A year of challenges and rewards - Discussion Thread
PkmnTrainerJ-ING
Posts: 4,833 Ambassador
As the news section is not open for comments, thought it was worth having a discussion thread for it.
PkmnTrainerJ-ING
Posts: 4,833 Ambassador
As the news section is not open for comments, thought it was worth having a discussion thread for it.
Comments
I’m sure it’s been difficult for the Wayfarer team (not as difficult as it’s been for the Wayfarers trudging through the literal garbage nominations though) but none of that seems too amazing.
I don’t care that Pokémon GO now has a Wayfarer badge. Wayfarer+ has had Dark Mode for ages. Great that there’s now Russian & Thai support. Nothing else really stands out to me.
I'll add my comments from the list here:
The Korea and Poland events, was there much transparency there? I saw the post about they bumped everyone to tier 2 rewards, but I would of loved to see the actual internal numbers (how many were accepted, declined and dupes, although more interestingly would of been how many were Redacted subs and what % of the backlog was cleared)
Forum Launch - Yeah okay, needs more moderation though, the pogo whining is ----ing unbelievable and I hate coming here because of how many threads are just "omgz wheres mah pokestop gone?!?!?"
Forum link in Wayfarer - 10 second job to add a link to a HTML page, completely irrelevant
Wayfarer Medal in PoGo - It's alright, the numbers could of been a bit higher considering Recon is 5k for Platinum, but as usual they gave it easy mode.
Image Reviews - Kinda cool, much easier process, I've had better results with Wayfarer image results than I did with NiaOps reviewing them.
End-of-Queue message - Lies, E17 and the whole of east London says otherwise.
Updated rating bar - Useless, didn't change anything, people dropping rating still don't know why.
New criteria page - Meh, it's alright but still needs work, there's more that needs adding to it.
Dark Mode - Cool, the 1 good thing to see Nia pulling from WF+
More Languages - Useful to those specific regions I guess
Showcase - Still rubbish, the highlights I get are 1 sentence descriptions that are complete garbage, I've seen other submissions with much more effort.
Training quiz - Still too easy
Categories List - 50/50, it's alright but confusing as people use it to say "this is eligible" when it really isn't.
Rejection reasons - Useless, people still pick the incorrect rejections because there's no punishment or downside to doing so, so it makes 0 difference.
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Overall Wayfarer is still OPR but is nowhere near adapted to deal with the numbers of (garbage) submissions coming from the PoGo side with the insane amounts of begging for pokestops and dealing with the backlog.
I'll just add in a small section of comments:
Poland and Korea event - Was there much (if any) transparency there? I'd like to see the internal numbers (accepted/decline/dupe) and how many of them were Redacted vs Prime, with what % of the backlog was cleared.
End-of-Queue message - Complete lies, E17 and the whole of east London says otherwise.
Showcase - Still rubbish, I've seen much better stuff than then 1-line description stuff I see on my showcase, minimal effort submissions with little value of anything.
Can’t say I’m impressed by any of it. Good for Russian and Thai support. I don’t use dark mode for anything so that’s irrelevant.
The polish event was a failure, not that I was able to participate, the Korean one could have been interesting but was unfortunately cancelled.
Let’s not mention the exceptional amounts of coal and abusive subs in the system, I went through and old screenshot and before PoGo subs I was on a ratio of 9:1 accepts to rejects, now I’m on 3:2. So many subs of people just begging for “moar stopz” or “this grit bin is a great place for a pokerstop as trainers can meet up and put a lure down”.
The network is in shambles and nothing seems to be done to those who are subbing and reviewing against the criteria.
The network is Niantic’s most valuable asset, and allowing so much abuse to go unregulated is only going to be to the detriment of Niantic and the awesome games it makes.
I just play Ingress and PoGo, and am only being honest to help these awesome games contribute to thrive, and for the network to only contain genuine high-quality points of interest to discover, rather than people’s lounge and local bus stops.
A Few hickups? The system is broken, and inoperable.
We told you where the system is broken, but you do not repair it
Good point about Pokémon GO & Ingress.
I had totally forgotten that there’s still a Wayfarer related issues with POI not syncing to Harry Potter: Wizards Unite which doesn’t seem to have been looked at really.
Agreed with the above.
March: Wayfarer community forum launch!
^This was a great step forward
May: Adding link to Forum in Wayfarer
Why is this considered as a notable achievement, for an entire month? This is literally a two second job of just adding a hyperlink
Everything else is fine and mostly it's pretty lacklustre. Where is the drive to fix the system? Educate reviewers and nominators? Bring people back to reviewing?
2020 saw a huge rise in the number of reviews due to a mix of people coming from PoGo in late 2019 and also due to being stuck at home due to COVID-19 lockdowns. However, around April/May masses of people stopped reviewing entirely, due to numerous system bugs (sudden random red rating, perpetual cooldowns, nothing to review, etc.) and the constant literal garbage that kept coming up to review. Yet Niantic does nothing.
At the start of the year, I would do 100-200 reviews a day. Now I'm lucky to do 10 a week. Wayfarer has turned into a clogged up broken system and Niantic's inaction had led to it never being worthwhile to review, let alone nominate again - some of us want to, but the way things are handled means it either cannot be done or it's simply not worth it.
Well done, COVID-19 wasn't the only worst thing about the year, but Wayfarer was too.
I hope @NianticCasey-ING and the team realise that the stats reveal that in **14 months** every single Wayfarer averaged a little over 32 reviews between them (around an hour of reviewing, depending on the subs).
This is disgraceful and it's no wonder review times have exponentially increased globally. During Wayfarer VFS we manage at least 10 times this number.
Another kick in the teeth for me. And I've still not had a response from Niantic about my 18 month old submission.
A quick calculation shows that the average reviewer did 32 reviews this year. 32. That's not good enough and its no wonder some places have huge queues. Niantic, what are you going to do to encourage more people to review?
From talking to people the main reason they stop reviewing is because there are so many awful submissions in the system. What are you going to reduce this?
12 million reviews by 370,000 explorers is a worrying number. That works out on average at about 32.4 reviews PER EXPLORER. In that case, I can't believe that the backlog in any country is completely cleared.
Like @TheAuraStorm-ING and others have pointed out, there's nothing about the updates that really stand. Great for Russian/Thai support but overall the system doesn't really seem to have changed a great. Like great that there's been changes to the rejection reasons and the criteria but there's still a lot of very bad nominations that are being made and very little action being taken against abusive submissions.
While Ingress First Saturdays have been virtual, the UK Wayfarer community run an IFS every month, in addition to the usual method of collecting and measuring stats, the POCs ask for a screenshot of agents’ Wayfarer home page, showing the number of reviews before and after.
I didn’t POC last month (December), but did in November, there was about 18 agents who submitted their numbers, and they completed about 2000 reviews, averaging around 100 per agent. This is over 2 hours.
As the others have pointed out, an average of 32 reviews per wayfinder is pathetic, to put bluntly. I don’t believe people should be forced to review, and can’t imagine anyone forced to will review properly, but more need to be done to stop people just submitting, people who just submit aren’t helping the review process, there needs to be a bit of give and take.
I’d suggest reducing the number of agreements required to earn an upgrade, to say 50? As an arbitrary number. Having more unique reviewers, rather than fewer dedicated reviewers would speed up the whole process and may possibly clear known “limbo zones”, like that bizarre spot of North East London that has candidates in review after 14 months. Niantic is still yet to look into that.
As a Korean the S. Korea event was a disaster. We had to get in touch with vanguards because the wayfarer lag was super duper slow-almost unavailable to review at all. I used my bonus location for the first time because of that.
Why are Myanmar & North Korea blue?
In theory N. Korea should not have access to Niantic games
They need to do something with Africa.
There are few reports in this forum that the region are lack of reviewers yet many nominations were nominated, especially in the West Africa. One thing I remember is, there is a country in that region that only has 1 Wayspot for the entire country!
Your comment made me wonder what Africa was like.
Saint Helena and Ascension Island only has a single portal, which is odd given the sports history and history with being Napolean Bonaparte's location of exile. You would think there would be more, but perhaps it's just not seen in Wayfarer.
On the mainland, Maritania has a total of two wayspots (very far from each other). Looking around, wayspots are generally very few and far between. Definitely if anywhere needs a boost in reviewers, it's Africa!
Doing ny beat need help like crazy
Cooll thread, lots of -ING)
This year was the year of trainers. Next year should be a year of agents?)
Can someone tell me if I can start a poll? I tried, after tapping on "Save" - this happened:
One more, since the Go Beyond update why Platinum Wayfarer badge in PoGO only need 1500 agreements (compared from Gold medal that only need 1000 agreements), while every other Platinum badges in the game need even a harder requirements?
I understand if most people don't want to review in Wayfarer by many reasons, but isn't 1500 agreements just like, easier to achieve (apart from facing too many cooldowns and/or no nomination to review)?
TLDR for myself; Wayfarer team and I operate in different realities.
The Wayfarer Team isnt really a team. as NianticCasey pointed out, theres someone from accounting, someone that does tech, someone from PR, someone that brings the bagels, someone that does the dishes.
As i understand, they get together once in a while (presumably now with Teams/Zoom) and discuss things.
There is no way that everyone did 32 reviews.
370.000 peeps did the test, and made it. about 320.000 did 2-3 reviews, and then moved on with life.
Id say about 49.000 people do reviews on a regulary weekly base.
About 1.000 people will be the ones that did the majority of those 12 Million reviews. I did 10k since June 2019.
That average of 32 reviews provides the answer about why so many people hit the "nothing more to review". Of course that's not the real average of the people that usually review, but as soon as you start reviewing a little ahead of the real average you're more likely to stay ahead of other reviewers in your region and you hit the end of the queue of the nominations that can be reviewed.
thats not it.
I think you are misinterpreting things a bit. Anyone who submits a nomination automatically creates a Wayfarer account. So the 370,000 number is a reflection of how many accounts that have submitted at least one nomination. It doesn't mean that 370,000 people logged into the website to review. And even if you want to claim that 370,000 accounts are solely from logged into into the website, a significant number only do so to track their nominations. And then there is the not so small portion of the remaining that failed the Reviewer Test...twice. So that further diminishes how many of those accounts are reviewing.
One more challenge for me: understand wayfinders.
¿Resistance? wayfinders changed location of legendary portal in Chornobyl - Exterminator. Just to drop existing links.
This is hypothesis. Maybe Niantic can tell for sure?
IMHO biggest accident of the year in Wayfarer.
@NianticCasey-ING
You called it "Improved end-of-queue messaging". I think that was nowhere before stated.
Our social media put this message in a row with the 4h and 24h bans for reviewing in a too fast way or with repeating patterns. The reason is simple: there are people from my region, who get these message. But evry active submitter from my region should have a big queue of candidates, that is labled "in queue", and that for months, or years. This should be impossible, if that is really a "end of queue" message.
So we saw the connection more with the temporary bans, instead of the joke of the end of a queue....
So again: Please check your wayfarer code mess. And do something against dead cells, or how your team calls it dry voting zones. Our region doesnt have a lack of reviewers - its simply the problem of your prioritization algorithm!
The problem with the dead regions is still untouched, and it gets worse and worse. My thread to this topic is still highlighting a ongoing problem .....
https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/6453/waiting-times-and-the-motivational-problem#latest
I dont want to count my own submissions, that are stuck "in queue" for lots of months. It would be dozens, possibly over hundred on both accounts together....
Counting them would make me only sad and waste my time ...
also, i just wanted to add that, if i may speak for everyone on the forums:
Please do not add anything new to wayfarer. Concentrate on fixing the system.
The Spring/Summer Roadmap should only contain Fixes.
This is a technical note, but the West Bank is incorrectly marked as a body of water in the world map in Casey's post. 😅