I have been reviewing and rejecting a lot of individual holes for golf and frisbee golf because I thought I saw guidance that for safety reasons we did not want Pokemon Go players with their eyes on their phones to be wandering around golf courses with flying round projectiles in the air. Not joking that there may be a liability thing here.
This week I got another one to review and I saw two recently approved neighboring individual holes approved as wayspots. I reported them in the official way and got this in reply:
Thank you for your location report for Stoneybrook Golf Course (Dilemna - Hole #3) on Oct 14, 2026.
Niantic has decided that your report will be rejected. Any changes based on reports take up to 48 hours to be reflected in Niantic products that use this location. Note that not all available locations are used across all Niantic games.
Your friends,
The Wayfarer Team
SO, I guess I have been wrong all along and individual holes are OK. I will start approving these going forward.
The lack of consistency in guidance, rejections and approvals is staggering. Maybe it’s time to re-write the guidance with a lot more specific examples. I am sure there are a bunch of new reviewers all the time that are Pokemon Go players just trying to get 1500 agreements done so they can get a platinum medal needed in the game - why don’t we clear-up the guidance so new players can learn quickly and so we can all be more consistent.
I’m sure that this is frustration and sarcasm talking, but for the record, the results of reviews and appeals have been specifically stated as ‘non-binding’. I.e., we should never make assumptions that something is eligible (or ineligible) based on them. Only official Niantic / Scopely statements should be taken as guidance.
No - honestly - I took the rejected report as meaning that individual holes are actually allowed. I have read the “point of play” comment above and cannot decide it that means individual holes are - or are not - allowed. I appreciate the “non-binding” and “human error” comments - both valid. Point being that consistency is lacking in guidance, approvals, and even in reviews. Now it’s on me to accept that it is what it is… but - I just got another one for hole #9 on a frisbee golf course and I can see that basket #8 was already approved - what to do?
If there are multiple, use the ‘report abuse’ form. It’s a moderately efficient process.
The guidance is pretty solid, to be fair, although there is always a qualitative aspect to submissions, so there is never a clear “always this”, and rarely even a clear “never this”.
Reviews will always be wildly inconsistent, because the people doing them have wildly different priorities. Some (like most people here) want to keep the map in a good state. Some want MOAR STOPS and approve everything. Some want the wayfarer medal ASAP so for them it’s all about quantity.
As for the appeals staff… I can’t say I know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that role had been somewhat outsourced to staff who aren’t necessarily on the same wage as those managing the map.
1 hole does not make an entire game, therefore it is a “point of play.” You must engage with multiple points of play in order to complete a single game. This is why I always make the comparison to baseball. You can’t play an entire game of baseball without rounding all the bases, therefore the bases are a “set”.
On a real golf course, I might make an exception for the 10th hole IF someone can prove that a particular course is routinely played in sets of 9 holes, so that the 10th is a kind of starting over point. For context, the golf course I played on in high school was a public course with 3 sets of 9 holes. In order to play a full game of 18 holes, you had to decide which 2 courses you were playing or to repeat a single course. They literally did not have an 18 hole course. If websites had existed back in those days, that could have been easily proven online. So, I would have accepted the starting hole for each of those 3 courses.
But I have no idea if frisbee golf is played the same way with an option to play 9 or 18 holes. Someone doing the submission would have to explain that.
It’s extremely frustrating. However, I’ll throw you another curveball. We have seen on here time and time again that when multiple people report the same Wayspot, they send rejection emails instead of a “we already took care of it” email even though they actually did remove it. Then again, it follows their pattern of lumping many things into one. It’s why we constantly get people complaining about their submission rejection reason being of a non-permanent object when in reality it was rejected for being non-distinct.
Yeah, this is an annoyance, and the text really ought to be swapped with “The waypoint has been moved / been removed / been renamed / not been changed”.
The staff who check removal reports are making a lot of mistakes with golf course wayspots. I can understand a mistake being made once or twice, but Scopely Explore are failing to specifically educate every person who decides removal reports about golf courses. It’s a bad look.
The only positive out of it is that if they reject one of them, it opens up the floodgates to come here to post the rejection appeal and then name all of the other holes at one time. Sure, you can do that in a report, but this is more fun!
The disc golf course by me has “alternate routes” (i.e. goal 1a or goal 1b, goal 4a or goal 4b, etc.) available, but it still plays as if you chose 9 goals/holes total. I’d still consider it one whole course since those choices are still close enough together that you’re not veering away in a completely different direction to get a whole new 9-hole course.
Now, I’m not familiar with disc golf at all, either, so I don’t know if that is the norm having multiple goal choices, lol.
Generally-speaking, the only spots you can safely stand on a (disc) golf course are the clubhouse and the first tee.
At all other points, someone could potentially be aiming directly at you.
There are exceptions (here, golf courses are subject to the public’s ‘right to roam’, so old buildings and trig points etc. on the course may still be valid), but the onus would still be on the submitter to show that those spots are reasonably safe and would not disrupt games.
