Ideas to make future Wayfarer Events more engaging
GearGlider-ING
Posts: 1,331 ✭✭✭✭✭
I figured with Wayfarer events ramping up again, we as users could toss around ideas about how to make Wayfarer Events more engaging so that participants don't just "one and done" it to get easy rewards. Hopefully these ideas will help people hop on early and review more during the events.
Tiered Rewards:
Basically, better rewards for people who reviewed more. This would get people to review more in order to unlock better/more rewards.
Team Competition:
Team competition like how we have ENL vs RES back on OPR. It could be done by Ingress or PoGO team, or made-up teams specifically for the competition. Seeing the agreements racked up by ENL and RES back in the OPR days was exciting! As some of you may know, this is a personal favorite of mine.
Wayfarer Bingo:
Bingo is a popular game to play while reviewing by many local wayfarer groups. While it might be too difficult to implement a game where the spaces are things like "playground" or "gazebo" that could also be automatically checked, the spaces could be geographic locations, or the last digits of GPS coordinates or something. Or maybe even a bingo ball roll for everyone every time 100 new wayspots are added if you added at least one agreement in that group.
Anyone else have any idea that could make Wayfarer events more engaging and exciting?
Comments
I would throw in the word "agreement" to your tiered system, I agree with it, but we still need to prevent abuse. Having the rewards measure by # of reviews only lead to people just doing the bare minimum, not caring what the "right" answer is.
Expand the review areas so we can cover more of this extremely large country. In the past, with reviews based on a standard review cell size, many people who chose more outlying areas received few submissions to review, and those who chose border areas got foreign submissions that didn't count towards challenge goals. I'd love to be able to review Brazil as a whole instead of a static populous city.
In those expanded review areas, prioritize based on length of the time in queue so we can clear out the backlog efficiently and avoid being swamped with Edit reviews from the Foursquare dump to the exclusion of all else.
A simple live counter at the top of the Wayfarer forums to say how many new Wayspots had been created would be great.
Even if it can’t be live, maybe an hourly update to it. I’m sure there’s some way that figure could be pulled automatically.
Group reviewing. I think this could be fun. A set of reviewers get to see the same nomination at once and review it together.
See how Niantic reviews. See how the "experts" rate nominations and what they look for.
Group reviewing is already a thing. The system sometimes churnes out the same thing to evryone.
Niantic should absolutely change the way challenges are done so that you opt into the country challenge rather than having to choose a specific location. I also agree that rewards should be tiered based on individual contributions, not just collective ones. It doesn't make any sense that someone who reviewed 2000 candidates during a challenge gets the same reward as someone who reviewed 20. Giving ten upgrades to anyone who participated in the most recent challenge, even people who joined after the reward had been achieved, was a bit of a slap in the face to people who did a lot of work to unlock the reward.
Oh, another idea to add:
If better reward ever are implemented, having small "events" where people can earn double rewards of a certain type would help. Ingress gets a boon of activity during double XP events or special medals. Pokemon GO gets a boon of activity during their limited time pokemon events or double reward events. Wayfarer could as well.
Double agreement/upgrade progress rewards are nice, but outside of wayfarer no one seems to care much. If there was weekends or evenings where reviewers got 2x agreements, or 2x progress towards a competition, or 2x in-game rewards for a game of their choice, you could get a small boon of reviewing and help start working away at the backlog.
The WDD Discord Server had their monthly Ingress First Saturday reviewing contest, a scavenger hunt. Ingress's very own @BrianRose took part this time and said "this is cool". Was nice to see a Niantic employee doing a couple of reviews. @NianticTintino @NianticDanbocat it would be nice to see Niantic host a similar event. As always it's an open invite for any future at home IFS events we host.
This does sound like fun....unfortunately our First Saturday attendees have been pretty resistant to any Wayfarer-related Activities, and as the most active host I'm unable to attend other events. It would be nice to see a puzzle/fun contest as a standalone event!
Randomize five Golden Tickets in all pending reviews, and finders of that Golden Ticket get a free trip to an underserved location in an area speaking the language of the winner's choosing, plus 20 bonus submissions and 10 upgrades. I'd go for that. 🤣
Another idea - Niantic has three live events coming up for Pokemon Go that I know of, all of which are hybrid live/virtual events. Why not have a Wayfarer booth and live review sessions at events like these?
With any luck it sounds like NianticThia may be at @Gendgi-PGO ’s next Ingress event on First Saturday in October with @NianticTintino in toe, so hopefully some questions about future Wayfarer Live events can happen then?
Ingress does technically have Wayfarer Live (Formerly OPR Live) as an event that even has a medal!
Would love to see the return of live wayfarer events to Ingress and introduce them at Pokemon GO events.
Not sure where you got this idea from, while we would love to have Thia or @NianticTintino at our next IFS event, we don't have any current indication that they will attend or even have plans to. Even if they do attend, we won't want to bombard them with questions about future events.
Also, it was me and @Stephyypooke-ING that ran September's event, although I'm not sure yet if we will be hosting October's event or if someone else will.
Added an image comment for those who don’t have access to the forums but that’ll take time to approve.
I agree that you shouldn’t bombard them for sure. But asking a few questions would be expected.
Oh, I missed that! Pretty sure she is referring to my tweet though, at least that's how "Briantic" knew to join us 😂
Ah, okay. So long as we have Niantic folk attending some events, that’s great!
I just noticed now that @Gendgi-PGO and @AisforAndis-ING are different usernames. Easy mistake to make IMO!
I see @Shilfiell-ING make comments all the time and go “I don’t remember that” as we have the same “forum monster”. 😆
I disagree here. It should be based on total reviews, that way you are reviewing based on criteria and now based on how you believe others will vote. Voting based on criteria is the way to go, voting based on how others will vote leads to more manipulation.
I was thinking about the Ingress MU score game, especially global MU, and I realized that the Wayfarer challenges have one of the same issues. As an individual, my contribution is only a tiny drop in the bucket for hitting the goal... my personal contribution feels meaningless.
I also don't have any metrics from Niantic to know how much I've contributed. How many reviews did I do in the country? How many wayspots that I reviewed went live in that country?
I would love for future challenges to have the following:
This lets me see how I personally contributed, and gives me a much stronger incentive to participate. Leaderboards would provide an incentive for people who enjoy competition.
Over on the Ingress forums;
Hi @GearGlider-ING,
Thank you for your suggestions :) I'll bring these back to the team for consideration in future events.
I'm glad you find them helpful!
One more idea I had was having some kind of daily log-in rewards (like many Niantic games have) during events to encourage people to join early and participate often. Daily log-in rewards might also be a good idea to help keep people engaged with Wayfarer outside of events as well.
THEMES - highlight good categories of nominations - a different one each month. Examples: fountains, parks, statues, murals, interesting architecture, historic places. So, for Fountain month: