While most people might know Niantic for building the hype-monster that is Pokemon GO, GO wasn’t the company’s first big release. That title goes to Ingress, an equally (if not more) location-centric game.
Just days after Ingress’ fourth birthday, Niantic is shaking things up with
the introduction of a feature they’ve been working on for months: the ability for players to vote new real-world locations (“portals”) into the game.
Like Pokemon Go, Ingress uses real-world landmarks (things like landmarks, or statues, or murals) as important gameplay spots.
But Niantic can’t be everywhere, and can’t know the landmarks of every city and town around the globe — so they turned to the players. Players were previously able to submit locations they thought might work well in game, which Niantic then moderated one-by-one.
But in September of 2015 — right around the time Niantic spun out of Google — the company stopped accepting new portal submissions. The burden was simply growing overwhelming; their backlog of submissions was getting bigger and bigger, and this manual method of approval clearly wasn’t keeping up.
Thus, “Operation Portal Recon”, as the new hub is known.
Here’s how it works:
- In the initial closed beta rollout, the new hub will work in San Francisco and Tokyo
- The tool will initially only be invite-only, only open to Ingress players who’ve reached L16 — the highest level in the game. Getting there requires a helluva lot of time and dedication, but also suggests you know what a portal should be like.
- Players will ultimately be able to give feedback on potential portals in two places: the area they play most, and one other location of their choice that they have local knowledge of — be it their childhood hometown or a place they visit often
- Players give feedback on multiple factors — the photo, the Portal’s name, whether or not it’s a duplicate, etc. It’s not a straight up yes/no vote.
- They’ll be starting with Niantic’s existing backlog first
- Behind the scenes, the hub weighs each player’s feedback based on how good they seem to be at ranking portals
- Once a portal gets enough positive feedback and an algorithm gives it the greenlight, the portal goes live in-game. If it’s working correctly, there’s no human intervention required on Niantic’s side.