What is Niantic doing to make better use of all POIs in the Lightship database?
AisforAndis-ING
Posts: 1,044 Ambassador
The recent "fix" to the 20m rule in Ingress has inspired a lot of conversation about the usefulness of "lightship only" POIs as well of the general usefulness of most POIs in a general sense.
While not every POI will show up in every game, Niantic's typical response when a POI does not show up in a desired game is that "That POI may show up in future games". However, Pikmin Bloom, Niantic's most recent title, and Transformers Heavy Metal, their upcoming title, both use significantly less interactable Wayspots than their predecessors, including using even less POI than Pokemon GO. This does not bode well for the future of Niantic wayspots that are restricted due to often arbitrary density rules.
I have seen some suggestions on how to make Wayspots more useful, such as allowing all Lightship POIs to be useable for missions within Ingress, or to expand Pikmin Bloom's "postcard" system to other games. However these ideas generally have limited scope and don't truly highlight POI equally or in meaningful ways that most players will enjoy or appreciate.
The best suggestion I have seen is to adopt a system from the now-defunct Catan: World Explorers game, which every season rotated in and out which POIs are used, making every POI useful at some point. Rotating POI will allow all POI to be highlighted, and will also work to reduce abuse that specifically works to add POI to specific games. It would also allow those interested in things like scanning wayspots or improving wayspots via new photos or edits the opportunity to access those wayspots.
It doesn't seem like Niantic has any current plans to truly make better use out of their wayspots though. So what is Niantic doing to make better use of all POIs in the Lightship database?
Comments
I made a related topic yesterday: https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/30221/how-can-niantic-motivate-people-to-submit-lightship-only-pois
Maybe the two can be combined, as your suggestions overlap with my question?
Having a database of all the points of interest in the world, with categories, can be used (or sell) to develop apps or maps way out of the domain of games !
I'm specifically thinking of tourism, arts (Wayfarer is the biggest database for street art), religions, and many services...
Theres a big difference between incentivizing people to submit relatively useless POIs and making more use out of currently useless POIs
I personally really like the idea of adding in the currently unused POI as purely aesthetic shapes into the games with the highest proportion of submitters. Something like berry bushes or grass in pogo that could even be a floor pattern instead of 3D. This allows us to see, click on, and edit POI that are missing info or in the wrong place without affecting the balance of game play.
I do really like this idea, but it really depends on the game whether or not this would work. Pokemon Go has so many things they could add to showcase lightship-only POIs in a purely aesthetic fashion, but Ingress really doesn't.
I would also be a little worried that, in the case of a game like Pokemon Go, the purely aestetic POI would significantly outnumber Pokestops and Gyms in some areas, and that would lead to a lot of complaining. Not to mention that if every portal/lightship POI was made visible aesthetically in Pokemon Go, it would likely lead to players editing these in mass to manipulate the gameboard.