Thank you for bringing this to our attention, You can always report any inappropriate gameplay via the chat window in our Help Center: bit.ly/2MdSD5D. One of our representatives will take it from there and investigate. Thank you!
For me, wintrading is only wrong when using two accounts for one player, because the place with few players 1, 2, 4 and how to play? How funny it is that one day you go up the portal and the next the other one goes down. One thing is wrong and another if it is unethical.
when u have made up plans before with a player from the opposite team to take down portals in a systematic way that to me is win -trading. ppl that do it like this are so lame make up plans in advance be at a certain place and take down certain portals in a pre-planned way is just wrong and bad team spirit.
Win trading is collaborating with the other side to build up and knock down portals so that both agents would gain a lot of AP. For instance:
Res player puts a level 1 resonator on an neutral portal
Enlightened player immediately pops that level 1 resonator and deploys their own, capturing the portal
Res player immediate knocks that level 1 resonator down and deploys their own, capturing the portal.
This goes back and forth (hence the term: Win trading.) Note that doing this as part of normal gameplay is ok. If the agents just so happen to be in the same area and just so happen to be battling it out for a portal, then that's playing the game. What separates normal gameplay from win-trading is collaboration with the opponent. If the two agents are collaborating to maximize AP gain while battling, then it's win-trading.
And, this is why win-trading is difficult to prove. How can one tell what the players' intents are? But, whether or not it's provable, win-trading is against the TOS.
nor does it appear in any current documents i could find on ingress supprt.
it was my belief that it had been removed from TOS because it was simply too difficult to prove and accusations were draining Niantic resources.
[please do NOT mention the third party "Ingress AMA Archive", as with many things, rules have changed over time. Information in this archive is NOT current and does not represent current Niantic policies]
[and yes, i know PAST VERSIONS of Ingress TOS did specifically call out win trading. however, i can find no CURRENT policies on OFFICIAL Niantic / Ingress sites that discuss it]
Win trading has always been a slippery thing. Clearly fighting over control of a portal because you both want to control the portal is not win trading. It's just as clear if two opponents deliberately agree to do the capture dance that was described earlier in this discussion.
There's a third case though, and that's implicit collusion. Imagine that there's a special event that has bonuses for creating and destroying some number of fields. I head to Main Street to microfield and discover an opponent has arrived a few minutes before me with the same idea. If I hang out and wait for them to finish then start smashing is that win trading? If they decide to wait for me to finish so they can do it again is that win trading? What if I smash and build again and then they smash and build again? We've never spoken a word about our intent. Is there a point at which just anticipating your opponent's moves and using that to your benefit becomes cheating?
Also, isn't the non-COVID IFS basically sanctioned win-trading?
Y'all are worried about the wrong type of assisting the enemy: Blocking OPs or fielding plans by throwing links blocking ones own team to aide the enemy is the worst form. Clearing friendly links is extremely expensive.
@GorillaSapiens Yes and no. Anomalies are primarily about the competition, and it's pretty common to come away from the anomaly itself without getting a ton of AP. First Saturdays are promoted by Niantic as events for gaining AP and other stats. (That's why I don't personally find them interesting, but that's an entirely separate conversation.)
Your point about other types of cheating is valid and I completely agree. I think that the rule against win trading should really only apply to the most egregious situations... those where players are doing it a lot and where there's also no underlying gameplay reason for their actions. Purposely waiting for an opponent to finish building so you can smash up as much stuff as possible and build it yourself? That seems reasonable to me, even if you know they'll probably do the same thing when you're done. Trading the same portal over and over, as fast as possible, for two hours? That doesn't.
I wanted to understand how it affects the game and the players, I got used to it, I see small towns doing it because of the number of players. that shows. My fun is winning each medal.
it's not "never" though, should be "almost never". Niantic did remove very few accounts that were reported...but that does not help because those players just register new one and the Win-Trading engines launch again
At this point in time, I don't see Niantic enforcing any "rule" (it's been removed from the written rule set) that discourages players from being friendly and even occasionally cooperative with the other faction.
Whether the game is best understood as a zero-sum competitive battle is another matter entirely.
URBANLEGENDD
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Comments
You can report people via https://ingress.com/support but win trading is hard to prove and not that likely to get them banned.
Keep reports short and to the point with facts not opinions.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention, You can always report any inappropriate gameplay via the chat window in our Help Center: bit.ly/2MdSD5D. One of our representatives will take it from there and investigate. Thank you!
What is win trading so I know what I should not do?
For me, wintrading is only wrong when using two accounts for one player, because the place with few players 1, 2, 4 and how to play? How funny it is that one day you go up the portal and the next the other one goes down. One thing is wrong and another if it is unethical.
Google translator.
when u have made up plans before with a player from the opposite team to take down portals in a systematic way that to me is win -trading. ppl that do it like this are so lame make up plans in advance be at a certain place and take down certain portals in a pre-planned way is just wrong and bad team spirit.
Win trading is collaborating with the other side to build up and knock down portals so that both agents would gain a lot of AP. For instance:
This goes back and forth (hence the term: Win trading.) Note that doing this as part of normal gameplay is ok. If the agents just so happen to be in the same area and just so happen to be battling it out for a portal, then that's playing the game. What separates normal gameplay from win-trading is collaboration with the opponent. If the two agents are collaborating to maximize AP gain while battling, then it's win-trading.
And, this is why win-trading is difficult to prove. How can one tell what the players' intents are? But, whether or not it's provable, win-trading is against the TOS.
i thought "win trading" had been removed from the TOS as a violation.
the phrase does not appear in https://nianticlabs.com/terms/en/
nor does it appear in any current documents i could find on ingress supprt.
it was my belief that it had been removed from TOS because it was simply too difficult to prove and accusations were draining Niantic resources.
[please do NOT mention the third party "Ingress AMA Archive", as with many things, rules have changed over time. Information in this archive is NOT current and does not represent current Niantic policies]
[and yes, i know PAST VERSIONS of Ingress TOS did specifically call out win trading. however, i can find no CURRENT policies on OFFICIAL Niantic / Ingress sites that discuss it]
It has been removed as it was redundant. It's still considered cheating and can still be reported.
redundant with what? specifically, what part of the TOS covers "win trading"?
Unfair play
Win trading has always been a slippery thing. Clearly fighting over control of a portal because you both want to control the portal is not win trading. It's just as clear if two opponents deliberately agree to do the capture dance that was described earlier in this discussion.
There's a third case though, and that's implicit collusion. Imagine that there's a special event that has bonuses for creating and destroying some number of fields. I head to Main Street to microfield and discover an opponent has arrived a few minutes before me with the same idea. If I hang out and wait for them to finish then start smashing is that win trading? If they decide to wait for me to finish so they can do it again is that win trading? What if I smash and build again and then they smash and build again? We've never spoken a word about our intent. Is there a point at which just anticipating your opponent's moves and using that to your benefit becomes cheating?
Also, isn't the non-COVID IFS basically sanctioned win-trading?
Y'all are worried about the wrong type of assisting the enemy: Blocking OPs or fielding plans by throwing links blocking ones own team to aide the enemy is the worst form. Clearing friendly links is extremely expensive.
All Niantic sponsored events are sanctioned win trading.
"Hey, 5000 people, come to Philadelphia at this date and time so we can build and smash each other's stuff!"
Basically any and all "win trading" difficult at best to detect. And other types of cheating are far more common.
I'd rather Niantic spend more time fixing bugs, honestly, than chasing "Mom, Jimmy is leveling up too fast!"
@GorillaSapiens Yes and no. Anomalies are primarily about the competition, and it's pretty common to come away from the anomaly itself without getting a ton of AP. First Saturdays are promoted by Niantic as events for gaining AP and other stats. (That's why I don't personally find them interesting, but that's an entirely separate conversation.)
Your point about other types of cheating is valid and I completely agree. I think that the rule against win trading should really only apply to the most egregious situations... those where players are doing it a lot and where there's also no underlying gameplay reason for their actions. Purposely waiting for an opponent to finish building so you can smash up as much stuff as possible and build it yourself? That seems reasonable to me, even if you know they'll probably do the same thing when you're done. Trading the same portal over and over, as fast as possible, for two hours? That doesn't.
*Battle Beacons has entered the chat*
lmao
I wanted to understand how it affects the game and the players, I got used to it, I see small towns doing it because of the number of players. that shows. My fun is winning each medal.
Cant do nothing when Niantic never removed accounts we report when agent use multi accounts and Win Trading.
@NianticBrian @NianticKK
during anomaly you use r8 and aegis not only l1 resonator.
it should be easy to detect millions of ap done while only you low level resonator on few same portals.
some bots use that to get to l8 very fast, one account burst the others capture (https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/12100/obvious-cheat-how-can-this-not-be-detected)
it's not "never" though, should be "almost never". Niantic did remove very few accounts that were reported...but that does not help because those players just register new one and the Win-Trading engines launch again
At this point in time, I don't see Niantic enforcing any "rule" (it's been removed from the written rule set) that discourages players from being friendly and even occasionally cooperative with the other faction.
Whether the game is best understood as a zero-sum competitive battle is another matter entirely.