Why is my Wayfinder rating going down?

jaxtoon63-PGOjaxtoon63-PGO Posts: 15 ✭✭
edited April 2021 in General Discussion

I'm curious why my Wayfinder rating has been dropping out of the higher levels lately. I was Great for a long while, then sat in Good for about a week, and just checked today and found it at Fair. What decides this rating?

Is it dropping because my reviewing choices are not agreeing with others'? In that case I'd be really confused, as I follow the guidelines very well and many of my decisions, especially rejections, seem to be no-brainers.

Or is this rating simply how many reviews you are doing per day or week or something, in which case simply reviewing more nominations will bring it back up?

My only other guess would be that maybe my ratio of reviews to agreements is low, in which case should I slow down reviewing so that others have time to agree with my decisions and bring my rating back up before it sinks low enough?


Thanks!

Tagged:

Comments

  • Theisman-INGTheisman-ING Posts: 1,001 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Your rating is based on 2 things

    1) How you rate submissions against your fellow reviewers

    2) How you rate a submission that has been already reviewed by Niantic.

    For point 1, the more times you disagree with the end result of a submission with other reviewers the more your rating will continue to drop.

    For your rating to improve, you would need to be reaching more agreements than disagreements with the end review result.

    For Point 2 (and this is part fact part speculation) Niantic did previously confirm that they put "honeypot" submissions in to ensure that people are reviewing correctly.

    It has been speculated that should a reviewer rate one of these submissions against how Niantic would rate it then your rating will significantly drop i.e. from great to poor straight away.

    As I say this is speculation as Niantic have, understandably, not given in depth details on how the raiting system works, in order to prevent people gaming the system.

    To improve your rating, you would need to review more submissions and be in agreement with the review consensus with your fellow reviewers.

    Your rating is not based on the number of reviews you do per day per week etc. Only on the outcome agreement/ disagreement.

    Also you should not worry about the Approved / Rejected number of submissions reviewed to total reviews ratio. That all depends on the type of nominations you receive, the area you are in etc.

    Its quite possible to be in great and yet aprove less than half of the submissions you have reviewed.

  • Theisman-INGTheisman-ING Posts: 1,001 ✭✭✭✭✭

    I would also add theres, no need to wait on "other reviewers catching up"

    As its based on the end result of reviews you have done, if a submission is still being reviewed then it doesn't have any effect on your rating, only once it has reached an end consensus will it matter.

  • Thamesius-PGOThamesius-PGO Posts: 19 ✭✭

    Reviewing a lot at once can also make it drop temporarily until those reviews are finished in the voting process as your % of agreements vs total reviews will go down

  • Thamesius-PGOThamesius-PGO Posts: 19 ✭✭

    then why did mine go down, but once i stopped reviewing my % is going up as more aggreements come through.

  • NorthSeaPoet-INGNorthSeaPoet-ING Posts: 895 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Probably because you didn't get enough agreements for a while which caused it to drop, so once you gained enough agreements afterwards, it likely boosted your rating again.

  • jaxtoon63-PGOjaxtoon63-PGO Posts: 15 ✭✭

    Okay, thank you! I guess I'm confused that a lot of mine aren't ending up not agreeing in that case, then. Like I said, I've been sticking to the guidelines quite well, so I guess I'll just be more careful with how I rate stuff.

    So, does this rating have any consequences? As in like does it have a bearing on like how fast one's own nominations go through or anything like that? Or would being a 'Poor' wayfinder lead to temporary bans or anything?? Just trying to make sure I'm not going to incur any penalties for some reason. Thanks.

  • Pollaryss-PGOPollaryss-PGO Posts: 42 ✭✭

    The number of agreements received while you're Good or Great appears in PoGo and Ingress.

  • Theisman-INGTheisman-ING Posts: 1,001 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Poor rating doesn't lead to a ban on Wayfarer, it also has absolutely no effect on your own submissions.

    However it does have two effects for yourself.

    1) Any review you do while in poor has no effect on the end consensus of the nomination, your review is recorded but will not be used to determine if the submission is to be accepted or not.

    What you are essentially doing while reviewing in a poor rating is just proving your ability to review correctly. Any agreements that you make are used soley to improve your own rating, and will not be used to determine the submission outcome.

    Should your reviewers, while in poor, match the consensus outcome then after x number of reviews your rating will improve, and your reviews will once again be used in the consensus outcome.

    Should your reviewers continue to differ, then you will remain in a poor rating until such time yours and your fellow reviewers decisions begin and then continue to match.

    I can't say how many reviews are needed as this is a Niantic internal secret. However the current guesses are about 200 reviews in agreement to move from poor to great.

    2) Any review in poor will not lead to an increase in your agreement count for badges in either PoGo or Ingress, they will only start tracking again once you are out of the poor rating

  • MacAllyster-INGMacAllyster-ING Posts: 1 ✭✭

    With more than 30.000 revisions and over 60% agreements I am stuck on "Fair". How can we change that? Does anybody know?

  • Mormegil71-INGMormegil71-ING Posts: 202 ✭✭✭

    One way of changing it is joining one of the organized efforts in low density areas by setting your bonus location there. As they are near virgin territory, what you get are most often very good nominations which everyone agrees upon, and by that your own rating improves as well.

    There are a number of such already in African countries, and one is starting up now, in Iraq. Suggested bonus location for that one is Al Suwaira, southeast of Bagdad. There are active submitters, a messenger chat, and most nominations are made in english, I'm told. I'd join it if my BL wasn't set already.

  • Elijustrying-INGElijustrying-ING Posts: 5,482 Ambassador

    @Theisman-ING

    1) Any review you do while in poor has no effect on the end consensus of the nomination, your review is recorded but will not be used to determine if the submission is to be accepted or not.

    Can you please provide proof that it is totally discounted?

    The comments I have seen from Niantic staff use phrases along the lines of - it has a lower weighting, not that it has zero input.

    I’m also not sure that what you are describing as to the effect or otherwise of cases reviewed but not yet having reached consensus is accurate. I have not read anything definitive from Niantic and it does fit with my experience or some others that I have seen.

    Of course if there was openness we would all clear on what was happening and why. This would in turn enable people to have clear guidance as to how to regain “great” status. In the meantime we can only speculate and experiment.

  • Elijustrying-INGElijustrying-ING Posts: 5,482 Ambassador

    @MacAllyster-ING

    This was my methodology when something went wrong and I dropped down. It worked for me but whether it’s more generally applicable I don’t know.

    The thinking behind it came from my interpretation of comments made at the time, and relates to trying to have a recent history of agreements. There was a change and few local people were reviewing.

    I started by doing nothing but tracking agreements as they came through. Progress was very slow.

    So I restarted reviewing (keeping careful track of what I was doing) but very slowly. Only doing 2 or 3. Cherry picking those I was reviewing to be non contentious so very obvious 5* or 1*. Anything with any hint of doubt I would skip or simply stop at that point. I also focussed on ones that were not local. Rural or distant locations. These would either be fast tracked or upgrades. The logic being that these would reach agreement in a couple of days. This would mean current rate of agreements was very high.

    It took about 10 days but I was back and another day or so to be fully back to the top, with less than 20 reviews. It didn’t matter that my votes were not counting much as these were ones with a high degree of exposure.

    As I said no idea if this is just coincidence (it did work for a friend but that is still too small a sample size) or something that works with the programming. 🤷‍♀️

  • Hosette-INGHosette-ING Posts: 3,469 ✭✭✭✭✭

    @Elijustrying-ING We know that there's a reduced impact. We don't know if it's reduced all the way to zero or not, and Niantic probably isn't going to tell us that.

    I'm reasonably certain that reviews that haven't reached consensus don't impact your rating... if that was the case then it would be 100% certain that new reviewers would immediately drop to poor. However, it's easy to see how there could be sequencing variations that would cause a rating to go down temporarily. Imagine you did 100 reviews and then stopped. It's possible that the first 30 to resolve would all be disagreements but the 70 that came after would be agreements. If that happened then your rating could drop and then bounce back up again without you doing any additional reviewing. That's an extreme contrived example and it's never going to break that clearly in practice but it's certainly possible that randomness could cause a bunch of disagreements to come in earlier than agreements and could temporarily impact your rating.

  • Theisman-INGTheisman-ING Posts: 1,001 ✭✭✭✭✭

    I'll see if I can find it, I believe it was on the ingress forums before Wayfarer was separated to its own forums.

Sign In or Register to comment.