Any plans to make the guidelines less ambiguous?
Losifer026-ING
Posts: 198 ✭✭✭✭
As it stands one can discuss anything regarding the guidelines in this forum and many others and get all manner of opposing advice which devolves into arguing. It doesn’t matter how uncontroversial it might be. This is created by the ambiguity in how the guidelines are phrased and structured. Is there any way or plan to make the guidelines less ambiguous?
Comments
I think they want them intentionally vague so that “anything could be eligible” (outside of the clear rejects like K-12). It’s not like the OPR days when it was clear about what was and wasn’t acceptable.
Hopefully that’s not the case, because overall it seems they’re well intentioned, but that approach would invite tons of frustration and drive people away. It also makes the entire system far less efficient than it could be. I don’t think that’s what they want. I also don’t think they want every forum for Wayfarers to become as toxic as they are.
I wanted to ask a similar question, but a slightly different way.
What is the current direction/future of the 'criteria' of Wayfarer? I personally feel Niantic have moved too far away from the mission of the portal network and I disagree with a few things Niantic have said "eligible" to, they aren't interesting, are 100% mass produced and basically everywhere, why is this stance acceptable when the objective is to have high quality wayspots and not just any generic crąp because their main game thrives on quantity and numbers rather than things that are genuinely interesting.
This is almost unsolvable.
We are dealing globally with different cultures and perceptions of what the value of things are. Loose guidelines and simple principles allow for a more nuanced response to reflect those cultural differences.
It would be pointless to have a yes/no ruling on everything.
But then that assumes we can all comfortably negotiate and reach agreement 🤪😂
It does and can work when a community can reach a common consensus.
Personally I'm not sure why the "refresh" was needed, its only result is opening more doors to the race to the bottom, things worked just fine under OPR guidance, why the change was needed I really don't know.
To that point, the biggest problem is that Niantic and the Pokémon Company have misjudged the order of the Pokémon GO game system and have not corrected it.
This is due to the wrong purpose of the game.
Unlike Ingress, the primary significance of Pokémon GO is to catch pocket monsters.
Therefore, the significance of visiting exciting places as advocated by Niantic is only of second-order importance to many players.
Niantic and the Pokémon Company should have understood this and made the game system less reliant on wayspots, and this would have been more satisfying for players.
Well, saying that won't solve the problem, so it would be better to start sorting out the wayspots that don't meet the eligibility criteria.
Currently, too many low-quality wayspots do not meet the criteria for deletion but do not meet the requirements for approval.
“Other Rejection Criteria” could be easily be abused while not assisting the nominee in improving their nomination. The special nature of nominations could easily be voted and used with the “cultural significance” and “visually uniqueness”.
Personally, I am tired of the same old complaints about "high quality" vs "low quality." We ARE NOT building a travel guide! We are finding spots that LOCALS can use to meet the tenets of Niantic: Exercise, Explore, Be Social. If that's not how it was explained in the OPR days, I'm sorry but things change. Get on board or get left behind.
Pokémon GO isn't dependent on wayspots like Ingress is. or for that matter, Pikmin, Peridot, NBA All World, and even past games have different dependencies for wayspots.
Wayfarer don't forget was largely requested by Ingress players long before Pokémon GO was even a thought. It was a dedicated team within Ingress developing it, with it initially released as Operation Portal Recon.
We warned the Wayfarer devs, about the amount of junk being parsed through Wayfarer when it was open to pokemon players. It's better now, but still seeing junk.
The Wayfarer App is open to game devs who are looking to use Niantic Wayspots for their games and apps.
It no longer is a dedicated product for any, one, game.
That might be true, portals received from Ingress was also littered with pre-schools in my area. I know of at least 2 removed since Pokémon Go came along.
Lots of the wayspots in my area which were grandfathered into Pokémon from Ingress were shockingly bad. Wildly misplaced, pitch black photos, ineligible places like scout huts. Pokemon players arent worse submitters than Ingress players, there's just a hell of a lot more of them.
Go players and Ingress players are not separate entities that can be put into little boxes marked good and bad Wayfarers.
Building the Wayfarer/Lightship database isn't splitting the atom, it doesn't take a genius or someone who is only an Ingress player to add some stuff, good or bad, to a phone game.
It is hard to say what those WAYSPOTs are without confirming the date they occurred.
2012-2016.
Nominated by an Ingress player and approved by Niantic.
2017-2019
Nominated by Ingress players (but including Pokémon GO players) and approved by OPR reviewers.
2020 - Present.
Ingress players and Pokémon GO players were nominated and Wayfarer reviewers approved.
The difference is this.
You can see the year the WAYSPOT occurred on the Pokémon GO screen, so you can use that as a reference.
In particular, some Pokémon GO players who learned about the new wayspots when OPR started and was approved in 2017, flowed into Ingress and started making wayspot nominations from Ingress.
Therefore, it is not clear which is the player's main game, just that he/she is nominated from Ingress.
Also, I have heard from others that a 2014 nominee from Ingress appeared in 2020, so please check the agent profile then.
Well, one thing that is relatively easy to distinguish is that many players whose main game is Pokémon GO stop at a player level of 12 or 13 in Ingress after accumulating only anniversary medals, and yet the Recon medals are of such splendid colors that they are disproportionate when compared to the other medals In many cases.
And most of them, of course, have no Verify medals lit up.
In comparison, when Ingress is the main player, the anomaly medals are lit from past to present (and many of them are two to three lines), monthly events and achievement medals are interspersed between the anniversary medals (continuous play), etc. It is
If a player has published a detailed play record, it would be easier to see that as well.
None of that is relevant in any way to Wayfarer. Get out of your ING vs PGO mentality. I'm sorry one game took off like a rocket in popularity while the other can only grow by gaining players from the other's base. But none of that matter when we are talking about POI and the broken system that is Wayfarer. It's equally broken for players of all the games. Well, both games since some Niantic games don't grant access to it at all! I'm actually looking forward to Pikmin Bloom getting Wayfarer access so PGO players can stop being blamed for all that's wrong in the world.
If only HPWU had gotten Wayfarer, we could have all ganged up on them!
Those warty hogs!
When I said "grandfathered in" to pokemon I meant the ones that were in the game from day 1 which were brought over from Ingress, so pre-2016.
Then it is Niantic's decision.
Because their wrong decision at the time was made by us and they would not reverse it.
And that is an issue that continues to this day.
It doesn't meet the removal criteria, but it also doesn't meet the eligibility criteria at all.
Niantic needs to review their past mistakes.
Bring on those Peridot losers.
We are not going after the NBA Ballers firstly?
I thought Niantic ditched Peridot when they laid staff off a little while ago?
Peridot is still coming. They ditched Transformers. Peridot is their own IP, so more secure.
I read they ditched 4 games including peridot but I honestly cant remember where I read it so may not have been a credible source
Though not official, Killed by Niantic is always up to date.
It's only a matter of time for them to shut down peridot. The images and characters might be very cute, but expecting that a significant amount of people are willing to go around with the cameras in their phones enabled and looking at AR creatures is not realistic.
People will install it, try it for a few minutes, hours, days and then they'll get bored because we know that using the camera that way with AR destroys the battery and it will feel repetitive after a little while.
I think you’re probably right. Bright and shiny fades pretty quick. I think they might have had a better run at getting what they want if they’d made Transformers where we were transformers(not humans helping them), and we had to go scan whatever it is we would transform into. Or if they made a zombie game where gathering supplies was dependent upon scanning the things you were trying to gather. There are ways to work AR into the games but you’ve got to make it interesting in a lasting way. But no matter what they do with new games and their communities, they need to make sure that new players that nominate and review have a clear understanding of what their role is and what it is Niantic wants as in game POI. Based on the wide variety of frustrations brought up in this AMA I think it is pretty clear that while most of us reviewing and nominating have a pretty good idea of what that is, we all have things we’re wrong about, but there are a lot of people who don’t and/or willfully do the wrong thing. Once the bad actors are removed and everyone has learned what they need to know; the next step is keeping everyone on the same page. Beyond that, and what is likely to be very difficult work to get there, it would be a lot easier to maintain the efficient system.
Great question: why are the guidelines so vague?
All statues are always accepted, while architecture most often gets rejected. Are architects unworthy (even renowned ones), compared to sculptors (even the worst of them)?
And why does everything needs a sign before it is eligible? 400 year old hawthorn, rejected. 1 year old sapling with a sign? Bang! Accepted!
And all those edge cases? When reviewers follow these guidelines, we even get punished with a lower rating, just because we took a little more effort to check if there is a school, to check property lines on the local government's website.
Why is this system based on an argumentum ad populum fallacy?
If the rules were clearer, and nominators could just check boxes to which rules they appeal, and reviewers check if all requirements are adequately met...
It's simple.
The use of the building takes precedence.
For example, a gymnasium for exercise or a convention hall to promote social interaction can be approved even if it is the work of an unknown architect.
However, a police station or a fire station, no matter how famous the architect's design, will be denied.
That's all there is to it.
It is only a matter of whether the use meets the conditions or not.
Also, plants are just natural things.
The example you give is so childish that I would not approve it.
However, if some low-level reviewer gives a star to a sign that says "this is a pine tree," I'm sorry, but it is a majority decision and will be approved.
Sometimes the building is art. For example an office doesn't meet criteria. Or a common store. But if its building designed by a famous arcitect, or has some super unusual feature, the building itself qualifies as something you'd "explore" from the outside, regardless of what's in it.
This is in fact more or less how the guidelines were worded at one point, but you’re right; architecture is art. If you take an art history class you absolutely study architecture. A lot of it. Architecture is somewhat of a form of utilitarian sculpture that’s usually on too large a scale for the artist to do by themselves.