that's a good question, and reading back through everything I've written on this topic in the past month it's basically all "what/how" and very little "why."
for me personally there are a number of reasons.
slow resolution time in my area and in other areas is one. some areas are slow because they have a high wayspot density relative to reviewer count and others are slow due to low numbers of both and I think each needs help in their own way. one thing that I've repeated for a long time is that many reviewers doing a little is vastly more effective than a few reviewers doing a lot. if only a handful of folks are reviewing, no amount of effort on their part is going to get nominations across the finish line.
spreading the load of finding interesting new wayspots is another. many areas have potential but the folks who live there aren't even aware of wayfarer or of how to make a quality nomination. incentives for taking the first step are key here. sure the few experienced players in the region can do their best, but it's time consuming and hard to find everything out there.
The third reason is kind of tied to the last reason you suggested. Generally speaking I do enjoy reviewing but without specific goals or motivations it can sometimes be tough to keep at it. You could call this burnout, and I know it affects many who have been at this a long time. Keeping folks interested who have already taken the time to dive in and learn the ins and outs is as important as bringing new folks.
I don't think that's the case at all, I think those in charge of Wayfarer are desperate for both new reviewers and some way to retain old ones. I think they're just understaffed and completely impotent when it comes to making any structural changes to enable that. I doubt it's their fault, someone above them probably sees their team as unimportant.
One of the best ways to incent new Wayfarers and re-engage old ones is to examine the current frustration points and systemically address them. You can't really engage and retain people until you remove the things that drive them away.
I understand that online forums are disproportionately skewed toward negativity, but a careful tour of this and other discussion forums will turn up a few very consistent themes-- confusion about how the system works, confusion/disagreement about what is and isn't acceptable, things waiting months or years for reviews, egregious abuse of the system (fakes, botnets, local cabals), and I'm sure a few other things. You're not really going to get people engaged and excited when the experience is unpleasant.
Once you address those things you can start looking for ways to draw people in.
If you want reviewers, it's also important to *remove disincentives* and there are plenty out there. There are several often-articulated reasons why dedicated, high-volume reviewers review less than they optimally would and some of these would be easy to fix, while others would require more effort.
One obvious, easy fix is mandatory application of upgrades. I have seen many, many posts from people who say that they've stopped or slowed down their reviewing because they simply don't want an upgrade. A fix for this has been promised since at least last summer, but nothing has happened. Think of all the lost reviews because this hasn't been implemented.
A harder to address disincentive to reviewing is the amount of completely prima facie ineligible garbage that has overwhelmed the system. It is incredibly off-putting to me and others I've talked to (I am not excited about the idea of "easy agreements" when they come from things that should never have been submitted). The reviewer test might have helped, but if so, it's too-little-too-late for me. (I'm not sure, because after 36,000+ reviews I got so burned out by the unrelenting pile of garbage I had to slog through that I haven't reviewed much in 2022.) I would say that the problem of terrible submitters is a much, much more corrosive one to Wayfarer than the individual bad reviewers who are constantly complained about (putting abuse rings aside).
THEMES: highlight good categories of nominations - a different one each month. Examples: fountains, parks, statues, murals, interesting architecture, historic places. So, for Fountain month:
Email Explorers explaining which fountains are good nominations and why - encouraging them to nominate some.
For four weeks after the email, put only fountains on the showcase (globally).
For four weeks after the email, automatically upgrade nominations that seem like fountains (including ones nominated before it was a theme).
If your fountain nomination is passed, you get some kind of flair.
In game, get some flair for hacking or spinning fountains. Maybe a new category of profile stats? Scavenger hunt!
Keep (and share) a running total of how many fountains have been added to the system since the start of the challenge.
A badge saying your nomination was used for a 5* "honeypot". (After it's run its course and is resolved.)
Two badges: number of "What is it" categories you've nominated, and reviewed.
Review streaks (IE 7 days, 30 days, 60 days, etc)
Cumulative days your nominations have been in queue, and in voting. Might as well have bragging rights.
Wayfarer could include the wayspots-visited stat that already exists in-game. It's all about exploring!
Two tiered badges: #nominations accepted and #review agreements. No upper limit - once you complete a badge, it remains on your profile, and another version of the same badge is started with 0.
For earning 10 agreements in a review challenge for a state or country - you get a badge of its flag. Once you have a bunch of flags, they could convert to a globe medal in PoGo, Ingress, and community comments (but you could still see your individual flags on Wayfarer and community profiles).
A simple incentive by displaying the results on the Wayfarer site would be sufficient.
I don't particularly care about this since I have a public profile on Ingress, but there are a certain percentage of people who don't like the display of code names on Pokestops and Pokemon gyms.
If Niantic wants to protect this as player privacy, I'll go along with it.
If they were to be displayed, the number of nominations and approvals, with the current 4 rank rates as reviewers also displayed as nominators, and the number of reviews and approvals as reviewers (the same number as Recon medals in Ingress) would be sufficient.
That is almost enough to tell you what kind of player the Wayfinder is.
A Wayfinder who wants to make himself proud will naturally strive to improve his numbers.
I guess I’m missing something. Why does Wayfarer need more incentive? I would argue that the opportunity to open up gameplay is incentive enough. The system in its current form is rife with disincentives: poor user education, poor company communication, bad examples in game, and an overall bad reputation of cheating (tolerance for GPS faking, multiaccounting, bots, and local cabals). Removing the disincentives will automatically improve player participation and retention.
Pikmin seems to use them even if they don't show up on its board and Catan's seasonal maps could have (RIP). I've heard claims that they impact Pokemon Go spawns too although I'm not sure if that's true or not.
In addition to not automatically spending agreements on an upgrade, it would be nice to be able to buy extra appeals with them, maybe 20, 25, or 33 agreements for an appeal? This would increase the incentive to earn agreements by giving them more flexibility.
Similarly, maybe also be able to spend them on extra submissions?
I think it would also be nice if having an appeal accepted gave you a new appeal immediately. The appeal being approved acknowledges that the submission shouldn't have been rejected to start with. So like a successful coach's challenge, having a rejection overturned shouldn't "cost" you anything. This wouldn't contribute to the appeals process being flooded with bad nominations, since those presumably wouldn't be approved and wouldn't earn the appealer any new appeals.
The incentive value of an upgrade would be improved if an appeal of a rejected upgraded nomination were given priority in the upgrade process. After all the effort to earn the upgrade, it's disappointing for the nomination to be rejected and then sit in the appeal queue for months, even if it is ultimately approved. There'd be more incentive to earn upgrades if they were more powerful in this way.
I know ingress portals that aren't in pogo effect spawns, they basically create a spawn point where the portal is. haven't heard anything about lightship though, bit then, I don't think pokemon has had a reshuffle of spawn points since they started using lightship
The biggest incentive I would like to get at the moment would be the complete appreciation of my work and then being able to benefit from the entire work.
I started because I wanted to contribute to the game and create more places for myself and other people to meet and play together.
Sure, you can discuss ingame currencies and co. here. But it would be really more important to me if all the work was appreciated.
Why should I go to the trouble of submitting stuff and collecting upgrades (unfortunately that's the only way to have something rated) only to find out that it was accepted but will never appear in my game.
I only play Pokemon and I want to create new locations for this. But here a completely Niantic unfortunately stands in the way. Because unfortunately we can never have all the opportunities that are available in the other games. Because either the cell system hinders you or Niantic hasn't updated spawn points in over years.
All of you (Niantic, Ingres, and also PokemonGo) explicitly call for submitting new stops via Wayfarer to discover many new things.
We demand standardization of the appearance rules of POIs especially in PGo and no or at least a drastic reduction in size of the stop cells to ½ or ¼! We want to have ALL added POIs in PGo, like Ingress, bc all are based on the same database!
Last year, we added over 3.8 million new Wayspots. That's almost 4 million new Gyms, Pokéstops, and Portals that our players can interact within the real world. Explorers, how many more Wayspots do you think we can add in 2022? (Niantic, 01/29/22)- there is sooo much more possible in PGo without or with a reduction of the cell system when you compare PGo and Ingress!
Because we could have so many more stops to go out and discover new places, that's the general slogan, right? (#MeetYouOutThere)
That's what all the changes in the games are currently aimed at!
Even if you ask why this or that stop never ended up in the game, even though it was accepted, you get the totally helpful answer (and I'm not kidding!) that this stop is too close to other game locations and I, when I'm looking for new stops I should walk in a park. Are you serious?! Sorry, but that's not the way to deal with suggestions for improvement and the work of others!!
The opinions of others have become more than clear here and also in the Twitter post at the time, and I too am sometimes walking on thin ice here. This change would give me so much more motivation, for example, because then I know I can really actively contribute something to the game, my work is valued and doesn't just disappear into obscurity. You always say that this is a PGo problem, but I think you have a bit of a say and more influence as a team within the company than the outside players. It's time for the cell system to change and for the Wayfarer team to do their part and support us instead of just stepping back. Because all the displeasure, the frustration and the lack of understanding are reflected here and in the reviews. And that also reduces the fun of ratings and submitting.
This actually sounds very interesting and worthwhile. One would finally see progress and it would really be incentives of Wayfarer for the users of Wayfarer.
many good ideas in here, I'd like to add something:
- Radiusfilter: It would be cool to widen the radius of your reviews the more you have reviewed as an option. Many people in my area are fed up because they have to review stuff hundreds of kilometers away in languages they don't understand. By making this "widening" an optional filter that you can change yourself (e.g. 10km, 50km, 100km...) you'll have an incentive to bring people back and have a bonus system for newcomers to get keen on reviewing.
- Removal Fast Track and/or report via wayfarer: High experienced reviewers should get an option to get fast tracking on duplicates and fake portals through wayfarer. Right now you can just report ingame but often we see duplicates and fakes while we are reviewing. Why can't you have an option for high expetienced reviewers to report this in wayfarer? As a bonus this could be fast tracked the better your review status is.
IMO, best way to incentivize wayfarer is to get rid of the biggest motivation killers. I can't speak for others, but for me the biggest issue by far is the so called "inclusion rules." If I'm going to the trouble of nominating something, then I want it to have an effect on the games I'm playing, and this doesn't happen if it gets stuck as a lightship only POI. Sure, we're given the vague promise that lightship only POI's may eventually be used in other niantic games, but:
1, not everyone is going to be interested in those games,
2, There's no certainty that the POI's will actually be used in these future games, especially since the newer games seem to be trending towards stricter inclusion rules,
3, There's no telling if said games will even get out of beta testing (Or survive long term) after what happened with Catan & Wizards Unite,
And 4, if you're focusing on using wayfarer as a means to get people to explore new places, then having invisible POI's isn't going to accomplish that goal.
Instead, the inclusion rules encourage people to either abuse the system to get around these arbitrary rules that really don't help anyone, or just not bother nominating and reviewing as much. There's areas I've explicitly avoided attempting to nominate anything because I already know those waypoints would never make it into PoGo, and possibly not ingress either. Sure, you can try to convince people to review & nominate for the sake of improving the lightship database, but the fact is...most people aren't going to care about it directly. To most players, lightship is nothing more than a nebulous list of locations that we can't even see or do anything with.
No, most people nominate because they want more pokestops, gyms, portals, etc. How many we can get is already limited by what's actually out there to nominate, and how much of it really warrants getting a wayspot. Limiting it further with arbitrary inclusion rules is simply counter productive to creating more incentive to participate in wayfarer.
Having said that, the wayfarer team should work closely with the game specific teams to find ways of incorporating all waypoints into all the games, but in such a way that the currently invisible POI's have only minimal effect on the game(s). Every waypoint doesn't need to be a pokestop or gym, but they should at least all show up on the map in some capacity. Even if all they do is allow people to obtain gifts, they should still be...present. Or reuse Catan's idea of rotating waypoints in and out periodically. Either way, all waypoints in lightship should have a chance to be in the spotlight, regardless of which game you're playing.
Besides the inclusion rules, having super long wait times without the use of upgrades is the other big motivation killer. I still have nominations from late 2020 in voting. Having to wait 2-3 months without an upgrade is one thing, but 2 years is entirely too long. I get wanting to speed up rural areas since they have less to work with, but this should not come at the expense of big cities being permanently backlogged without upgrades.
tl;dr; Prune the inclusion rules so that they don't exclude as much / find ways to have unused POI's still have some visibility and mild functionality, and implement a first in first out system for nominations that have been in queue / voting for excessive amounts of time. Those 2 things would be huge incentives to be more active in wayfarer.
Similarly to the other thread, wanted to let you all know that myself, the team, and Ambassadors will take these into consideration and in our meeting next week, our Ambassadors and I will discuss the ideas y'all have shared. The discussions won't be closed after that though so feel free to share even after our meeting.
I literally said the same as you long time ago ofc with different wording but the idea was the same and the -ING warriors got mad and just spammed disagree on me, glad to see the common sense in this forums has gone up since then because it looks they arent spamming disagree on you
Allow people to flex about their contributions. Preferably in-game but even on Wayfarer itself it could work.
Allow people to see a subset of Wayspots they helped into the "gameboard"'s. Show cool stats about those like "unique players interacted with this POI", "MU gained using this portal", "Leaders defeated here" etc. Something to indicate that the review made a difference for players.
Another great way is to allow others to see this too. Allow players of all games to show-off their contributions through their game. Be it cloths for PoGo, badge (already there) for ingress or a custom postcard for Pikmin Bloom. Just make sure every player that decides to waste their time on Wayfarer can at least prove to their friends they did so, and say something like "Yeah that Pokéstop is totally there because I reviewed it a month ago uwu".
Another incentive I would actually absolutely LOVE to see. Substantial changes in how reviews are weighed. Based SOLELY on how well a reviewer reviews "honeypot" entries, NOT THEIR AGREEMENTS. Make it so that if a reviewer agrees with Niantic almost all of the time for those "honeypots" that when they review other nominations there vote is weighed significantly, and noticeably more than reviewers who disagree more frequently with the "honeypot". This might finally be a way out of the endless loop of bad reviewing.
In a similar light, reviewers who rejected a nomination that was appealed and accepted should be penalized (strongly imo). As my upgrades being worthless due to bad reviewers is a major reason I stopped reviewing.
Before we even discuss Incentivizing, Niantic needs to focus heavily on awareness as @tehstone-Ambo mentioned. Subtle notifications that indicate the presense of wayfarer would help loads.
Comments
that's a good question, and reading back through everything I've written on this topic in the past month it's basically all "what/how" and very little "why."
for me personally there are a number of reasons.
slow resolution time in my area and in other areas is one. some areas are slow because they have a high wayspot density relative to reviewer count and others are slow due to low numbers of both and I think each needs help in their own way. one thing that I've repeated for a long time is that many reviewers doing a little is vastly more effective than a few reviewers doing a lot. if only a handful of folks are reviewing, no amount of effort on their part is going to get nominations across the finish line.
spreading the load of finding interesting new wayspots is another. many areas have potential but the folks who live there aren't even aware of wayfarer or of how to make a quality nomination. incentives for taking the first step are key here. sure the few experienced players in the region can do their best, but it's time consuming and hard to find everything out there.
The third reason is kind of tied to the last reason you suggested. Generally speaking I do enjoy reviewing but without specific goals or motivations it can sometimes be tough to keep at it. You could call this burnout, and I know it affects many who have been at this a long time. Keeping folks interested who have already taken the time to dive in and learn the ins and outs is as important as bringing new folks.
yes, this is alot of grey-area talk.
we do not know why niantic would want to give an incentive to reviewers / contributors.
“What are ways in which we can incentivize Wayfarer as a whole to take full advantage of all its features?”
Who is we? Niantic? The Ambas?
Incentivize as a whole? to take full? advantage of its features? - What does it mean at all?
I don't think that's the case at all, I think those in charge of Wayfarer are desperate for both new reviewers and some way to retain old ones. I think they're just understaffed and completely impotent when it comes to making any structural changes to enable that. I doubt it's their fault, someone above them probably sees their team as unimportant.
One of the best ways to incent new Wayfarers and re-engage old ones is to examine the current frustration points and systemically address them. You can't really engage and retain people until you remove the things that drive them away.
I understand that online forums are disproportionately skewed toward negativity, but a careful tour of this and other discussion forums will turn up a few very consistent themes-- confusion about how the system works, confusion/disagreement about what is and isn't acceptable, things waiting months or years for reviews, egregious abuse of the system (fakes, botnets, local cabals), and I'm sure a few other things. You're not really going to get people engaged and excited when the experience is unpleasant.
Once you address those things you can start looking for ways to draw people in.
If you want reviewers, it's also important to *remove disincentives* and there are plenty out there. There are several often-articulated reasons why dedicated, high-volume reviewers review less than they optimally would and some of these would be easy to fix, while others would require more effort.
One obvious, easy fix is mandatory application of upgrades. I have seen many, many posts from people who say that they've stopped or slowed down their reviewing because they simply don't want an upgrade. A fix for this has been promised since at least last summer, but nothing has happened. Think of all the lost reviews because this hasn't been implemented.
A harder to address disincentive to reviewing is the amount of completely prima facie ineligible garbage that has overwhelmed the system. It is incredibly off-putting to me and others I've talked to (I am not excited about the idea of "easy agreements" when they come from things that should never have been submitted). The reviewer test might have helped, but if so, it's too-little-too-late for me. (I'm not sure, because after 36,000+ reviews I got so burned out by the unrelenting pile of garbage I had to slog through that I haven't reviewed much in 2022.) I would say that the problem of terrible submitters is a much, much more corrosive one to Wayfarer than the individual bad reviewers who are constantly complained about (putting abuse rings aside).
THEMES: highlight good categories of nominations - a different one each month. Examples: fountains, parks, statues, murals, interesting architecture, historic places. So, for Fountain month:
BADGES: to show on https://wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/new/profile, and this community's profile and comments (on first line, after name and # posts). Some ideas:
Work with game makers to provide a monthly incentive box.
Like I'll use PMG as example (numbers off top of my head)
Box contains 40 stardust per month for each agreement you have if your rating is Great, 20 good, 150fair... 0 poor
Box contains 100 startdust per month for each wayspot accepted
A simple incentive by displaying the results on the Wayfarer site would be sufficient.
I don't particularly care about this since I have a public profile on Ingress, but there are a certain percentage of people who don't like the display of code names on Pokestops and Pokemon gyms.
If Niantic wants to protect this as player privacy, I'll go along with it.
If they were to be displayed, the number of nominations and approvals, with the current 4 rank rates as reviewers also displayed as nominators, and the number of reviews and approvals as reviewers (the same number as Recon medals in Ingress) would be sufficient.
That is almost enough to tell you what kind of player the Wayfinder is.
A Wayfinder who wants to make himself proud will naturally strive to improve his numbers.
This will work as an incentive of sorts.
I guess I’m missing something. Why does Wayfarer need more incentive? I would argue that the opportunity to open up gameplay is incentive enough. The system in its current form is rife with disincentives: poor user education, poor company communication, bad examples in game, and an overall bad reputation of cheating (tolerance for GPS faking, multiaccounting, bots, and local cabals). Removing the disincentives will automatically improve player participation and retention.
But they aren't able to remove the disincentives so that's a nonstarter
If you nominate a Lightship only wayspot, that doesn't really open up gameplay for anyone.
Pikmin seems to use them even if they don't show up on its board and Catan's seasonal maps could have (RIP). I've heard claims that they impact Pokemon Go spawns too although I'm not sure if that's true or not.
In addition to not automatically spending agreements on an upgrade, it would be nice to be able to buy extra appeals with them, maybe 20, 25, or 33 agreements for an appeal? This would increase the incentive to earn agreements by giving them more flexibility.
Similarly, maybe also be able to spend them on extra submissions?
I think it would also be nice if having an appeal accepted gave you a new appeal immediately. The appeal being approved acknowledges that the submission shouldn't have been rejected to start with. So like a successful coach's challenge, having a rejection overturned shouldn't "cost" you anything. This wouldn't contribute to the appeals process being flooded with bad nominations, since those presumably wouldn't be approved and wouldn't earn the appealer any new appeals.
The incentive value of an upgrade would be improved if an appeal of a rejected upgraded nomination were given priority in the upgrade process. After all the effort to earn the upgrade, it's disappointing for the nomination to be rejected and then sit in the appeal queue for months, even if it is ultimately approved. There'd be more incentive to earn upgrades if they were more powerful in this way.
I know ingress portals that aren't in pogo effect spawns, they basically create a spawn point where the portal is. haven't heard anything about lightship though, bit then, I don't think pokemon has had a reshuffle of spawn points since they started using lightship
How can we expect honest people to stay and review if they have to face this for months? https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/26671/fake-series-of-a-moving-lfl-in-northern-sydney-and-other-random-junk
Just reading that thread makes my stomach turn.
The biggest incentive I would like to get at the moment would be the complete appreciation of my work and then being able to benefit from the entire work.
I started because I wanted to contribute to the game and create more places for myself and other people to meet and play together.
Sure, you can discuss ingame currencies and co. here. But it would be really more important to me if all the work was appreciated.
Why should I go to the trouble of submitting stuff and collecting upgrades (unfortunately that's the only way to have something rated) only to find out that it was accepted but will never appear in my game.
I only play Pokemon and I want to create new locations for this. But here a completely Niantic unfortunately stands in the way. Because unfortunately we can never have all the opportunities that are available in the other games. Because either the cell system hinders you or Niantic hasn't updated spawn points in over years.
All of you (Niantic, Ingres, and also PokemonGo) explicitly call for submitting new stops via Wayfarer to discover many new things.
We demand standardization of the appearance rules of POIs especially in PGo and no or at least a drastic reduction in size of the stop cells to ½ or ¼! We want to have ALL added POIs in PGo, like Ingress, bc all are based on the same database!
Last year, we added over 3.8 million new Wayspots. That's almost 4 million new Gyms, Pokéstops, and Portals that our players can interact within the real world. Explorers, how many more Wayspots do you think we can add in 2022? (Niantic, 01/29/22)- there is sooo much more possible in PGo without or with a reduction of the cell system when you compare PGo and Ingress!
Because we could have so many more stops to go out and discover new places, that's the general slogan, right? (#MeetYouOutThere)
That's what all the changes in the games are currently aimed at!
Even if you ask why this or that stop never ended up in the game, even though it was accepted, you get the totally helpful answer (and I'm not kidding!) that this stop is too close to other game locations and I, when I'm looking for new stops I should walk in a park. Are you serious?! Sorry, but that's not the way to deal with suggestions for improvement and the work of others!!
The opinions of others have become more than clear here and also in the Twitter post at the time, and I too am sometimes walking on thin ice here. This change would give me so much more motivation, for example, because then I know I can really actively contribute something to the game, my work is valued and doesn't just disappear into obscurity. You always say that this is a PGo problem, but I think you have a bit of a say and more influence as a team within the company than the outside players. It's time for the cell system to change and for the Wayfarer team to do their part and support us instead of just stepping back. Because all the displeasure, the frustration and the lack of understanding are reflected here and in the reviews. And that also reduces the fun of ratings and submitting.
This actually sounds very interesting and worthwhile. One would finally see progress and it would really be incentives of Wayfarer for the users of Wayfarer.
many good ideas in here, I'd like to add something:
- Radiusfilter: It would be cool to widen the radius of your reviews the more you have reviewed as an option. Many people in my area are fed up because they have to review stuff hundreds of kilometers away in languages they don't understand. By making this "widening" an optional filter that you can change yourself (e.g. 10km, 50km, 100km...) you'll have an incentive to bring people back and have a bonus system for newcomers to get keen on reviewing.
- Removal Fast Track and/or report via wayfarer: High experienced reviewers should get an option to get fast tracking on duplicates and fake portals through wayfarer. Right now you can just report ingame but often we see duplicates and fakes while we are reviewing. Why can't you have an option for high expetienced reviewers to report this in wayfarer? As a bonus this could be fast tracked the better your review status is.
Before we can talk further about this, @NianticTintino can you assign more staffs into this forum especially who can at least active in weekends?
What Polish players did in this forum are disincentivizing Wayfarer greatly. At least for local players there.
IMO, best way to incentivize wayfarer is to get rid of the biggest motivation killers. I can't speak for others, but for me the biggest issue by far is the so called "inclusion rules." If I'm going to the trouble of nominating something, then I want it to have an effect on the games I'm playing, and this doesn't happen if it gets stuck as a lightship only POI. Sure, we're given the vague promise that lightship only POI's may eventually be used in other niantic games, but:
1, not everyone is going to be interested in those games,
2, There's no certainty that the POI's will actually be used in these future games, especially since the newer games seem to be trending towards stricter inclusion rules,
3, There's no telling if said games will even get out of beta testing (Or survive long term) after what happened with Catan & Wizards Unite,
And 4, if you're focusing on using wayfarer as a means to get people to explore new places, then having invisible POI's isn't going to accomplish that goal.
Instead, the inclusion rules encourage people to either abuse the system to get around these arbitrary rules that really don't help anyone, or just not bother nominating and reviewing as much. There's areas I've explicitly avoided attempting to nominate anything because I already know those waypoints would never make it into PoGo, and possibly not ingress either. Sure, you can try to convince people to review & nominate for the sake of improving the lightship database, but the fact is...most people aren't going to care about it directly. To most players, lightship is nothing more than a nebulous list of locations that we can't even see or do anything with.
No, most people nominate because they want more pokestops, gyms, portals, etc. How many we can get is already limited by what's actually out there to nominate, and how much of it really warrants getting a wayspot. Limiting it further with arbitrary inclusion rules is simply counter productive to creating more incentive to participate in wayfarer.
Having said that, the wayfarer team should work closely with the game specific teams to find ways of incorporating all waypoints into all the games, but in such a way that the currently invisible POI's have only minimal effect on the game(s). Every waypoint doesn't need to be a pokestop or gym, but they should at least all show up on the map in some capacity. Even if all they do is allow people to obtain gifts, they should still be...present. Or reuse Catan's idea of rotating waypoints in and out periodically. Either way, all waypoints in lightship should have a chance to be in the spotlight, regardless of which game you're playing.
Besides the inclusion rules, having super long wait times without the use of upgrades is the other big motivation killer. I still have nominations from late 2020 in voting. Having to wait 2-3 months without an upgrade is one thing, but 2 years is entirely too long. I get wanting to speed up rural areas since they have less to work with, but this should not come at the expense of big cities being permanently backlogged without upgrades.
tl;dr; Prune the inclusion rules so that they don't exclude as much / find ways to have unused POI's still have some visibility and mild functionality, and implement a first in first out system for nominations that have been in queue / voting for excessive amounts of time. Those 2 things would be huge incentives to be more active in wayfarer.
Ooooooo weeeeeee! Loving the ideas y'all!
Similarly to the other thread, wanted to let you all know that myself, the team, and Ambassadors will take these into consideration and in our meeting next week, our Ambassadors and I will discuss the ideas y'all have shared. The discussions won't be closed after that though so feel free to share even after our meeting.
I literally said the same as you long time ago ofc with different wording but the idea was the same and the -ING warriors got mad and just spammed disagree on me, glad to see the common sense in this forums has gone up since then because it looks they arent spamming disagree on you
Allow people to flex about their contributions. Preferably in-game but even on Wayfarer itself it could work.
Allow people to see a subset of Wayspots they helped into the "gameboard"'s. Show cool stats about those like "unique players interacted with this POI", "MU gained using this portal", "Leaders defeated here" etc. Something to indicate that the review made a difference for players.
Another great way is to allow others to see this too. Allow players of all games to show-off their contributions through their game. Be it cloths for PoGo, badge (already there) for ingress or a custom postcard for Pikmin Bloom. Just make sure every player that decides to waste their time on Wayfarer can at least prove to their friends they did so, and say something like "Yeah that Pokéstop is totally there because I reviewed it a month ago uwu".
Another incentive I would actually absolutely LOVE to see. Substantial changes in how reviews are weighed. Based SOLELY on how well a reviewer reviews "honeypot" entries, NOT THEIR AGREEMENTS. Make it so that if a reviewer agrees with Niantic almost all of the time for those "honeypots" that when they review other nominations there vote is weighed significantly, and noticeably more than reviewers who disagree more frequently with the "honeypot". This might finally be a way out of the endless loop of bad reviewing.
In a similar light, reviewers who rejected a nomination that was appealed and accepted should be penalized (strongly imo). As my upgrades being worthless due to bad reviewers is a major reason I stopped reviewing.
I’ve put up a poll about an idea and I’ve linked to this thread so am linking back.
Summarize this into 4-5 lines bro. no one wants to read all this. Or maybe send directly to in-game support
Do you understand the purpose of this thread? Please don't leave such unnecessary, disparaging comments.
Before we even discuss Incentivizing, Niantic needs to focus heavily on awareness as @tehstone-Ambo mentioned. Subtle notifications that indicate the presense of wayfarer would help loads.
My incentive would actually be to have things in queue or in voting actually moving... In some areas of London things are taking ages
Trying to add a photo, but seems it's not possible
Apologies for the empty post
For example, these are nearly one year old...