Incentivizing Wayfarer - Discussion
NianticTintino-ING
Posts: 1,103Niantic › admin
Hello Explorers,
Please use this space to share your thoughts about the Incentivizing Wayfarer goal mentioned in the Message from your Wayfarer Ambassadors post.
Feel free to pose questions, share ideas, feedback, etc.
Safe Exploring!
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We need to be able to bank upgrades without them automatically applying to a nomination. I do not want to upgrade every single nomination but at the same time i want to review more
We need much better incentive to review.
There are enough people contributing.
Sadly noone knows what these better incentives could be, as Niantic always says that they do not want to give out anything that is worth anything to not create a system of income.
Also John Hanke has closed his purse.
The Wayfarer website is saying that I am "Great". But I don't feel like that when I use my hard earned upgrades on my nominations and get declined many times. It would be awesome to get some free upgrades per week or month depending on the Wayfinder rating.
It’s been discussed on @BlameJamal-ING & Lachlan (I forget their tag)’s podcast and other places but it would be great if instead of getting an Upgrade when you hit 100%, you got a “Wayfarer Token” which you could then exchange at any time for an Upgrade, or other rewards.
Then I could wait until I find an unsubbed rural area and exchange ten of my tokens to upgrade all the things I just nominated.
Perhaps some items are 2 (extra Appeal) or 3 (Bonus location change) tokens?
The only incentive I ever needed was for me to feel like I was contributing to a system where my own nominations were valued enough to be reviewed in a reasonable amount of time. For quite a while, that wasn't happening. Recently, however, our area has seen a substantial improvement in turnaround time. That alone has incentivized me to increase both submitting and reviewing.
If we're talking about the game Pokémon GO, I would like my accepted Wayspots to have some kind of effect. Niantic hasn't updated spawn points in over a year. Meaning that even if I add 50 new Wayspots deep in the forest, there is no point in exploring when there's nothing to find. You're wondering why this is Wayfarer-related? Well, I'm still submitting in rural areas because I like to plan for the future. So when Niantic is finally pressing a button, a lot of hiking markers will have Spawns nearby. For a over a year nothing changed. I guess people will actually start adventuring again when this change happens.
People will go out and explore again, maybe submit some more hiking markers and your database grows! Here are some links where people talked about this issue: https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/comment/151378/#Comment_151378
Incentivizing reviews or coordination of voting blocks through in-game rewards with a cash value - that's not an appealing concept to me, and I feel it will create more abuse opportunities. We definitely could use more tangible stats, visibility of Niantic Wayfarer Profiles on the Social pages. Maybe attach degrees/levels to Wayfarer actions on that profile only? In Ingress, the Wayfarer-based Recon badge level is visible to all, but the stats line for Portals Discovered is blocked when settings are made private. That's great, and all as it should be, but there should be an equal opportunity for Pokemon Go reviewers to flex as well. I'd love to see those Wayfarer profiles!
Make profile pages more interactive and rewarding.
Interactive:
Rewarding:
Also, discontinue disincentivizing things, like nominations taking more than two months, reports ignored, and making us guess what's valid or why people's rank changed.
I've talked about this before a lot. I have two threads I think narrow down a lot of ideas.
Ideas to make Future Wayfarer Events more engaging - Thread where we discusses prior how to get people more engaged with events/challenged (Like the Poland Challenge).
Social Profile Rewards feedback - response to an AMA asking for feedback about rewards for a potential Social Profile for Wayfarer. And a lot of these ideas (like team-based competition) are a great way to advertise Wayfarer on social media.
Though both @NianticTintino and @NianticDanbocat have commented on the above threads, so I know they've seen them and won't rehash them here.
The big thing is that many of those above ideas are wayfarer exclusive, and have little appeal to people outside the wayfarer bubble. If you want to bring more people into wayfarer, the big way is to provide In-Game Rewards. This will draw players who aren't interested in wayfarer back into trying it out. And there are a few different kinds of rewards that could be offered:
Rare/Premium Items: Probably the most obvious option. You could get a legion of dedicated Pokemon GO players to do wayfarer of Rare XL Candy were a rewards. Also could get a good chunk to do wayfarer for lures, ultra-balls, rare candy, heck even stickers. And Ingress players would also get involved if offered VR Gear. Could be distributed through one-time reward codes, or deposit items directly into your account.
Cosmetic Rewards: Having clothing or poses in Pokemon GO that could only be unlocked by getting to a certain wayfarer medal tier would be a great to to get people to engage more. And advertise wayfarer to people in game if there was wayfarer swag (you see people's avatars in Gyms, Raids, Friends lists, Battles, etc.)
In-Game Currency: Probably the biggest "**** you pay me" option, getting in-game currency. Though I imagine this would be the hardest to convince the individual games to do.
There are criticisms raised before about these rewards providing perverse incentives for people to review, and possibly leading to poor reviewing. But you can't have people do free work without providing some incentive that will motivate them. And players have a desire to do things correctly, especially with proper education and guidance. Besides, Wayfarer already provides the biggest perverse incentive: new wayspots. So dealing with that kind of potential abuse will already be in-line with the wayfarer team's attempts to better educate and tackle abuse.
All in all, I do think the Team-Based competitions from the social profiles rewards feedback thread is a great idea that may be easier for the wayfarer team to implement. All the other ideas are good too, but I like stats and when my side wins.
But first, this please :)
I think it would be good to give a free upgrade to every people that does 100 reviews in a week. It is a small incentivize to motivate players to keep up with Wayfarer on a weekly basis.
Also, Niantic keep on mentioning that they are adding additional rewards for reviewers, but Wayfarer have been live since October 2019 and still nothing besides upgrades. I think a lot of us Pokemon Go's fans would appreciate a special research or something to reward us for our hardwork.
I completely agree with this. Last October I found a new nature reserve set around a sloping mountain ridge. I returned to hike up and down multiple times over several weeks in order to submit every trail marker I could find. The Wayspots I added are all there, but there's still only about a dozen spawn points in this entire big reserve. The experience has really hit my motivation in a bad way, I probably wouldn't make similar efforts again unless things change.
To me, bringing new locations to life in PGO has always been one of my primary motivations. It's no good having a bag packed full of pokeballs if there's nothing to catch. In the past, I had been able to help turn some of the worst places to play in my local area into some of the best (edit: through submitting and reviewing) and I found that really rewarding. Getting Wayspots back online when it comes to generating spawns in their proximity would result in a big boost to my motivation.
From the point of view of a submitter, I will usually skip over nominating things that I know won't appear in any games due to the inclusion rules, because I like when my submissions are useful to people regardless of what games they may play, and I like the idea that they'll get people out exploring. Therefore I feel like there needs to be some incentive within Wayfarer to submit Lightship only wayspots which won't necessarily end up getting other people out exploring, but that still rewards a submitter for doing some exploration. What that incentive could be, I honestly don't know, but there needs to be something there, otherwise it seems like a bit of a waste of effort to submit something that will not currently benefit anyone.
It's beyond embarrassing that this issue has not been even been acknowledged yet. Like do you know how discouraging it is to have built up a rural park only for the radar to be BLANK for over a year?!?! Why would I ever bother submitting any waypoint that does not already have cell phone data at this point? If you're a rural player you have to drive into town to even play the game, it's absurde.
Incentives in Wayfarer are a difficult issue.
This is because Wayfarer is not something that can be encouraged, but something that must be built up steadily.
For example, giving upgrades in the Russian Challenge caused some Wayfinders to continue to make noise based on unofficial data for months afterward.
This should have been painful for the Wayfarer team to be caught up in the commotion.
Also, when it comes to giving game items, limited editions and rarities can create strong incentives, but can also create the same problems as upgrades.
So, while items such as monster balls and Bursters that can be obtained normally are fine, special eggs, Pokémon, and very rare link amps can cause strong problems.
Well, if it is a pose or avatar that has little to do with the game, I agree to some extent, but items that are directly related to the game need to be carefully considered.
And in such cases, unfortunately, people will head in a low-quality direction as they try to speed up the process and get their rewards as quickly as possible.
Never towards high quality. And the more valuable the item is, the stronger the force in that direction.
This is evident in past OPR Live events.
This is the nomination side, but the low quality wayspots that were approved at the time still continue to degrade the quality of the wayspots in the area.
Also, displaying names on wayspots to tickle nominators' self-esteem doesn't bother me, especially when I am from Ingress, but for some reason some Pokémon GO players just hate it.
I don't know why they would want to hide it, but these things can be difficult.
All of the above being said, I basically don't like strong incentives, including giving away items on the game.
However, if I must try to create some kind of incentive, I would like to give real world items to excellent Wayfinders, just as I gave T-shirts with the Portal Recon medal printed on them to the first person to get the Onyx medal when OPR was launched in the past. It might be a good idea to give them a gift.
In GORUCK, which some Ingress players are enthusiastic about, event achievers receive a special patch (like an army tag patch) directly from Cadre.
This strong experience keeps them coming back to GORUCK events.
Wayfarer special shirts, hats, patches, metal items, etc.
These real world items are good in that they are respected by those who know them.
Twitter/ social media contests with IRL prizes. Great advertisment and public engagement to show non reviewers what the process looks like and prizes that appeal to those that don't want upgrades. Many discord groups do these already but official versions could reach further.
*Screenshot your favorite review and post to twitter for a chance to win t-shirts/merch/Google play cards
*Scavenger hunts - find a review of xyz and tweet it to enter for a chance at merch
Idea 2, global events that reward bonus upgrades and shake up prioritization could be engaging while addressing areas with major backlog. I personally would want them to be 3-7 days and happen regularly (maybe once per month or every other month)
* Time travel week(end) -rural fast tracks and upgrades are put on hold, all nominations are reviewed in purely first in first out order and the oldest 5-10% are upgraded.
* City Lights week(end) -again current fast tracks and upgrades temporarily on hold while large cities are prioritized (though admittedly this is effectively the same as time travel week)
* Featured Cities week(end)- Niantic picks a dozen or so cities and all reviews come from those. If feasible it would be better if people were assigned the chosen city closest to them.
*Themes week(end)- Niantic picks a theme to prioritize from the "what is it list" so we could have a sports court week or a trail marker weekend.
*Double agreement week(end)- each agreement counts as 2 towards upgrades
Add one more application / Edit location limit relation(fixed term) etc....
Dunno if it could be classed as incentivising, but I know several people who stopped reviewing because their rating dropped, but they had no idea why it dropped, they followed the guidelines yet were in poor. So my suggestion to incentives is to finally have a "review" of your reviews, so you can see what you've got "right" based on other people's voting and what you git wrong. Especially if youve fallen into a honey pot of niantics. It could also be used to show niantic where abuse is happening, cause things might be being mass rejected and can be shown with the reviews
This is based on my personal experience and I've said it earlier here in the forums but I think your rank can get down if you actively vote on wayspot nominations in short time, lets say 100 to 200 at least in a day, honey pot or not.
This is because your 1 review doesn't automatically mean that certain wayspot gets nominated. It needs handful of votes (5 or more?). Depending on the area, it might take a while. Until the vote gets result, it remains in a limbo of "unresolved" status. I strongly believe that these wayspots affects your rating negatively, as it has your vote but wont show up in statistics, thus equalling minus points until resolved.
TheHackerNorway hits this on the head. Allow us to bank upgrades without the constant threat of auto-upgrades. If your main concern is having a revolving door of team members and not being able to retain a lasting team, what good is discussing and making such proposals if all you're going to provide is a roadmap in May of the things you said you might do?
By the way, incentivising Wayfarer goes both ways. You create incentives that try to appeal to everyone and the incentives can be both used by regular Wayfinders, as well as abusers. You had a long line of complaints that lasted for months from people who allegedly didn't qualify for the upgrades for the Russia Wayfarer Challenge. Incentives that are gained by the community are also gained by the abusers.
You would naturally incentivise Wayfarer by progressing through on your roadmap and building on the platform. Creating that elusive Lightship Map that would allow people to interact or even see Lightship-only nominations beyond the submission and dupe check screens. Eliminating abusers by the throat and actually weeding out the endless coal that weary reviewers have to shovel through. Furthermore, why does Wayfarer need to rely on various scripts such as keyboard review and other QoL features when they should be built-in natively into the system?
We're not likely to:
Although a badge would be nice (the Seer badge comes to mind), but only once you've established a good enough system to continuously weed out coal, have a framework to actually deal with abusers and limit available nominations. Not every one should start with 40.
What's the biggest disincentive to people submitting items - the overall length of time a very large number of submissions spend waiting to be reviewed. Asking people to nominate new Waypoints is rather pointless if the full results aren't seen for two years or more. Niantic need to solve this issue first. Of course, they could do something radicle and suspend all nominations untill the backlog is cleared, but that would annoy rather a lot of people and we know how long the submission hiatus was last time something like this in Ingress OPR. Currently, the entire process is not helped by the huge number of submissions available to each player at any one time now - Niantic need to bite the bullet and just say that "40 nominations" is too much, and go back to 7. Less duplicate spam, less "I'll nominate this anyway to brute force it" coal submissions and more quality, as people will submit waypoints with the greatest likelyhood of being accepted. You can have 100 nominations at a time, but if the system is clogged downstream it makes no difference.
Regarding submissions, the various in-game submission facilities need to make it very clear they are not purely submitting a game related Portal or Stop. It needs to say "Submit a Niantic Lightship Waypoint" or similar, with the text saying "If accepted it could appear as a Stop in Pogo / Portal in ingress". Wayfarer and the entire nomination / submission process needs to be seen as completely separate from the actual games but still within them, I don't think a separate Wayfarer app is sensible.
So - how to encourage people to review, or more importantly, review properly with regards to the criteria. Rewarding players simply by "review volume" is not sensible, as this just encourages "review them all the same", whether high or low. Badges and gear are ok, but if these things happen they need to be graded in response to the volume done. These is no continuing incentive if you get the "max badge" avatar T-shirt at 1500 Stops reviewed, how does this incentivise further. You need cumulative things in both Ingess and PoGo, so badges say "max 1", "max 2", "max 3" etc with no end limit so people really can see you have 30,000 accepted reviews under your belt.
The number of submissions available should be tied to your sucessful review level, with the caveats above. If you are a large scale reviewer, then you should get more submissions than the basic player.
If you want people to review, and review according to criteria, Niantic need to give to have some sort of feedback mechanism for reviewers so they can understand on which reviews they are misinterpreting criteria. I'd like to improve my overall "correct" rate, but until I know where I am going wrong I have no idea. This may mean that for at least some particular waypoint types, Niantic will need to be more definite about exactly what is acceptable or not - I've commented on this elsewhere. Clarity for a very few areas will help reviewers considerably. Finally, make the "Poor - Fair - Good - Great" ratings more transparent and less punitive. If you do get a honeypot review wrong, again provide feeback, but don't make reviewers review for month to "work their way out of it". Yes, keep the ratings, but make it easier to work out where you went wrong and how to interprt the criteria properly.
Living in an area that's deprioritized I haven't found that the extra nominations made my experience any worse. The amount of coal I see hasn't noticeably changed and the time it takes for an unupgraded nomination to finish reviewing has remained constant at never. You're right about nothing mattering if the system is clogged, but I think you'll find that it's clogged because hardly anyone actually reviews.
The idea for an infinitely prestiging badge is good though. I think that the in game teams completely brush off the wayfarer team and will outright refuse to give real rewards so it would be as good a replacement as we could hope for.
I think that the first step is asking: Why should people care about Wayfarer?
For most of the people they want more pokestops/portals around them their goal is the game that they play, other people enjoy nominating/reviewing Wayfarer is the game itself for them. And of course many people lay in the line between those points.
Can we get the proper answer here?
I doubt it, most of the people that stay in these forums is because Wayfarer is the meta game for them, so their opinions will be biased towards "better PoI" and not looking at the issue in the same way that other person that don't wanna spend their time dealing with foreign countries, very bad nominations and their nominations rejected for reasons that they can't understand.
If we're not able to look at the whole picture, then any outcome will focus just on a subset of all the people.
let´s just be clear: a badge doesnt do it.
I agree but I get the sense that the game teams more or less blow off the wayfarer team when they ask for things so I don't think we're going to get much more than that unless someone from much higher up at niantic intervenes.
I think Wayfarer is not looking to recruit or keep new reviewers. There is no invitation with an explanation of what Wayfarer is. The voting categories are vague. The stars are vague. The desired / undesired results are vague (even if you do randomly find the criteria). How to select a rejection reason is vague. Reviewer rating is vague. It's vague why you run out of reviews. The award, an upgrade, is vague. If your nomination is rejected, it's vague why. And if your nomination is accepted, it's vague whether it will show up in your game.
I also think Wayfarer does not want good long-time reviewers. We see a mind-numbing amount of coal. (Niantic encourages coal with 40 nominations and no guidance. And it doesn't automate processes to prevent or pre-process it.) Our own singleton nominations don't move thru the system at all, even if we have a 90% acceptance rate, and 80% agreement rate, over the past year. There's no "attaboy" for being a good nominator (say, every 100 accepted), or reviewer (say, every 1000 agreements). If we review for years, then stop nominating and/or reviewing for a few months (or years), they don't care.
In other words, I don't know why Wayfarer made this post. They don't like any of us. 🤪
Wayfarer could emphasize its strengths. Why do you review anyway? I like seeing new places - learning science, history, and nature; admiring art and architecture. I like fiddling with the map to find the thing (such different terrain!). And googling, to learn more. I like to help an earnest nominator get something they like into a game. Someone, somewhere in the world, said, "Hey, look at this! It's cool!" And I wanna look.
What is Wayfarer's competition, for the attention of people who actually like to do things like this? I might switch to "global exploring" by searching satellite pictures for archaeological sites: https://www.ted.com/participate/ted-prize/prize-winning-wishes/globalxplorer
I am curious what made the ambassadors choose this, Incentivizing Wayfarer, as a goal?
Are they seeing long turnaround times in their areas and they are looking to incentivize more reviewers to help?
Are there too many eligible things in their area to submit that it will take them forever to submit them all themselves and they want to incentivize fellow submitters to help?
Do they just want to share this activity they enjoy with more people?
Part of the reasoning is to encourage new participants, keep existing reviewers, and find ways to bring back those who thought they were done with their area.
As a Pokemon Go player, i would have fun if all my accepted POIs are golden instead of blue in game (only visible for my own account). It would be a possible way to remember and show off while playing with friends.