A complaint that I wish they would listen too.

I have a complaint about Wayfairer that I really wish Niantic and Wayfair would genuinely listen to, I'm skeptical if they would, but I really wanted to try. This isn't meant to be a "I've heard this one" sort of complaint, this is a genuine complaint that if the game makers would just listen to as a resolution it would solve so many of their frustrations.

It's this... STOP USING (S2) SQUARES TO DEFINE A ROUND PLANET (REALLY!)

Waypoints in the games are chosen based on cells (S2) that are shaped like rhombus... this is a horrible way to pick where things should go on a planet that is shaped like a sphere, the earth is round, not a square. This is also a really horrible thing for players to have to learn about and deal with. The problem is that it's very non-intuitive. When you have a game like an ingress that has very small squares for determining where portals go this is fine because, for the most part, the game works like a bunch of small circles and everything is compact and close together, but when they are made larger like the cells for Pokemon Go and other games they made... they stop working!

The problem is this... when players have to submit waypoints the requirements are very confusing and unnecessarily complicated for many players. You see most people can imagine a circle, it's just a radius around the object you are looking at and you tell the player, no waypoint within 20meters or so of another waypoint, this is very intuitive. After all, they can just look at the object in question and know how far away an object has to be from it in order to be accepted, and it doesn't matter what direction that they walk in as it's always the same. But when you use the squares then that answer changes depending on where in the square you are, for example, if the waypoint were in the middle of a square and we assumed it was a perfect square straight up and down, if you walked NESW it would be 1 units until you get to the center of the next square, but if you go NW, SW, NE, SE then the distance from one square to the next is 1.42 units. In other words the direction you walk changes how close the waypoints can be to each other, that's not intuitive. Plus the other frustration to this is that Niantic already uses a circle when they determine if a waypoint can be accepted, for instance, they say it can't be a certain distance to another waypoint AND it has to be in a free cell. In other words, you are doing the worst of both worlds using a square and a circle to determine where waypoints should be! Is it any wonder people are confused, combine this with the fact that pogo players can't see some Ingress portals, and what you get are very confused players. Then when they submit waypoints to close to another and get rejected, or are accepted but don't show up in the game they are playing because they are located in the same cell as another (so it doesn't show up)... then they get confused and upset why it didn't work. Niantic keeps telling players not to worry about S2 cells and to just submit stuff where it is... but any player who isn't aware of how they work just gets burned. Is it any wonder people get so frustrated with Niantic and Wayfairer?

So here is my proposal for how to fix this... for Pokemon Go players and for any other game that doesn't use the smaller S2 cells like ingress does... get rid of the S2 cell requirement! It's not necessary for the waypoints, it just makes the games very complicated. Only keep the radius rule and no Pogo stops (for example) will be too close to another one. It's easier for the players to understand and they will probably get more stops and gyms out of it if you do this, especially in places with lots of stuff like parks zoos, historical sites, and things. Plus submissions will make way more sense for them if you do this. It's easy to understand... if it's too close to another stop it won't show up in the game... that's it that's all they have to know! It's intuitive and easy to understand. You can keep the larger cells for things like how many gyms and other stuff are placed. However, I would say that if you do this you should allow for extra gyms in pogo to be possible because more stops can fit into a larger cell than is currently possible to do with the way it is right now and it would make more sense (in my opinion), that if it can be denser it should be possible to have more gyms than 3 in the same large cell, make like the max 5 gyms or something like that you can decide.

Admins if you see this post, and if you read it. Please ask at your team meetings why games like Pogo and others need both the radius and S2 cell requirements for stops. It doesn't make sense. Please ask them to look at it.

Thanks, I genuinely didn't know where to submit this but I know the wayfarer team helps determine how waypoints are placed, and I've really been wanting to tell them for a while.

Comments

  • Hi there! Since this is not a Wayfarer-related discussion, I will be closing it for future comments. I appreciate your understanding!

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