The Seer-medal was awarded for submitting new approved Portals. It was discontinued on 31. December 2014,[1] coinciding with the introduction of Trekker, Engineer, and SpecOps.
While new Portals no longer count towards the medal, Agents who earned Seer before the cut-off still have the medal in their Agent Profiles. The medal's exclusivity grants the bearer a fair amount of prestige, similar to the Founder, Innovator, and Anomaly Medals. Should a Portal submitted before the 31. December 2014 be accepted today, it would however still count towards the medal.
Criteria
Prior to the medal's retirement, each new Portal that was successfully approved by Niantic caused the Agent's Seer count to increment. The Medal was awarded upon restarting the Scanner once a threshold was reached.
While it no longer counts towards a badge or achievement, how many Portals an Agent has submitted is visible in the stats section of their profile under Discovery.
Strategy
Because Portal density was initially low and many modern medals had yet to be introduced, Seer was once a key medal for Agents seeking Access Level requirements. Aggressively submitting numerous new Portals decreased the time required to reach the crucial 500 Portal threshold, and Agents often used software utilities to track their submissions and keep their pipelines full.
Retirement
While Portal submissions were always brisk, the introduction of medals and higher Access Levels massively increased the quantity of submissions. By Ingress' second anniversary, over 3 000 000 Portals had been approved, averaging approximately 4 000 approvals per day.[2]
The increased volume overloaded Niantic's approvals team, leading to an increased number of Portals which lacked pictures, notability, local flavour, and sufficient distance from others. This led to a community outcry[3] and shaped much of Ingress' contemporary clustered topography.
On 16. December 2014, Niantic announced on Twitter and Facebook that Seer would be temporarily suspended. The suspension was never lifted, and the Medal is presumed obsolete. Coupled with Niantic's more aggressive approval process, new Portals now appear far less often.