I doubt they're boycotting wayfarer. I haven't reviewed in 2 to 3 weeks and my agreements are ticking up much faster than the before. The re-submission of a previously rejected community garden took 2 weeks in an area where I was expecting a 4 week turn around. I'm in the US.
I heard about the approach of withdrawing own submissions in lots of groups .....
The logic behind this is stupid, how lots of people here already figured out. Active wayfinders would never do this, but be happy when thousands of randoms would withdraw their (coal?) submissions. Especially ING-only-players grab only their popcorn, like in this thread already. And way around: Partially clearing the queue this way sends no signal to Nia. Maybe they would interprete the decrease of reviewing timescales as success of the wayfarer team, especially since the effect of this is visible with weeks or months delay, when the topic of the interaction radius might be already outdated 😂
Since wayfarer and the POI database behind it are the ony things, that causes that Niantic sticks out of other AR companies. So when protest actions hit wayfarer, Nia should at least be very careful. The percentage of active reviewers and submitters is very low. Since all Nia games involve organizing the communities in local social media groups, there are lots of possibilities to ask the superior number of non-wayfinders and casual wayfinders to do something .... for examle to spam protest submissions. This filly the queue, fills this forum with lots of reports and lots of anger, and Niantic would need to take actions ....
Since I don't want that people interprete my comment here in a wrong way:
I'm neither pro nor contra the reduction of the interaction radius. In my oppinion 80m is too much, but 40m is really low. So something in between would be a good choice. 50m, 60m ..... so I simply wait what will happen. In the interim I'm enjoying my popcorn. It's simply pathetic, when Brandon Tan talks about going F2P because of that ....
I'm lvl 50 in PoGo with 460k catches, almost 1000 gold gyms and so on. A higher interaction radius is simply a nice QoL update - nice, but not necesary. With the 80m radius I had very often the problem to reach the spin cap, especially during Gible Community day this was very annoying, since I went nearly out of Pokeballs and couldnt solve quests for hours. The 2nd annoying point for me is, that the 80m confuses the go plus prioritization during slowly driving. With the old 40m range pokestops while driving slowly (so speed up to 30km/h, so fast biking, speed of bus and tram, ....) were nearly neglected. The go plus targetted only spawns. But since the pokestop interaction radius is larger, the go plus targetted the far away stops 1st, because the spawns weren't loaded fast enough to be prioritized. So whenever I entered public transport I had to turn off spinning stops, otherwise the go plus didnt catch anything. It only spins somethimes, but in most cases it nethertheless ends up with an error....
The new datamines included again code, that the pokestop range could be upgraded, and this is imho a bad solution, at least how it is in the datamine now: they force the people to regularly scan a pokestop to upgrade its range. This is okay, if you have to do it once, but the datamine found, that there is a cooldown for this upgrade mechanism - so that people might have to scan a stop on a regular basis. Since uploading the scan data is very comlicated, this is a very bad idea. I expierience an app crash while scanning or uploading with a 50:50 chance, and I dont want to do that very often, because it costs lots of mobile data (yes, Germany has a comparatively underdeveloped mobile network, and there might be lots of other countries where this is an even bigger problem).
@Raachermannl-ING I hate to break this to you but I'm not an -ING only player. I am level 45 in pokemon.
I am just pointing out an observation about wayfarer in the US. I think the shorter review time and quicker response was the increased reviewing because US players wanted more pokestops in reach. I also dislike the calls for boycott when it's obvious that based on the queues of the raiding apps, it's more of a do as I say not as I do from those calling for boycott.
It's not "Easy" mode vs "Hard" Mode..... the overly small original range was just bad design. The new "Pandemic" range is just good design.
Heck the tiny range in POGO visually doesn't even make sense inside the app. The POGO character is surrounded by a pulsing circle. Stops just inside the pulsing circle which is supposed to be your visual clue, are still out of range. Very poor interface work. No stop inside the POGO circle should be inaccessible... but it is....
As a POGO player, if I take a 30 minute walk, the new vs old range doesn't make me walk more or less. It just means if I want to interact with the pokestop across the major road, I have to cross the street back and forth. How does that make sense, or make players safer in general as the stops aren't at corners/lights. It doesn't help me walk "More" which is already distance tracked for eggs, it just tries and influence the direction of my walk, not the amount of my walk.
Also in POGO, raids don't happen at night. I presume Niantic wants to avoid people gathering in the dark. But I'll tell you a story from last night. It was about 1030 at night, and I'm a middle age man and I had to go pick up my kid at work. I had a few minutes so I pulled into a shoping plaza where a gym was. All the stores are closed. There are 2 teenage girls and 2 younger boys about 10ish taking the gym. They took it. I did NOT want to drive up to them at night as it would be creepy. Prechange, I could have interacted with the gym and gave those kids space. Post change, I couldnt. Sure ive interacted with kids at raids before with small distance, but again thats during day and lots of other people potentially around. Not 1 creepy car in an empty parking lot driving up to kids....
The distance is too short, was originally too short, and has nothing to do with pandemic. Although it is totally insensitive to revert the changes as the "Pandemic ending" in USA where Delta is climbing up and states are setting new records of hospitalizations. Very bad PR and timing.
Until the change from a 20m radius to a 40m radius the distance was a little irritating at times. This was because sometimes points were just out of range or GPS problems meant you had to dance around trying to get to the point. I don’t think people thought much about it, as it had always been that way. I hadn’t given it much head space.
The change suddenly showed starkly how much better game play could be.
I’m not talking about people suddenly sitting at home able to interact. Yes a few could now do this, but the vast majority of players still couldn’t. In the U.K. many housing estates are low density in terms of waypoints except for the odd play area with wooden animals. So I think the often trotted out argument that it discouraged players from going out is a nonsense. Covid kept them home.
Since the key element is to catch a Pokémon, the mantra of throw, catch, spin repeat is fundamental. So the ability to spin a stop easily encourages more play, more exploration.
As an active wayfinder I do enjoy going to new places finding new things to submit. But I have to work and do ordinary life as well. I am not well off so can’t afford to travel large distances. This means like the vast majority of players, 95% of my play time takes place on foot in a local area (during lockdown I stayed within a 1 km radius of home). Lord knows ( or at least Niantic does) how many times I have interacted with those stops and there is nothing to be gained by making me get to within 20m of them.
Personally the 40m distance helped and encouraged me to walk further and interact with more stops as it was now more attractive to do loops where I could now spin an extra 3 or 4 stops easily.
Some of this may sound counter-intuitive but if you actually play the game the reality is stark.
The distance is a very arbitrary thing. I did prefer the larger distance tbh.
I don't know where people are getting the additional poi's because I've milked the walking distance around my home in the suburbs dry. I don't think it will be much more than a small increase in reviewing for a short period of time from omg distance reduced reaction.
I only have the nominations from a day trip about an hour and a half from home to a site listed on National Registry of Historic Places which wasn't restored until 2019. Not motivated currently to review and upgrade them.
Ive heard different reasons why they should stay at the increased distance. Players with disabilities, also being on the opposite side of a busy road seems to be a frequent one I’ve heard. I’ve played way before and after the changes. To me it doesnt make much a difference if they shorten the range or not but I can sympathize with other player’s reasons.
People should of known this wasn’t a for ever thing and should of set the expectations with that. But obviously change is hard.
There are some things I’m positive niantic will keep. Remote raid passes are a huge cash cow with the really endless raids you can do. Which I honestly also like! Sometimes you want to do a raid to get a specific pokemon/shiny but the time and money to be able to constantly give to the game to drive to a location is sometimes not practical.
The free items and tasks daily. I believe is a good thing for the game. Helps rural players be able to work towards the weekly research reward when the lack of gyms/stops really prevents people from doing so.
And obviously the range. I think in the end this will go back to a normal range. It is nice, but sometimes I do miss the actual human interaction portion of the game where we can gather and be a group with others while raiding. It made the game more enjoyable and friendly. I can see them finding middle ground where its not the max from the pandemic but also not the smallest range so that players can still be happy :).
with that said i think withdrawing nominations is kind of a waste of one’s own time to me. As I nominate to help the experience of others playing not to just help my own and definitely not to help niantic 😅😂
What you are saying might not be true. That doesnt mean your lying or anything insulting, but it's obvious since Pokemon came out in 2016 for five years, and you mentioned eight years you are talking about Ingress. Design features in Pokemon and Ingress might well be different. Let's explore 2 concepts.
1) Does Ingress have a pulsing circle effect that shows interaction distance?
Pokemon does. And the fact that stops and gyms just inside the circle are not interactable is bad design in Pokemon. It's not off much mind you, but interaction points inside the circle should be interactable. If Ingress has the same effect, how can you say the in-game pulses and in-game interactions not matching isn't bad design?
2) Does Ingress have events designed to cause people to gather like raids, and do these events shut down at night?
If not, then you dont experience the bad design. At the very lease, interaction distance should increase at night to reduce night gatherings OR raids should run 24-7. The no raids after dark but same interaction distance is illogical on Niantics part.
As part of #2, remember that Pokemon Go appeals to younger kids way more than Ingress does.
If PoGo's visual marker doesn't match the real range then they should fix this. That's a simple bug, and it's unrelated to the other question.
Not one person in this discussion has proposed a method for calculating the optimal interaction range for interaction. What factors should go into this decision? Why is 80m better than 40m and not 100m or 60m or 53.2m? If you had to make a data-driven decision on this how would you do it?
Can we also try and remember that the ethos behind the Niantic ARGs is to get people out and about to go out and visit the POI's so you can appreciate them, look at them, interact with them etc etc. Make you intersted and then move onto the next one.
Its far less of an incentive to actual move or pay attention to POI's if you're doing it from further away.
They are all Augmented Reality Games, taking the real POIs and blending it with the game world so people visit and appreciate the POIs in both real life and game life.
At further distances it becomes less of people going to visit and appreciate the POIs whilst also playing their desired game, and more of just an game played on a screen. The AR aspect loses its effect and theres less incentive to actually look at the real world POI, why would you when you can stand 50m away get what you want and move on. Its no longer an AR interaction.
The original slogan for Ingress, "It's time to move" , basically sums up Niantics game design philosophy, getting people up and about and interacting with real life objects / places. That interaction in real life can only be done at short distances, anything to great and they aren't ARG's anymore.
@Hosette-ING The obvious answer is the distance that brings a gym within spinning range of my couch. I had to laugh when the Epoch badge came. The portal is just out of reach but the dog does need to be walked so I haven't missed a day.
I can convince myself to drive an hour. Go on a boat for a half hour to see sights that really need to be portals but I have trouble convincing myself to walk the 2 blocks for a raid. About once a month or two, I decide to take a day trip and see something new, I enjoy the portals in game and submit stuff if it looks decent.
It is a good question as to how you decide what is the optimum distance to allow interaction.
I don’t think much thought or experimentation went into it. What we have had with the pandemic is the first experiment and it is clear it improved game play.
I appreciate that the games are to encourage activity and the POI in real life are meant to be a key part of that. In Ingress the whole design is focussed on the POI. You do nothing in between them. And for some play you need to be pretty much on top of the point. Keeping the radius of interaction relatively small is also important so that defensive resonators are not too spread out. But with nothing to do between POI it is not called cargress for nothing. And there is more encouragement in basic play to cover greater distances. There are no time critical factors.
By contrast the key focus of Pokémon Go takes place everywhere. So the original design of the game places much less emphasis on the POI- the are places to get resources but most of your time is interacting with Pokémon away from POI. Over the years they have worked to place more importance on the POI, The introduction of raids, ex raids, tasks, rockets all increased the importance of the POI. And data mining shows a new initiative for stops in the offing. Most people play by walking around most of the time in a smaller area. There are also time critical factors as Pokémon, rockets, raids are only availed for a limited time - and for most of these you have no idea when it will go. So time pressure is a key difference.
So how close do you have to be. I can see my local pub easily from 200m, most of the POI in the park can be seen from 80m, except for the tree carving which needs to be about 20m. I can see the information board from a distance but need to stand next to it to read it. And it is perfectly acceptable to have POI inside but you can’t always go inside - how vital was it that I couldn’t look at the plaque in my local library when it was closed. I don’t think more than 40m would very helpful but it is now clear how unhelpful 20m is. I have created a lot of stops by looking around me as I play, not just when at a POI. There are lots of other interesting things to see that will never make it into any game so I wouldn’t want people to switch off as they walk around.
With time pressure with game elements it is just not as easy to stop play and switch to appreciating a POI compared to ingress.
Niantic has given us something different and good but the games and game play are very different and it shouldn’t mean the common element in both - the way points- should be interacted with in the same way.
Edit: Sorry got distance wrong. The old interaction distance was 40m and the extended is 80m
I think the problem with your statement is that it seems the world is "Play from my couch" vs tiny distance makes you get out.
I got out every single day with the larger radius. There was no playing from my couch. The difference is more like do I want to Zig-Zag accross busy streets? Answer is No. I appreciate seeing the metal globe statue across the street without having to cross to appreciate it.
@Elijustrying-ING You make some interesting points, but 20 meters has never been the interaction radius for anything AFAIK. It's been 40 meters in Ingress since I started playing in 2013, it's 40 meters in HPWU unless that changed recently, and it was 40 meters in PoGo until it got expanded to 80 meters.
The maximum weapon range in Ingress is 168 meters.
why do you say ''there is a niantic game'' when everybody knows is PoGO, its the game that let us play Ingress, without it Niantic could been in bankrupt by now, without it Niantic wouldnt be able to have the data that it has right now, without it Niantic wouldnt ever got the money for its project, without it Niantic wouldnt be able to invest more money in ingress and upgrade it and keep it running, without it Niantic would still be unknown with no sponsors or new companies approaching them, without it...and i could type a whole bible about it, so atleast be more respectful
Niantic should approach carefully or its wallets and data will get hurt by a lot, literally PoGO is the 99.9999999..infinite...999% of the real playerbase/customers that Niantic has
Be realistic and respectful, you arent better than any of them just because you play Ingress...like at all...at all
Personally I think the distance to reach pokestops should be the same distance we are able to reach Pokémon. It just makes sense. Why be able to catch a Pokémon across the way, yet can’t reach a pokestop we are pretty much standing next to?
Distance should roughly be Sidewalk to Sidewalk with 4 lanes of traffic in between which the 80M was pretty good coverage for.
People can "Explore" by seeing the POI from across the street, there is no need to actually force them to cross the street to interact with it.
Here's an honest curiousity for the contrary crowd....
Players home's within 40' of POI: Are unaffected by change
Players home's over 80' of POI: Are unaffected by change
It can't be that many players percentage wise that actually live in the 40-80 No Mans land, that "Arent getting out with 80 but would with 40".
As a suburban player, literally the only difference for me, is if I want to take a half hour walk, I'd have to cross back and forth over a main road or give up reaching half the stops/gyms.
If think in this case the best way is by testing different scenarios. Anecdotally, everyone (apart from a guy that didn't like the fact he can reach too many pokestops) loved the new distance. It doesn't mean it's the best one, but it means it's better than the previous one in the players' opinion, so I agree with Elijustrying-ING.
Are you sure it's 40m in HPWU? It felt a bit larger than Ingress, although I didn't play it much, just tested it, and it could be just my gps drifting.
The change makes zero sense considering the entire basis was to accommodate COVID and COVID is not even close to being over. Beyond that, it's a clear quality of life improvement. Not needing to cross 4-5 lanes of traffic to reach a stop is huge. Being able to park further away from a gym because the actual parking is tiny or unavailable is huge. The core point of the game remains unaffected, anyway - you have to walk to catch Pokemon and to hatch your eggs. The interaction radius is completely irrelevant to that. It only helps people reach things a little easier, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to.
Whatever behavior Niantic thinks it's going to drive more or less of simply isn't going to happen to any relevant degree. People who will walk will walk. People who are interested enough to look at the real world stops will look at them, regardless of the radius. And those who were never interested won't. The pros far outweigh the cons. Gameplay is simply nicer when you can reach things easily, and that motivates you to play more.
@aleprj-PGO I have a pretty good test case at home since I have three couch portals (I live in a dense urban area) and several other portals that are just out of range. I drew 40, 50, and 60 meter circles around two things that exist in HPWU but are just out of range for me at home then went outside and walked around to test ranges. The two purple pins in the image are the ones I used for testing-- the portals are 91 meters apart.
If I stand where the blue pin is then I can interact with the inn on the right but not the one on the left. Walking just a few feet to the left allows me to get the one on the left but not the right. There's a very small window where I seem to be able to hit both the left and the right. Thus, empirical evidence suggests that I was wrong and that the HPWU interaction range is 50 meters.
Everyone loved the new ranges is certainly an interesting argument, but I think that would be true if the range was 100, 200, 500 meters. I was certainly spoiled in PoGo by having a couch gym and three couch stops plus a couple of others that I drifted to occasionally. (-:
The change makes zero sense considering the entire basis was to accommodate COVID and COVID is not even close to being over. Beyond that, it's a clear quality of life improvement.
Do you have access to Niantic's telemetry data? Because Niantic's actions (ie. not implemented in other games that equally encourage from social distancing) suggest that this didn't work and people weren't social distancing as expected.
Not needing to cross 4-5 lanes of traffic to reach a stop is huge.
I took a measure of a 4 lane highway with center turn lane on Google Maps. Though this section did not have sidewalks on boht sides, it did have full car-width shoulders which I included. Total distance was about 85 ft or roughly 26m. That's well within the 40 meter interaction radius of all of Niantic's games. So I'm going to call BS on this.
Being able to park further away from a gym because the actual parking is tiny or unavailable is huge. Being able to park further away from a gym because the actual parking is tiny or unavailable is huge. The core point of the game remains unaffected, anyway - you have to walk to catch Pokemon and to hatch your eggs. The interaction radius is completely irrelevant to that. It only helps people reach things a little easier, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to.
Convenience is not a good reason as to why Pokemon Go should remain inconsistent with the other games. And being inconsistent is a very good reason why Pokemon GOs interaction radius should be reduced back to be inline with the other games.
Comments
Regarding these recent changes, there’s now been a blog post from Niantic.
I doubt they're boycotting wayfarer. I haven't reviewed in 2 to 3 weeks and my agreements are ticking up much faster than the before. The re-submission of a previously rejected community garden took 2 weeks in an area where I was expecting a 4 week turn around. I'm in the US.
I heard about the approach of withdrawing own submissions in lots of groups .....
The logic behind this is stupid, how lots of people here already figured out. Active wayfinders would never do this, but be happy when thousands of randoms would withdraw their (coal?) submissions. Especially ING-only-players grab only their popcorn, like in this thread already. And way around: Partially clearing the queue this way sends no signal to Nia. Maybe they would interprete the decrease of reviewing timescales as success of the wayfarer team, especially since the effect of this is visible with weeks or months delay, when the topic of the interaction radius might be already outdated 😂
Since wayfarer and the POI database behind it are the ony things, that causes that Niantic sticks out of other AR companies. So when protest actions hit wayfarer, Nia should at least be very careful. The percentage of active reviewers and submitters is very low. Since all Nia games involve organizing the communities in local social media groups, there are lots of possibilities to ask the superior number of non-wayfinders and casual wayfinders to do something .... for examle to spam protest submissions. This filly the queue, fills this forum with lots of reports and lots of anger, and Niantic would need to take actions ....
Since I don't want that people interprete my comment here in a wrong way:
I'm neither pro nor contra the reduction of the interaction radius. In my oppinion 80m is too much, but 40m is really low. So something in between would be a good choice. 50m, 60m ..... so I simply wait what will happen. In the interim I'm enjoying my popcorn. It's simply pathetic, when Brandon Tan talks about going F2P because of that ....
I'm lvl 50 in PoGo with 460k catches, almost 1000 gold gyms and so on. A higher interaction radius is simply a nice QoL update - nice, but not necesary. With the 80m radius I had very often the problem to reach the spin cap, especially during Gible Community day this was very annoying, since I went nearly out of Pokeballs and couldnt solve quests for hours. The 2nd annoying point for me is, that the 80m confuses the go plus prioritization during slowly driving. With the old 40m range pokestops while driving slowly (so speed up to 30km/h, so fast biking, speed of bus and tram, ....) were nearly neglected. The go plus targetted only spawns. But since the pokestop interaction radius is larger, the go plus targetted the far away stops 1st, because the spawns weren't loaded fast enough to be prioritized. So whenever I entered public transport I had to turn off spinning stops, otherwise the go plus didnt catch anything. It only spins somethimes, but in most cases it nethertheless ends up with an error....
The new datamines included again code, that the pokestop range could be upgraded, and this is imho a bad solution, at least how it is in the datamine now: they force the people to regularly scan a pokestop to upgrade its range. This is okay, if you have to do it once, but the datamine found, that there is a cooldown for this upgrade mechanism - so that people might have to scan a stop on a regular basis. Since uploading the scan data is very comlicated, this is a very bad idea. I expierience an app crash while scanning or uploading with a 50:50 chance, and I dont want to do that very often, because it costs lots of mobile data (yes, Germany has a comparatively underdeveloped mobile network, and there might be lots of other countries where this is an even bigger problem).
@Raachermannl-ING I hate to break this to you but I'm not an -ING only player. I am level 45 in pokemon.
I am just pointing out an observation about wayfarer in the US. I think the shorter review time and quicker response was the increased reviewing because US players wanted more pokestops in reach. I also dislike the calls for boycott when it's obvious that based on the queues of the raiding apps, it's more of a do as I say not as I do from those calling for boycott.
that was a general comment to the whole thread, not to your post in detail xD
It's not "Easy" mode vs "Hard" Mode..... the overly small original range was just bad design. The new "Pandemic" range is just good design.
Heck the tiny range in POGO visually doesn't even make sense inside the app. The POGO character is surrounded by a pulsing circle. Stops just inside the pulsing circle which is supposed to be your visual clue, are still out of range. Very poor interface work. No stop inside the POGO circle should be inaccessible... but it is....
As a POGO player, if I take a 30 minute walk, the new vs old range doesn't make me walk more or less. It just means if I want to interact with the pokestop across the major road, I have to cross the street back and forth. How does that make sense, or make players safer in general as the stops aren't at corners/lights. It doesn't help me walk "More" which is already distance tracked for eggs, it just tries and influence the direction of my walk, not the amount of my walk.
Also in POGO, raids don't happen at night. I presume Niantic wants to avoid people gathering in the dark. But I'll tell you a story from last night. It was about 1030 at night, and I'm a middle age man and I had to go pick up my kid at work. I had a few minutes so I pulled into a shoping plaza where a gym was. All the stores are closed. There are 2 teenage girls and 2 younger boys about 10ish taking the gym. They took it. I did NOT want to drive up to them at night as it would be creepy. Prechange, I could have interacted with the gym and gave those kids space. Post change, I couldnt. Sure ive interacted with kids at raids before with small distance, but again thats during day and lots of other people potentially around. Not 1 creepy car in an empty parking lot driving up to kids....
The distance is too short, was originally too short, and has nothing to do with pandemic. Although it is totally insensitive to revert the changes as the "Pandemic ending" in USA where Delta is climbing up and states are setting new records of hospitalizations. Very bad PR and timing.
@Cowyn2016-PGO I've been playing Niantic games with that "bad design" for nearly eight years. I don't think it's bad at all.
Good design to allow good game play is vital
Until the change from a 20m radius to a 40m radius the distance was a little irritating at times. This was because sometimes points were just out of range or GPS problems meant you had to dance around trying to get to the point. I don’t think people thought much about it, as it had always been that way. I hadn’t given it much head space.
The change suddenly showed starkly how much better game play could be.
I’m not talking about people suddenly sitting at home able to interact. Yes a few could now do this, but the vast majority of players still couldn’t. In the U.K. many housing estates are low density in terms of waypoints except for the odd play area with wooden animals. So I think the often trotted out argument that it discouraged players from going out is a nonsense. Covid kept them home.
Since the key element is to catch a Pokémon, the mantra of throw, catch, spin repeat is fundamental. So the ability to spin a stop easily encourages more play, more exploration.
As an active wayfinder I do enjoy going to new places finding new things to submit. But I have to work and do ordinary life as well. I am not well off so can’t afford to travel large distances. This means like the vast majority of players, 95% of my play time takes place on foot in a local area (during lockdown I stayed within a 1 km radius of home). Lord knows ( or at least Niantic does) how many times I have interacted with those stops and there is nothing to be gained by making me get to within 20m of them.
Personally the 40m distance helped and encouraged me to walk further and interact with more stops as it was now more attractive to do loops where I could now spin an extra 3 or 4 stops easily.
Some of this may sound counter-intuitive but if you actually play the game the reality is stark.
The distance is a very arbitrary thing. I did prefer the larger distance tbh.
I don't know where people are getting the additional poi's because I've milked the walking distance around my home in the suburbs dry. I don't think it will be much more than a small increase in reviewing for a short period of time from omg distance reduced reaction.
I only have the nominations from a day trip about an hour and a half from home to a site listed on National Registry of Historic Places which wasn't restored until 2019. Not motivated currently to review and upgrade them.
Ive heard different reasons why they should stay at the increased distance. Players with disabilities, also being on the opposite side of a busy road seems to be a frequent one I’ve heard. I’ve played way before and after the changes. To me it doesnt make much a difference if they shorten the range or not but I can sympathize with other player’s reasons.
People should of known this wasn’t a for ever thing and should of set the expectations with that. But obviously change is hard.
There are some things I’m positive niantic will keep. Remote raid passes are a huge cash cow with the really endless raids you can do. Which I honestly also like! Sometimes you want to do a raid to get a specific pokemon/shiny but the time and money to be able to constantly give to the game to drive to a location is sometimes not practical.
The free items and tasks daily. I believe is a good thing for the game. Helps rural players be able to work towards the weekly research reward when the lack of gyms/stops really prevents people from doing so.
And obviously the range. I think in the end this will go back to a normal range. It is nice, but sometimes I do miss the actual human interaction portion of the game where we can gather and be a group with others while raiding. It made the game more enjoyable and friendly. I can see them finding middle ground where its not the max from the pandemic but also not the smallest range so that players can still be happy :).
with that said i think withdrawing nominations is kind of a waste of one’s own time to me. As I nominate to help the experience of others playing not to just help my own and definitely not to help niantic 😅😂
I think the blatant hypocrisy of saying on one hand
we need to revert the distance so people go outside ( no current money to Niantic)
and on the other we will keep remote pass so people don’t need to go out (huge money input to Niantic)
is what a lot of players think is awful.
we all know about Niantic’s attitude but seeing it so blatantly is rubbish.
if the protesters actually understood the problems of wayfarer they would know if they wanted to create havoc the they needed to do the opposite.
What you are saying might not be true. That doesnt mean your lying or anything insulting, but it's obvious since Pokemon came out in 2016 for five years, and you mentioned eight years you are talking about Ingress. Design features in Pokemon and Ingress might well be different. Let's explore 2 concepts.
1) Does Ingress have a pulsing circle effect that shows interaction distance?
Pokemon does. And the fact that stops and gyms just inside the circle are not interactable is bad design in Pokemon. It's not off much mind you, but interaction points inside the circle should be interactable. If Ingress has the same effect, how can you say the in-game pulses and in-game interactions not matching isn't bad design?
2) Does Ingress have events designed to cause people to gather like raids, and do these events shut down at night?
If not, then you dont experience the bad design. At the very lease, interaction distance should increase at night to reduce night gatherings OR raids should run 24-7. The no raids after dark but same interaction distance is illogical on Niantics part.
As part of #2, remember that Pokemon Go appeals to younger kids way more than Ingress does.
1) It is not a pulsing circle but a fixed circle in Ingress that shows the interaction radius.
2) Yes Ingress does have official events that people gather for. These off course don't run through the night.
Then there are ops that groups of agents can choose to undertake like creating large fields, field art, starbursts, etc.
But you didn't quite answer my question
Does Ingress Circle match interaction circle... in Pokemon it doesnt which is a design flaw imo.
In Ingress the interaction has never been increased during the pandemic and I believe it’s the same as Pokémon GO.
If PoGo's visual marker doesn't match the real range then they should fix this. That's a simple bug, and it's unrelated to the other question.
Not one person in this discussion has proposed a method for calculating the optimal interaction range for interaction. What factors should go into this decision? Why is 80m better than 40m and not 100m or 60m or 53.2m? If you had to make a data-driven decision on this how would you do it?
Can we also try and remember that the ethos behind the Niantic ARGs is to get people out and about to go out and visit the POI's so you can appreciate them, look at them, interact with them etc etc. Make you intersted and then move onto the next one.
Its far less of an incentive to actual move or pay attention to POI's if you're doing it from further away.
They are all Augmented Reality Games, taking the real POIs and blending it with the game world so people visit and appreciate the POIs in both real life and game life.
At further distances it becomes less of people going to visit and appreciate the POIs whilst also playing their desired game, and more of just an game played on a screen. The AR aspect loses its effect and theres less incentive to actually look at the real world POI, why would you when you can stand 50m away get what you want and move on. Its no longer an AR interaction.
The original slogan for Ingress, "It's time to move" , basically sums up Niantics game design philosophy, getting people up and about and interacting with real life objects / places. That interaction in real life can only be done at short distances, anything to great and they aren't ARG's anymore.
@Hosette-ING The obvious answer is the distance that brings a gym within spinning range of my couch. I had to laugh when the Epoch badge came. The portal is just out of reach but the dog does need to be walked so I haven't missed a day.
I can convince myself to drive an hour. Go on a boat for a half hour to see sights that really need to be portals but I have trouble convincing myself to walk the 2 blocks for a raid. About once a month or two, I decide to take a day trip and see something new, I enjoy the portals in game and submit stuff if it looks decent.
It is a good question as to how you decide what is the optimum distance to allow interaction.
I don’t think much thought or experimentation went into it. What we have had with the pandemic is the first experiment and it is clear it improved game play.
I appreciate that the games are to encourage activity and the POI in real life are meant to be a key part of that. In Ingress the whole design is focussed on the POI. You do nothing in between them. And for some play you need to be pretty much on top of the point. Keeping the radius of interaction relatively small is also important so that defensive resonators are not too spread out. But with nothing to do between POI it is not called cargress for nothing. And there is more encouragement in basic play to cover greater distances. There are no time critical factors.
By contrast the key focus of Pokémon Go takes place everywhere. So the original design of the game places much less emphasis on the POI- the are places to get resources but most of your time is interacting with Pokémon away from POI. Over the years they have worked to place more importance on the POI, The introduction of raids, ex raids, tasks, rockets all increased the importance of the POI. And data mining shows a new initiative for stops in the offing. Most people play by walking around most of the time in a smaller area. There are also time critical factors as Pokémon, rockets, raids are only availed for a limited time - and for most of these you have no idea when it will go. So time pressure is a key difference.
So how close do you have to be. I can see my local pub easily from 200m, most of the POI in the park can be seen from 80m, except for the tree carving which needs to be about 20m. I can see the information board from a distance but need to stand next to it to read it. And it is perfectly acceptable to have POI inside but you can’t always go inside - how vital was it that I couldn’t look at the plaque in my local library when it was closed. I don’t think more than 40m would very helpful but it is now clear how unhelpful 20m is. I have created a lot of stops by looking around me as I play, not just when at a POI. There are lots of other interesting things to see that will never make it into any game so I wouldn’t want people to switch off as they walk around.
With time pressure with game elements it is just not as easy to stop play and switch to appreciating a POI compared to ingress.
Niantic has given us something different and good but the games and game play are very different and it shouldn’t mean the common element in both - the way points- should be interacted with in the same way.
Edit: Sorry got distance wrong. The old interaction distance was 40m and the extended is 80m
I think the problem with your statement is that it seems the world is "Play from my couch" vs tiny distance makes you get out.
I got out every single day with the larger radius. There was no playing from my couch. The difference is more like do I want to Zig-Zag accross busy streets? Answer is No. I appreciate seeing the metal globe statue across the street without having to cross to appreciate it.
@Elijustrying-ING You make some interesting points, but 20 meters has never been the interaction radius for anything AFAIK. It's been 40 meters in Ingress since I started playing in 2013, it's 40 meters in HPWU unless that changed recently, and it was 40 meters in PoGo until it got expanded to 80 meters.
The maximum weapon range in Ingress is 168 meters.
Apologies…..shouldn’t post late at night. 🙄
I started by thinking about the 20m clearance needed between POI.
I’ll if I can add an edit.
why do you say ''there is a niantic game'' when everybody knows is PoGO, its the game that let us play Ingress, without it Niantic could been in bankrupt by now, without it Niantic wouldnt be able to have the data that it has right now, without it Niantic wouldnt ever got the money for its project, without it Niantic wouldnt be able to invest more money in ingress and upgrade it and keep it running, without it Niantic would still be unknown with no sponsors or new companies approaching them, without it...and i could type a whole bible about it, so atleast be more respectful
Niantic should approach carefully or its wallets and data will get hurt by a lot, literally PoGO is the 99.9999999..infinite...999% of the real playerbase/customers that Niantic has
Be realistic and respectful, you arent better than any of them just because you play Ingress...like at all...at all
Personally I think the distance to reach pokestops should be the same distance we are able to reach Pokémon. It just makes sense. Why be able to catch a Pokémon across the way, yet can’t reach a pokestop we are pretty much standing next to?
Distance should roughly be Sidewalk to Sidewalk with 4 lanes of traffic in between which the 80M was pretty good coverage for.
People can "Explore" by seeing the POI from across the street, there is no need to actually force them to cross the street to interact with it.
Here's an honest curiousity for the contrary crowd....
Players home's within 40' of POI: Are unaffected by change
Players home's over 80' of POI: Are unaffected by change
It can't be that many players percentage wise that actually live in the 40-80 No Mans land, that "Arent getting out with 80 but would with 40".
As a suburban player, literally the only difference for me, is if I want to take a half hour walk, I'd have to cross back and forth over a main road or give up reaching half the stops/gyms.
If think in this case the best way is by testing different scenarios. Anecdotally, everyone (apart from a guy that didn't like the fact he can reach too many pokestops) loved the new distance. It doesn't mean it's the best one, but it means it's better than the previous one in the players' opinion, so I agree with Elijustrying-ING.
Are you sure it's 40m in HPWU? It felt a bit larger than Ingress, although I didn't play it much, just tested it, and it could be just my gps drifting.
The change makes zero sense considering the entire basis was to accommodate COVID and COVID is not even close to being over. Beyond that, it's a clear quality of life improvement. Not needing to cross 4-5 lanes of traffic to reach a stop is huge. Being able to park further away from a gym because the actual parking is tiny or unavailable is huge. The core point of the game remains unaffected, anyway - you have to walk to catch Pokemon and to hatch your eggs. The interaction radius is completely irrelevant to that. It only helps people reach things a little easier, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to.
Whatever behavior Niantic thinks it's going to drive more or less of simply isn't going to happen to any relevant degree. People who will walk will walk. People who are interested enough to look at the real world stops will look at them, regardless of the radius. And those who were never interested won't. The pros far outweigh the cons. Gameplay is simply nicer when you can reach things easily, and that motivates you to play more.
Well, joke's on them, now, they can't withdraw nominations.
https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/21717/wayfarer-update-unable-to-withdraw-from-in-voting
@aleprj-PGO I have a pretty good test case at home since I have three couch portals (I live in a dense urban area) and several other portals that are just out of range. I drew 40, 50, and 60 meter circles around two things that exist in HPWU but are just out of range for me at home then went outside and walked around to test ranges. The two purple pins in the image are the ones I used for testing-- the portals are 91 meters apart.
If I stand where the blue pin is then I can interact with the inn on the right but not the one on the left. Walking just a few feet to the left allows me to get the one on the left but not the right. There's a very small window where I seem to be able to hit both the left and the right. Thus, empirical evidence suggests that I was wrong and that the HPWU interaction range is 50 meters.
Everyone loved the new ranges is certainly an interesting argument, but I think that would be true if the range was 100, 200, 500 meters. I was certainly spoiled in PoGo by having a couch gym and three couch stops plus a couple of others that I drifted to occasionally. (-:
The change makes zero sense considering the entire basis was to accommodate COVID and COVID is not even close to being over. Beyond that, it's a clear quality of life improvement.
Do you have access to Niantic's telemetry data? Because Niantic's actions (ie. not implemented in other games that equally encourage from social distancing) suggest that this didn't work and people weren't social distancing as expected.
Not needing to cross 4-5 lanes of traffic to reach a stop is huge.
I took a measure of a 4 lane highway with center turn lane on Google Maps. Though this section did not have sidewalks on boht sides, it did have full car-width shoulders which I included. Total distance was about 85 ft or roughly 26m. That's well within the 40 meter interaction radius of all of Niantic's games. So I'm going to call BS on this.
Being able to park further away from a gym because the actual parking is tiny or unavailable is huge. Being able to park further away from a gym because the actual parking is tiny or unavailable is huge. The core point of the game remains unaffected, anyway - you have to walk to catch Pokemon and to hatch your eggs. The interaction radius is completely irrelevant to that. It only helps people reach things a little easier, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to.
Convenience is not a good reason as to why Pokemon Go should remain inconsistent with the other games. And being inconsistent is a very good reason why Pokemon GOs interaction radius should be reduced back to be inline with the other games.