Social Profile Rewards Feedback
GearGlider-ING
Posts: 1,328 ✭✭✭✭✭
In the Sept. 2021 AMA, we had this question answered:
10. Is there any information you can provide about incentivizing players to join or be more engaged with Niantic Wayfarer outside of medal tiers and country-specific events? Stuff like in this thread or more frivolous things like cosmetic rewards for wayfarer/niantic social profiles that you can show off?
a. This one is exciting! We’ve already been thinking of different ways of making the community more engaging. Some of the ideas we’ve thought about are having events focused more on the spirit of exploration, explorer highlights, etc. All with the intention of making the community more fun. This also goes for our events, Wayfarer Challenges, etc. Shout out to those of you who have already made your suggestions. When it comes to social profile rewards, what kind of rewards would excite you?
I figured having a feedback thread about social profile rewards and community engagement suggestions. A thread where instead of focusing on the usual suggestions (like events rewards, upgrades, tangible in game rewards, etc) we could focus on feedback about the social aspect of wayfarer.
So here's some of my thoughts:
- Team Competitive Reviewing
A favorite of mine to mention is to bring back the competitive aspect like the ENL vs RES agreement acount back in OPR. You could view different leader boards based on different teams from the various games connected to your Niantic Social account. This could have the benefit of when the competition cycle is over, results could be posted to big social media spaces to show winners and encourage the losing sides to review more for the next cycle.
Another spin is to have competitions like Splatoon's Splatfests, where you choose a team based on some opinion (like Ketchup vs Mayo). Would encourage people to review to get their favorite choice to win, results posted to social media, get people engaged, etc etc.
- Local Leaderboard
Another idea from Ingress, a local leaderboard of people in your area who reviewed the most this cycle. Would encourage people in their local area to review more to try and get on the leaderboard, and show it off in local Niantic gaming groups when they do. This in turn could get other people in on reviewing to try and get on the leaderboard to show off to others. Or encourage people in their area to keep reviewing more to beat their reviewing rivals.
- Wayfarer Profile Medals/Badges
People love to show off their medals from their Ingress and PoGO profiles all the time. Why not give the same to Wayfarer. You can have tiered badges for participating in certain types of recurring events, special medals for participation in one-time events, medals for number of bonus location resets, number of different states/countries you've reviewed in, etc.
- Ways to show off customizable Wayfarer Profile stuff
While screenshotting and sharing your rating, badges, etc is fun, what's really fun is being able to show off these things to people who didn't ask. Similar to avatar costume options and buddy pokemon in PoGO, or titles and badges in HPWU, being able to have a profile someone can click on and see to view all these goodies would encourage people to collect them and be active in Wayfarer spaces to show them off. Say for example, if there was a local leaderboard you placed on: If you were given the option to show off some cool unlockables like an avatar, medal, symbols representing the games you play/teams you're on, etc for other to see, it would encourage people to show off their team pride, or their own pride by showing the cool new unlockables you have to your local community. I know on reddit, it's very popular to include a flair of your in-game team next to your username.
- Integrating Wayfarer unlockables into existing Niantic properties or on the Forum
This is probably the hardest for the wayfarer team to do, but outside of the current Wayfarer/Recon medals in the game, having some kind of other cosmetic reward in Niantic games to show off wayfarer stuff would be awesome. Like wayfarer-related clothing in Pokemon GO that could be free to advertise wayfarer, or special clothing that can only be unlocked/purchased when you reach a certain tier in the wayfarer badge. Similarly for Ingress, a scanner avatar that is unlocked when you reach a certain recon badge tier.
Having unlockables on the forum tied to your wayfarer profile would also be encouraging, though IDK if Vanilla forums would allow something like that.
That's ideas I have for now. Anyone else have any input about possible ideas for wayfarer social profile rewards?
Comments
I'm only a PoGo player, but I'd love to have wayfarer clothing or something to kinda show that I am part of this program and, to kinda flex that yeah, everyone in this area, your welcome I made all these stops and gyms for you on the map. Haha.
Besides the local leaderboard, I hope to have a world leaderboard.
TBH, this. I've never spent money (irl or in game currency) on clothes, but it would be fun for some sort of exclusive swag. Be it for being a Platinum Wayfarer receiver, for participating in an event, or Stops/Portals discovered (as long as it counted across apps).
I feel like badge tier unlockable clothing should be one of the easier things to implement in Pokemon GO related to Wayfarer. They already have unlockable clothing based on other badge tiers. And there's IRL Wayfarer clothing in the Niantic Supply store. Could be a twofer where the IRL clothing gets advertised in PoGO, and then trainers buy it to look like their avatars.
A full fledged Wayfarer profile with badges. Stats could include edits agreements, reviews in various categories based on "what is it", furthest distance from "home" that a you've completed a review (the location of the nomination vs current), review streaks (1w, 1m, etc)
Make this data available through an API so it can be displayed on websites, discord, etc.
https://www.agent-stats.com is really popular to share stats on, so you're onto something with being able to share leaderboards or other stats with an API. I think that r/IngressOPR had a similar thing with flairs showing off your agreement stats at one point.
Unlockable clothing is great! Except that it should be free as a reward, not a gatcha to make people spend more money.
I'm not sure this is quite what's being discussed, but I feel like it's related: more than swag or avatar items, I want to receive visible credit for all my nominations across every Niantic game I play.
Currently, a player's name appears on in-game wayspots in only one Niantic game - whichever one was used to make the nomination. It's demoralizing to see my work credited to "unknown" simply because I nominated using a different game than the one I happen to be actively playing in that moment - a portal that was nominated through Pokemon Go, or a stop nominated through Ingress.
I recognize that this may be difficult or impossible to implement for players who have different usernames across Niantic games; whose game accounts are not linked to one another; or who have not created accounts for certain games. But I hope that with the ongoing Lightship work, player contributions can be highlighted across games.
Along with this, Ingress's "Portal Discovered" counter only counts Wayspots nominated in Ingress. Would love for it to count wayspots that have been contributed through all Niantic's platforms.
If we are all nominating Waypoints for the same Lightship system, rather than individual games, how about some paritiy between the games in terms of badge / medal requiements.
Ingress top tier "OPR" badge - Onyx requires 10,000 "agreed" nominations.
PoGo top tier "Wayfarer" badge - Platinum requires 1,500 "agreed" nominations.
😗
I think some unlockable clothing would be great. I have my platinum Wayfarer medal but nobody sees that. I’ve added over 100 quality waypoints to my wider area, much of which is semi-rural and involves a fair bit of travel. My particular passion is to facilitate play in rural areas, which hope brings joy to people. So yes some way of showing that off as recognition for efforts would be nice.
Cool ideas! Would love to see any/all of them implemented
Another I just had:
Continuing Education Tiered Badge/Leaderboard
I've brought up the idea of ConEd before, where reviewers can re-take the wayfarer quiz or some kind of criteria course for bonuses, to incentivize staying up to date.
For a social aspect though, having a tiered profile badge showing the number of times you took con-ed would encourage people to do con-ed to get the highest tiered badge. And it could be a statistic for local leaderboards, "Number of players on team X that took ConEd this cycle".
@NianticDanbocat any updates on that AMA response?
yep - @NianticTintino and I are thinking through different ways of making the program more fun to be a part of. It takes time to get these squared away to execute on so please bear with us! We are totally aligned on many of your ideas :)
While most of these mentioned things can be fun, it’s not what shows people how important reviewing truly are, and most people just don’t care about the leaderboards of cosmetics. Proper in-game rewards would be a much much better addition to get people to get actively reviewing, the in-game aren’t required to be much, but it sure would get people over to actively review or even start out.. The real problem is most people don’t understand how important Wayfarer can be, and they just leave it behind so there’s 2 things that I think would increase the encouragement of reviewing a lot:
1: in-game rewards for getting agreements (while being in Good/Great rating) to assure people take their time more and not just review as quickly as possible making their review quality worse.
2: Niantic making new posts in-games like the Pokémon GO blogpost or the Ingress in game news, to make them aware and explain them how important Wayfarer truly is.
I’m truly convinced that these 2 are the best methods and ways to get people to review a lot more. Yes cosmetics and all the other ideas above could help, but usually once they have a certain clothing they want they stop. Whenever they have a certain badge or medal they stop. It’s not something that keeps them interested in reviewing, and most of the people don’t even care about those cosmetics and statistics.
While in-game rewards and better visibility of wayfarer in-apps would help a ton, and I would personally love them, this thread was specifically made in response to an AMA answer asking for feedback about Social Profile Rewards, many of which do not require collaberation between the wayfarer team and Niantic's other properties, making things much easier to implement.
And while leaderboards may not be important to you, they were a huge part back in the OPR beta, with many posts on r/Ingress and r/IngressOPR talking about who won the most recent cylce, giving visibility to OPR/Wayfarer. In addition, many wayfarer communities (such as the Wayfarer Discussion Discord) use competition games like bingo/scav hunts, king of the hill, and other games to foster competition to make reviewing more enjoyable (to great success I might add). So having leaderboards and social profile rewards can indeed be a way that the wayfarer team can increase reviewing.
@NianticDanbocat @NianticTintino if you have any questions about Wayfarer games/competitions that I've helped run or been a part of, feel free to **** me a DM.
Oh yeah, another thing that would be fun for wayfarer is unlockable themes.
We have light/dark mode right now. It would be cool if the more agreements you got, the more unlockable skins/themes/whatever for wayfarer. Like backgrounds, different colored stars/upgrade wheel, etc. Maybe the ability to change your icon from that of your google/facebook account at a very high tier (so it would be easier for Niantic to make sure they don't contain anything innapropriate).
When Wayfarer used to glitch, the stars would appear as shoes instead... That would be a cool "feature".
I would LOVE to rate nominations on a scale of 1 - 5 🍞
I hope I don't miss the exclusive Niantic/Walmart/Tiffany & Co. "stars with a blue hat" collab event.
I want exclusive wayfarer clothing in pogo so I can show off
Same. They even have IRL Wayspot clothing in the Niantic store. I know a few friends of mine that like to cosplay their Pokemon GO avatar who would unlock that hat in PoGO and buy the real one just to cosplay.
I'd want a full hour of 1 on 1 communication with @NianticTintino, to be able to express all my issues, fixes, and ideas! 😁
I see no need to hide the nominator code name.
And now that we have a common database, it will be easier to modify.
Here, your code names are followed by three letters of the alphabet.
I would be tp235-ING.
I think it would be easier to figure out which game player suggested it if you put the letters like this.
Also, for some reason in Pokémon GO, you can't see other people's profiles in the game either.
This is one of the reasons why the game encourages cheating, which is currently widespread.
Information that does not need to be hidden should be made open.