Wayfarer Feature Update Feb 2022 - Discussion
Hello Explorers,
We have 3 updates for you today that we know will help improve your exploring experience!
Pokémon GO Wayspot Categorization
Wayspot Categorization is now available globally! As a reminder, this means that category selection will be required on all your future nominations and will soon be displayed in the reviews in Wayfarer. This will be helpful for reviewers as you’ll have a bit more context on the nomination.
Pokémon GO Onboarding Flow Launch
As mentioned by @NianticDanbocat in the 2021 Playback and Roadmap Update, we shipped a new onboarding experience. We’ve added to the feature by locking down the submission features in Pokékmon GO until the Wayfarer quiz is passed. This will help ensure that nomination criteria have been reviewed and result in better quality nominations. We will be bringing this flow to Ingress as well in the coming months.
New Wayspots in India for Pokémon GO
We’re happy to announce that we’ve added the 3rd and final wave of new Wayspots in India! This means India now has 500k+ new ways to explore!
That’s it Explorers! More updates coming soon! Hint hint: Wayfarer Ambassador related wink
Original post HERE
Comments
Are the new Wayspots in India in Pokémon GO only? Do they appear on Ingress/Pikmin/Transformers too?
Also, this is a very Pokémon GO heavy update. Hopefully the next batch of updates is more Wayfarer than Pokémon GO. Already enough jibes about this being the Pokémon GO forum.
I think everyone who didn't take the test should have to. I believe most of us wouldn't mind taking it again as long it helped us to get less trees and foot while reviewing.
Agree. I need uptade for ingress. But good news for pogo
We’ve added to the feature by locking down the submission features for new Explorers in Pokékmon GO until the Wayfarer quiz is passed.
So does that mean only players reaching lv38 after 2/2/2022 have to do the test to submit? Or just anyone that has never submitted before.
Definitely a good thing, but I was really hoping that all the submitters that haven't even touched wayfarer or taken the wayfarer test would still be required to do it, since they can still continue to nominate 40 pictures of their dog and their yard and a starbucks and the very oldest tree in the land where snorlax lives...
Some of our local team have tested out the Pokémon GO Onboarding Flow Launch feature.
This may add much take-up to Wayfarer in the short-term as people that want to make abusive location edits and add photos might try to pass it brute force with the 15 minute cooldown between attempts (still think this is a mistake!) but man, will this stop people from casually submitting trees, their dog, and all the Pokemon GO photos. I will report back on the existing Sydney Abuse post in a month's time, but there might be a bit of a lag before all the abusive contributions are reviewed through.
At the same time, please do consider an offboarding process. There are many people who should not be Wayfinders. Say someone passes the onboarding test, and then submits something that would definitely fit in the "I want a PokeStop at my house" crowd. Or they submit a primary or high school as a nomination (not a nomination on school grounds, the actual school itself), or even a screenshot of a Pokemon GO screen or something else. Imagine trying to pass a test or trying to coast through it so you can submit something that is completely ineligible, as if that person did not learn from the test or read the criteria itself. It is akin to trying to pass a medical exam brute force, and then when trying to perform heart surgery, the something is connected to the red thing, and the red thing is connected to a wristwatch. I hope you may also consider the suspension or limiting of contributions for serial abusers and those that spam the system.
But after witnessing and testing out this Onboarding Flow Launch feature, my last six months of complaining about abuse feels heard now, and I am pacified. Thank you. I don't know how effective this will be, but it is absolutely a step in the right direction.
Ramen?
It was implied to be anyone who has never submitted before, so those 38+ currently and have never submitted anything and those that reach level 38 from now on before submitting.
okay, thats good. Still would be nice to also force the current "pokeystop" folks to do the test... but I guess we'll save that for 2025 update.
We won't forget about Ingress :)
I hope bro!
Making the edit to the main post but I meant new Explorers meaning they have officially become one of us aka full on Explorers who have passed the test. So anyone who is not game eligible and has not passed the rest (previously or up to now) cannot make nominations. Hope that makes sense.
@NianticTintino
Pokémon GO Onboarding Flow Launch
As mentioned by @NianticDanbocat in the 2021 Playback and Roadmap Update, we shipped a new onboarding experience. We’ve added to the feature by locking down the submission features in Pokékmon GO until the Wayfarer quiz is passed. This will help ensure that nomination criteria have been reviewed and result in better quality nominations. We will be bringing this flow to Ingress as well in the coming months
Pokékmon GO? Huh?! What’s that? Reminds me of Chinpokomon. Sorry! Big South Park fan. Couldn’t resist
Can we see proof you passed the test @NianticTintino ?
Haha I mean I didn't take a screenshot of it when I passed... I can show you a screen shot of my review page if that works?
We'd love to stream you reviewing, some time.
lmao lets see those numbers on the Profile tab!
They probably forgot we were told they were working on something like this... years ago now?
In theory - if somebody will not pass the test - is there any cooldown before next try, or it's 30 day ban or what?
The cool down is 15 minutes.
Kinda too short :|
It's good that now you have to pass the quiz in order to submit things, however this brings up this issue again:
https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/comment/123656
So my friend now can't nominate wayspots because the game thinks they haven't passed the quiz, but there's also no way to resit the quiz because wayfarer itself knows they have already done the quiz and passed it. Trying to nominate in game resulted in a "Complete the Wayfarer tutorial to unlock!" message.
Niantic hasn't even acknowledged the bug yet. It wasn't much of an issue before since those people would still submit things, but now they're locked out of submitting as well as reviewing. They have submitted an in-game bug report as well, hoping for the best... 🤷
They mentioned that in the announcement post: "We’ve added to the feature by locking down the submission features in Pokémon GO until the Wayfarer quiz is passed."
As long theres security measures to keep vandals out of edit title/description, add photos & edit location im fine with it
I kinda think its still gonna serve the purpose. Plenty of people will deem it too much trouble/work to have to go out to another site to test and then be able to submit. Because (before today) you could just tap on the submit a pokestop button and submit away your big toe and your sisters face and whatever other coal. And non of those people even know what or how Wayfarer works or what the eligibility criteria are.
So I think its either going to 1. educate potential submitters what you SHOULD submit before being able to, and 2. stop those who now don't have the opportunity to just randomly upload junk. Its too much work for those people, not and those small children that also want "pokeystop here make it a gym" etc aren't going to get through that probably either. There will still be abuse and intentional junk... but this makes gatekeeping waaaaaaay better.
Seems like lazy people could just add any old category to their nominations, and then we're back to the original situation. Any plans to discourage that sort of behaviour?
Whats the original situation? Categories don't mean eligibility, and they don't affect reviews, theyre just categories for organization and categorization for Niantic's Lightship secret sauce down the line.
@NianticTintino
It is of course important to attract new explorers to Wayfarer. But I think it is more important to revise the system, to clarify criteria without any leeway and to check and ban Wayfarers who abuse them. This problem weighs much more heavily than filling the pool of nominations even further & getting rejections without meaning. Categorization is a great idea, but shouldn't have been a primary goal since wayfarers should be able to recognize a playground, a soccer field, and a hiking trail. It would be more important that the appeals go ahead, where Niantic is currently pulling out of the affair and leaving us in the dark. @NianticGiffard 's statement is all well and good, and yet nothing at all has happened since release. And that would be a sign from Niantic where you can see that something is being done. There are so many more important areas of concern that the community is addressing and wanting to improve, but not taking on board. Whether an update is generally Wayfarer-compliant or PoGo-heavy doesn't matter as long as there are blatant deficits among the reviewers who only look at themselves. The PokéMon Go Hub page has published a nice article on this, even if the writer wasn't on the road too much at Wayfarer, he still says what is a fact. And then there's the question of whether you want more of these players here, because let's be honest, the tests for Wayfarer are anything but preparatory to what's really going to happen with Wayfarer and don't reflect reality. And if you then have partly vague criteria then the soup is definitely oversalted!
The bad thing is that you have to comment negatively in almost every post, because Niantic doesn't address any concerns or at all, and the worst thing is no concrete answers, but only any automated and ready-made answers that don't help you in any way. It may be that it would be work to do that, but otherwise you can't help people or the community like this!
Your categorization isn't though far enough.
For example you can choose school while it should never be a nomination.
You could have help so much reviewers not seeing 1* nominations like tree, school by addind the messsage : this category is not to be nominated.
I'm glad to see that Wayspot Categorization is now a reality, although I believe it was being considered by the wayfarer team before I suggested it to you.
I believe that this will help guide us to higher quality nominations.
However, at the moment, it seems that the categorization is not yet fully translated into each language. Therefore, we hope that more detailed Wayspot Categorization will be developed in cooperation with the staff and wayfinder in each country.
But we think that there are still many wayspots that are not suitable for our adventure to import from the FourSquare database.
For example, a common hotel or a motorcycle store is imported, but these wayspots are not suitable for Ingress at least. (You may need them to win monster balls in Pokémon GO, but that's not an adventure.)
And we don't want to be Mayors.
We hope that there will be a system in place to quickly re-review low quality wayspots, not just this one.
New Wayfarers/ Nominators regularly confuse the "Category List" with an "Acceptance List", it's not made very clear that the list is purely descriptive and not an exhaustive list of things that "must be allowed to be Waypoints". Perhaps the addition of some explanatory text on the page in PoGo where you select the category along the lines of "Add a description catergory. Please note that these are descriptions only, not a list of items that are all eligible to be Stops". Perhaps some of the more "obvious" non-eligible categores could be highlighted in another colour like red, and if selected you get a pop up saying "This ategory is not eligible to be a Stop" or similar.