Dry Voting Areas IGNORED and disadvantaged by Nomination and Voting System. Please correct.
I'm in Addis Ababa Ethiopia, played PoGo since launch and I'm a veteran of all previous games. The dry voting area problem is exasperated here as not only do we have few stops and gyms, we also have few players, though those who do play do so dedicatedly. This means that not only do I have many nominations pending, I am also not getting nominations to review, as the low number of stops/gyms mean that getting to the required level takes 10 times as much effort here, as opposed to high stop/gym density areas, hence we gave few submitters and even fewer evaluators. Niantic NEEDS to allow low voting density areas to get their stops with less reviews, as we have less reviewers. Maybe atleast allowing people outside our dry area to review our submission(maybe make photospheres a requirement to keep fake nominations out) would solve it all in one stroke. In a city of 6 million with barely 15 stops/gyms, it took me well over a year of intensive play to make it to lvl 40, and I have reviews pending(voting) since November 2020, and I will have them in pending until November 2043 unless Niantic looks to widen it's consideration to areas that may give them less money due to low density of players. I understand Niantic is a business, but we're not asking for much, just a little R.E.S.P.E.C.T 😅
PLEASE take a look at this discrepancy Niantic. Thanks. Pokemon Go is not one of those Pay-To-Play games, one of it's best qualities. But when it comes to waystop nomination, those of us in dry voting areas are experiencing the same effects as if it were.
Comments
The Wayfarer Review challenges that have been done for Russia & India etc. are Niantic’s way of addressing low POI reviewed areas.
Have you tried to set your bonus location to somewhere where there will be a lot of POI? Then you can review more and Upgrade your nominations to be viewed by a wider area.
It’s also of note, not to think only of one game when discussing/nominating POI. This is a Wayfarer forum after all, not a Pokémon GO one.
I have a local pokemon go group. Some of the members haven't set their bonus location.
If you can assure that Addis Abeba has many nominations, my group will help you with bonus location.
According to my observations this is not helpful nowadays. When Upgrades were released during g'old OPR times, then back then this was possible. I can remember having a review from Belarus, as a German....
The data since wayfarer release shows, that evrything stays within the 9 cells of your location (plus those of bonus and home location) and then there is a rough geofence for your country. So even upgrades dont help to push those nominations to reviewers outside of Ethiopia.
So in the end I'm totally sick of all those, who act like that upgrades would be the answer to evrything...
I'm stuck in my bonus location for another few months, but I would like to help in time. It would be great if we had a resource showing areas in need of additional bonus area reviewers: I know posters here have, in the past, talked about a heat map for backlogged areas, which I think would be ideal. With such a resource, Niantic could keep using their same rather inscrutable algorithms while we reviewers work proactively to improve the database.
If I recall correctly, Niantic even referenced a "growing mobile gaming need" for the India market. The event did not feel altruistic in intent. I hope I'm eventually proven wrong, but I have limited faith that Niantic will eventually focus on areas that really need reviewer support as there just isn't the obvious return on investment for them.
Russia and India especially are extremely large geographically so picking an area during the event proved hard for some to ensure they would actually get reviews and be able to help "rural" areas that actually needed support. How would you see an African review event? One focused on each country, or would Niantic "open the borders" to allow review for the entire continent?
This also isn't the first time somebody has posted about difficult review times in Africa. We'll obviously never know how Niantic really prioritises, but I certainly hope it can one day include these regions.
Lol, I feel your pain altho I’m not in an area with low stops/gyms. It’s been my experience around here those areas get resolutions very quickly, much faster than pokestop dense areas. I have nominations in voting since JULY 2020. We are almost at a year waiting for a resolution. Some people have been waiting for a year and a half!! There needs to be a way to prioritize old nominations over new stuff. B/c this is really ridiculous.
I don't know where you are getting your information from, but this is not true. I live on the US East Coast, in the south. I review things from Guam, Hawaii, Alaska, all along the west coast of the US and everywhere in between. I review things in Puerto Rico, Mexico and Canada. That is all well outside the 9 adjacent cells from where I live.
I'm not sure that upgrades will help OP, but the 9 cell limit you are declaring as fact is not fact in my case.
To be honest, my concern about an African review event would be more than just the process and physical barriers issues. I would be very concerned about cultural issues not being well understood from people who have never stepped foot on that continent. I felt confident participating in the Russia challenge because I lived there many years ago and feel like I understand the basics of how their culture works. But I don't have a clue what things are culturally relevant/normal to people in multiple nations with their own diverse histories all across an entire continent. The cultural variation from Egypt to South Africa is huge.
Evrything concerning this topic is in this thread, including the heatmap of my reviews: https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/11095/waiting-times-and-the-distribution-of-reviews-dead-cells/p1
The stuff you enumerated doesnt dis-prove anything. Some of the things are only cringy, that you mentioned them. Hawaii and Alaska are US states. Puerto Rico and Guam are US insular area, that has the US president as head of state and are not considered to be independent countries.
Mexico and Canada are your direct neighbour countries - so you can get stuff from there. That's why I mentioned a "rough geofence". You get only things from very close to the border. So for Canada reviewing stuff from Vancouver may be possible for you, but not from Edmonton. Same thing for me: I get stuff from all German neighbour countries, but Czechia and Poland are the only ones, where I can get stuff from deeper than 10(?)km behind the border, since those two countries are covered by my 9 s2-lvl6-cells.
There is only one solution:
a niantic employee can Review 5 wayspots a day in zones Like the one mentioned by the OP.
This would Not Take much time but would boost the needs of Players 500%
I have even less confidence that a Niantic employee would understand the cultural issues in the suggested areas. They can't even seem to figure out the issues facing rural players in their own country.
That is sadly very true, but i think this is the only solution possible
What cultural differences can be so great that they would impede the reviewing process?
How many total nominations do you think are outstanding? I can potentially set my bonus location to help clear some of these out.
Cynically, I doubt there are enough to keep a group going for a whole YEAR, although progress will be motivation to locals to submit more.
We need to be able to change our bonus location more frequently, say monthly, or even "on a whim". Unless a change by a single player creates a huge overhead reindexing a database (it doesn't) there's no need to contain it.
I've changed mine to a location I hope to move to and quickly drained the outstanding queue but with few reviewers, those nominations (and my own) are unlikely to go live any time soon - reducing my chances of earning upgrades. I have enough of a network that I could get people to change their bonus location for a month but nobody wants their bonus stuck there for a year.
I agree completely. A full year is too long!
Hard to say. While there is an utter lack of reviewers, there aren't that many nominations, like I mention in the OP, there aren't many Wayfarers here.
Not many. It's the lack of reviewers that is incapacitating us here, not an excess of nominations. I'm not concerned about my own nominations, any new waypoints by any wayfarer in the city would be welcome.
I think there's more than one solution here. It would be pretty simple for Niantic to make every 10th nomination that people see something that's over a year old, or something like that. While having local reviewers is optimal, there's clearly a recognition that clearing the queue is equally valuable, given the ability to set your area for events. They clearly don't want to pay someone to do actual reviews.
see my thread also in "Report a Bug". Niantic still investigating.
It describes the problem of getting a single wayspot in a big S2-Cell. There wont be one, as the other lower corner of our area already has thousands.
In the end it is the same problem as with the OP.
clearing the queue is vital, and Niantic still has no Idea. There are thousands of submissions i voted on that are still in the system, and wont get resolved. It is cleary that someone has done alot of errors here, but Niantic even doesnt have this problems on their list of next.