Mod note: Play nice.
2 Likes
Hell, it is yet another Big Brother plot, each more insidious than the last.
2 Likes
I took a walk around my place early yesterday morning and saw two fawns with their mamas, a red fox, four box turtles, and I heard a great horned owl.
I think I can survive without Pokemon for a few more days.
6 Likes
Gots to give you you mad 
for this.
I love the love.
I haven’t played in maybe a year but last I checked any registered player could submit an Ingress portal. I submitted a couple of sculptures outside the new hospital but made the mistake of using “hospital” in the description, which is against their guidelines. (Presumably to avoid the mobs we’re now seeing with PokéGo blocking ambulances and such.) Shortly thereafter someone else successfully submitted the same locations by not mentioning the institution they’re attached to.
Anecdotally, it appears that Pokemon density tracks Ingress XM density pretty closely. And my observation has been that XM density is high in areas with a lot of smartphone use - with some reason for location services to be actively running.
Presumably Niantic used a big smartphone location dataset to seed XM/Pokemon density. You’re going to need some algorithmic way to build a world-spanning distribution without a lot of manpower, and this is a dataset that would be readily available to Google/Niantic
Any machine generated dataset is going to have biases. If this is the sort they used (and I’m pretty sure it is) the biases would be:
-
Locations where people with smartphones and a big data plan tend to appear. Don’t have statistics, but I can imagine this introducing socioeconomic bias.
-
The requirement that location services had to be running for Google to plot your location at all leads to some non-intuitive spots having very high densities. Truck stops along major highways are VERY dense in XM, and in some limited testing, also seem to be very Pokemon rich. I presume this is because people running Google Maps are constantly pulling in and out.
Crowdsourcing of portals/pokestops/gyms can approach the distribution of players, but unfortunately doesn’t affect unfair XM/Pokemon distribution. Maybe they could add a term increasing density near the crowdsourced locations?
2 Likes
Niantic closed public portal submissions a few months ago due to having built up a huge backlog to work through. They haven’t re-opened them yet, and it’s unclear whether they ever will.
A bit weird that you say your portals were rejected for saying “hospital” in them. There are a number of hospitals around here that have multiple portals on them, including ones with “hospital” in the name. For example:
Also, it’s become a “thing” for people to drop lures on the portals at children’s hospitals, for the benefit of kids recovering in them who can’t get out to play Pokemon Go.
2 Likes
According to Ingress Support they reject
- Candidates that may interfere with the operations of FIRE STATIONS, POLICE STATIONS AND HOSPITALS
- Candidates on the grounds of PRIMARY/SECONDARY SCHOOLS
But as with any human-administered system, it’s a crapshoot depending on which particular human you get. It might be obvious to one person that a park right outside a hospital is not “interfering,” while to another person it might be indistinguishable from an ER ambulance bay on a cursory glance at the map.
1 Like
Or give some sort of reward for players who submit such. That seems like the best route–it gives something back to the same people who were penalized for living in underserved neighborhoods, and keeps things inclined towards popular local landmarks as intended, rather than randomly-chosen businesses.
2 Likes
AI is not involved in the post we’re discussing. The stops and gyms are 100% crowdsourced from players of a previous game, and those players skewed white. A very real problem, and a related one, but not what your link is talking about.
2 Likes
3 Likes
2 Likes
So the Ingress players created the game landscape for Pokemon Go? That’s an interesting form of crowdsourcing.
2 Likes
A major Dutch hospital has asked that people please stop hunting Pokemon there. Maybe the hospital-banning rules are new?
1 Like
P-go? Is that what we’re calling it? I prefer 'man-go" cause it sounds like a fruit. Maybe just GO. Anyway, gotta trot. Been a game I been wanting to play on my XBone.
1 Like
I don’t play Pokemon Go; is there any way outside the game to figure out if the crowds of people in my “backyard” are swarming there because of the presence of some “spawn point”?
The submission stated Ziekenhuis, the underpaid and overworked wage slave missed it?
2 Likes
9 Likes
