"The majority of “Submission Statements” in pokéstop submissions is currently useless and misleading. Simple text solution could help."

#PokemonGO: IntroductionSup travelers. I’ve been an OPR reviewer for a couple of months, and since I started, I never really understood how the Submission statement/Additional text makes sense. This is basically because it should be used to help reviewers with more relevant info, but doesn’t.For those who are unaware of how the feature works, you can submit pokéstop nominations if you’re level 40 in an eligible country. They aren’t approve/rejected immediately, it will take some time and needs to be reviewed by other Ingress players. You submit the primary and secondary photo, a title, a description, the location marker and this “submission statement”.I don’t usually chat about it with other reviewers, so I’ll be happy to read what others think, from a submitter’s perspective too.If you feel the need of tips to be a better submitter and get your pokéstops approved make sure to check my other threads/guides:Questions and Answers - How can I create Pokéstops or Gyms? How is the submission/review system? Who can do that? What's a S2 cell? And more.andGiving your Pokéstop Nominations the best chance to be approved. With OPR insights + good and bad examples..First, how the things currently are:The current in-game text:Show why your nomination is importantExplain why you believe your PokéStop nomination is important and what trainers will see there. Effectively communicating these points will help reviewers evaluate your nomination and understand it’s value.Enter additional supporting information, which will only be seen by reviewers, here.What the official support website says:Show why your nomination is importantThe final step helps give the nomination reviewers some more context as to why your nomination should be considered eligible. Here, you can specify what makes your nomination a high-quality PokéStop candidate. These sections will not appear on the PokéStop details and will only be shared with the community of reviewers that are evaluating your nomination.What it really means, via OPR:The submission statement should clearly explain why the Portal Candidate meets the Acceptance Criteria.Second, why is that a problem?It’s misleading because in both sides say different things, and they don’t necessarily correlate.It’s mostly useless because it suggests reasons that aren’t reasons to help with ratings.For the in-game text, it has a bunch of words but they don’t direct at any important direction. *The word “important” is super vague. I’m pretty sure at least 90% of the submitters wanna submit because they want one more pokéstop/gym in the game, which is fine, but they will use the camp to describe it and this has nothing to do with the Portal/Pokéstop criterias that use in OPR.About 10 months ago where I read that text on the Pokéstop submission beta release for Brazil I was very confused. It doesn’t guide you because it’s too vague, so I stood in that screen for a couple minutes before I was able to write something meaningful(which wasn’t). The text asks“why” is a good submission, but don’t say what this “why” should be.Usually players argument in this text has one or more of the following:“Accessibility” is the most common topic brought, which is good to have. You need it to be safely accessible by pedestrians, but you don’t need to be publicly accessible according to guidelines. It can be in private property, as long as it’s not in private residential property and some other specific cases. They usually follow with “it’s a busy/active place”, or “a bunch of people/players go there”, which is not really a criteria(I don’t get why so many people say this).The other common topic used are kind of “pokéstop begging”. Like “We need more pokéstops”, “we have lack of pokéstops in this neighbourhood”, “there’s no pokéstops and gyms nearby”, “a good place for a pokéstop”. “5 star begging because I want more pokéstops”. Those are irrelevant.“Blank”. When the submitter doesn’t know what to do, so it just repeats the description or title, which is essentially nothing. Also “this is eligible”(yeah, typed like this).Then we have actual good “POI qualities”, which are rarer but very helpful. Examples are showing the actual criteria, giving historical insights of the local POI (which could be in the description), what’s actually done in the place that connects people, etc.Third, so what’s a solution?There might be some options. The obvious one is to change the in-game text to show the OPR description version, but it could use more directions:Get rid of “important” word. Players think the important part of pokéstop submissions is to have another in-game gameplay thing, that won’t ever change. Our primary instinct isn’t to respect the pokéstop guidelines to submit high quality candidates, specially when you don’t force or suggests the submitter to read the very detailed guideline page that has multiple eligible reasons. Instead, “why it’s a good pokéstop” right now means it’s a feature in the game the players can have, and they argue how cool it will be.Give some mention to portal/pokéstop criteria. Since it needs to fit a criteria and is what both other descriptions ask, communicate to players to type which one is it. It’s pretty simple to help actual ratings and to guide both players to know what is eligible. If not, people will submit whatever they think it would make a good pokéstop.This one might be out of bounds, but ask submitters to describe how the reviewer can find the criterias. Rating begging allows a 1* reject, but what I’m saying is more bringing and highlighting arguments that will probably be missed because of how limited the submission is. For example, where is the public identification of the place(like a signage that wasn’t covered in the photo), why the location marker is accurate(A LOT of submissions have misplaced markers because there’s the level 17 rule), inside of where the POI is located(when not visible via street maps/satellite, having only 2011 data makes it kinda hard), when the POI was created, etc.So my suggestion would be(my wording isn’t the best tho):Title of screen: Why your submission helps trainers find the value of their community?Description: Describe which criteria your submission meets in accord to our eligibility guidelines. You can also say how the point of interest is helpful for people’s real life activities.Inside the text box: Your description will help the reviewing community to decide if it’s a good quality pokéstop candidate and to find an agreement sooner. This information won’t be published.A couple of actual review cases to better illustrate the problem:Tree identification, follows the Ingress guidelines. At first glance it could be rejected by “natural feature”, but the POI is the signage of the planting of a “Pau-Brasil”, which is the tree that Brazil was named on.Place with high flow quality of players. Whatever this means.There are a lot players in the city, because of the lack of pokéstops and gyms, we need to move to other cities. That’s true for a bunch of places, but this isn’t relevant info.Prefecture building that provides support for people in need or homeless.. Pretty helpful, it describes how the POI helps the community with social plans.Reviewer, only one portal left for the latest pokéstop to become a gym of the pokémon community. This parrot statue is old in this place and is in google street, you can check in the walking view, the place is the entrance of a tourist spot of X. Asking please for you to 5 star it and help our community. Prime example that some submitters will look just a gameplay thing. This is mostly not relevant, and could mess up the sub.Other problems to be looked:I find other problems in the beta system too:Review takes too long. There’s isn’t incentive to it outside Upgrades. We need more active reviewers, just expanding submitters will go even worse, this happened in the past.No punishment for fake submitters. It might be different in some other places, but there are a few submitters that completely flood and clog the system with faked photoshopped POIs inside their houses. It’s pretty obvious. They won’t stop till the city is full of pokéstops. Those aren’t available in satellite or street view obviously, so it wastes even more reviews because of disagreements. There’s the guideline for tagging “Abuse”, but I’m yet to see any actual case of this punishing those players.There’s isn’t any feedback available for submitters. There reject/ineligible e-mail is exactly the same for whatever reason. There’s no way the system doesn’t track the ratings. Have a filter system that selects one to three of the most common reject criterias or lower ratings and show them to the submitter. Right now a bunch of players think Ingress reviewers waste their time rejecting submission just to troll, which for me is insane. Most of the time is just a mismatched location case correctly evaluated(in accord to guidelines).Bonus: They just announced that they are working on feedback for reject emails and should be out as soon. Hopefully for PoGo’s system too.TL;DR: Change the in-game text, please. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2ZxcZRC