NianticDanbocat let go?
PkmnTrainerJ-ING
Posts: 4,845 Ambassador
First of all we have @NianticCasey-ING move on to other Niantic projects and now we have had @NianticDanbocat let go?
I’m not going to link to their LinkedIn profile but a post shared 2 weeks ago notes;
The most painful part of being suddenly let go yesterday was not about being "out of work" (thankful for that privilege), but the sudden severance of my emotional and intellectual ties to coworkers and products that I grew to passionately love. That was hard, NGL. I woke up this morning about to check slack, out of habit. Oof. I took a bet on Niantic, and I lost. That isn't to say my time at the company was regretful. I'm so proud of what I accomplished with the team, the experiences I gained, and the personal connections that were made (I will miss you!). And while I still need some days to deal with the grief, on top of what 2022 has already gifted, I do know that exciting opportunities lie ahead.
With Wayfarer being a small but essential team, I didn’t think that the 8% of staff being laid off would affect this team. Best of luck with whatever you do next Danbocat if you’re still checking in on a personal account!
Comments
Thanks for bringing this to our attention….sounds like a lot more going on.
I wish you well
There is a worrying turnover of staff ( maybe normal in industry🤷♀️)
My astonishment at the bad decision-making from Niantic leadership is a bottomless pit.
Make someone the social media voice of the company, and then let them go without telling the affected community. I don't know why I continue to be stunned.
Funnily enough, Casey has been on the forums more recently than Danbocat. Do we get the return of Casey?
Yeah. I assumed the people let go were all working on the games they closed because they didn't have work for them anymore, not the core tool feeding the main databse of all their products, and which needs an incredible amount of work done.
I wonder if there was dissatisfaction with the erratic and often fraudulent growth of the poi database.
I would think the solution to this would be to hire more people and give them more resources rather than firing someone whose job description wasn't even directly related to maintaining the database... but then we have to remember what company we're dealing with, I suppose.
If you think Wayfarer is essential for Niantic; think twice.
Look at all the things Niantic does with the database of POI. There are dozens of Apps that use it. /ironyoff - besides Pokemon Go there is nothing substantial that uses the database. nothing.
Niantic wants to market the AR SCANS-. But - Pokemon Go Players arent willing to do that.
so its up to all ingress players to be forced to do ar scans ? since pogo players only cares for shiny pogo monsters and not do dull chores as scanning....
Many Pokémon GO players still believe that scans get stops removed so won’t do them. Or do them but scan their feet for a Poffin.
You spend as little time as possible at a stop - spin get resources, get back to either catching or walking, which are he main time consumers in the game. Spending time doing a scan means an important Pokémon might disappear ( eg on incense) or in a stop dense area your game play gets very disrupted.
I scan in Ingress because there's a badge in it. It's not altruistic or an earnest attempt to help the company, it's just to get my Scout and Scout Controller numbers up. Maybe Pokemon Go could use something similar?
I play both Ingress and PoGo, and have zero interest in scanning in either. If our Niantic overlords want me to work for them for free, they're gonna have to find some sort of decent incentive. A Poffin is far from it, and so is "Scout Controller."
In PoGo they realized this and started giving more items for spinning "powered up" stops and gyms (scanning powers them up.) But there's a discrepancy between what Niantic says is the # of scans needed (5/10/25) and what # scans needed that it shows when you tap the stop/gym. (50 for just base level bonus.)
No one I know bothers.
You need 5 scans for Level 1, 10 for Level 2 and 25 for Level 3. The PokeStop/Gym gains 10 points with every uploaded scan. Level 1 is active for 48 hours, Level 2 for 60 hours and Level 3 should be 72 hours. I recently tested this for the latest C-Day and got my home gym to Level 2. My honest opinon: Not worth it. 2 extra items with every spin is just not good enough. Often times it was just 2 more PokeBalls. You'll also get a heart for your current buddy if you spin the PokeStop/Gym. If you change buddies 20 times a day you can get up to 60 hearts. I don't think I will do it again and I think the general consens in the PoGO community is that it's not worth it. At least Ingress has a badge and you can brag that you're scout controller...if anyone really does that (I don't think so)
At least Ingress has a badge and you can brag that you're scout controller...if anyone really does that (I don't think so)
There are 100% people that chase Scout Controller. There’s a separate badge for having it on Unique Portals @dustinyeeaah-PGO
I did get a PokéStop to it’s highest level with scans and agree that it is not worth it.
Seems like Niantic got no money to pay people and if an already slow system becomes even slower that seems totally ok...
But hey, at least got money to pay rents in San Fran...
I find scanning difficult it's just super hard with my kids. Some portals are just too difficult to scan .... Playgrounds are very spread out. There's the embarrassment factor too. Scanning takes much longer than a photo.
Aside from the fact that it just feels really awkward filming a location for several seconds when there's usually people around looking at you as if you're behaving weirdly, in Pokémon Go there's no real incentive to do scans. We have no medal for it (not that I'd be incentivised by that personally), the rewards from AR scanning tasks are not really worth it (the best thing you can get is a Poffin, which is only situationally useful at best, and it's easy enough to get your buddy excited without a Poffin), and the power up function for Pokéstops and Gyms barely has any noticeable effects for players who aren't rural (the extra items from spinning might be useful in a more rural setting, as may the extra Premier Balls in raids if those rural players can find someone to raid with).
We also don't tend to linger when playing Pokémon Go, as @Elijustrying-ING says. In comparison, you do tend to stop a lot more when playing Ingress, especially if you're having to take down an opposing field. I can see scanning fitting in more with that play style.
yes there are 3 left out there. let them do the work.
@PkmnTrainerJ-ING NIA has come out and said that scans don't contribute to POI's being removed. I think they need to do a better job of broadcasting this to a wider audience. More channels and different platforms other than just the community forums.
Oh I am aware but there’s certainly still sects of Pokémon GO players that believe it is the case.
Well, the whole thing is sad. We get to know so few people on the Niantic side, and so when one of that select few is gone they're missed all the more. Despite the whole Dog Waste Station debacle, I appreciated his attempts to communicate with the world at large via Twitter, and his input here always provided food for thought. Boo, Niantic - and best of luck to the rest of the Wayfarer staff, I hope the company sees the value you provide!
One of the issues is that in normal play PoGo players hardly even stop at a waypoint and an ingress player might stand there but they are looking at their phone ( or as many locally do stay in their car). To do scans the person suddenly becomes more visible holding phone up and pointing it directly at places. When several people are doing the same they get noticed.
So someone concerned about privacy might complain and have the wayspot removed.
We had this locally when a golf club and a blue plaque were removed - the strong suspicion is because a house in between which unusually for that area is blurred out on streetview - they value privacy.
A logical explanation as to why scanning can remove waypoints - turning a game that blends into the background into one grabs attention.
It is unfortunate that Danbocat is leaving Niantic.
However, I interpret this as Niantic rearranging the roles of the Wayfarer team a bit, as he and Tintino had some roles that seemed to overlap. (Tintino was in charge of the forum, while Danbocat was in charge of social networking)
Also, on a different note, there was some talk about scanning.
Unless the level cap changes again and scanning is a mandatory task or medal requirement in it, Pokémon GO players will not be enthusiastic about scanning.
But I do know one condition under which they will be eager to scan.
If you make remote raid passes the reward for scanning, they will be incredibly diligent.
I'll leave it up to Niantic to determine the required number of times.
Really makes me wonder how niantic can keep making decisions that are so obviously detrimental from a business perspective.
It won't matter how much they want people to go out in boiling heat, frigid cold, etc to play the games & coordinate with other players if they can't keep them running reasonably well, which they already have issues doing...
Niantic hires "surveyors" to scan things in "key cities". It's probably low pay, but it's not all volunteer.
I believe scan locations led to the wayspot moves in NYC, Seattle, and more - the wayspots were moved to the place people (mostly surveyors) stood when they scanned them. Since the Empire State Building and the Space Needle are huge, you can infer less by the scanner's physical location. They stood in plazas near the tall wayspots. That doesn't mean the wayspot was in the plaza.
This year, Ingress anomalies are all about battle beacons. You can scan a portal 7 times to invoke a free battle beacon. And, the 13th scan invokes a free fracker, which brings down the energy of all the resonators. So, if you time it right, you can recharge during its free battle beacon - and get anomaly credit.
To be perfectly fair to Niantic (wait, did I just say that?) we don't know why she was part of the layoff. I believe her role at Niantic was product management, and anything she did in forums or on social media was probably secondary to her primary work. Maybe the company's focus shifted away from her specialty, or maybe... well, there are many possibilities.
You know the old story about the blind men and the elephant? The only part of the elephant we have access to on this one is like the left ear.
The story about blind men and the elephant is good analogy for portal scanning. I uploaded 50 high quality (did my best lol, but can't tell for sure not seeing the end result) of a goal post. Can lightship understand that white metal pipes represent "Soccer Field #2"?
And speaking of product management and focus shift, what is the product in this context? Database of portals (both plain and VPS-activated), and/or the platform? Or, the product also includes players which are supposed to play with AR stuff, but for some reasons don't like to play with the camera in public locations? To me, it does not look like wayfarer/platform problem, but well
Well thats surprising and disheartening. I though danbocat was in charge of wayfarer, im guessing I'm wrong.
You’re not. She was the Product Owner/Product Manager for it.