September AMA

NianticTintino-ING · September 2021

Hello Explorers,

Super excited to announce our next AMA taking place September 30, 2021! For new explorers, this is the time for you to ask your most pressing questions about Wayfarer and vote on other questions you want answered too. Once voting is done, 15 questions will be selected and sent to our team for responses.

With that being said, please drop your questions as comments in THIS thread by September 22, after which you'll have 5 days of voting to determine the top questions for selection.

Thanks again for your excitement and I look forward to all of the questions!

NianticTintino-ING · September 2021

Hello Explorers!

It has been an amazing turnout for the Sept. AMA! Loving all the questions. Today we begin the voting process. Please check out the discussion thread HERE for more information about the voting process (hitting the Like reaction). As a reminder, the AMA will conclude on September 30th when I'll post the winning questions and responses from the team.

NianticTintino-ING · October 2021

Hello Explorers!

I hope none of you thought we weren't going to meet our deadline! Without further ado, here are the Top 15 voted on questions!

Please note: I did some consolidation on questions that were similar so while your question may not be verbatim, it's meant to capture the sentiments of other questions similar enough to it.

Sept. AMA Top 15!

In cases when a reviewer rejects something because the submitter didn't provide enough context to convince us of its worth, it would be nice to have a rejection option of "Reviewer did not provide enough information to explain why this is a notable point of interest." My hope is that if a submitter sees this rejection that they try to submit the nomination again with enough information to help explain why it's notable.
1. Great question! We think that the introduction of the appeals process will help with this experience as a downstream solution. We’d agree that the entire experience should be more about the community helping each other improve their nominations through feedback rather than having only a single moment of determination. It always excites me as I go through the community posts and I spot an explorer asking the community for feedback pre/post nominating. It’s admittedly too deterministic right now, for a community mapping project that’s supposed to be fluid and dynamic. We’ll be thinking about how to move toward a more feedback oriented model to the program.
"Don't upgrade it, upgrades are more likely to be rejected" is an all-too-common sentiment shared across multiple communities. This leads to "I am not reviewing right now because I don't want upgrades." What can Niantic do to help this encourage reviewing and discourage "unfair" rejections?
1. "Don't upgrade it, upgrades are more likely to be rejected"... Well this is interesting; upgrades only boost the chances that your nomination appears in someone’s review page. It doesn’t affect the rate at which your nomination gets resolved, or whether it is accepted or rejected. However, "I am not reviewing right now because I don't want upgrades." - this is more true, in that more reviews mean more accrual of Agreements, which leads to accrual of Upgrades, which then get randomly auto applied unless you mark your Upgrade Nexts. If the concern is that you don’t want to waste your upgrades by the auto application, please make sure you mark Upgrade Next. Also note that we are working on a feature improvement in the next few months where you can better control how your Upgrades are used. When it comes specifically to discouraging “unfair” rejections, I feel this will happen as we reimagine our onboarding process and program as a whole.
Given that Ingress is no longer a clear representation of the overall Wayfarer map, do you intend to make the map (+Lightship) of Wayspots available to Explorers? This ensures that players do not end up submitting things that are already in the database.
1. Yes, we do want to eventually add a feature that lets you see all the community contributions against yours. We agree, this would save you time and give you more info to nominate other interesting things in your community. We are still looking into the best place and format to bring this to life.
What is the abuse team doing to combat the abuse that plagues Wayfarer and what is being done to prevent recidivism among repeat offenders?
1. As we have mentioned before, the new abuse reporting system is not purposed to solve the abuse issue, it is purposed to solve the abuse reporting management system. We agree that this is a serious issue across all of our games, and the Wayfarer team is working with our Trust & Safety team to strategize on a multi-pronged approach that looks upstream (prevention policy and actions) as well as downstream (policing policy and actions). Thank you for caring so much about this. We will share this feedback with the game teams too.
Can an official specific criteria page be made on the Wayfarer website for the many clarifications/directives that come up on random threads in this forum?
1. It sounds like the community is looking for a binary response to this; is a thing in or out, but with our last Criteria refresh we wanted to be clearer that community mapping decisions aren’t always binary. One shouldn’t reject/disqualify something based on the category alone. In other words, don’t judge a book by it’s cover. Your idea isn’t lost on us though, and we’ll think again on how to redesign this page and content. One thought we have is that the concept of ‘acceptance’ and ‘rejection’ criteria is not helpful. If we want to work toward a feedback culture, these should really be ‘contribution guidelines’ (except for the truly abusive cases of course!).
How do you see these AMAs evolving over time and will they be our only source of clarifications and answers to issues?
1. Since this is my first one, I’m definitely giving AMA’s a try before making any significant changes. I am, however, happy that this AMA is providing the answers to the most popular questions. While it may seem like AMA’s are the only way to get answers it’s definitely not where I see AMA’s going, rather more of a short term solution. As the Community Manager I hope to continue engaging with you all and provide enough answers so that AMA’s can shift from the perspective you shared above to potentially being phased out if there is no need for them; or shift the focus to something more fun.
Can the Wayfarer team please select a group of beta testers and roll upcoming changes to that group, let them test the new wayfarer for a week and then hear their feedback before global release?
1. Already on it… but not fully there yet. We’ve been thinking about different ways in which we can have a program with that concept in mind. Our community has grown to a size where having a model like that would be a better way to roll out features. We’ll get there!
There is a persistent rumor that rating a candidate 1* or 2* in any category is a rejection of the whole submission. In other words, any 1* or 2*, even for something like "Historical or Cultural Significance", is the same as voting 1* or 2* for the "Should this be a Wayspot?" question. Can you confirm or deny this?
1. Let’s get this rumor all ironed out. So, yes, a 1* rejection on the first question “Should this be a Wayspot” will trigger the list of ineligible reasons, which is also you marking it as a rejection. The 2* is not. For the rating on Historical and Cultural Significance, it does not actually affect the final decision. But the scores may matter for our other products built on the platform.
What is being done to reduce nomination turnaround times in some areas, and why is it that one area can take months or years for nomination turnaround when in many places you can drive 5 minutes away and get a nomination back in less than a week?
1. We’re definitely looking into ways to improve the system to reduce the decision timeframe. We agree it’s not ideal, it is too long and too inconsistent across geographies. While there isn’t an exact time frame per nomination, what we are striving for (in the redesign) is to make the decision window smaller and have a more consistent window across geographies. We are really into this idea of having a smaller group of Explorers who are ranked to be our map stewards who get to help out smaller communities, but have not finalized on that design yet, but, we’ll get there!
Is there any information you can provide about incentivizing players to join or be more engaged with Niantic Wayfarer outside of medal tiers and country-specific events? Stuff like in this thread or more frivolous things like cosmetic rewards for wayfarer/niantic social profiles that you can show off?
1. This one is exciting! We’ve already been thinking of different ways of making the community more engaging. Some of the ideas we’ve thought about are having events focused more on the spirit of exploration, explorer highlights, etc. All with the intention of making the community more fun. This also goes for our events, Wayfarer Challenges, etc. Shout out to those of you who have already made your suggestions. When it comes to social profile rewards, what kind of rewards would excite you?
Have you looked into reducing the 1 year lock on bonus locations? What are your reasons for and against this?
1. Following question 9, we have thought about possibly allowing a top tier of Explorers to help out smaller, less populated communities. This could look a variety of different ways and they may get this privilege of unlocking their locations periodically in 1 year. When it comes to the 1 year lock, we have this in place to ensure folks aren’t reviewing in areas they are not familiar with, eliminating the community relevance of a location which would make it interesting to them but not others.
When will Niantic start to Look for Bad reviewing and punish the people that constantly Vote against Niantics Rulebook?
1. Our team continuously reviews and updates policy on how to deal with bad behavior and breaking Niantics Terms of Service. Niantic is also actively looking into improved processes for community support across all Niantic products, so that we continue to work together to keep the community safe, welcoming, and encouraging.
What is being done to address the number of low-quality wayspots and wayspots that do not meet the acceptance criteria (for both old and newly approved ones)?
1. Along the same lines as the other questions and what’s been shared in the community, we are looking at improving the onboarding process which we hope will improve the quality of each nomination. Furthermore, next year we hope to cultivate a culture of feedback through improved features in the review process and now within the Wayfarer Community. When it comes to those that have already been accepted, these can be caught through edits and the upcoming abuse reporting process.
Lately, more Explorers have been receiving emails about their nomination and editing behavior in regards to Wayfarer. Typically, the wider Wayfarer Community views these as “warns” or “strikes” on their account. Typically, these emails are vague and inaccurate, and additional details on which edit(s), or nomination(s) were flagged as abuse per niantic were not made available, with no appeal process. Are there any plans on the roadmap to add more transparency to this process?
1. As mentioned in the community by @NianticDanbocat, we are looking into the email system/process and are making updates to it. We hope this will help alleviate some of the stresses. @NianticDanbocat will discuss this experience with the team. Agree that it should be as informative as possible. It would be useful to get examples of why you feel it is inaccurate, though.
Will there be any possibilities in the future to give the reviewers additional information for edits? For example URLs are sometimes necessary, or supporting pictures, etc.pp.
1. Yes, we’ve thought about this before but it’s in the long-term roadmap, as we feel addressing the review processing time, feedback on decisions, and criteria confusion are to be addressed first.

Thank you to all of the Explorers for contributing your questions and your votes! Looking forward to the Dec. AMA! You can share your thoughts HERE.

September AMA

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