Wake up and smell the coffee
Elijustrying-ING
Posts: 4,751 Ambassador
@NianticTintino @NianticAaron @NianticLC
Hello and Good Morning to you all.
There are many posts here are about the community members helping each other, which is great. We offer possible answers try to help new wayfarers find their feet and provide explanations to make up for the lack of clarity in communications. This aspect of the volunteer service seems to work reasonably well. It should also be viewed as a rich source of feedback on the wayfarer process. For example repeated questions about what has happened to my accepted spot, should produce a red flag that something needs to be improved.
Maybe someone does notice, but the evidence is that the issues are ignored.
There are also several problems that wayfarers raise - large/repeated abuse, accounts resetting, issues with variability of Niantic decisions and other topics. These are all really important, they each in their own way affect the experience of volunteer wayfarers.
Each is met by silence by Niantic staff. Sorry but that is rude.
This silence speaks very loudly, creates a very negative atmosphere and affects motivation and morale. These are 2 key factors that keep volunteers going.
Action
You need to tackle these issues.
Acknowledge each exists. It helps to know you have read the posts. And it’s plain good manners.
Say you are sorry. If someone is expressing distress at a broken system, apologising for that experience is a big starting point and it’s really easy to do.
Say what you can or cannot do. Explain what you plan to do. Say who you plan to approach to help. If there is a brick wall say so. Try to work with the wayfarers to resolve.
I’m guessing that we are not aware of factors such as a lack staffing /resource / access to technical changes / bridges to other Niantic developers etc. Being honest with the community is important to manage our expectations or otherwise we are just constantly let down. Staff just disappear without comment or even appear without a hello or idea what their focus is.
Read the posts - Experienced disillusioned reviewers are starting to walk away each time they meet a potential new wayfarer they are not going to recommend it.
in case you hadn’t noticed you are in a downward spiral and unless you do something it will get worse.
Wake up!
If you are true to form, I’m sure this will be ignored - go on prove me wrong 😂
Comments
Preach Eli!
There is a pronounced silence in the forums lately, and it's been exasperated since Giffard and Danbocat left the team. There's been some pulses to try and jumpstart conversation and activity, but everything in-between is severely lacking. The horse with no direction is being jumpstarted into the earth.
Perhaps its time to evaluate the last 9 months of the Ambassador's role. There is (un)likely to be a new rotation of ambassadors next February, but man, I don't want Wayfarer to dıe (even if it seems like I bring brimstone and lava whenever I post). Where is the fresh blood!
It's grim to to think about but we should probably prepare ourselves for wayfarer dying, or at least entering a sunsetting period where updates and interaction are no longer even expected while the users drop off. Companies shut down beloved projects all the time for reasons as meaningless as office politics and right now it just doesn't look like it's a program with a meaningful advocate in niantic's boardrooms.
There will be a time when most of the nominations are bad, a city has a number of buildings and poi, some of them are gonna be removed and a few ones will be added, but most of the nominations will be abuse trying to add anything as a couch portal/pokestop.
That would leave only rural areas where no one has gone there to nominate, things are kilometers apart and in the end no one plays, there won't be a community because people can enjoy a game for some months/years, and then they move to another thing and the other few players feel alone and also move to other things that don't have Niantic's requirements in order to enjoy a game with their phone.
This has been happening since long ago, its only a matter of time for each location to reach its saturation point.
Unless they really go wild and let players add janky, old picnic tables, open spaces of grass and your local shopping centre(mall) signs....
I'm definitely seeing a downward trend in Wayfarer activity, at least as far as reviews and agreements. I've also noticed a similar trend in the games based on Lightship: Pokemon Go is quiet (frequently not enough raiders to raid, chats nearly silent, even lack of activity in gyms), Ingress is quiet (been a long time since we've done field plans and in-person meetups), and Pikmin doesn't require much chatter so I have no measurement. I do feel that if Niantic was more open and communicative with its customer base, the games would thrive as well. If Wayfarer dies first, it would only hasten the demise of the other games - no new gyms to get gold, no new stop when your area gets its first public playground, no "one more layer" in a spine of portals - stagnant play.
We're a small group here. We're overwhelmingly committed to accuracy and truth. The vast majority of forum members aren't looking for something for themselves as a main goal: they're helping people they've never met, every day. One would think that we'd be an easy bunch to interact with, to have a conversation, to establish a semi-human connection. I know the days of RedSoloCup are come and gone, but the memories do linger....
And another thing...
The queueing system has been abysmal since OPR began in fall of 2017, continued when rebranded as Wayfarer. After this long, we have to assume it's on purpose. But if they WANT some nominations to take over a year, why don't they tell us their parameters, so we can volunteer in ways that can be seen? How many thousands of complaints have been met with Niantic silence? QUITE rude to treat your donors this way.
Yes, Rude is the right word.
It is the same word as when we talk about Niantics Customer - Ingame - Service.
We are met with Rudeness, and ignorance.
I'm definitely seeing a downward trend in Wayfarer activity, at least as far as reviews and agreements. I've also noticed a similar trend in the games based on Lightship: Pokemon Go is quiet (frequently not enough raiders to raid, chats nearly silent, even lack of activity in gyms), Ingress is quiet (been a long time since we've done field plans and in-person meetups), and Pikmin doesn't require much chatter so I have no measurement.
I know this is not a Wayfarer issue, but when it comes to Pokémon Go, I can't blame anyone who plays being quiet given how abysmal the item boxes have been in the store for the past couple of months. It's almost like Niantic doesn't actually want people to be playing their main game all of a sudden, with no communication as to why.
I do agree with you on the topic of Wayfarer though - things definitely seem to be moving slower and there seems to be a lot of silence/apathy from Niantic on the Wayfarer side of things. I miss Danbocat for that reason. She might've been busy a lot of the time, but she'd actually communicate when she was around, and in a way that came across as one human being talking to another, rather than a human version of Remy the support bot.
There's no need to be so dramatic. Wayfarer will die, but that's not related to the games.
Most of the people doesn't care about new pokestops if they have enough around them, so even if there's not a single addition in a whole year that won't matter to most of the people as long as they have plenty in their daily walks.
If there aren't enough wayspots Niantic can do a foursquare at any time.
They don't care about locations lost in the woods, they want wayspots in the places where people live because people have phones and money.
Can confirm here (at least in the UK specifically) things have slowed down a lot, agreements not coming in as quickly as I felt they used to several months back, which is probably a result of several downturns in Wayfarer recently, with nothing really "good" to point out and lots of bad things all putting people off.
Theres alot truth in here. I dont know if Niantic is interested in locations in the woods, infact the PoGo community isnt interested in locations in the woods that havent been populated with spawns since August 2020.
Infact, the community isnt interested in anything that they cannot walk to in 2 minutes from home, or get there by car (and maybe stay in the car).
The Overall idea of having an AR Game that leads to exploring is doomed when you do have the same bad spawns in the woods anyway.
The local communithe isnt interested in the game anymore, and you can feel it in the air and hear it in the sea. As pointed out, here in germany the overall staying time "in Gym" passes 100 Days in certain areas. That also has to do with Niantic blocking several thousands of accounts that used software that was manipulated. These people are not there anymore to spoof up to gyms. The remainder of Spoofers uses other ways, but still isnt interested in taking gyms.
Most people in the communithe have stopped talking on whatsapp, and dont even log in anymore. We have had lost the "covid players" already a year ago (those that came when they have nothing else to do when covid began).
Now the players that played for several years are not a bit interested in the game, and surely those that stick around do not buy coins.
All this and people not using wayfarer anymore leads to one thing: Niantic just ignores what happens here, and gave a way the resource of manpower to other areas (or just throw people out).
Everone knows how this will end. Maybe yall folks out there find other things to do in their time.
Driving to play Go has never really been as big a thing in the UK. Pre pandemic people would quite happily walk, cycle around to do raids with each other.
Remote passes pretty much killed that community side of the game though, that includes in person and group chats.
Niantic have never really managed to convince the majority to play GBL either unfortunately.
I was looking forward to Route Making but it looks like it may not be that great either :(
I'm sure there are lots of reasons people become disinterested but Niantic's indifference/inability and lack of investing in their games plays a major part in that.
I do always like when I get Wayspots approved that people cannot drive past/to such as trailmarkers a decent ways along the trail.
The new staff is not even given a chance to say hello. The same goes for staff leaving the team. I think it is very disrespectful to those of us who share the community.
Finger trouble - wrong post quoted....
I'm going to disagree with this point about cars. When there were raid days when people actually got together to do them, a lot of people would arrive / sit in their cars to play. Quite a few of the location edits I see are clearly trying to move the pin location away from the correct, real location to somewhere where it is possible to access the waypoint while sitting in a car - is the pin in the park or at the edge of the park car park for instance. Covid killed off the community "get togther" aspect of raid groups, I'm only just starting to see a few "familiar faces" return to their old haunts during Community Day events, though this is slowly improving. As for "Remote Raid Passes" - brilliant bit of Niantic thinking, it just means all the multi-account spoofers no longer have to even leave their sofa to raid anywhere, provided they spend money on the passes.
I didn't say we don't have cars :)
It's just not that common.
Surely spoofers have never had to leave their sofas?
I was confused then as it said I was mentioned here and then I wasn’t?
I mean, yeah....
We have a faker/abuser that called himself out 2 weeks ago, rewarded with a new cluster of fake couch waypoints because no action was taken... (or insufficient action)
And meanwhile I am now coming up on 7 months of having my profile reset, and no word whatsoever... I even just had a nomination approved from my reset profile a couple days ago... But IDK what else was in the queue, what's been rejected, all my agreements lost.
The reset issue is dusgraceful
cars are not popular where I live as there are clusters of 2/3 and gyms en route.
parking can also be an issue so people just walk.
in Ingress so many use their cars. I was asked once how I had managed to get to portals that were along a river. The person asking said there is no road 🙄 so had I been spoofing. So I said there is a good footpath😂
“Cargress” is a well known Ingress term for a reason. 😆
Another reason why I enjoy things being accepted that cannot be reached by car.
The thing is... none of this is new. Nothing.
Niantic's communication has been terrible and continues to be terrible. They've been called out for it again and again - by us Wayfarers, by the PoGo userbase - no real change ever occurred, even in the rare instanced when promises were made.
At the end of the day, it's Niantic products that will suffer the most for it. It should be Niantic's interest to improve on this front... and if it isn't, then it isn't. There's only so much we can do.
It’s probably not helped by having nobody at the helm at the moment.
The previous captain @NianticDanbocat didn’t manage to avoid the 8% of staff cuts for whatever reason.
I can see @NianticTintino-ING doing their best with some things but they could do with someone else too. Anyone know if @NianticCasey-ING is busy these days? 😆
I guess the stuff that happens between stops and gyms is more important for Go players? I can't imagine sitting in a car playing Go it doesn't seem like fun.
What do Ingress players do between portals?
What do Ingress players do between portals?
not much
they drive.
I just walk, maybe check on my KCap, switch to Pikmin/Pokémon GO/Witcher and then back to Ingress.
Sometimes my phone even goes in my pocket between Portals.
Hate the other faction and track them on intel.