Upcoming Indonesia Challenge: Issues, Fixes, and Advice
niktero-PGO
Posts: 348 ✭✭✭✭
So somewhat unexpectedly Niantic has just confirmed there will be a new wayfarer challenge event in Indonesia starting in mid February 2023. They have said we will be able to change our bonus location for the event so all can participate. I can already see some potential issues and the need for advice, both for reviewers and for the Niantic planners in order to make this event the best it can be. This post is to raise legitimate issues, propose fixes and give advice for people who want to join the challenge so lets have fun!
Comments
So to start with I can see a big issue arising from the fact Indonesia is really spread out and mostly water. Since bonus location reviewers can not see edits or upgrades we could have a lot on people reviewing a very small area and neglecting the rest of the country (particularly rural sections which are probably the priority for Niantic).
One fix would be for us to be able to change our location multiple times throughout the event. Another option is to temporarily increase the size of the bonus location in that part of the world for this event. Artic regions above about 55 degrees latitude already experience bonus locations 4X as large as the rest of the world.
As a local I just want to tell,
If you want consistent nominations in review, put bonus location between Jawa and Bali (especially big cities like Jakarta, Bandung, Semarang, Yogyakarta, Surabaya and Denpasar).
If you want to help remote locations with fewer Wayspots (which you should), put bonus location outside Jawa and Bali. If you want more challenge, Aceh and Papua are more fitting for you since both regions almost have no street view! Kalimantan (Borneo) is also good pick for more challenging locations especially for locations far from big cities, just like this thread here
More advice later?
Oh right, to not repeat the mistake @Gazzas89-PGO did in Brazil challenge, avoid picking bonus location on the ocean! Or, for those who will pick bonus location on Kalimantan and Papua, please do some research before you'll pick bonus location on random locations of the jungle with few to almost none population!
Additional bonus, picking locations near the borders between Indonesia and other countries will likely allow you to review nominations from other countries next to Indonesia. (If picking Batam, as example, will allow you to review nominations from Singapore and/or Malaysia.)
By getting us to change our bonus, they are asking us to trust them to allow us to reset our bonus at the end of the challenge, even tho it has not been a year.
I wish Niantic would just put a switch in our settings: "Participate in global review challenges". Yes/No
Next, the language.
As I said in another thread, most nominations here are in Bahasa Indonesia and English but rarely in local language. However...,
1. If the nominations are in Bahasa Indonesia, sometimes the online translator won't translate the text properly due to modern terms and abbreviations. Not to mention there are some terms that are only to be understood by local reviewers, such as B5 ('Bintang 5' or 5 stars, referring to asking reviewers to give their nominations 5 starts)
2. If the nominations are in English, sometimes they didn't use the proper grammar, and that's it. However they should be easily understandable by native English speaker.
My advice, just review based on the nominations alone, and ignore supplemental information at most (unless they have useful information).
#ad Indonesia has Jungle pattern Vivillon. If any of you still looking at it, feel free to add me in Pokemon GO. Just find my friend code in Twitter (my account name in Twitter is same as this forum account's).
Due to the size of the bonus area (blue rectangle area near Jakarta), if this is the only mechanic used to draw Indonesian nominations for the upcoming challenge then it will fail to cover a significant area of the country.
This leaves users to select one of two strategies:
During the Russia challenge, some people picked in the middle of Russia, and ended up getting no Russia reviews and hence were not eligible for the prize. Unfortunately, this means that the system used during the Russia challenge can dissuade reviewers from trying to help remote and rural areas.
Ambassadors are aware of these potential issues and have shared their feedback through appropriate channels.
Rather than choosing a bonus location I would suggest Niantic add the ability to opt into the challenge, and people who opt in would essentially have a fourth location temporarily. This would save users the trouble of trying to pick a location within the country, and would serve all areas equally.
I won't be participating in this challenge because I feel it is disingenuous to set my bonus location somewhere I am not at all familiar with. I hope you are working on other ways to support communities as well as other ways to encourage wayfarers to actively and accurately participate in reviewing.
I’ve done quite a number of reviews on that country. Allow me to voice my concerns sincerely:
So, before Niantic wanted to start the project, may I ask if the team had looked into the Reviewers’ concerns, and had them addressed?
Or, at least, anticipate the challenges ahead, after the incidents of this year’s unfortunate event of not supporting rural communities?
I understand the feeling and the need for people around the world to be able to enjoy something without barrier. However, that should not be the foundation of other’s happiness.
Truthfully speaking, we are lacking in assurance from Niantic that things will occur in proper, timely, honest, fair and with integrity manner.
Instead of creating events that creates more back logged with the system, wouldn’t it be more fruitful to pause, had issues and bugs all sorted out, before starting something?
Sweeping everything under carpet will only snowball into something even worst. So many people that are not paid anything have so much love for Niantic, that we tried so much to protect it.
It should be Niantic’s staff showing us their love for Niantic, even more than we do.
Trusting Niantic means setting yourself up for disappointment, failure, and frustration.* With little incentive to participate and no faith in the oversight, I’ll be sitting this out.
*For what it’s worth, I don’t necessarily fault the Wayfarer team for this, I fault corporate management for not giving the Wayfarer team the resources they need to run this arm of the company effectively, including technical support and including turning over the most important people on the team earlier in the year.
After attending those other events I won't do a thing on those in 2023.
Niantic clearly shows that they have not learned a bit from the previous car crashs.
That pretty much summarize what everyone will see for reviewing nominations here. Entrance gateways, place name signs, generic mass-produced statues and fountains.., all for the Pokestops in Pokemon GO.
By the way I haven't seen that one Ambassador from Bali..., how was he/she?
For reference this is a map of the population density in Indonesia. The purple circle is about the size of a normal bonus review area.
Thank you for saving my time by posting this. Maybe someome here can post number of Wayspots in each major islands (Sumatera, Jawa, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Papua)?
It looks like google has a fair about of recent streetview and the satellite images are decent so it should be easier than the India challenge and least! Most reviews in India I could only get to 3 stars "it could be there but I can't tell". I was looking at older streetview and the vegetation grows so fast! I'll have to keep that in mind when reviewing.
There were concerns raised above that some locals are not reviewing to the criteria. Yes, this can be a problem when you are just one reviewer trying to keep to the rules. The benefit of this global event is that there will be a massive influx of reviewers who do actually vote by the rules. The local cabals will be outnumbered by less biased reviewers and hopefully this will encourage more locals to vote properly after the event ends.
Well, if that means reviewers in my country didn't actually read any single thing:
Description mentions Pokemon GO.
Part of description that should be in supporting information, was included into main description.
Now I probably have an idea why did the whole abuse in Lombok Island happened...
India was a catastrophe. People there harassed me on Facebook because i told them that their contributions need improvement.
Random thoughts #1: as I've complained much earlier, some nominations here are still using third party photos. Mostly the photos are taken from uploaded photos in Google Maps so most of the time you have to check uploaded images of the locations in the Maps, especially if both main and supporting photos are just the same. Good for avoiding cooldowns by reviewing too fast, too!
However there's another twist, as some local reviewers here might 'blindly' accepting them. So between review following criteria and not gaining agreements, or accepting them for agreements but against criteria..., the choice are yours. (Well, you can use support chat to request third party photos removal from Wayspots, if that works.)
And that's for now, Happy New Year 2023 from Indonesia.
Considering the way these challenges are set up I don't think anyone should be participating with the goal of getting lots of agreements. Reviewing an area and a culture you are unfamiliar with that also has poor streetview/ satellite is very hard (as we learned from other challenges). If you want lots of agreements then just vote in areas you are familiar with and skip the challenges. The goal of these challenges is to help out countries that are struggling under a lack of reviewers/submitters and long backlogs. Vote by the real rules not the ones other people make up or say are the local ideas or you are just furthering the cycle of local abuse.
In the event you notice that a 3rd party photo got approved then you can report it using the wayfarer help chat and that photo will be removed from the waypoint. Same if you notice other abuse while reviewing. Often local reviewers are incentivized to not report abuse because they will loose local waypoints and be harassed by other local players. So the best way to help keep abuse down is for impartial reviewers to report whenever they see abuse.
Whatever happened to South Africa? I think I remember they announcing it with the brazillian challenge.
Anyone know which cities have a low number of waypoints compared to their populations? Looks like there are a few dense areas surrounded by much rural zones that could use some help.
For a country with a vast territorial area like Indonesia, it is difficult to have a small review range in the current bonus location size.
And while there is a sufficient density of street views in Java and Bali, the rest of the islands are pretty scarce.
In these cases, it would be nice to be able to see all of Indonesia, making it upgrade-worthy.
Well, I am not expecting any sort of prize for my contribution to the review, so I was thinking of keeping the PIN in the rarefied areas.
I look forward to seeing some good quality nominations around Halmahera Island and West Papua, where some good quality nominations will be sleeping before September 2015.
They enrich my mind.
If number of Wayspots is linearly proportional to number of populations in an area, then this article below may help:
But again, just as I said before try to pick bonus location outside Jawa and Bali.
Was hoping people forgot I did that lol
To be clear, it wasn't the ocean I picked for people reading ..... it just happened to be the empties bit of Brazil lol
Reviewers already inside a country can review that whole country (or rather the L6 cells that the countrys border are inside of). For this challenge, maybe they can tweak the bonus location have the same coverage?
IMHO, this should be done permanently for all low density nations...I'm trying to help out in Africa right now, but I most often have to set it to the capital and can not help out other places, no matter how big the other cities are. :/
This would make a huge difference for all wayfarer challenges and in general be a great idea to help rural areas in low waypoint dense countries! @NianticTintino-ING If you have access to any programmers for the upcoming Indonesia event please consider this. Since Indonesia is a spread out island country the current bonus review system will be not very effective.
You are right about that.
The current Wayfarer review system is flawed in that areas with low player density are left out.
Therefore, there are places where WAYSPOT candidates nominated prior to September 2015 are sleeping.
Random thoughts #2: based on this thread, I have to mention that not only the submitters here are nominating based on "What is it" category list, but most of them also can't differ between specific objects. Well, this behavior may be found in other countries as well.
For examples:
One more, sometimes submitters who play Pokemon GO are 'optimizing cells usage' by nominating individual objects of a series, like individual playground equipments, individual statues that are a part of a series, or signs of any locations/buildings, which the locations are already being the Wayspots.
Random thoughts #3: I belive this issue is happened everywhere all around the world, but safe pedestrian access is one of main issue here. Most of streets in Indonesia are designed to not have pedestrian walkway on the side of streets. Either village streets or countryside roads far from big cities, or streets within large residential properties like Pantai Indah Kapuk, at which the residents are expected to use own vehicles as main transportations.
As the result, most pedestrians have to walk on the grass or edge of the street if there is no pedestrian walkway available.