New Wayspots in India - Discussion

NianticTintino-INGNianticTintino-ING Posts: 1,103 admin
edited June 2022 in General Discussion

Hello Explorers, 

I hope you are all doing well. As you may know, we are constantly working to improve the gameboard for many communities. This has been done via your contributions, our Wayfarer Challenges, and at other times through Niantic adding Wayspots in communities that need them. Today, we are happy to announce that we will be adding new Wayspots to help our current and future Explorers in India. 

We heard your feedback on the last time we added Wayspots in Turkey and have made significant changes to ensure that these new Wayspots meet our standards. In the meantime, we have also been accelerating the Niantic reviews of Indian nominations, so that we reduce the backlog before we add new Wayspots.

Starting on December 15, 2021, we plan to add about 500k new wayspots to the platform. These new Wayspots will be added between December 15, 2021 through February 2, 2022. We’ll let you know in advance when we’ll be adding them. Keep in mind that it is still up to each game to decide which ones will live in the gameboard. These wayspots will not have any images, and we are excited to see what great photos you submit for these new Wayspots.

Check out the original post HERE.

Safe Exploring!

Post edited by NianticTintino-ING on
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Comments

  • Gendgi-PGOGendgi-PGO Posts: 3,534 Ambassador

    @NianticTintino

    If I may, how are these counties selected? Is focus made to ensure rural or the most current under-represented areas are receiving the most attention, rather than already crowded locations?

    What about areas which much more disparity, such as this thread below:

    Thanks!

  • SiIverLyra-PGOSiIverLyra-PGO Posts: 952 ✭✭✭✭✭

    To speak bluntly, I think Niantic's main focus here is money - breaching into untapped/poorly tapped markets to maximize profits from massive population centers. I have no doubt that Niantic is a lot more interested in Turkey's population of 80+ million, Brazil's 200+ million, and India's 1.3+ billion, and their respective player bases (existing and potentially growing once there are more wayspots to interact with) - than in Iraq's population of 40+ million and much smaller player base, to use your example.

    I'm definitely not saying it's a fair strategy or one that I support - I definitely would've loved to be able to aid smaller player bases that struggle with getting new wayspots reviewed, and help improve their game maps - but this is probably the logic behind it.

  • RU001-INGRU001-ING Posts: 61 ✭✭

    Niantic is a business of course their gonna try & milk as much money out of us as possible but they also do this to encourage Exercise & exploration. So try not to judge pls

  • WheelTrekker-INGWheelTrekker-ING Posts: 3,387 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Exactly. Any effort made in India means many more players than in any other region of the world.

    They already had some automatic import of wayspots, an event and now this massive 500K+ wayspots.

  • HaramDingo-INGHaramDingo-ING Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭

    There's a bit of a silver lining in which many Indian Wayfinders and players will finally get to play Pokemon GO locally in their areas rather than simulating their location elsewhere and creating gunk in the process. Well, that's being optimistic, but I guess Niantic is looking into creating a new office somewhere on the continent. And maybe work with or look into some of the ideas the Hyderabad-based studio Empower Labs did too for inspiration into an existing Niantic game.

    Well, all we can do is wait until Indian wayfinders start reporting in the Foursquare stuff, and given that Intel is now on Lightship (in which it had a 3-month delay when the Foursquare things in Turkey were exclusively in Pokemon GO), we will see it populate with the daily syncs.

  • tehstone-INGtehstone-ING Posts: 1,154 Ambassador

    We heard your feedback on the last time we added Wayspots in Turkey and have made significant changes to ensure that these new Wayspots meet our standards.

    I am very curious what methods are used in this effort. Off the top of my head I can think of filtering by some combination of: type of location, average review score, review count, visit count, various location tags. Is this the kind of process that is happening to "ensure these Wayspots meet standards" or is it something else? 500k is quite a lot to be reviewed in any sort of manual way so I'm sure something must be automated.


    Can @NianticTintino or @Danbocat-PGO weigh in on this?

  • patsufredo-PGOpatsufredo-PGO Posts: 4,215 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Why India? Why adding 500k Wayspots using Foursquare method? And what's purpose of Wayfarer if everything is added via Foursquare?

    And is it fair to add 500k Wayspots in India, while there are even fewer Wayspots in Middle East and Africa? I've even asked an AMA question about this:


  • Gendgi-PGOGendgi-PGO Posts: 3,534 Ambassador

    I don't think their message was intended to be too judgy or critical. Niantic (and any business) exists for reason: profit and a sustainable business model. Setting up the India market helps secure long term sustainability for the market. There's nothing "wrong" with it, and I suspect profit has everything to do with the reasoning, or else we'd have seen more focus on Africa and the Middle East over the least year. The image below was based on user-generated POI contributions.

    Source: https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/10959/a-year-of-challenges-and-rewards

  • I really hope Niantic is mindful of the cultural minefield of India, especially closer to the Pakistan border. People being able to turn these into whatever they want sounds worrisome but glad to see them actively working to break the feedback loop.

    Assuming this is more geared to rural low POI dense areas, or is there a criteria being applied to where these go?

  • Liediawa-PGOLiediawa-PGO Posts: 58 ✭✭✭

    That is good and now please also the other countries.

    For years we call for a standardization of the rules for the appearance of stops, especially in PokémonGO, and we want it now! We want to have ALL accepted POI`s in PokémonGo, like in the other games, bc all of them are based on the same database!

    We too could discover so much more and explore in the world. Especially small cities and towns have it hard to get anything at all in stops due to the cell system and playing becomes so impossible. The system is outdated and just swallows up so many beautiful and really good submissions. We also want to benefit from them and not have a divided playing field. It just **** way too many good suggestions. Maybe that way people will stop putting all the **** into the vote.

    And even with such a big change you can still balance the game well. Why don’t you change it? The outcry as several thousand stops were removed showed you that the players thought differently about how we were happy with many new stops and would like to have them still in the game. For more #MeetYouOutThere!

    I’m aware that not everything is a good proposition in Wayfarer. But those that were adopted probably have their existence justification and should then also be included in ALL games. The big distinctions are sometimes unfair. Why don’t you give the companies the opportunity?

  • WayfarerMSE-PGOWayfarerMSE-PGO Posts: 1,625 ✭✭✭✭✭

    I don't think you understood anything. Absolutely nothing.

    It's all about quality and not quantity!

    Niantic did not say that they would let any wayspots appear in Pokémon Go that were previously only visible in other games. If so, I would support it.

    The point here is to implement wayspots without images that do not meet any criteria from the purchased Foursquare database. Including e.g. petrol stations.

    Who wants something like that as a wayspot? No one! That doesn't meet any criterion!


    @NianticTintino

    Then they could have saved themselves the task of submitting and evaluating from the start and simply distributing the wayspots randomly around the world.

    So they're just ruining everyone's hard work and trampling on us.

    I'll only say that only once: Should Niantic dare to pull this **** off in Germany, I'll never help report a single fake wayspot again.

    This rubbish from Foursquare has absolutely no quality and in no way corresponds to any criteria!!!

    I don't support this!

  • HankWolfman-PGOHankWolfman-PGO Posts: 4,850 ✭✭✭✭✭

    As you've been told previously @Liediawa-PGO, this is not a Wayfarer issue, it's a Pokémon Go issue. The development team for Pokémon Go get to set their own inclusion rules for what does and does not make it into Pokémon Go. The Wayfarer team has no say in this process.

    Also, you are spreading incorrect information. None of Niantic's other games use all the POIs in the database. Not even Ingress. There are wayspots that don't appear in Ingress but do in Pokémon Go. There are even wayspots that don't appear in any games at all.

    For the most part, the current inclusion rules in Pokémon Go are fine, especially in areas with a high wayspot density. I do think it would make sense to look at changing the rules for areas with a significantly lower wayspot density, as this would help rural players, but for the most part, players in towns and cities don't need the inclusion rules changing as we already have more than enough stuff in game, and in some cases the map already feels a bit crowded.

    But yes, as I originally said, this is not a discussion that is suitable for the Wayfarer Forum, so please stop spamming your request here, especially when your views don't represent the Pokémon Go community as a whole.

  • Ochemist-INGOchemist-ING Posts: 355 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Even better, would the poster like a four hour cool down after a pokestop is spun four times?

  • patsufredo-PGOpatsufredo-PGO Posts: 4,215 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Please explain who are the Pokemon GO's community managers before your statement will causing confusions. We still didn't have an official Pokemon GO forum yet, unlike other games and Wayfarer.

  • Gendgi-PGOGendgi-PGO Posts: 3,534 Ambassador

    During the earlier import from Foursquare, the Wayfarer team retroactively applied generic photo to these Wayspots so they would sync across eligible platforms.

    At this moment, a significant amount of early Ingress seed Portals including hmdb.org and Post Office locations remain without photos. Is any effort being made to find ways to push all of these into the games? Kind of seems like low hanging fruit.

    (C.C. @NianticTintino)

  • definitely glad to hear that, but my concern is our nominations get stuck in the process (from "in queue" to "being processed") for way too long. we have to wait almost 6-7 months for nominations to get evaluated only to see that it's rejected, well i'm not complaining why are the nominations getting rejected after taking so long, my point is if we get the negative result soon we can re-nominate and move on with the plan to populate a certain area with pokestops and gyms, but since the wait time is way too long people lose their zeal to nominate and well develop the area ! please do something about the waiting time there are only a handful of people left who actively participate in nominating, we don't want the game to die out just because people got sick of waiting.

  • Seraphim9k-PGOSeraphim9k-PGO Posts: 2 ✭✭

    Thank you Niantic for the stops. I've already seen some of these go live and they have certainly made it possible to play in several densely populated areas where stops couldn't go live earlier either because of vicinity of K-12 or highways and such. Malls and restaurants too have been added which got rejected earlier as generic businesses. I haven't seen any outdated/ mismatched addition so far, at least in my city (Delhi). Guess that puts to rest the apprehension that it'll be a repeat of Turkey/ Foursquare scenario.

  • I hope this new features help both the trainers and as well as you to explore more places and enjoy the game more than ever I'm eagerly waiting for this features in India

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