How open/cooperative are other Niantic games to events involving Wayfarer/Lightship?
GearGlider-ING
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Recently, Pokemon GO just had an event with invites as an incentive for in game rewards. What are the barriers to doing something like this with Wayfarer?
We've had wayfarer events before in Ingress and PoGo. Why doesn't it happen more often, especially with how long the backlog is many places?
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Have Pokemon Go had events before Wayfarer? I was previously unaware of that if that is the case.
There was an event that had spawn rewards a few years ago, but the implementation of the rewards was bungled a bit.
Sometimes at an Ingress anomaly, people who are in that one city in the world can pay $30, and Niantic will review a random 7 of their submissions (nominations, photos, edits). They offered this in Munich this year, last July. The Niantic reviews were done about a month after the event. Things Niantic approved have still not showed up in game (unless it happened recently and I haven't heard).
Be careful what you ask for.
The Requiem Anomaly, which was planned to be held in Munich alone in the world in May 2020, was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and was reshaped into the Super Position Anomaly, which took place in July 2022.
I am not sure if it was planned for the Requiem Anomaly, but the OPR Live event was indeed held as a sub-event of the Super Position Anomaly.
The OPR Live event before that should have been held at Abaddon Prime Kaohsiung in May 2019.
This event required a certain number of nominations, edits, and photo additions. (The number required varies from time to time.)
On the other hand, Pokémon GO had a Wayfarer event at this year's GO Fest, but I think it was a very different event (socializing only) than Ingress' OPR Live.
I was not able to attend the Anomaly and OPR Live in Munich due to my busy schedule and because it was before the easing of travel restrictions in Japan, but I believe a friend of mine was there, so I thought I would ask him about the content at the upcoming Yokohama Anomaly.
And can we have such an event about Wayfarer in the future? I think it can be held as a social event among Wayfinders like the one at GO Fest.
However, it may be not easy to hold an OPR event like the Ingress OPR event, both as a partnership and independently.
This is mainly because of the expected number of participants.
Even if Wayfinder requested a discussion with the Wayfarer team, it would be difficult if the number of participants was too large.
Therefore, it would be difficult to hold such an event with a large number of people, such as GO Fest.
Even in Ingress, the number of participants in OPR is very limited.
And unlike Wayfarer, ticket sales for Ingress' NL-1331, a meetup and real-time AMA event with the Ingress team, are also very limited.
Around 2014 when there was only Ingress, there wouldn't have been much of a barrier, but now it would be difficult without a system in place to prevent confusion well in advance.
But a Wayfarer event could be entirely different.
How about a presentation where a Niantic employee shares their screen to a large projector - and they review 25-100 things assigned to them at random? The audience could ask questions.
Or a classroom full of computers - a Wayfarer Explorer at each computer doing reviews - Niantic people walk around and give advice to all the reviewers?
I was thinking less along the lines of an in-person event, and more along the lines of something that will get players to do reviews for in-game stuff. Like "get the playerbase to reach X agreements to get Y rewards" like with the recent PoGO referral challenge.
If we are going to do that, we need to complete the Niantic ID authentication system first.
And we need to build a program to let the Wayfarer application recruit using SMS and Campfire so it may take a little time.
It could be completed in the Ingress application when it relies on the Ingress internal database like in the old days.
But now it's already independent as Wayfarer and Lightship databases.
Why would we want to do all that first instead of just tracking the total number of agreements or approvals or reviewed contributions in the meanwhile?
Or we could have a theme. For weeks 1-2, nominate things in parks. For weeks 3-4, extra credit for reviewing things in a park, and double extra credit if one of your nominations in a park is approved. Or, let's just **** for a global park-wayspot increase.
Thing is, everyone would be incentivised to say yeah that gas station is a park feature. Or that pine tree in a park is a valid waypoint. SO Niantic would need to first have some kind of intellegence to prevent cheating. Maybe read Google maps and/or OSM to make sure it's really a park. Then some kind of quick look to make sure the thing in the park is valid.
We don't know what kind of technology Niantic has. We just know that they don't have communication. Or compassion (see posts about long waits, invalid rejections, and slow appeals).
Please know first that I do not disagree with your suggestion.
It is just that it will take some time.
If it can be done in the future, it should be done a lot.
Pokémon GO and Ingress are smartphone applications.
However, Wayfarer Review is a website.
And even though we have the same login email address, on Wayfarer Review we are disconnected from the game.
We are not Pokémon GO Trainers or Ingress Agents, we are just one Wayfinder.
Therefore, we cannot give out rewards unless we have a system in place that clearly shows who the Wayfinder recruited the new Wayfinder, not to mention the arrangements we have made for in-game rewards.
Unfortunately, we do not believe that the current Wayfarer review has that capability.
In the past, when there were recruiter medals, Ingress had that mechanism within the game application, but it has been abandoned in the current Prime scanner, along with the agent verification program.
Also, Pokémon GO has recently built a new system to reward trainers for inviting trainers back to play, but such a system would have to be built across multiple applications and websites.
This should not be too difficult if there is a unified login system (Niantic ID). Still, with the disparate current situation (Google, Facebook, Apple, Nintendo, Niantic Kids, there are many others) it is expected to take time to build.