Best Of
September AMA
Hello Explorers,
Super excited to announce our next AMA taking place September 30, 2021! For new explorers, this is the time for you to ask your most pressing questions about Wayfarer and vote on other questions you want answered too. Once voting is done, 15 questions will be selected and sent to our team for responses.
With that being said, please drop your questions as comments in THIS thread by September 22, after which you'll have 5 days of voting to determine the top questions for selection.
Thanks again for your excitement and I look forward to all of the questions!
NianticTintino-ING
End of Summer Lookback - UPDATE
Hello Explorers,
Thank you all for your continued feedback as we worked on fixing some of the known issues with the previous update. We are very excited to ship Version 4.1! As promised in the post End of Summer Lookback by NianticDanbocat, here is the list of updates we addressed:
- Location accuracy map will display existing Wayspots, StreetView and isometric ‘tilt’ view option ✅
- StreetView should not render as blank in Location accuracy map ✅
- Auto scroll will no longer trigger when suggesting a new location or resetting the location card ✅
- Cookie bar should now render in the correct language ✅
- Increasing the size of the rating stars ⭐️ in the Review page ✅
- Upgrade Next should no longer appear on a decided Wayspot nomination ✅
- Fixes to StreetView in the Wayfarer Quiz ✅
- Fixes to log out flow ✅
- Fixes to hidden Duplicates map at certain locations ✅
- Updated attribution consent language (to reflect that the attribution consent toggle will affect all Niantic products including Wayfarer) ✅
- More UX polishing for mobile ✅
We hope that these fixes will improve your experience and continue to bring joy to exploring, nominating, and reviewing.
More updates coming soon!
NianticTintino-ING
Update on reported 4-day "cooldown"
Hey folks
Wanted to personally update you on the numerous reports we saw, especially in the last few days, regarding the mysterious 4-day "cooldowns". It is true that sometimes you will run out of things to review based on the various parameters that pull up your reviews (like your last played location, hometown or bonus location). But the frequency and specificity for which you weren't seeing reviews was suspicious, so we opened up the hood to investigate. Turns out there was a little bug in there that we quashed right away. Thanks for being so vocal about it, and very sorry for the inconvenience! 🙇♂️
If you're one of the folks who has experienced this, please do try logging in again and let us know if reviews are still not populating.
Thanks!
End of Summer Lookback (long update!)
Hello Wayfarer Explorers!
As we approach the end of the summer, we wanted to reflect upon recent work and impacts to you, and review our roadmap for the upcoming winter season.
But first, please let me introduce myself! I'm the Product Manager for Niantic Wayfarer and I look forward to bringing you product updates directly moving forward! Why am I introducing myself now? Quite honestly, I have been a tad nervous about doing so. I am human and I know how busy it can get on the frontlines with the community, on top of all of the back-of-house work we do - but I am totally committed to working with you all on reshaping what Wayfarer can be 1, 3, 5 years and beyond! Please note that I'll be more of an observer here in the forum, but know that I do review your feedback with NianticTintino on a regular basis.
About me!
In my previous life I was an urban planner both in the private and public sectors writing policy, talking urban design, master planning and parks planning. I then transitioned to the geographic information sciences/geomatics field where I worked on major infrastructure projects (like urban sustainability, rail, bridges, airports). I enjoy ceramics (mostly hand building) and traveling. I’ve lived in Canada, US, Netherlands, and Argentina. I can get by in basic Korean, Spanish, and Dutch in that order of capability 😅 - Anything we have in common?
Ok, now let’s look at what we mentioned in July’s update.
Recent Infrastructure Work
On 8/11/2021 we rolled out Wayfarer 4.0 which for the most part didn’t come with any new features or major feature updates. We do note that some bugs slipped our radar, and apologize for the inconvenience that has caused. We’re working hard to triage and push fixes out as soon as possible. Appreciate your patience on this! Please note that we do not test features against any third-party plug-ins you might use on your browser of choice.
Bug fixes we pushed out on 8/19/2021 prior to 4.1 release:
- Fixing missing StreetView pegman in the Review page.
- Fixing maps not rendering in the review page on iOS
Upcoming bug fixes in Wayfarer 4.1 (target release date 9/8/2021)
- Location accuracy map will display existing Wayspots, StreetView and isometric ‘tilt’ view option
- StreetView should not render as blank in Location accuracy map
- Auto scroll will no longer trigger when suggesting a new location or resetting the location card
- Cookie bar should now render in the correct language
- Increasing the size of the rating stars ⭐️ in the Review page
- Upgrade Next should no longer appear on a decided Wayspot nomination
- Fixes to StreetView in the Wayfarer Quiz
- Fixes to log out flow
- Fixes to hidden Duplicates map at certain locations
- Updated attribution consent language (to reflect that the attribution consent toggle will affect all Niantic products including Wayfarer)
- More UX polishing for mobile
Team, Events, Features
- Team changes: Yes, we grew! After NianticCasey had transitioned to another Niantic team, we welcomed NianticTintino to the Wayfarer squad!
- Future events: You voted on which of our shortlisted countries should have a Wayfarer Challenge next, and we decided to host it in Brazil ! 🇧🇷 We loved engaging you in the decision-making process and will continue to do so moving forward for the Wayfarer Challenges. Stay tuned for details on the upcoming event.
- More educational content in more places: We shared a lightweight new infographic on what makes a great Wayspot. What infographic should we work on next?
- New features: See the ‘what’s cooking’ section below.
- Rewiring the onboarding flow: See the ‘what’s cooking’ section below.
- Nomination Management: See the ‘what’s cooking’ section below.
- Email notifications: See the ‘what’s cooking’ section below.
- Reviewers: See the ‘what’s cooking’ section below.
- Community Forum: We’re still testing out a few quality of life improvements for the forum as well and will be rolling out a few small but impactful changes
What’s Cooking
As we noted in July, while our engineers were working to refactor the site in the first half of the year, I was busy pouring over lengthy community feedback, and developing a crisper roadmap for Wayfarer’s future. Many of you responded to our survey and candidly shared comments about the good, bad and the ugly. I read them all.
Here’s a broad breakdown of what we heard vs. what the team is planning to deliver over the next 6-9 months, loosely in the order that they will be delivered. We can’t give you an exact ship date yet as the work is actively being scoped out.
“Fix the system!” ⚙️
We looked deeply into this problem and believe that it’s actually two separate challenges. One is around a lack of broad understanding of the purpose and mission of the Wayfarer program (which cascades confusion across the product), and the other is actually a paradigm shift on how the product helps you improve as a contributor (see “Help me succeed!” below).
For understanding of purpose:
- New User Orientation: We’ll be funneling all new users to the Wayfarer website first, where they’ll experience a simple stepwise orientation of the program that eventually leads to the Wayfarer quiz. Once folks pass the quiz, both the in-game submission and website review features will be unlocked for them. This will only affect new or lapsed Explorers (e.g. 6 months from the date this feature is shipped). Also note that, following several other improvements noted below, we will be reconsidering the use of a quiz for orientation purposes.
- New branding on Notification Emails: We know the emails have been historically bogged down with bugs - there are dependencies we built into the emails that are a bit unstable which we’d like to eliminate. Our refresh will mean replacing game email notifications with Wayfarer email notifications, with links back to your Nominations page (as your source of truth). We’re also updating the language in the emails to resolve the confusion and conflation of ‘eligibility’ and ‘accepted’ in our messaging, which are not the same concepts. We hope this also clarifies that contributions are to the Niantic Platform, for all Niantic games to consider using.
“Show me my impact!” 👀
We hear you - You want to feel like you’re accomplishing meaningful exploration goals, and that your contributions add value to your experiences with Niantic games or the community at large. It’s pretty cool to play games where you can also shape the gameboard, right? You’ve put in the legwork and you should be given more agency to manage your contributions.
- New Features for Contribution Management: The “Nominations” page will be renamed “Contributions”, and will see many new features that we think you’ll love. In particular, more control over how your Upgrades are applied, appealing your rejected nominations, and tracking the status and impact of all your contribution types (e.g. edits, nominations, photo submissions). Think of this as your Explorer archives and your one-stop-shop for tracking your impact across Niantic games. We’re actually really excited about the concept of an archive of your adventures and are already researching more ways to evolve the Contribution Management experience next year.
“Help me succeed!” 🙌
We are looking at shifting the paradigm on how the product helps you as a contributor. It was never the intention for the program to feel punitive for what is supposed to be a collaborative and collective activity where differences of opinion are allowed. Nor do we like the fact that the experience can feel ‘rigged’. There is no real right or wrong/black and white answer when the question being asked is ‘Is this a great place for exploration, exercise, or being social’. Our cultures, opinions, and interests are diverse and can change over time. That means you may feel your contributions are rejected for illogical reasons. Wayfarer should have mechanisms to dialogue with Niantic so that the fairest choice possible can be made in the interest of all stakeholders.
- Feedback on appeals: Part of the appeals experience mentioned above will include direct feedback from Niantic on Niantic’s final decision. This does mean we need more real people to work with you (no bots!) so please bear with us as we sort out what we can achieve in terms of processing time when we first launch it.
- Practice-based ratings: We’d rather everyone learn to succeed by practice-based learning rather than defining your success only on final outcomes like quiz passes or nomination decisions. We’re brainstorming how best to measure how much you practice, and how that should impact your rating.
“Make Wayfarer an app!” 🤳
We know there’s room for improvement when it comes to addressing how psychologically different it can feel when using a responsive web-app vs. a native app. Most of you experience Wayfarer on your mobile phones and expect more of a native app experience. We’ve heard this request in the wild for some time, so we’re assessing it very carefully, including possible new features that would be better supported by a native app, making it an indispensable companion for your real-world adventures.
Continuing to collect your feedback
We know there’s a lot more to do under each bucket, such as addressing the extremely long wait times for a decision on a submission; reworking the often confusing review questions; and adding features that make submissions and reviews more fun to do in groups. We’ll share more once these product plans are finalized!
With that in mind, we’ll be sending out quarterly surveys to a random selection of the community to capture sentiment in a more consistent and measurable way. Please be on the lookout for that, we appreciate all of your ongoing feedback to make Wayfarer better! We’re also looking into the best mechanism to collect your feature ideas/suggestions in a structured way. So be on the lookout for that too.
Final Note - Where is my Wayspot in the game?
We see some ongoing confusion around why you are receiving wayspot acceptance notifications from a game but aren’t seeing the Wayspot in that particular game. Please be reminded that each Niantic game (not Wayfarer) chooses which Wayspots to use from the Niantic platform, and are at liberty to modify their gameboard at any time.
Wayfarer does not control how each game utilizes Wayspots. Games may also sync with Wayfarer’s Wayspots in a different cadence to each other, which Wayfarer also does not control or mandate. We hope this becomes more intuitively understood with our email refresh mentioned above!
That’s it for now. Thanks for reading down to this line, and hope that it was informative!
I’ll be back with another update before the winter holidays start. Take care!
-- NianticDanbocat ☺️
Welcome our Community Specialist, NianticTintino
We’re extremely excited to introduce the newest member of the Wayfarer team, @NianticTintino. A life-long explorer and urban planning enthusiast, @NianticTintino is excited to bring his extensive experience in education and building communities to the Wayfarer Community.
In his own words:
Hi Wayfarer Explorers,
I’m super excited to share that I will be your new Wayfarer Community Specialist. It’s been an amazing onboarding experience thus far and I look forward to learning more about all of you and how I can best support you on your Wayfarer adventures. Thanks to @NianticCasey-ING , @NianticPooja , @AnsonNIA-PGO, and the rest of the Wayfarer team for the warm handoff.
A bit about me:
- I come from an education and nonprofit background. I’ve had the opportunity to support many communities in the past and look forward to using those skills to support you!
- I find joy in exploring new places and when I travel, I tend to never plan it but rather will just go where the journey leads me.
- My travel goals are to visit every state within Mexico and every country in South America. Y para los que estén curiosos, sí, también hablo español.
- Nature is my happy place! Oceans, mountains, rivers, lakes… any of those can make any day a good one.
- Likes:
- Hiking
- Exploring new food places
- Camping
- Nights in watching scary movies, rom-coms, sci-fi, and documentaries
- Trying new things
Super appreciative of all the support @NianticCasey-ING has contributed to the community and they have now moved on to other projects. @NianticGiffard and I (@NianticTintino) will be here to support you with new & known issues, events support, etc.
In the next couple of weeks, I’m looking forward to:
- Getting to hear your feedback
- Bringing back AMA’s (Ask Me Anything)
- Ideating ways to make the Wayfarer forums more engaging
- Planning fun events
- Responsive troubleshooting and bug reporting
Once more, I am super excited to be a part of the Wayfarer Explorer community and look forward to all the learnings we’ll have together! I appreciate your patience in advance as I learn the ropes.
- Tintino
NianticPooja
Russia Wayfarer Challenge Rewards Clarification
Hi Explorers,
We want to offer some clarification to the rewards for the Russia Wayfarer Challenge.
The original intended eligibility for the rewards was anyone who reviewed at least 1 Russian Wayspot that reached a decision during the event period. The rewards were distributed in phases:
- June 16 - Items were awarded to those who reviewed a Russian Wayspot that got decided on
- June 23 - Some participants were missed in the initial wave of rewards, and were rewarded in this second wave
- June 30 - Rewards were given to participants who reviewed a Russian Wayspot that still remained in voting (no decision during the event)
We have also reviewed the accounts of players who have not received the rewards and can confirm they did not have nominations reviewed during the campaign.
We apologize for any confusion caused by the initial event announcement and will be more clear in the guidelines and eligibility requirements for future Wayfarer Challenges. Thank you for your understanding!
-The Wayfarer Team
Wayfarer Roadmap Community Update
Hello Explorers!
We have had a pretty eventful past few months, haven’t we? Here’s what we’ve been working on.
Gathering user feedback and Reimagining Wayfarer
While we were refactoring code and tackling some tech debt on the engineering side, we also invested a ton of time into gathering your feedback on your experience - And wow, your responses were overwhelming! We had over 13K respondents from around the world. Thank you so much for taking the time to give us your honest feedback on both the good and the bad.
This was the first time since Wayfarer’s official launch in Nov 2019 that we also included user interviews while gathering feedback, and it was really a pleasure to meet some of our community members in person. Thank you! Believe it or not, we are a pretty small team within Niantic, but we’re hard working and dedicated to making Wayfarer more fulfilling and enjoyable for each and every one of you. We’re really excited about the future of Wayfarer, thanks to your insightful feedback!
Here’s a snippet of what we heard in your open comments:
- What’s most interesting about Niantic Wayfarer?
- 28% - exploring the world virtually
- 27% - mapping the world together
- 17% - nothing or negative sentiment
- 13% - miscellaneous other reasons
- 11% - improving gameplay
- 4% - that it’s community driven
- Describe one big thing to fix
- 55% - fix the system (review system, the criteria, abuse, inconsistency etc.)
- 25% - make it feel more impactful (to me, to the game, to the community)
- 19% - help me skill up and succeed
- 2% - build a standalone Wayfarer app
Wayfarer Challenges
We are so excited to have been able to squeeze in two Wayfarer Challenges since our last update, and you blew us away with your participation both times! We know we had a few hiccups with the rewards following the Russia Challenge, but we’ve learned from that and are planning to run a tighter ship next time. Thank you for your patience!
- India Wayfarer Challenge: March 16-26, 2021
- 4.1K new Wayspots added
- Collectively reviewed 210K Wayspots, averaging 1.1K reviews per day
- Russia Wayfarer Challenge June 1-16, 2021
- 8.4K new Wayspots added
- 13K participants that reviewed over 301K nominations and edits
Support materials
One of the key takeaways from our listening exercises as well as your ongoing feedback from the forum was that onboarding to Wayfarer has a lot of room for improvement. Tackling that problem will mean addressing several parts of the experience including how new Explorers learn about Wayfarer, how it works, and how to succeed at contributing. In the past we’ve created informational videos and resources,refreshed the Wayfarer criteria, and centralised this information on the Wayfarer website. Our goal is to try new educational formats over time to more effectively reach more Explorers more strategically, so please do share with us what you think! Here’s the latest we produced.
New In-game features
We launched two in-demand features in Pokémon GO as well: the PokéStop image gallery and the Upload Management feature that lets you upload your image submissions or AR scans later while you’re at home and on WiFi. Please let us know what you think of these features! And pssssst - we’re working on several more updates to your entire contribution experience for both Ingress and Pokémon GO.
What’s in store for the next few months
- Team expansion: We’re growing! Expect us to engage with you more often in the coming months through the forum and social media.
- Future events: The next Wayfarer Challenges of 2021 are being planned right now. We’d love to hear your thoughts on where you’d like to see it travel to next!
- More educational content in more places: We have new ideas in place on what content and tools to help you succeed as a contributor, and will start to release more over time.
- New features: We’re innovating the contribution experience in-game, including the ability to see what Wayspots have already been approved during the Wayspot nomination process in Pokémon GO.
- Rewiring the onboarding flow: Newly eligible Explorers will soon be required to learn the Wayfarer criteria before being allowed to submit contributions as well as review them.
- Nomination Management: Big improvements are coming to the nomination management experience including (drum roll…) the ability to appeal rejections! Stay tuned for more details as we’re still working them out.
- Email notifications: We haven’t forgotten about our promise to fix the email notification experience. The experience will tie much more closely to your Nomination Management page in Wayfarer. We want to ensure you know exactly where to go for details about your contributions and what you can do next.
- Reviewers: A new product design for the reviewer’s experience
- Community Forum: We’ve been testing out a few quality of life improvements for the forum as well and will be rolling out a few small but impactful changes
-The Wayfarer Team
Russia Wayfarer Challenge Update: Double Time
Great job to the Wayfarer Explorers in Russia! You reached the 3000 Wayspot goal in just a few days, securing the Pokémon GO and Ingress rewards. With several days left in this event, however, we have opened a new opportunity to earn double the initially planned rewards: Double Time.
A new goal and new tier of rewards have been introduced:
Double Time Rewards: 7000+ New Wayspots Accepted
- Pokémon GO: 100 Pokéballs, 2 Super Incubators, 2 Incense, 2 Premium Raid Pass, and 10 Wayfarer Upgrades
- Ingress: 40 Resonators, 40 Hypercubes, 6 Rare Heat Sinks, 6 Rare Multi-Hacks, 6 SoftBank Ultra Links, and 10 Wayfarer Upgrades
To clarify, the rewards listed above will not be stacked on top of the rewards initially announced, but will be the total awarded on 18 June should the community reach 7000+ new Wayspots.
We are loving the energy from the Russian community, and want to embrace the enthusiasm that our Explorers are demonstrating. If you have any questions, please ask them in the Russia Wayfarer Challenge category.
-The Wayfarer Team
Resources for new Reviewers
Hi folks,
Firstly, let me welcome all of the new folks to the Wayfarer Community! We’re so glad to have you here and are really looking forward to chatting with you and answering any questions you may have as you ramp up as new reviewers!
A great place to start would be to review the Wayfarer Community Guidelines and Welcome Note. We are working hard to create a respectful but curious culture here.
When it comes to ramping up on reviewing, the Wayfarer Help Center has the basics you need to know, with articles about what’s eligible, ineligible and in-between.
- About Wayfarer: Learn more about Wayfarer, your profile, how to earn upgrades, and how you can manage your own nominations
- Submitting a Nomination: A diagram that walks you through the nomination process.
- Wayspot Criteria: Understand how to identify a good nomination and what makes a good Wayspot. This section also allows you to submit questions you have about the criteria.
- How to Review Wayspots: Tips on reviewing nominations and edits
- Step-by-step Wayspot Review Process: A video that shows the basics of reviewing in the Wayfarer Portal.
- Reporting Abuse: Tips for reporting invalid Wayspots or edits.
In order to keep Wayfarer fair for everyone, your decisions are compared with the decisions made by others in the community. This information is used to create an overall rating for your decisions in your profile. Your Performance rating is displayed on a scale of Poor - Great and will change over time.
Here are a few tips to ensure your Performance Rating stays Good/Great:
- Follow the criteria while reviewing nominations, we recommend keeping the eligible and ineligible criteria pages open in a different browser tab for easy access.
- Take your time and review each segment on it’s own merit. Read this article for tips on how to review each section.
- Avoid using third party tools/plugins or depending on others to decide on how you vote on a nomination.
- Note that your Rating may also be affected based on actions taken on abuse reviews.
There are also a lot of really knowledgeable and helpful Wayfinders right here in the forum with great questions and equally great answers. Here are a few lively and interesting discussions that could be worth your time:
Again, we’re glad you’re here and we’re looking forward to interacting with you soon!
-Casey
NianticCasey-ING
Road to Rediscovery
Explorers,
First of all, thanks for your patience in waiting for this update. We can’t believe how quickly time has passed! You may have also noticed that we haven’t posted any release notes since release 3.3, last December, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been plugging away at our to-do list.
We haven’t forgotten about the updates that were remaining from 2020, which are:
- More tweaks to the Showcase to help you learn by example
- Boosting reviews in dry voting areas
- Improvements to the reviewing experience
But here’s what we’ve been up to, and you’ll see where and why we’ve postponed the remaining 2020 roadmap items:
- Refactoring code and tackling tech debt - We decided late in December that we would hunker down to update our stack for a more reliable experience. This couldn’t wait any longer. This is a pretty big task, but we’ll also be weaving in a few quality of life updates/tweaks along the way.
- Re-envisioning the Wayfarer experience - In January, as we reflected on your feedback and our own aspirations for Wayfarer, we felt the need to take a step back and re-evaluate both the submission and review experiences holistically, and dig deeper into the root of your pain points.
- Evolving the Wayfarer Mission - Mapping the world together is a complicated, but exciting mission for us. We are always thrilled at the level of passion folks put into this collective experience. Now it’s time to take that mission and your passion to think about how we evolve and we’d love to hear from you! If you have opted in to Niantic marketing emails, some of you will have received a survey to share your thoughts on the Wayfarer experience. Please take a few minutes to fill that out, or continue to use the Forum to share your thoughts.
- Focusing on India - As you may have heard, Niantic is putting a spotlight on India! We are so excited to collaborate with the Indian Wayfarer community later this month with the Wayfarer Challenge. We’ve also been reviewing submissions in India in order to fast-track the decisions in the queue . We’ll continue to do this for the entire month. See here for details about the India Challenge and the forum category.
So what’s coming this spring/summer?
- Showcase updates - We’re adding some Wayspots that we love from around the world. So in addition to popular Wayspots near you, you’ll see some of our favorite Wayspots from other countries. We always love reviewing Wayspots submitted from around the world, as it gives us a little sense of adventure. We want you to feel that too!
- Minor updates to the Criteria page - We’ve heard your feedback on the consolidated set of criteria and plan to enrich it with clarifications and more examples. Please continue to let us know how we can help clarify the Criteria!
- Improvements to the submission experience - We know it’s disappointing to submit a new Wayspot in Pokémon GO only for it to get rejected because as a duplicate of what we already have. We understand it's frustrating not knowing what other nominations are live or pending review in the area and we are working on providing this information. We intend to improve the flow by providing you with the right info at the right time.
- Improvements to the review experience - We also know the reviews can feel onerous and sometimes confusing and frustrating. We want to do better for you and are holistically exploring options here. For example, we could consider a more customizable experience so that you can do as much or as little as you’d like, while making our policing mechanisms a little less disruptive.
- Better notifications - We also want to bring more predictability and reliability into the notifications experience when there’s a decision on your nomination or edit. The email notifications have been troublesome as of late and it’s important that we get this right.
More details to come, as this is part of our whole re-envisioning exercise.
- More Wayfarer Challenges (countries to be announced soon!) - We’re eager to give many other communities the opportunity to participate in a Wayfarer Challenge! We’re working on expanding the challenges to the communities we know need a little more love.
- Continuing to Address Emerging Issues - We are working on building out a larger team internally to better serve you. This includes staffing for the Forum as well as the Wayfarer development and support team. All of this is in service of your experience, continuing to address emerging issues in a more timely fashion.
That’s it for now. We hope you are all well!
- Wayfarer Team
NianticCasey-ING