"“Ingress Portal photo with most upvotes creates Pokemon GO gym” theory debunked"

#PokemonGO: So I am sad to report that it appears the new theory on portal->gym creation is wrong. Let me explain the story of my town’s newest gym (created today, June 6).On reading about this new theory yesterday that Ingress agents can influence which portals are converted into pokestops and which ones can be forced to create gyms I informed the 4 other players in my town that also play both games. I also told them that I have a portal submission undergoing review that would create a new portal, and hence a pokestop, at a local church and after examination of the Level 14 S2 cell it was in would mean that the cell contained 2 pokestops, and therefore one would become a gym. Armed with the knowledge of the new portal photo to gym creation theory I told them if the new church received more upvotes we could make sure it turned into a PoGO gym. Since it has ample free roadside parking and the other one has no parking (the other is a Post Office Depot on a busy main road) then it would be a much better option, and given the fact that we could potentially influence which one became the gym everyone agreed it was better.Fast forward to this morning and by luck the church portal in question was approved (email timestamp was 08:49 BST). I noticed the Niantic email at 11:00 and quickly text the 4 other Ingress agents to ask them to upvote the portal photo. By 12:00 the portal had 5 ‘likes’ outweighing the 2 ‘likes’ on the Post Office Depot photo.Keeping an eye on Pokemon GO this evening I waited until I saw the creation of the new church Pokestop which happened at 18:50 BST. At that moment the Level 14 S2 cell contained 2 pokestops and at 19:00 BST the Post Office Depot was converted into a gym. We now have a gym on a busy main road that won’t be much use for raiding plus it busted the new theory that seemed to be working so well.Additional notes: In Ingress the new church portal was the most recently visited portal by an Ingress agent before the new gym was created. It had full deployment of resonators and it was linked to other portals in the area. Meanwhile in Pokemon GO upon the creation of the new pokestop, and during the 10 mins before one of them became the gym, there was no interaction from players with the new pokestop that I witnessed (no pokestop spins or lure modules active).EDIT: Adding a note here about the original posts which prompted me to look at this theory: https://ift.tt/2sOvm0W https://ift.tt/2M5Ijwf Thank you to all who are commenting and giving suggests why the theory failed to hold true today for me. Many comments so far seem to be focusing the timing between a portal being created in Ingress and the sync that happens with Pokemon GO. There maybe a time limit after its creation that the new portal must receive enough upvotes to overtake the existing portal before the decision is made and locked on which will be the gym. If the Level 14 S2 cell only has one existing portal and you are adding a second to create a gym it seems like it's difficult to force the new portal to become the gym if the older portal has a photo with many upvotes already, there simply may not be enough time to gather the votes for the new portal and overtake the old one. However if the existing portal's photo has zero votes maybe then it's random which one becomes the gym? This would have to be tested and the results reported from a large sample of Ingress players to see if it is a 50:50 split.As pointed out by u/tehstone testing the photo upvote theory on the creation of the second or third gym in a Level 14 S2 cell would be better. If one of the existing portals in the cell was selected in advance to be the gym, the photo given the most upvotes compared to the other portals, and then the final portal needed to meet the 2nd/3rd gym threshold (i.e. the 6th or 20th portal) was submitted for approval it would avoid the scramble to find the upvotes for the newest portal in time before the sync. One of the older portals/pokestops will already have been picked for conversion when the time comes to create the new gym. There will just be less examples of this to report on though as creating the first gym in the cell is more common (only need 2 portals) than the creation of the second and third gyms. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2szH00C