Cooldowns Update - Discussion
NianticTintino-ING
Posts: 1,103Niantic › admin
Hello Explorers, in case you haven't noticed yet, we’ve made some changes to how cooldowns work and cooldown periods.
Here's what you can expect:
- If your Wayfinder rating is Great, cooldowns are reduced by 75% (e.g. 4 hrs to 1hr).
- If your Wayfinder rating is Poor to Good, cooldowns are reduced by 50% (e.g. 4 hrs to 2 hrs).
We hope that this will be a small way to reward our good reviewers and encourage good reviewing overall.
Check out the original post here.
Safe Exploring!
Post edited by NianticTintino-ING on
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It would be even better if people can learn why they got a cooldown.
Can you PLEASE stop pinning new posts like this to General Discussion without unpinning older ones? This is a great opportunity for discussion, but it does not need to be at the top of the forum for the next year. I can understand pinning this for the first day or two, but if people want to discuss it further, allow them to discuss it without a pin and continue bumping the thread to the top of General Discussion naturally. Once the discussion is over in a few days, it doesn't need to stay there for months. The important part of the post is the announcement and that is easily preserved in the News section of the forum.
Are the cooldown triggers relaxed too, or just the amount of time you’re cooled down?
I can't answer from the backend, but anecdotally many of my friends have reported the triggers being relaxed, as well.
@NianticTintino
First of all, it's nice to see that Niantic is always thinking about improving Wayfarer in some way. But that's the only positive thing I can say about it, because I don't understand the approach!
1. As long as you don't get an exact answer as to why the cooldown was triggered, the change is not positive for me now. If I change 7 out of 10 reviews, only have rubbish to rate in the form of fakes, objects & trees photographed from a screen in the front yard and then get a cooldown, it doesn't make any sense to me.
2. Why ?, are rewards always useless ? EVERYONE who uses Wayfarer and invests time doesn't want trash (April AMA), in the form of avatar poses (especially since not everyone plays Pkmn Go and doesn't benefit from them).
As a Wayfarer, you want upgrades, or for that matter from now on, additional objections, because those options are the only viable thing you need for Wayfarer. Everything else is completely useless, including shortened cooldowns. No offense meant, but to me these "rewards" are just hot air to tell the Wayfarers "you get something from us" and nothing more. If you want to reward wayfarers, do them with something useful. Especially as long as the abuse of the reviewers is still too great and has too great an impact on the system and also on the (apparently) not all correctly trained in-house reviewers who are still not master of their own Niantic criteria.
Interesting that shortening a punishment is now presented to us as a reward.
Or does it also affect cooldowns, like 1 appeal per 30 days or 3 skips per 24 hours?
You can just dismiss older pinned posts
I should not have to do that. This is horribly unfriendly to users less familiar with the forum, especially new users. This is not a 2000's era tech support forum. We do not need 50 pins.
[deleted]
This is not really news. Sure, maybe it might amount to a Wayfarer 4.7.1 as a minor release but at least posts in the Release notes category can be commented on unlike anything in the News category. It would eliminate the need for these secondary 'Discussions' posts.
Anyway, onward to the actual content itself, I heavily dislike the fact that cooldowns are solely based on the speed of reviews and never about the pattern. I tested this by removing the minimum time for the smart-submits (ranges between 13-18 seconds) and reviewed things within mere seconds and got to maybe a dozen before I got an hour cooldown.
It is appreciated though with these far lesser times, but personal research and science behind the cooldown is never about the actual pattern of reviewing itself.
I think this is a mistake. People will be rushing without really reviewing in detail. 24hrs is brutal I know because I just got hit with my 1st one in over 3 months. Probably over 5,000 reviews.
In which way is that a reward?
How about telling people why they get a cooldown? Like that they shouldn't send a review made in less than 20 seconds or do the same rating multiple times in a row...
It’s nice that the cooldowns have been shortened. However, I must point out that this cooldown appears more often.
I’ve never changed the way I rate. Despite a rating of “Good” I can only make 5-10 reviews since the changes and then have to wait for the cooldown again. It seems strange to me right now and it’s very frustrating.
The problem is, that people don't know why they get a cool down. If there's no additional explanation, there is no learning effect.
And why should people with a poor rating get shorter cooldowns? There is probably a reason, why they get it?!
Recently, I get so many crazy rejections for hilarious reasons (A tombstone on a historical graveyard is a residential area? A multi confessional prayer room in a university is a school? Etc). Why should I want, that the same incompetent people may give even more unreasonable 1-second-rejections per day?
I've done 23,055 reviews and have never had a cooldown. No reward for me!
I noticed this a few days ago. Because I got it a couple of times. Is that a cool idea, maybe. I believe the reason for the cooldown should be explained because not everyone knows the cause. For me, there is probably a known reason, because I always get this message when I judge photo editing too quickly, which usually appear at the end of evaluating submissions.
Thank you all for your feedback on cooldowns. From what I can gather, there seems to be a desire for the cooldown page/message to indicate the reason "why"? Is that a correct summary?
From what I can gather, there seems to be a desire for the cooldown page/message to indicate the reason "why"? Is that a correct summary?
That does seem like a sensible way to help people learn to review better and not encounter cooldowns as much, yes.
Part of the problem is "don't get into patterns of voting". When all you get is a continual series of 1* nominations to review, it's pretty hard not to.
Do the current cooldown messages indicate a reason? Perhaps they just need to be a little more clear?
As long as I'm taking my time between rejects, I have never had a problem with rejecting a bunch in a row as long as I'm not using the same rejection reason every time.
Some people's 1* should be 5* going by what I have seen in the forum. Also people 1*ing on location when they should be 3*ing so maybe it's not a problem putting people who 1* everything on cooldown.
The problem with telling people why they have been limited is simple, they will game the system.
If you tell them they did 10x1* in a row to be put on the naughty step, they will do 9x1* then vote 3 or 5* before going back to doing another 9* votes.
Im Sure a time thing is in place too so X amount of reviews in a short amount of time shows you can't have possibly looked at them all carefully enough to decide properly.
Obviously the system still needs tuning to not catch genuine voters out and punish those but those who abuse the system would use any known trigger figures to continue to abuse the system to the maximum possible
Here are three tests that I did between three different 1-hour cooldowns today. These first two I attempted with no minimum timing in-between (italics are 1-star reject reasons):
1: 4, loc, loc, 5, orc, dupe, 4, 3, 4, 5, loc, 3, 4, 4, orc, 4, 4, fake, 5 - cooldown (19)
2: 4, t&d, 5, 3, title, t&d, 5, 4, 3, 4, dupe, 3, 4, temp, 5, 4, loc, 4, title, orc - cooldown (also 19!)
This third time I attempted to review with the smart submit, spacing 13 to 17 seconds between each review.
3: prp, title, nat, 3, 2, dupe, t&d, temp, 3, 3, prp, 4, mloc, 4, 5, loc, 3, t&d, 3, 4, 3, orc, temp, 3, photo, mloc, 4, 4, 3, 2, dupe, temp, orc, 4, orc, 5, 4, loc, title, retry, retry, t&d, retry, photo, t&d, title, title, retry, retry, retry, retry... - endless retries after 44 reviews
...
Ok sure, maybe the lot of 3 and 4 stars might be considered "patterns" but I'm quite stingy with giving 5 stars to nominations. But the fact that the system will often back you up into endless "Please retry your request" prompts after a solid session of reviewing might mean that the system is not routing fast enough at the speed in which I review. Notice how when the retries start to happen, I was only getting title, description and photo edits to review. If I have numerous 4-star nominations in a row, I might vary it up or downwards, but I'm always varying the cultural significance/visually unique questions between each so they're unique enough.
But these tests were my personal observation that the cooldown is not fully dependent on the pattern or "canned responses", but it heavily monitors speed. So indeed, a "why?" is heavily desired. Even if I don't get a cooldown, I'll eventually hit the endless retries or I'll often hit the "End of queue" cooldown when I know there are plenty more nominations to review (it refreshes after 15-20 minutes with new nominations to review).
For reference, this is the cooldown activation message:
We have detected some anomalies in your review behavior. As you are reviewing each nomination, please consider each question carefully to avoid falling into voting patterns. Use of shortcuts or pre-canned responses should also be avoided.
I am not an anomaly. There are not enough datapoints to warrant a lack of variance if we're only going by a 5-star system, alongside a suite of rejection reasons.
Currently, you just get a cooldown way too fast. Sometimes after 5-10 reviews, you're already out. That was not so before. Just because you might rate a little faster doesn't mean it's a bad thing. Some submissions are very easy, especially in places where these are the first submissions and where they also comply with the rules, after the pictures it is just a quick click-through. I agree with the others here that it is much worse that there seem to be people who consistently give 1* instead of looking at the submissions closely. Those people who consistently give bad or pejorative ratings should rather get a time-out. Example: If there are always 2 of 50 people who only give 1*, they must be taken out of circulation. I have already denounced the fact that there seem to be people here who just want to get their upgrade quickly and unfortunately the fastest way to do this is to reject them since you don't have to look at pictures or read through texts. Unfortunately, this also explains why a large part of your own submissions is rejected, sometimes with really incomprehensible reasons for rejection. (The bench in the forest is an unsuitable place to play, a public park is suddenly an offensive place, as is the spacious forecourt in front of the town hall, A playground is not of cultural importance...).
So we need new rules for the cooldown. There something should be done.
I'm quite stingy with giving 5 stars to nominations too. That's why it annoys me just as much, because only very important things should get 5*. If that's why the constant 3*&4* ratings are already a "pattern", I'm sorry, but they didn't deserve this last star according to my personal scheme.
Instead of the cooldown message I get something like "Superb Job" or "Well done - Come back later when there's more to review"
I can hardly believe that there's nothing to review in central Europe. Is this the friendly version of the cooldown?
You're talking about two different situations.
The message saying to come back later when there's more to review - means you've hit the end of your queue. To get more in your queue, your home and bonus locations should be at least 250 miles from each other AND from your usual place of play. Then you draw from a wider area, so get more nominations. Niantic should be much more clear about this.
If the message has "cooldown" in it - it's flagging something in your behavior.
I have heard that this is more likely to happen if the home location is not set up, and I had this tendency when it was not set up.
It is easy to be fooled by the word home, but there are three Wayfarer locations: home, bonus, and current location, not home and bonus.
Home should be set up where you are from or where you know the land.
A more precise reason would be nice.
However, when there is a series of clear 1-star nominations, the review speed will inevitably be faster.
And our rank rate as reviewers may drop from GREAT to GOOD or FAIR.
This is almost always the case when my rank drops from GREAT to GOOD, which is rare.
Thx, I have set up home and bonus location far from each other for years already. I usually get submissions up to 600km away from my home location which is in central Europe and those submissions are from various countries. The thing that confuses me is that I get this "nothing to review"-notification after 30-50 reviews per day and I doubt that there aren't that much submissions in this huge area.
On the other hand many of my own submissions are stuck "in queue" for weeks before they come "in voting". Even the upgrades stay in queue for many days now.
All of this was much more different 2-3 weeks ago: more to review (until I've got the cooldown occasionally) and faster reviews of my own submissions. Since I haven't changed my review/submitting behaviour I'm asking myself if there have been some changes from Niantic on this side or if other players just got lazy and review/submit less nowadays.
I suspect that Wayfarer can detect when you're using a third-party-app add-in, and gives more cooldowns.
I've never used a 3PA, and never gotten a cooldown (23k reviews).
If you're cooldown-prone, try a browser that doesn't have Wayfarer+ or IITC or anything.