Everything wrong with Wayfarer
1. Unrewarding
It’s already been said many times- using Wayfarer is like doing free labor for Niantic. Some might say the wayspots that get accepted are the rewards for that work – but, making the game more accessible is not the player’s job. Why should anyone work for hours, days and even weeks just to make the game playable in their area, while not being paid to do so? As a customer, I accept the developer to do so if they want to keep me.
This hard work is not being rewarded by any type of in-game currency which keeps players away from using it as making it hard to maintain the existing userbase over time – once the few wayspots you wanted get accepted, there is no reason to keep using the system.
2. Punishing
Not only the system is not rewarding the users, it is actually doing everything it can to punish and turn them away. Cooldowns for hours for experienced reviewers who have seen enough playgrounds and gazebos for a lifetime and don’t need full 3 minutes to evaluate them. This is just absurd.
And let’s not forget the ridiculous rejection reasons making all the work you put into the system go to waste and forces you to repeat it. Very unpleasant experience that drives people away from reviewing, as upgrading nominations might actually expose them more to this risk.
3. Long times
Partly due to the reasons mentioned above the loyal userbase has dwindled significantly in the past year since the launch of the Wayfarer systems. Where nominations used to take weeks to reach a decision now has turned into months, while in larger metropolitans the months have turned into years. Why should anyone put so much effort into a system that is so slow to show results? Some may not be playing anymore or living in a different area after all that time.
4. Prone to abuse
It’s enough to take a quick look around the forums to see how much the system is being abused. That is probably only the tip of the iceberg. There are probably thousands of fake wayspots and even more incorrectly located wayspots.
5. Terrible system
I have no other way to describe the reviewing system other than just “bad”. The 1-5 stars ratings need to go and be replaced by Yes/No questions (What is even a 3-stars safe access?)
The eligibility criteria are confusing and not elaborative enough to help in deciding on many cases.
It’s not for no reason that most people are using add-on and plugins to make the reviewing process feel a little less agonizing.
After over 17,000 reviews I have stopped reviewing completely several months ago, and you should probably too, until a complete rework is done.
Comments
As soon as someone hits 10.000 reviews or so, a wayfarer should get personally inspected by a niantic dude and get **** $500 or so.
Pokemon Go makes 4 **** billion dollar per year and wants free labor by slaves? no. Thats plain wrong.
you should get at least lots of pokecoins as soon as you reach a target. to prevent abuse, there should be someoine from niantic checking some picked ratings manually and delete bad accounts. there are no workers for this job? hire some. its still 4 billion dollar per year.
same goes for all the free labor for alphabet. google maps local guide? pay them. not all, not much, but stop free labor.
To add to #3, we have evidence that not only do reviews take a long time due to the attrition of good reviewers but Niantic's own programming is bottlenecking POI from "saturated" areas. They are intentionally making our POI take longer in the queue in areas where there are more players and more things to nominate.
Six. Education
Niantic makes no real effort to educate submitters or reviewers on how the system works or what makes a good candidate. There are a handful of guides available but no one is required to read them before diving in to the process. Everything we know about cells and the rules for how things work was discovered by *other users*. Niantic wants us to do all this free labor for them *in the dark.* They want to hide as many details about the process from us as possible so that it is as difficult as possible for us to get meaningful use out of the work we are doing.
No, it's not like. It's doing free labor for Niantic.
The Whole Wayfarer System needs to be scrapped. Just close down the ability to submit things and let people
work off the backlog that has been the lenght of the chinese wall.
i could go on and write hours what is wrong with the system, but i wont bore you. @NianticJohn knows what is wrong.
And once the backlog is cleared? As soon as it's opened back up the garbage will flow again. Niantic needs to improve quality of submitters and reviewers alike. Maybe only people with onyx reacon or higher should be able to submit. And we need more honeypots to catch bad reviewers.
I agree with everything you said.
Entry-level photographers: Those who are just getting started in the world of professional photography after taking some formal education typically charge $50-$150 per hour or $25-$125 per image.
Niantic should take some time to build a new Wayfarer System, maybe this time with asking the Community that runs it.
After reading a lot of the threads here about wayfarer I'm not 100% sure that asking the community how to build it is going to provide very good results, but taking the experiences they've made over the last years with OPR and Wayfarer and re-designing the system from scratch with those in mind would be a good idea indeed.
I still enjoy it after 31200 reviews. Even more after the update of the criteria.
I don't care much about being paid or not. I review maybe 30 nominations a day, and that is just a hobby. It's especially nice to see things from my bonus location, which is in africa. That way I can help people there.
However, the rating system has draconian punishments, and the cooldowns are just weird. Why do I have to stare at a general rock for up to a minute? The Home location is strange - things have changed since I left my home 30 yrs ago, and I can't see why I can't change it. The bonus location area has been shrunk to just 1/4 of what it was, so it has lessened my ability to help, and why, oh why is it set for an enitire year?
The thing is: if you start giving in-game currency or other material rewards for reviewing, abuse will skyrocket. ****, people have been scamming the system for years and using elaborate schemes just for the extra PoIs. Imagine what would happen if you could get actual valuable items directly from it. So in my opinion, it's best to keep it unpaid and completely voluntary. Everything else would quickly deteriorate things further.
Otherwise, I agree. I think the discrepancy of review times, the flawed rating system, the lack of education and the complete opposite of transparency (in a lot of ways) are major issues that need to be solved.
I'm new to this (just been reviewing and submitting for a few weeks).
I don't think rewards are needed or would be helpful. I feel already some reviewers are reviewing to get the badge and not taking it seriously.
I enjoy reviewing, so I don't need rewards.
I think the initial training was OK, but there could be a far more extensive set of evolving guidelines. I find myself often with questions to which I can't find clear answers in the criteria. I search these forums then, I find conflicting answers, many in archived forums that I'm not sure are valid anymore or not.
After over 17,000 reviews I have stopped reviewing completely several months ago, and you should probably too, until a complete rework is done.
This line should make everyone stop for a minute and give pause to this argument. Even if this isn't how you feel or you disagree with the original poster, a system that is causing long time, consistent reviewers to leave means that something is severely broken. This is not the first I have heard this. We have several local reviewers that stop reviewing regularly for various reasons.
The one I hear here the most often is they stop reviewing for fear of getting an upgrade at the wrong time. That's insane to me. Upgrades are so broken it causes reviewers to stop reviewing.
Why they get automatically applied is beyond dumb. I should be able to review at my leisure and earn an upgrade and apply it when i see an need.
...no wonder they need to create special review events to clear backlogs.
the Upgrade is something that could have been great, and something to look for.
Instead it takes a very long time until you have earned it, then you apply it and people reject your 5* submission. I am not talking about B + C Submissions that people do. I am talking about something that will always get thru because it is a good, valid wayspot.
but instead, people reject it. just happened today, again. I had to apply it, because otherwise, it would have been Lotto-ed into some B or C submission. Which might have been accepted ;)
The Upgrade is the worst thing in Wayfarer.
Agreed. And what's even worse is that if you're in a "slow cell", you have to upgrade everything or otherwise it has no chance of even going into voting within a year or so.
I nominated two memorials in a remote park I accidentally stumbled upon back in February. There's nothing there within kilometres. Still, because of the cell they happen to be in, they're still in queue and I will only even get them accepted if I upgrade them.
Abuse is already very prevalent though because the only people reviewing are the people who either like to review or people who do it to abuse. If you offer in-game rewards, the people who want the rewards will want to learn how to review properly for agreements so that they can get the rewards.
Niantic could also at any point add more honeypots to catch bad reviewers. In my opinion anywhere between 1-5% of reviews should be honeypots. That would of course require some manual labour from Niantic so it's unlikely to happen.
I started a thread in the Bug section, and NianticCasey promised to look into it.
It just cannot be that i submit something in a Area that basicly has no Ingame Structure with POI, and then the people there have to wait 1+ years for a wayspot to go live - just because it is in a slow S2-LVL9 cell (there are some bigger cities at the borders that have alot POI).
There needs to be a solution now, and not in 4 month. Players are furious they have to drive 40km during Covid Restrictions.
Honestly surprised people still feel like that. For me it used to be fun but now it's just digging through trash submissions. (at least in my area)
Hopefully CAs can be given a direct line to the abuse team to help understand what Niantic themselves consider abuse. Clearly the abuse I've reported (malicious location edits to oversaturate cells, requests to choose a referee location, and adding erroneous photos to swap the purpose of a Portal so they can move it and create "duplicates") don't really count as abuse, since my reports have ignored despite bringing it up multiple times.
Yeah, I do hope they implement some kind of CA program. It seems like a "This is everything wrong with wayfarer" thread gets posted at least every week and it would be nice if there's was a group that could help Niantic filter through the good and bad criticisms, and help submitters/reviewers understand what's abuse and how to report it.
"10 things wrong with Wayfarer (and 3 things we love) - you won't believe #3!"
The "slow cell" experience explanation is being skewed. Niantic's system is constructed to help low density areas gain points of interest faster, thats a fact. The main issue is each nomination needs an estimated 50 reviewers to look at it which is 17-60 min of reviewer hours. Thinking about it another way is an active reviewer can reasonably gain 1-2 upgrades a week. So they contributed probably about 150 reviews per upgrade or 3-6 fully processed nominations of effort. Meanwhile they submitted 7 new nominations. This is a runaway situation and a slower mirror of what happened in Ingress prior to submissions being shut down in 2015. Niantic needs to add effort or disincentive to submitting or reduce submissions to help the situation out.
The algorithm that defines what a "low density area" is is completely broken because the cells that are being used are way too large.
Also there are a lot of reviewers who earn 5+ upgrades a week.
Or they can make the reviewing system faster.
They can also improve the whole system to reduce the number of false rejections witch will likely be proposed again...
They can drasticly reduce the number of submission by simply lock submissions in high density area (the time the queue decrease)
They can also change the system to make the reviewing more gratefull. (because being look to "poor" and have no real use of upgrades (or have many reject when a nomination is upgraded) is not motivating)
For every reviewer that does that much there's a reviewer that does no reviews while both are submitting.
Even if the area size was decreased it'd be the same situation there's a deficit of reviewer activity compared to submitting activity. More players view reviewing as unrewarding than rewarding and the deficit continues to grow.
i wonder what people hit "disagree" here? there is nothing to disagree.
thats EXACTLY what I said. You cant just unlock rewards and then stop caring at all. They make BILLIONS per year, triple the mods, tenfold the mods, there is enough money to pay for them for the next 10 years or so, BILLIONS. Stop just milking the game and dont invest in it. How many mods are in here, 5? For how many reviewers? Why? Start spending money.
Once you have enough mods to personally check wayfarers (lol, 1 would be enough for a start, start from the top, sorted by reviews) you can start giving the best of the best money or at least ingame stuff. dont want the money? donate it.
also, dont forget to swing your banhammer and start banning exactly these peaope: scammers, abusers, fakers, spoofers, just delete their account so they lose everything and start faking in other games.
There are no problems in the whole world you cant solve by throwing money at it.