could easily be waiting till this time 2020 or even 2021. If trainers dont want to take some initiative and use and work with the tools currently available to them, that others have been doing for almost 2yrs now then they wont get much sympathy from me.

    While your intentions seem noble the idea of re-selecting gyms and being able to vote to change them etc is way to open for bullying and abuse. The pogo game has "survived" this long with gyms as they are and with steadily more and more coming online. Again it comes down to this locally community you speak of could have agent accounts, check intel and set up the cells so they know what is where. actually put in some effort instead of waiting for all the work to be done and nitpick over it.

    As others have mentioned taking massive hikes, going to hard to get remote places to either first submit the POI and then or claim then for both uniques and for fielding plans later is a huge part of ingress. I would wager that if not for pogo spoofers infestation that the majority of claimed remote pogo gyms would be dual agents/trainers.

    Lastly as again alot have already said this is an Ingress forum with a sub forum for Wayfarer. Which means its the wrong place for your questions, though i do get why you put it forward here, But people here either dont even care anything about cells since its not a part of Ingress portals OR they do and have been selected the best gyms for ages now in which case they probably think the tools are there either put the effort in to use them efficiently or just go on and thing gyms get selected at random.

  • not a single new gym i reconed has been in a bad place. you have to do your home work including knowing what the other portals in the area have in terms of likes and pics. and if you have one that needs to be upvoted, get with your local ingress group and ask for likes. it can be done remotely fairly easily.

  • I said I was doing all those things. Managing keys and community voting as best I can. Going to remote places to submit (hence the issue with pogo submissions not giving ingress keys after, no way to manage the gyms). The community is dying anyway and I'm talking about practical ideas which address some of the issues I've encountered over the years of doing this. Saying it's fine is wrong, the game is dying and there could be more done to keep it alive and interesting and accessible, and I'm listing some here.

  • harkonnnenharkonnnen ✭✭✭✭

    Guessing you mean pogo, if so a few differently placed gyms isn't the reason or cure.

    While the no key is annoying for linked accounts (as well as I'm guessing the no portal discover credit) it's not exactly suprising.

    The problem with your suggestions is they require someone with an Ingress account. Too many trainers have stubbornly refused to give Ingress a try and want everything to go through pogo. Which means that your gyms issue needs a full update in pogo Not Ingress or Wayfarer. Hence why it's irrelevant in this forum

  • My suggestions are about decoupling PoGo from Ingress. Currently the mechanics rely on Ingress votes and photo submissions to determine a gym, and calling in Ingress players to vote before the cutoff time. This is currently an Ingress issue which I want to turn into a PoGo issue. The lack of keys is not surprising as I said, it's the practical implication which is of concern for POI creators. Again you guys seem to just be looking to sneer and talk down without reading what is being said.

    Why is somebody stubborn for not wanting to play Ingress?

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    Whats this cutoff time you speak of? Suggestions become points after a certain number of votes, there is no time limit.

  • Gym creation in Pokemon Go is determined by the number of Ingress likes on the portal photos + photos count at about 6:45pm Australian every day of the week, and go live at about 4:45am the next morning (give or take a few hours, I've forgotten the exact times).

    When a level 14 S2 cell reaches 2/6/20 Pokemon Go points, one of them converts into the 1st/2nd/3rd gym, depending on how Ingress players have interacted with the portal. This makes it very difficult to control gym creation and put them in ideal social spots and not in bizarre island and deep forest and school church stops, because it requires a flurry of activity organized in Ingress before a cutoff time, hopefully by the submitter seeing the acceptance email in time before that happens, if they were even the ones to submit it. And if portals are reviewed in a non-ideal order, then there's no way to switch the gym to the ideal candidate later, which leads to situations like the unappealing drain-crossing gym I mentioned.

  • All wrong place for this arguments aside, I've actually suggested somewhere to Niantic before about having select players as safety captains, of sorts, for helping reselect gyms out of eligible pools. The idea of using Ingress likes was fine before raids gave people a reason to swarm individual POIs like crazy, and some places are not suited for this intrusion.

    Pretty sure it got buried in the pile of countless ideas thrown at them. Usefulness may not outweigh the potential for abuse.

  • harkonnnenharkonnnen ✭✭✭✭

    Well my definition of stubborn would be....2yrs ago when Nominations came back and people started finding out they could greatly improve there game by trying out Ingress but didn't because with the argument Why should I have to?. Then about a month ago Nominations go live and people are told they can create a level1 Agent account so they can use the Intel map, and track cell placement and quantity and help select which one will be a gym, but most refuse even though it requires 0 playing of another game. Now eventually Niantic might put an update in but that could be along way off While some people complain and 'stubbornly' wait

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