Why care - Roadmap
Gendgi-PGO
Posts: 3,424 Ambassador
Why should we care about your own internally decided roadmaps when you don't follow them? These clearly come from the team and receive some form of Niantic internal approvals, so what gives at not fulfilling a vast amount of self imposed timelines with no updates to your community?
Edit to add:
This should include responses to AMA. Reviewing the previous months/years, they are full of responses and promises to circle back on problems, issues, and opportunities that remain unaddressed. While these are community driven questions, they still carry your (sometimes unclear) answers but lack of fulfillment to even some of the more basic requests.
Post edited by Gendgi-PGO on
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I would extend this to AMA as well. There are topics previously address in them that Niantic say they are working on & never follow up on.
Fair, my mind was on roadmaps at the time. I've been intending on collecting AMA (lack of) responses but that's such a daunting task.
We shouldn't care about their roadmaps, you know this, I know this, they know it, they know we know, etc. There's no reason to think this is going to change anytime soon.
Personally, I feel this is one of the most important questions asked. Niantic released these yearly roadmap and AMAs with all their plans and it always sounds great, but then you just quickly realize that it seems like the plans were either take 2+ years or they do not bother to do anything about these plans that they laid out. It is definitely frustrating as a Wayfarer to see how little process is made year to year.
That is a harsh but fair criticism. In most places online the game communities more or less feel like Niantic is gonna do what it wants to do regardless of what anyone says or does, that they care more about their goals than making changes that would make people happy and increase revenue and player numbers, and that most of the communications are designed to try and keep the peasants that stay and play from revolting. Then there’s the theory that it’s not a gaming company at all, but a social experiment to see how mad that they can make people before they give up and walk away. While darkly comedic, the lack of transparency, vague and ambiguous communications of what they want, and a my way or the highway attitude are very real things that get in the way of people enjoying what they’re playing. If anything ever kills the company and the games that’s going to be what does it.
I certainly wouldn't be surprised if at any time in the future they publish some papers revisiting studies like the Robbers Cave, as the initial status of Pokemon Go was that people started playing, suddendly friends/families were confronted due to their initial chosen team, as it happens with Ingress where the members of each faction might hate each other due only to their choice of faction. Then they adjusted the raids so that everyone could cooperate towards a common goal and most of the arguments between different teams went away.
They have been able to carry out so many experiments along the lines, what happens if we push this button, announce this bad combination of items as an offer, how much can we push the FOMO,... they have both Ingress and Pokemon Go to test what works well and matches existing experiments, ....
My intention was definitely not to come off as harsh. I just feel it is frustrating as a player that they barely communicate with the playerbase. If they made an aim to give us quarter updates on these projects, I would be much happier with them.
That’s one of many disturbing psychological experiments that would be possible here. As long as they don’t start allowing us to deal with cheating/abuse then we’re probably not heading down the Milgram Experiment road.
Have you checked the attitude of some Wayfarers while reviewing nominations?
Oh I have! There’s some other experiment that that reminds me of but I can’t remember the name of it. There are actually kind of a lot of experiments that reviewing reminds me of.
I wasn't thinking about other experiments, just reflecting on your mention of Milgram and how there are some people that have an attitude that it's far strictier than Niantic itself and they think that they are the only ones able to save the database of Wayspots from being poluted with something that might be enjoyed by other people.
Ah, yeah, the purists! Lord help us if they ever get more power than they already have LoL! I actually described them in another post in nearly exactly that same way!
I remember reading a Facebook post on PoGo, when Niantic released some in game updates. It goes something like this:
”A feature no one asked for, an enhancement no one appreciates”
I don’t mean to criticize, but I do see a great deal of myself in Niantic’s way of doing work.
For example, I always have lists of New Year Resolutions, which I barely completed. And along the way, I set impromptu mini goals which I achieved, but do not contribute significant changes to my life.
I remember this line from the movie Eternals:
“when you love something, you protect it”
In a way, I’m lacking in self-love to protect my heart from constant self inflicted disappointments. I do hope that Niantic is nothing like me, because life should be full of wonders.