How to re-introduce Poke-stop submissions

Greetings trainers,

Table of Contents

1. Pre-amble/explanation
2. Proposal
3. Would this really be all that helpful?
4. Conclusion

1. Pre-amble 

I've been travelling about lately and I've gotten a good bit of perspective regarding the state of Poke-stop diversity in different kinds of communities. I've been in the boonies, I've been in the big city, and I've been in-between. Back when Niantic originally populated Poke-stop submissions (i.e. portals in "Ingress"), they used geo-tagged photos of interesting works of art, culture, and then public buildings like post offices or unique landmarks. This gave them a big base of Poke-stops to work from, and previously Niantic had portal/Poke-stop submission open for Ingress and Pokemon GO. The company shut down portal submissions back in September 2015, and never had the option to submit new Poke-stops in Pokemon GO.

I imagine Niantic has a massive backlog of data about GPS co-ordinates of submitted portals/Poke-stops, and they have more than enough data to filter through already; if they re-opened submissions, I imagine most of the data they would receive would be requests for Poke-stops that are already in their database. Thus, it would be a bit redundant to re-open submissions, and would just increase the strain on human resources figuring out how to best process these requests.

Niantic has said that they wanted to work on a new and more efficient way to process portal submission requests. Given my recent travels, I think the most important thing Niantic could do to re-open submissions would be to allow users to annotate areas in the world that are incredibly sparsely populated by Poke-stops/Gyms. Below is my thought process for how to best make this happen, which hopefully isn't too redundant with what Niantic already has to consider.

2. Proposal

Gym Prestige System Fixed!

Rejoice!

Greeting trainers!

Quick update post. Gym Prestige has been fixed! You still take down enemy gyms by 1000 prestige per Pokemon defeated, +1000 for defeating the whole gym. However, you can now earn up to 1000 prestige for defeating a friendly Pokemon again!

Here's a reminder on how to battle gyms most effectively!

• If the Pokemon with the highest CP in your party has a higher CP than the Defending Pokemon, you will earn 255 prestige minus a multiplier down to a minimum of 100 prestige.
• If the Pokemon with the highest CP in your party has a lower CP than the Defending Pokemon, you will earn 500 prestige plus a multiplier up to a maximum of 1000 prestige.

• The new battle mechanics will level down any Defending Pokemon to match your level (+2). So the Combat Power of the later Pokemon may be reduced from the overview.
• To get the most out of each battle, you should try to beat every Defending Pokemon with an team that's about half their Combat Power.

If you want a full-length article, feel free to check out the Let's GO guide to using the new gym battle system!

And be sure to check out our new Gym Defender's Tier List to know what Pokemon are top defenders in the new metagame!

Cheers,

Let's GO!