Niantic: Please find a better Gym selection method
Now that PoGo players have latched onto picture upvotes as the gym selection method, they've started to damage Ingress by creating level 1 accounts and spoofing to upvote. And now we have idiotic suggestions like "Give us a new portal channel so we can know to upvote" that do nothing for Ingress and just clutter an already data heavy information screen.
Pick a better method of choosing Gyms than relying on another game's players. Upvoting pictures is almost never done in Ingress for anything but stealing the primary photo from another player (or protecting a photo from people trying to steal the primary photo).
Is that the selection method you want?
Use OSM data like what is a park or field, choose locations that are further from a road or portals that are in a denser set of other portals. Anything but upvotes on photos.
Comments
I agree, this has gone way overboard long ago with the gym system... so much abuse on portal edits to move them to a different cell just to get a gym etc... i hear this daily almost..
I agree, the current 'security by obscurity' system encourages abusive edits that reduce the quality of the PoI database and clogs up the Wayfarer system... and this is before they have realised they can change where the gyms are with false deletion requests.
I have seen suggestions from various sources for people to create an account in Ingress skip the tutorial and repeat as many times as necessary to up-vote to get your desired gym. I have also seen low level accounts moving around up-voting stuff. It actually not even good for the pogo players themselves since they all have different agendas. Gyms easily accessible by car, ex-raid gym near home or not near home (since they avoid during weekday ex-raids), and the ego driven must be one they created. Please stop the multi-accounting in Ingress from this nonsense.
They need to get rid of the whole cell criteria and just make it random. There's so many cheat add-ons now like wayfarer plus and assistants to help submit poi and move around the ingress game board.
How to make Ingress instantly profitable:
Build Gym: 100,000 CMU
Make upvoting a photo cost 1000 CMU.
Choosing by things like "The ones in parks" or "The ones in portal dense locations" is a far better mechanism than "What people in Ingress upvoted". It doesn't have be random to be better.
It just has to be one you can't affect by cheating in another game.
Please this. The local Pokemon players are being rather aggressive in manipulating things to their benefit. Leave the Ingress POI database out of this.
From what I can see it's the hyper-agressive multi-accounters doing this. They generally make playing unpleasant for others. If cemetery portals and others prone to creating issues could have a less priority for gym creation, that would probably be best.
Soon Pokemon go players will be able to submit edit of PoI.
The chaos will be bigger than never was before.
Fields will be destroyed constantly after location edition.
There are already abusive location edits requests from Ingress players, I don't see PoGo getting the power to do more than title/picture/description for a while. The three I suggested should honestly be implemented soon, no harm with them
Maybe parse location edits from description edits too.
Mr. Reviewer, please select the less accurate location and don't select this description option. We need this for our gym plan. Thanks for doing Wayfarer
The biggest problem with adding so many photos is that it really messes up key recharging and selecting keys from inventory because then all those photos need to load! Hogs a lot more data too, for absolutely no reason. Before you had to select the key before the other pictures loaded and that was much less of a drain.
I hope Niantic fix we can write and send in feedback about portals dont follow criteria. Today we cant and cant remove portals dont follow criteria.
The criteria for approving has changed over time. Portals that were approved under a different criteria then we have now are still perfectly valid portals. You can’t report them because there is nothing to report.
Lots of new portals dont follow criteria.
This has nothing to do with this post. Please stop hijacking threads constantly.
I only 👍🏻 on the photo with best quality or take new photo with best quality.
It's better than leaving it up to Niantic's randomness selection and putting the gym in a completely terrible and.or inaccessible location. We've avoided so many bad gym locations by upvoting over the last year,
Is it though? Or do you just want to control where your gyms are? You're actively subverting one game for the benefit of another. And plenty of Trainers tell us that PoGo shouldn't be reliant on Ingress.
Would a better method be to allow upvoting of Pokestops and use those votes to choose the next gym?
Yeah, it is. I've seen where gyms get randomly placed and it gets nothing but complaints from the residents/business/etc. How can you be against placing gyms in publicly accessible areas in a bid to prevent mass complaints?
Earlier in the year we had a gym placed (that was not upvoted) inside a remotely controlled gate and private lot. Some dumb player decided to go there when it was -40 degrees celsius and then the gates closed on her and she got trapped. This caused huge backlash to both communities. if we could prevent that from happening, then why not?
We cant prevent people from being stupid.
If it's inaccessible it should be removed from the database. Not every portal (or pokestop/gym in this case) need to have full time access to and a big parking lot within range, free, 24h and with low crime rate, etc...
niantic is absolutely useless when it comes to reporting inaccessible portals. I've tried reporting so many and all i get is the generic "you have to be the property owner" response.
If i have learned anything in 6 years of ingress and 3 years of pogo is that people ARE going to trespass to reach the POI.
Not Niantic's problem, until the owner complain.
How can you be against placing gyms in publicly accessible areas in a bid to prevent mass complaints?
Because if that were the case it wouldn't be a problem. However, quite commonly, people have used spoofer bots to upvote inaccessible gyms so that pesky "real people" can't interfere with their coin mine. Putting Gyms into places where they're essentially inaccessible for that reason.
That's hardly common. I've barely heard of that happening within Canada, It's like 2% of the playerbase.
Inaccessible POIs are what we call durables, in this game. Has this conversation honestly turned itself towards removing durable portals for the sake of everyone being able to play in all the gyms in pogo? If someone is going to trespass, that’s on them. Yes it’s irritating that they try and manipulate our game, for pogo, but I don’t see the real harm in upvoting a picture. Why don’t we just impress upon them to upvote the picture they think is the best? Wouldn’t that be the system working as it’s suppose to? But again, leave the durables alone. Many of us have gone to great lengths to capture them, and for us that is a strong portion of the adventure and strategy. Many of us don’t want this game to be easy, which most definitely can’t be said for pogo.
Canada is too nice and thoughtful. Come to the US. Or better still, look at Russia and the Eastern European states.