NIANTIC WHEN WILL YOU DO SOMETHING TO HELP RURAL PLAYERS?
@NianThib @NianticAaron @NianticAtlas
When will you help the rural players now that your company is getting rid of remote raiding and we will need to be able to nominate and create more gyms in our areas (and Yes we have the items and places that will be able to be accepted so don't think we don't). Or are you guys just going to push us to the wayside and forget about over 80% of the country?
Post edited by NianticLC on
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And what would you propose then? With people will soon boycotting the game and maybe all Niantic apps including Wayfarer, even if you can nominate something eligible there's a risk that your nomination will stuck unreviewed even with upgrade
and Niantic to lower eligibility Trainer level to 35.I know I have stopped reviewing and nominating since Niantic has left us to rot as a rural player. They need to open up the cells and let us be able to play this game unless they just want to **** it off.
Never, Niantic prefers newyorker flying than honest rural playing.
I swear after the 6th that is what us rural players are going to have to turn to doing.
To be fair, Niantic already has done a few things to help rural players. Things like (and I'm doing this from memory so the list may be somewhat inaccurate) community noticeboards, playgrounds, and picnic tables make it easier to get wayspots in low-density areas. Reviewers are also instructed to review things more generously in low-density areas and I've accepted lots of things in small towns that would be automatic rejections in urban areas.
That doesn't mean that it's not still frustrating for people in low-population areas, and I understand that.
For people who are in really low-density areas, like it's nothing but farms or forests for ten or twenty miles in any direction, the game is always going to be immensely frustrating because there's rarely much out there that would qualify.
As a rural player:
They wont.
It is like talking to McDonalds that they don't build a restaurant at your place.
When you live somewhere remote and rural, there isn't a McDonalds or WalMart.
Move or forage the area for wayspots. Ask a pro (me) for finding those in your Area.
Or just move.
Contact Pokémon GO Help Chat or Campfire's Pokémon GO channel.
There is little Wayfarer can do about the remote raid pass price increase and frequency limit.
The issue you’re talking about with remote raid passes is purely a Pokémon GO one, so raise any issues about that in the relevant app.
If you have any ideas how Wayfarer can help support rural and remote communities, there is a thread here;
One way this was done previously was with the Indonesia Challenge as they lacked enough reviewers to get a decision on many things. Would a similar challenge help your area?
It's a different topic here, but Niantic's "points of interest" (POIs) will inevitably be denser in places with longer histories and larger populations.
So when a gaming team considers making the environment as homogeneous as possible, it will consider a variety of ways to do so.
(Ingress is different because the POIs themselves are valuable, and less density is not a detriment to gameplay.)
The NBA, for example, imported a large amount of non-POI information for almost the first time.
And although it doesn't look like much on the surface, Pikmin have imported non-POI information as well.
Well, I remember that Pokémon GO also used non-POI information for Pokémon appearances, but I think the Pokémon GO team should import non-POI information or build another mechanism.
As I believe I have mentioned here before, there is a popular location-based game in Japan called Dragon Quest Walk that is a competitor to Pokémon GO.
Originally, this RPG game was a huge hit on Nintendo's Family Computer.
They studied the weaknesses of Pokémon GO well as a competing game.
Therefore, they took steps to bridge the gap between urban and rural areas. As you can see on the screen, items spring up along the road and you have to walk to get them.
In addition, the system, which is a Pokémon gym, allows a single person to defeat a Pokémon. There is also a gift-like system.
Perhaps many Pokémon GO players will prefer this type of system.
But, Unfortunately, the Pokémon GO team is not expected to change the system at this time.
This is not a Wayfarer issue and you guys are greedy af. You can have over 20 POIs in a small town of about 1,500 towns and that still is "not enough" for most PoGo players.
I can feel your pain but I'm not understanding your comment about having the items/places that will be able to be accepted. Have you not already nominated them or ??
@AlexJ1373-PGO I have every empathy with you and the decisions taken in PoGo, although I am an urban player it will have an effect on my play, and I can easily understand how it affects those with less Wayspots.
It is partly a wayfarer issue, as this is where the Lightship database gets populated for Pokémon Go to then use. So the more wayspots in the database the greater potential for Pokémon Go. But what exactly what happens in terms of wayspot selection is in the hands of the Pokémon Go developers.
From the wayfarer side there is an ongoing issue of how do we encourage and promote rural submissions.
Personally I like to go out and target places that I can see don’t have much. If everyone did some of this it would help. It is also important that rural players explain the significance of wayspots to the reviewers so that they stand the best chance of being accepted. So doing some homework around good nominations will help. I benefit as it boosts my morale by getting quick returns on nominations and it’s good to go back and see they are actively being played with. Hopefully I will bump into some people and pass in encouragement to do more.
This is not a system solution which seems to remote a possibility, but a practical one of players helping each other rather than rely on the powers that be.
I feel your pain as well but feel everyone else's pain too. I use to nominate and have things decided on in less than a month. Now all of my noms just linger in queue and voting unless I upgrade them which I only have so many of. Trust me when I say we are all suffering from rural nominations that are not being upgraded because nominators are not doing their part on voting like the rest of us. It is all part of the process and we all pay the price by folks not reviewing.
Hallelujah someone speaks up
I feel your frustration. I live in the middle of nowhere and have nothing within walking distance. If I was not able to drive, I would not have the ability to play Pokemon Go. I have done a lot of submitting in areas without many POIs to help make the game experience better for other players.
Is there anything in your area that you can submit? Like a park, athletic fields, restaurants, etc?
For the record, Niantic is not getting rid of remote raids. They are just limiting the number you can do per day to 5 and raising the price of them. They are not getting rid of remote raids.
Also, using swear words in your post will not encourage Niantic or anyone to help you at all. It is just plain rude.
If you're taking about the United States, you have your numbers backwards. Less than 20% of Americans live in rural areas, and that number is declining every Census.
I often wonder why Niantic makes any extra effort for Rural America. Even if Niantic obtains the unobtainable goal of equal wayspot density, those areas won't be as profitable as urban areas, just because there are fewer paying customers in the sticks.
Remote passes are not going away...unfortunately.
It also looks like they may reduce the cost to 150 coins and a limit of 6 a day. As a player who maybe does 1 IRL raid a week and pretty much 0 remotes I could care less. In terms of cost that's only three days of gym coins. It might be even be healthy for the community to not have everything handed to it on a plate and be more focused on the community side rather than 'ma shiny Pokem0nz'
In terms of Wayfarer there is only really two choices unfortunately. Accept how it is or attempt to make changes yourself by adding poi in your area if possible.
When Niantic talks about how they helped "rural areas", they mostly crow about Wayfarer Challenges.
IOW when Niantic says "rural", I don't think they mean rural America. They mean places so sparce, they uploaded 4Square.
When I say rural player I mean a player that doesn't live in a major city or a suburb of a major city. Niantic should have equal s2 cells for every part of the US. New York/LA/Chicago, they should only have 1 spot showing and if not then they should allow every other cell in the US or world which would help the game. I've stopped nominating and reviewing because I'm not giving information to a game that isn't going to give me or players in the community anything back in return for my work.
I didn't use a swear word, It must have been a word they filer out. I'm actually smarter then that.
Yes, i've nominated them, along with my friends that play as well. One of the come backs that we get all the time is well as rural players you guys don't have things to nominate and we do actually have things that fall within the guidelines and we have nominated them but they just haven't been accepted or there is already something in the cell, etc.
I'm actually smarter then that.
*than
So, S2 cells are not a Niantic invention. These cells are not sized the same all over because...wait for it...the earth is a sphere. The whole S2 cell thing is a way to map a spherical shape into a grid system. The closer you are to the Equator, the smaller the cells are and the further away from it you are, the larger the cells are.
You also say "they should only have 1 spot showing." That is how PGO is design to operate with the cells. 1 POI per Level 17 cell. There are a few places where extra things show up but thats considered abuse and Niantic does their best to remove those. (There's also sponsored POI, but those will always be with us.)
You're just ranting here and seemingly contradicting yourself.
Great, I'll just rant then. So why don't they remove all the extras in New York City, Los Angeles, Tokyo and all those bigger cities then since it is abuse because I can guarantee you that most of those aren't sponsored stops.
And If I even do go back to reviewing I will be even harsher then before on stops. Especially in bigger cities.
Glad you catched that ;P Didn't know if someone was going to be patrolling that kinda stuff. Since my down home edumacation and all. 🙄🙄
Wait, wait, wait, you are contradicting yourself.
The size of the cells is basically the same because the earth is a sphere.
However, the reason it appears to get larger as latitude increases is simply because the map is drawn in the Mercator projection.
If GoogleMap were a spherical display, the size would be the same.
You may not have played Ingress, but the long-distance links appear to be crooked on IntelMap for the same reason.
If it is drawn on a sphere, it will be a straight line along the sphere.
I'm gonna need you to show me "all the extras in NYC, LA, and Tokyo." There are cities that have problems with abuse, these are not high on the list, to my knowledge.
There are a bajillion other Pokemon games that aren't hard to play in a rural area. Pokemon Go isn't going to change anytime soon, and whining isn't going to help, so maybe just find a different game
You have this backwards. The longitude lines are longer at the equator than near the poles - and there are the same number of latitude lines at the equator and near the poles. IOW The cells near the equator are larger than the ones near the poles, because the latitude lines are closer together.
However, the S-cells created by Google only cover land, not ocean (they were thinking of mapping roads), so it's not quite as differently sized as, say, on a globe.
The sizes do vary depending upon where on the planet you are. The range of sizes for each S2 cell are published: https://s2geometry.io/resources/s2cell_statistics.html
Also, @AlexJ1373-PGO the word you used was a four-letter word starting with K that means to take another life. There's also a movie named "K... Bill" that you may be familiar with. The Forum software has some really silly restrictions... in the Ingress forum we often get the word G-R-I-N-D starred out when people talk about gri..ing stats, and the word S-T-R-I-P gets censored because it might be talking about a certain type of club for adults. Most of their deletions are really quite silly.