Why the 20m proximity rule for portals needs to be reduced or removed
AisforAndis
✭✭✭
As many of you know, the most recent update to Ingress "fixed" the 20m proximity rule, which prevents new portals from coming online if they were submitted/accepted within 20 meters of an existing portal. Prior to the update, the 20m rule was not active for several months, allowing portals to come online regardless of their proximity to other portals.
I would like to take some time to talk about why this rule is both unnecessary and detrimental to Ingress, as well as the greater negative impacts it has on Wayfarer, Lightship, and the entire lineup of current and future Niantic games.
Before I get started, I want to note that @NianticBrian did actually answer one of my questions about this in yesterday's Q&A. Unfortunately, I think the answer I received encapsulated some of the issues with the rule, rather than explaining why it should exist:
@AisforAndis asks, “Why restrict new Portals with the 20m proximity rule?”
I’m trying to remember back to The Before Times when we originally implemented the 20m rule for new Portal submissions, and IIRC I think it may have been related to UX/UI of the mobile client and our disambiguation menu. If you’re in an area with extremely high Portal density, it makes it difficult to play in addition to creating performance issues. For example, here’s an area in LA near where I live that’s infamous for this: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=34.060706,-118.44575&z=18&pll=34.060196,-118.445404
Integrating with Niantic Wayfarer was meant to help somewhat, in that now these new Portal submissions won't be lost even if Ingress doesn't ingest them. They could still be used by other Niantic games, or if we were to revisit our Portal ingestion rules, then we can pull from Wayfarer's database of accepted Wayspots.
So lets start with the UX/UI argument. First, keep in mind that both disambiguation and the 20m rule were created during the redacted era. While I never have experienced such a thing, lets say that massive stacks of portals did indeed create performance issues. Were these issues not fixed or invalidated when Redacted was replaced with Prime? After all, Niantic has done nothing to remove existing high density portal stacks, only to prevent more of them. Presumably, the stacks of portals that originally created performance problems and inspired disambiguation and the 20m rule still exist. Yet in the modern era of Ingress Prime, I have never heard of an agent complain about performance issues due to such a thing. At best there are a small number of agents who just do not like these areas, despite disambiguation solving most of the problems that they ever presented.
But just as there are some agents who may not like these portal dense locations, there are many agents who love them. In a Discord community I am a part of, another user saw Brian's response to me and the portal cluster example he included with it, and ironically told me that they love that same exact portal cluster:
Clusters like these are nothing more than a matter of preference. Just like there are players who love/hate the existence of remote portals on islands and mountaintops, or portals inside gated communities, etc, there will always be aspects of the game that come down to preference. Except none of those other matters of preference are purposefully hindered by Niantic.
The true reality of this is that the prolonged removal of the 20m rule was beloved by the playerbase and that it being reinstated was unnecessary. The comments of the Ingress 2.90.1 Release Notes thread showed that in great detail. Some examples:
- "The last couple of months have shown that portals can work fine within 20m with the option to pick the portal you want. In fact, I bet the amount of submissions increased a fair bit as people were submitting things without worrying about it anymore."
- "Since Ingress Prime has the disambiguation... these days, no idea why it's still relevant."
- "The 20 meter rule feels restricting and preventing portals on top of each other would be possible with a smaller range, exempli gratia 5, 7, 10 meters."
- "By applying this rule, the amount of decent submissions will reduce as players will only want to take time to submit something that will appear in the game, or fudge the location. Both scenarios will be a negative for Niantic and their database. As a reviewer I also noticed an uptick of interesting submissions (which would probably have been proxies and therefore ignored or not submitted in the past) amongst the normal dross which we normally have to review during the period where the 20m rule didn't apply. If interesting points of interest are no longer being submitted for review the wayfarer process is going to be unappealing and the number of reviewers or the time undertaking reviews will no doubt drop."
- "As for the 20m rule, I’ve been submitting interesting things that I wouldn’t have done before because I knew they’d go online in at least one game. Now I’m disappointed it’s been reverted."
The above are just a few selections from the first page of the thread, with this trend continuing for several pages after. Judging by the amount of these comments and the nearly unanimous number of likes/insightfuls they received, it seems like the community consensus is pretty clear. I think the most important part of these comments is that they come with the experiences that these users have had for months while the 20m rule was not in effect - These aren't just some hypothetical suggestions of what could make the game better, but rather they are the experiences of those from when it did make it better, and seemingly had no negative effects. For many of these people, the temporary removal of the 20m rule was eye-opening, and opinion-changing.
As noted by some of the commenters above, the removal of the rule increased both the Ingress and Wayfarer experience. It increased the appeal of exploring for new POI, it made the process of submitting and reviewing more pleasant, and the effects of that resulted in a more interesting experience in-game. It is win-win-win all around. Its reinstatement will have many negative effects:
Players are incentivized to fudge the locations of portals so that they show up in Ingress. Because Ingress is has the least restrictive POI density rules of Niantic's games, many people do not find it worth it to submit things if it does not end up in Ingress. The promise of appearing in future games is not enough for many players (we will talk about this later). By now, many long-time Ingress players have found that other location-based games just aren't for them. For many players, it is Ingress or bust, or at least getting a portal in Ingress is their bare minimum goal. This leads people to intentionally misplace POIs and for Ingress, that can have some nasty in-game effects. Misplacing portals often puts them in inaccessible or sometimes unsafe locations, and can lead to frustrating gameplay situations. For example, imagine you are standing at the real-world object but because the portal was misplaced, you aren't actually on top of the portal to ultra strike the shields off of it. Additionally, fixing issues like this requires portal edits, which only work to clog up Wayfarer and depending on your region, can take months or years to fix. It isn't a fun experience, and it all circles back to the 20m rule.
Speaking of misplaced portals, this is a great time to bring up abuse scenarios, because while Niantic isn't allowing portal stacks through legitimate gameplay means, they are leaving those created through Wayfarer abuse relatively untouched. For example, take a look at this cluster of portals:
https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=28.245726,-81.283057&z=17&pll=28.245726,-81.283057
For convenience, this screenshot below shows the cluster with 20m submit range circles enabled. It is very easy to see just how stacked the portals are.
The problem with this stack, isn't that the lack of the 20m rule got out of hand. In fact, these portals were stacked by the Niantic abuse team! These portals were created by Pokemon Go players using a still unfixed exploit that allows them to collude together to accept these locations in wildly incorrect locations throughout their town so that they would all become Pokestops. When they were reported, Niantic corrected the locations of the misplaced portals, and they moved them to their correct location, resulting in this absurd stack of portals. The worst part is, when Niantic moved them, they almost all stayed as Pokestops when they shouldn't have, rewarding these players with a tiny park stacked with Pokestops and encouraging this behavior to continue. This isn't the only case of this either, you can see similar stacks created in the same way here and here. If Niantic treats massive portal stacks created through abuse with such leniency, then why restrict portals created legitimately with the 20m rule?
Aside from abuse, Wayfarer in general is greatly impacted by the 20m rule. As was mentioned by commenters, the 20m rule reduces the amount of interesting submissions, and makes the reviewing experience far more boring, which makes people less likely to review. It has prevented me from submitting a number of interesting things, and there has truly been a noticeable decrease in the amount of interesting submissions while reviewing in the past 2 weeks since the 20m rule was "fixed". In fact I was in the process of returning to places I had previously explored and submitting interesting things that I couldn't before with the 20m rule intact. I know it has effected others similarly. The worst part of the 20m rule is the lack of an ability to see lightship-only POIs. When submitting nominations in Pokemon Go, while initially placing your pin on the map, the Pokemon Go app shows you nearby POIs that have been accepted into Lightship, alerting you to something that has been submitted but doesn't appear in-game, avoiding potential duplicates. Ingress does not do this and Ingress players have no way to check what POIs are in Lightship, making submitting via Ingress a more frustrating experience. When the 20m rule was not in effect, this was not an issue at all.
Lets circle back to the end of Brian's Q&A clarification, specifically where he mentioned the idea that if your nomination doesn't show up in Ingress, maybe you will see them in another Niantic game some day. For a while now this has been the answer that was given to Pokemon Go players when their Pokestop didn't show up in that game, and it is now being recycled for Ingress. The problem is, the chances of this happening are unlikely. As we know, of Niantic's current games, Ingress is by far the least restrictive with it's POI. Harry Potter Wizards Unite came second to it, however that game was shut down. Catan World Explorers had a very interesting feature where the POIs used in-game rotated in and out every season, making all POIs useful although not all at the same time. But again, that game was also shut down before it even left Beta. Pokemon Go uses significantly less POI than Ingress, and while there are very niche cases where a wayspot can appear in PoGo but not Ingress, this is specially due to the 20m rule overlapping with S2 cells.
This brings us to Niantic's latest games, the recently released Pikmin Bloom and the upcoming Transformers Heavy Metal which is in Beta in some countries. As far as interactable POIs go, these two games are far more restrictive than Niantic's prior games, even featuring significantly less wayspots than Pokemon Go. Of course, the less wayspots a game features, the less likely we are to see a POI show up that couldn't be in Ingress due to the 20m rule. Considering Niantic is on a downward trend as far as how densely they use their wayspots in their games, the chances for them to create a game that used your unused wayspots is slim. Pikmin Bloom at least has a feature where you can get a postcard from a location not used in-game as an interactable POI, however these are mostly for vanity. Personally, my postcard box filled up months ago, and because it is a massive pain to delete them, I no longer get postcards and the feature is now basically non-existent for me. The reality is, that unless Niantic plans to create a new game that uses a POI density similar to or better than Ingress, most POIs that do not already appear in Ingress might never appear in another game.
The wild card in this puzzle though, is Augmented Reality. We have all seen Niantic pushing their AR technology over the past few years, and even with the most recent Ingress update they are incentivizing AR scans even more. It is no secret that AR is the future, and that Niantic is collecting AR data from portals to use in their future projects. But this raises the question, if a POI isn't in Ingress or any other current game, and if it isn't likely to show up in a future game, how will Niantic get players to scan these POIs for future use with AR projects? The likely answer, is they probably won't. The POI are left in the dust. They can't be edited, they can't have photos added to them, they can't be scanned, and they are unlikely to reap the benefits that come with being improved upon. The 20m rule excluding these POIs from Ingress largely excludes them from the methods that Niantic uses to gather data for POIs for future use, and it makes them even less likely to be used in the future. Please take note that one of the big complaints about the 20m rule is how many interesting POI it excludes. This exclusion will have nasty limiting effects for the future of Niantic's games, and for the future of the Lightship platform, as it excludes many interesting POIs in favor of the aging portal network that is full of grandfathered neighborhood signs, generic memorial benches and more. How can Niantic truly map the world with these limitations?
So, how do we solve this problem? Its pretty easy - significantly reduce or outright remove the 20m rule. It is clear the rule is unliked. It is clear the rule makes Wayfarer worse. It is clear the rule leads to abuse. It is clear the rule has negative cascading effects on the future of Lightship. It is likely the rule's impact will get worse as time goes on. It is time for the rule to go.
I'm not going to pretend I have the perfect answer for what it should be reduced to, but I think it is clear that while the 20m rule was not in effect, things were much better off, the future was brighter, and it did not get remotely close to breaking the game in an unhealthy or unappealing way. Any reduction in the 20m rule would be beneficial, but personally, I would probably reduce it to 3 or 5 meters or maybe even less. Just enough to make sure that portals aren't literally on top of each other. Besides, at a density closer than 3 meter, nominations that close are far more likely to just be duplicates.
The reality is that real world locations where large, potentially problematic stacks of portals could be created are few and far between. Locations like the example that Brian shared in his Q&A answer are the types of places that the majority of players will never even encounter. That example exists within the sea of thousands of portals in Los Angeles, at which point, if that specific 40 meter **** of sidewalk truly annoys a player, they have a near infinite number of other places to go play in Los Angeles. The best thing to govern the density of portals is the real world itself. Areas with many interesting potential POIs like this are not common, but when they do occur, it makes the world more interesting and it inspires exploration. The 20m rule does a lot more to disrupt interesting POIs when two things are just slightly too close together, rather than actually stopping problematic portal clusters. The 20m rule hurts rural players too; Many small parks are lucky if they have more than a park sign, a playground, and a pavilion. If one of those three things is within 20 meters of another, that means that an ingress agent can't even make a single field at that park. The list of negatives to the 20m rule goes on and on. It is time for the rule to be put to an end.
I hope this detailed explanation will inspire positive change, and thank you to anyone who took the time to read it in full.
Comments
One point i agree is NIA need do daily S2 size 17 one poi per cell script runs to revert & nerf abused gyms that should nitappear in pogo, regardless of age & move request consideration. Ie if appear as gym then gets approved for move to another cell, revert to pokespot if too many gyms..in their s2 size 14 cell.
I'm really not getting Brian's reply because if I'm in a huge city isn't it expected to see a lot of POIs close to each other? Applying the 20 meter rule really leaves a lot of potential POIs to just simply not ever appear in any Niantic game. It shouldn't be first come, first serve to display places especially when the database is approaching 10 years. Think of your city in the past decade and there is no question you know stuff has changed.
I don’t see how problems with submission abuse should relate to the 20m rule.
Submission abuse should be handled for sure, nothing to do with this rule.
Having portals a few m apart makes the game annoying to play imo because they are hard to select. Anything that makes performing actions a bad user experience is bad for the game.
And portals 5m apart hardly fit with the idea of promoting physical movement.
I would be happy if Niantic went further and introduced some kind of change that allowed really close portals - say within 10m - to be thinned out by eliminating some of them. There could even be a game lore event to cause this. The only tricky part is how to keep the best portals, and also do it in a way that isn’t subject to abuse.
The worst part of 20 m rule after Ingress POI database migrating to Lightship is, the accepted nomination that within 20 m range will never goes into Ingress and of course Intel map, but it will added to Lightship database. Before lightship, the nomination simply gone and not appearing anywhere, it makes a re nomination will have some hope to goes live if the placement corrected due to 20 m proximity rule. But, a renomination on Lightship era will come out as forever invisible duplicate, wasting time on renomination and reviewing.
Whats more frustrating from that case? Theres is actually snowball effect of 20 m proximity. I have a case in a park which is have only 3 POI appearing in Ingress but 6 POI on Lightship. How is that possible?
Turns out the first invisible POI 20 m range can affect new nomination even the latter is outside 20 m range of visible Portals. And this snowball effect continued makings invisible POI. Intel map cannot help because it is invisbles everywhere. Disastrous, wasting time to nominate and reviewing for upgrades.
The solution that i came up with, could be these options:
1. Favourable for agents of course, removal of 20 m rules or reduction at least
2. Maybe it is more of wayfarer team responsibility. Makes a feature in Ingress like Pokemon GO to see invisible wayspot when nomonating. Or even better, make a Map like intel map, but including invisible POI.
3. Revert back that accepted nomination but doesn't goes live in Ingress due to 20 m rules will not added to POI database, so we can always try renominate and prevent snowball effect of invisible trap of invisible wayspot 20 m range for another object nearby.
I hope our opinions can be heard. We had enough unpaid labor works to make wayspot for Niantic, we just need fair accepted nomination goes live, not to be frustrated by ridiculous rules.
Tdlr; I'm not going to read the entire thread,
20m in Ingress isn't the problem
The currently inability to see ALL the pois, leading location duplication and manipulation is....
Subs and pois shouldn't be managed in the games at all.....
Ingress should regularly purge pois closer than 20m from others...
Just wanna point out that regularly purging portals will have a pretty nasty side effect for missions in some areas.…
As portals should reflect real world worthy points of interest lets say it is usual that on educational trails, theme parks or even historic places the builders of those didnt care about nias concepts in these means.
Many really cool educational and insightful missions are impossible to make a good sense if two thirds of the pois are missing and are randomly chosen even, upto shitty powerbox murals are blocking historical signs, statues or even buildings.
Open your eyes nia, its a complete nonsense to insist on a whatever artificial and non realistic ruleset which furthermore massively damages worthy implementations
A great suggestion that I have seen is to add all Lightship POIs into mission creator. It certainly isn't a replacement for reducing the 20m rule and solving the problems it creates, but it would give more meaning to Lightship POIs and at least make their occurrence less frustrating.
The currently inability to see ALL the pois, leading location duplication and manipulation is....
This really isn't the point of this thread. 😁
People aren't complaining because their arbitrary number can't be raised higher with dense portals. People want more portals within a given area so that they can use their portals. So the exact opposite of what you think the "problem" is.
Showing all the portals in an area won't make people who want denser regions stop wanting the removal of the 20m rule. It'll just give them a better idea of the potential portals they can't have.
The simplest solution should be to lessen it in increments ro see if the game handles it first down to 15 (and any lightship poi not In ingress because of 20m rule, but would make it in 15 should appear) if its still working, then 10m, same again as before, portals appear, if game handles it, move it to 5, then if its still working, just remove it.
Think about it: the 20 meters is more strict than the CDC and WHO guidelines at the start of the COVID pandemic with keeping 2 meters (6 feet) apart for social distancing.
The area of a 20 meter circle is 0.31052 acres or 13,526 square feet. That's roughly the size of a "super" convenience store for a gas station that also specializes in its own food service (for the US, the best examples are Wawa, Racetrac, QT, Sheetz). That's a big footprint.
You're definitely more on the money than the person who didn't read the thread, but your point is only half of it. It isn't necessarily about outright getting more portals to increase density, but about improving the number of interesting portals out there. Here's a real world example:
A town near me just added a really cool set of signs to its parks revolving around the solar system. There are 10 of these, one for the sun, and one for each the planets, even poor Pluto which got demoted to being a planetoid. Each of these planet signs are placed at a distance away from the Sun sign on a scale of 4-billion-to-one, and it illustrates the distance each planet is from the Sun. The signs also include a bunch of facts about the planets, and there is a QR code you can scan with your phone to engage in a separate Augmented Reality experience. The whole thing is really cool. You can read more about it here and I'll leave an example of one of the signs below:
The problem is, of these 10 stations, at least half of them cant appear in Ingress due to 20m proximity, and the portals blocking them are far less interesting. Examples include pavilions, playgrounds, and a common sign about manatee preservation. While these things are generally valid submissions, they're boring, uninteresting and repetitive. Because they are already portals, they will forever supersede the more interesting things that got added to this park. To make matters worse, most of these signs are just barely blocked by the 20m rule, rather than being right on top of an existing one. A reduction in the 20m rule would let all of these become portals in Ingress. These portals could make a really interesting Ingress mission that will now be either impossible or janky.
This type of scenario is not limited to just this one park, this happens all over the place and is very common. As Ingress is nearly 10 years old, there are an insane number of grandfathered and/or boring portals that prevent more interesting things from appearing in-game, and as time goes on that problem will only get worse.
Omg this is so true. Your solar system example is an amazing linked poi journey. These sorts of series of things should be highly valued as game poi.
All these series pois should be all in games. Pogo should have them too.
For clever POIs like these the game rules need to go bye-bye
The distance rules in both ingress and pogo annoy me a lot. Suburban sprawl and rural areas need a rethink as to what can be done to make more POIs.
City dwellers and city workers go for a 700m walk and get 20 POIs ... If I made the 700m walk to my local park I want to have all of the 6 POIs that are present in the park.
* I personally do because they were 20m apart.* but I know of many locations where the only POIs in 500m2 are within 20m.
And don't get me started on how many locations I know about where if the pin was just 2m in another direction then the poi would also be in pogo too.
Check out Hair Park, in Runcorn Australia. The playground portal is 50cm off forming a 2nd poi for pogo.
Pogo is not my game. But it's great game for many people.
The aim is to get people walking get them outside . And in suburban sprawl and rural we need every poi in a park to be counted.
People got to remember that the most needful demographic of niagames are those that are sedentary more bang for your buck is needed in suburban parks.
I'm not timerclock-ing it here. We don't need every bench and tap... we do need every proper poi to be included.
Just going to say for sure... portals aren't people :-)
If the game really were about "physical" movement, deploying etc needs to go way faster. I think that idea is long gone. I have to wait for the game to catch up all the time.
With Pokemon Go you need to move even less. Pokemons are all over the place and in heaps. Catch the 5 where you are standing, walk 10m and get another 5 popping up. Gotta catch them all? How fast would you walk doing that?
As for the 20m restrictions? I am against that rule too. I'm not even living in a really big city but there are interesting new things here too which will never make it into the game due to the restrictions. We have a kinda new comic museum here, but there is some outdated and not soo interesting wall ornament in nearly same place. What would be more interesting for someone new to the city? :/
There's definetly dozens, if not hundreds, of potential POI I'm not submitting becasue of the 20m rule. It's just too large. There are areas around me that have denser portals from before the 20m rule, and from the few times the system let them through, and they are much more fun areas for playing and gathering with agents. The biggest victim of this in my area are local public parks and walking trails. These areas were ignored in the early days of ingress, and it causes agents (and other players of other games) to flood graveyards and traffic congested cities as these were the popular areas niantic encourages in the early days.
God I hate how dense graveyards are, it's nearly ruined the infrastructure of a few local graveyards near me because of pokemon-drive and cargress agents mixed with Niantic's refusal to remove no-longer eligible portals.
Reducing the portal limit to ~10-5 meters would help curb a lot of the abuse as well. I've seen a ton of players misplace the location of portals when submitting specifically to get around the 20m rule. Move portals within 20m in Wayfarer to **** the opposing faction's team out of portals. etc. It's making the lightship POI database less accurate and helpful if everything is meters off form the actual location. When you can't reach the bookstore's portal because it was too close to a mural that's not even there anymore, that's annoying.
Heck, even in the recent March 2022 AMA, @NianticBrian and @NianticThia stated that Ingress was like the game that beta-tests features and mechanics for other games. Why have a game for that purpose be the cause of the POI database being innacurate and sparse? Though Brian's twiter comments makes me think either the team is aware of the problem but is under instructions to leave it as is, or just does not understand why people are frustrated despite us stating it clearly multiple timed over the years. Catan never even made it worldwide, why bring it up at all?
@AisforAndis, though a large wall of text, hits the nail on the head as usual. I'm very tired of the potential of my local areas being stymied by the 20m rule when the only thing to interact with in Ingress ARE the portals.
Yet you're missing the point with the math I presented which was more critical.
If there truly are thousands of pois why are you not submitting them, and then using the number of pois not in game as an argument for letting more pois in......
When the "bug" was fixed a few weeks ago, I withdrew 15-20 submissions and have since, only submitted 2-3 nominations and I only submitted them because I knew they would make it into the game. None of them are even in an area I play in.
I have a lot to say about this 20m rule thing ....
About the rules of wayspot inclusion for both Ingress and Pogo
In a nutshell:
1) The wayspot network is a blunt caricature of the real world.
The system lacks the finesse to map the real world as accurately many would like.
* A playground is not a point it's a polygon.
*It does not keep information about portals that relate to each other. A series of information signs, series of trail markers or the works of the one mural artist painting all over town.
* People with their own games in mind are not disincentivised to misrepresent where a poi is.
Ingress folk are map people for the main not abstract artists.
2) the game poi selection rules are too restrictive for locations not in town.
Will jump on again in a day or so to explain some more stuff. Particularly some examples .. but it's midnight here. And I'm just exhausted.
The 20m rule is outdated and restricts access to in game exploration of soooo many cool things that would benefit the game so much. It prevents cooler, more beautiful art and interesting historical information from being explored, because they’re being blocked by a boring object like a generic memorial bench, that Niantic won’t remove from the system because it’s still there.
The 20m rule being gone opened up a world of possibilities. I strongly doubt there’s a real performance issue, or else y’all would have dealt with the existing clusters and prevent them from happening when wayfarer staff move a poi to the correct spot.
Lower the number, if we can’t get rid of it entirely. All it’s doing right now is encouraging abuse. Stop pretending that wayfarer is entirely separate, when nominating is *integrated into your game* and is what’s encouraging the abuse.
I'm not going to put in the effort if I'm not getting anything out of it.
Wish I could give this a hundred likes, really describes well why having arbitrary limits on how many POI's you can have in games like Ingress is just not healthy game design. Niantic, if you really want to encourage exploration, then you shouldn't be setting arbitrary limits to POI density, in any of your games. At most, 3-5 meters to prevent the issue OP mentioned of having portals literally on top of each other. Beyond that, there should be no further limits. Not in Ingress, not in PoGo.
Please, for goodness sake, update the so called "inclusion rules" to just focus on not having multiple waypoints in the exact same position. We don't need 20 meters, or 1 POI per level 17 S2 cell to accomplish that.
Wayfarer had an AMA where the 20m rule was asked again. It bounced it back to the Ingress AMA as an answer.
20m rule, is it needed?
Alright, so looking past the “this is NOT Wayfarer related” for a little bit, we already have systems in place that address the abuse the 20m rule mentions to ‘encourage’. At this time, games continue to be able to set their own inclusion rules and abusers will be addressed accordingly. Wayfarer does not dictate how games choose which Wayspots to include in games. Lastly, Ingress recently responded to this too. Please check out the response from Ingress here.
There is no point to having a 20 meter rule. As MANY other people have said, countless times, it causes good POI to be rejected in favor of existing, often low-quality POI.
Case in point, we had to fight for and contact Niantic many times in order to get Independence Hall, a UNESCO World Heritage site where both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were debated and adopted, into Ingress. All because a random statue across the street was blocking it due to bad distance rules. It took years and multiple rejections before we finally got Niantic to accept an appeal and manually place it into the portal network.
This is the kind of nonsense that happens all over the world. Statues don't get in because random signs or old memorial benches exclude them. Sculptures are rejected because they're too close to the building that is a portal right behind it. Nature and educational signs get excluded because a nearby trail marker is too close.
It makes the game less fun and less interesting AND reduces our exposure to education and culture by not having important, beautiful, or educational items in the real world included in the game world.
My issue with the 20 meter rule:
Integrating with Niantic Wayfarer was meant to help somewhat, in that now these new Portal submissions won't be lost even if Ingress doesn't ingest them.
There is no solid identification in any of the games that show nominations that have been approved but "rejected" because they are within 20 meters. The Wayfarer contributions page fails to really disclose this except by showing the nomination as approved. If this is the case, it really needs to be explicitly stated on the website. It might be somewhat stated in the emails but you would have better results mentioned at the website.
I thought someone said pogo showed all pois (yet to see proof, don't open app often enough to be able to sub)
Submissions really should be outside of the games and stand on there own, perhaps as a reincarnated field trip...
It doesn't as far as I can tell, it looks like they only have waypoints that are still in other games (so ingress), nothing in just lightship
Next time someone gets a Too Close, check it? I can't see anything near me except accepted portals in Ingress but I don't know of any recent Too Close submissions either.