Awww, man! Is that why I can't use Upgrade next? 😄
It was set to 'On' in my Settings, which I didn't do, so I'm thinking that is the auto-setting. Turned it off now, as I like to prioritize my stuff myself, but I can't find what must have been upgraded automatically. So weird. My "Upgrade next" button is gone and there is just an "Upgrade" button, but that one is greyed out. Hmm...
I think every single one Explorer will agree that this is a great quality of life improvement! Thank you for listening to the community, Niantic folks.
Correct! You'll no longer need the Upgrade Next button. If you turn the setting off, then you will see the Upgrade button and then you can apply it to any nomination prior to it going into voting. I noticed you claimed that it's greyed out? Can you show me what you see?
@NianticTintino continuing the experiment I attempted to upgrade a nomination in queue and it assigned just fine (albeit one I didn't intend to upgrade).
If this is true, I guess there’s no point in reviewing; everything I currently want to upgrade is in voting. This is utterly mind boggling. They fix something simple we’ve been asking for for ages and end up making the feature unusable. Truly pathetic.
I'm sorry but this is such a BAD change that I am trying my best not to use every curse word I know. In the history of a company that has made a string of stupid decisions, this one might be the worst one I've seen yet.
I have 40 nominations In Queue and 43 things In Voting. I currently have 1 thing set to Upgrade Next. I have no intention of turning off automatic upgrades because there are plenty of times that I get close to earning an Upgrade and go to bed. By the time I wake up the next morning, I've earned my Upgrade, my Contribution has moved into voting and already been approved. When that happens, it can appear in GO that same day.
Now you're telling me that I have to be awake to click the button to hit Upgrade manually after I earn my upgrade.
And, oh, by the way, I'm screwed if I want to Upgrade a Contribution that has already moved into Voting? So I have NO CHOICE but to set everything to Hold until I want something to be Upgraded?
I live in an area where it takes things 12 - 18 months to go through natural voting. But the beauty of the old system was that I could Upgrade anything at any time despite its Voting status. Now I have to make a decision from the outset whether to let something take a full 18 months or Hold it until I Upgrade it?
That makes ZERO SENSE. You have crippled the system.
To continue from above, I had a whole plan laid out of the order in which I wanted to upgrade my contributions. But now that some of them are already in voting, I won't be able to upgrade them so I'm SOL and will have to wait more than a year to help my community. I found an area that had a lot of cool POI - enough to get a second gym in GO. So I'm working through upgrading them because they're all basically 5 star nominations that even the idiots who review upgrades can't reject (playground, map of walking trails, & a dog park). But, oh well, Niantic has decided that a nomination that's already in voting can't be upgraded so those people won't be getting a second gym for a year (or more).
You cannot make such a fundamental change to how things work without talking to SOME real person who uses Wayfarer for the purpose of improving an actual game. As much as y'all want to believe that WF is its own thing that exists outside of any single game, it's NOT. 99% of the people who participate in WF do so for the SOLE PURPOSE of improving one (or more) of the games they personally play.
Or you could really clog things up and resubmit them, put the resubmissions on hold, and then upgrade those when ready. Which is the monster that Niantic has irrationally decided to create.
@NianticTintino i thought things would be different with these new features now that we have ambassadors for feedback... but boy did you miss the mark. Please set up a system to test these so called "features" before you make changes that will upset everyone. I will personally not be reviewing until you fix this mess that you caused. @NianticAaron@NianticDanbocat@NianticAaron@NianticAaron@ace-ING
P.S. @NianticTintino your Boba and Tacos offer is being retracted until this is fixed as well.
Okay Niantic peeps. Don't make me eat my hat! I'm probably the last positive person left on the whole forum, and you are crushing my spirit. Implementing this feature while taking away the ability to set "upgrade next" or, more importantly, to upgrade something already in voting - if I understand the reports correctly - is not a step in the right direction. I'm afraid this is something I can't test myself as I review way more than I nominate, and always have upgrades piling up. But I really sympathize with folks who are in the opposite situation. If this is now "working as intended," let's go back to the drawing board please.
Right. I'm trying to talk myself down to focus on what needs to be done to fix this situation.
We have a toggle to Apply Upgrade Automatically.
When set to On: The current change means that the oldest nomination will be upgraded. This is not acceptable.
Requested change: Allow us to have the Upgrade Next button (maybe it's not available when the toggle is set to Off) so that we can control what automatically upgrades as soon as we achieve an upgrade.
When set to Off: The current change means that we can bank upgrades and apply them when we want. This is a welcome change for many. But for some baffling reason, this also changed our ability to Upgrade something that is already In Voting.
Requested change: Allow us to Upgrade (or Upgrade Next) a nomination that is In Queue or In Voting.
I have so many things in voting that I want to upgrade. :'(
Why would you not allow us to do this? Now if I nominate something and want to upgrade it I am going to have to put it on hold until I get an upgrade. Which is very annoying, but not half as annoying as finding out that I can't upgrade the few things nearest me that are already in voting. :'(
If this was really about letting us better manage our nominations, we'd actually be able to manage them. All the nominations I have in voting are now stuck for months or even years. And I can't just withdraw them and renominate. That cell and everything around it just simply blocked until they resolve.
Additionally, Niantic could change their formula for reviewing order, so no place on earth has an average wait longer than a month (upgraded) or two (not upgraded). Then upgrades would be nice, but not as life-changing as shaving a year off wait time.
In other words, nominations should be queued fairly - more-or-less FIFO (First In, First Out). It's madness that some places take days while others take years (200-700 times as long).
I agree. I don't mind helping rural areas to an extent, but the queue times are way, way, way out of balance.
I've started making connections in rural areas to help them get more POI because I can get things accepted without upgrades. What I've found is that there are things to nominate and there are people to nominate them. But the process is so confusing and such a time sink (and, frankly, requires an ability to write well) that they just haven't bothered with it. I found a person this week who is literally living next to 2 POI that can easily create a gym and they were thrilled to discover that. It's been there the whole time.
I'm tired of a system that caters to people who don't want anything to do with it while punishing the people who spend hours working on it every week.
Removing the ability to upgrade nominations in voting is a bad move. What’s the point of reviewing for upgrades if all of my nominations have already entered voting?
Removing the ability to choose which nomination to apply my next upgrade on, before I earn it, also sucks.
All due respect, but taking away the ability to upgrade a nomination that's already in voting is...very detrimental. Being able to store upgrades for later use is great, but this won't be very useful if nominations going into voting renders them impossible to upgrade. This change is also a major blindside to folks in major cities where the review time without upgrades is years long.
For reference, right now I have 10 nominations in voting. From oldest to newest, submitted during:
October 2020
November 2020
May 2021 (3 nominations)
September 2021
March 2022 (4 nominations)
For all I know, if I can't upgrade these, they may STILL be in voting come 2030. Unless something changes, at this point I either have to re-submit these, while having the older ones presumably clog up the ability to have newer nominations get into voting once upgraded, or just accept that all 10 are effectively a lost cause. This is not desirable.
That's also ignoring the issue that the one from November 2020 is now a duplicate, because someone else nominated the location after I did but used an upgrade on it before I could. But because it's in voting, I can't withdraw it or mark it as a duplicate myself. Using an upgrade on it (even if I could), would be a waste when there's a bunch of other not duplicate nominations still waiting.
So, if someone could re-enable the ability to apply upgrades to nominations in voting, and make it possible to mark your own in voting nominations as duplicate(s) to clear up space for others to go into voting, that would be greatly appreciated.
"then you can apply it to any nomination prior to it going into voting."
If this means we can no longer upgrade nominations in voting then
Wow!!! What a downgrade.
I submit in a rural areas at least once a year, I've 13 in voting from 2021, 6 in queue from Jan this year & 5 Appealed (2 2021 & 3 2022)
Now that we can no longer upgrade nominations in "voting" I'm 100% sure that I'll be waiting for the results of those 2021 rural nominations in 2023 or maybe till 2024 if we don't get any reviewing challenge.
I lost all the motivation to review after reading that upgrades can't be applied to "in voting" nominations,my nominations will be stuck in voting forever & I can't do anything about it.
I'm sorry but I AM DONE WITH REVIEWING.
I've no intrest in helping communities from big cities, which will get their nominations processed without my help anyway, while the players nominating in rural areas have to wait for years just to get the results.
1-2 years of waiting time is not acceptable, especially when people from big cities with lots of POIs get results in weeks/months.
This is what happens when Niantic fail to communicate properly.
So we now have something that is dreadful because users were not asked for feedback, and presumably little (?) real life resting.
If Niantic had said in a posting
we recognise that X is an issue
we plan to implement a change and give date.
this is what it aims to do
this is how it will change what you see / be able to do
can anyone foresee any issues.
I am a bit tired of having to discover changes by someone posting.
I have over 27 in voting ( some of which are duplicates that I can’t remove) and overall these are mainly from Spring/ Summer 2020.
i sometimes find new local things that I want to prioritise because they are interesting and will improve gameplay and don’t want to wait over 2 years to have either accepted or if necessary appealed. Sometimes as I just did last week I upgraded one that was in the old group to get it through.
Well this is dumb. Why remove our ability to upgrade things already in voting? Totally demotivational when I've had things in voting for YEARS. Bring back the ability to upgrade things currently in voting or I have no reason to continue reviewing.
I'm struggling a bit to get to post this reply, for some reason it keeps getting saved in Drafts when I hit Post Comment. It's an issue I get a lot in here, but today it's crazy. I finally deleted the draft and now hoping a whole new post will help. So sorry if I end up spamming the old post somehow... But this is actually quite annoying.
The greyed out Upgrade button:
Looks the same on nominations in voting, except they just have the grey button, not the Hold and Edit buttons.
You know when I saw this post I really thought that they got something right for once and that it would be nice to have a win for everyone. This seems like a problem that could have been easily avoided by having any idea how the user base actually used these features and it's concerning that Niantic is so out of step that they didn't consider it.
Comments
Finally!
edit: Omg noooooooooo nvm
This is a good change!
Now for the next QoL update... Optional dark mode on the forum when? 🤔🤣
Awww, man! Is that why I can't use Upgrade next? 😄
It was set to 'On' in my Settings, which I didn't do, so I'm thinking that is the auto-setting. Turned it off now, as I like to prioritize my stuff myself, but I can't find what must have been upgraded automatically. So weird. My "Upgrade next" button is gone and there is just an "Upgrade" button, but that one is greyed out. Hmm...
I think every single one Explorer will agree that this is a great quality of life improvement! Thank you for listening to the community, Niantic folks.
Yes—FINALLY. This is so long overdue, and has fallen on deaf ears for so long.
I continue to wonder why Niantic is so slow to acknowledge and respond to clearly better practices. Seriously, what is the problem?
Correct! You'll no longer need the Upgrade Next button. If you turn the setting off, then you will see the Upgrade button and then you can apply it to any nomination prior to it going into voting. I noticed you claimed that it's greyed out? Can you show me what you see?
Does this mean we won't be able to upgrade nominations already in voting?
...you can apply it to any nomination prior to it going into voting.
Was this wording intentional? I'm receiving an error when I try applying an Upgrade to a nomination already in voting.
And, yes, I have an upgrade available.
@NianticTintino continuing the experiment I attempted to upgrade a nomination in queue and it assigned just fine (albeit one I didn't intend to upgrade).
This is a VERY bad move if intentional.
If this is true, I guess there’s no point in reviewing; everything I currently want to upgrade is in voting. This is utterly mind boggling. They fix something simple we’ve been asking for for ages and end up making the feature unusable. Truly pathetic.
I have 3 nominations in voting since February, two from March, and two from April. Now I can't upgrade any of them!?!?
Once a nomination has been in voting for a month, Niantic should automatically apply an upgrade - without the nominator having to earn it.
But I'd rather have upgrades with the old two options (upgrade next or auto-applied) than lose the ability to upgrade in voting!
I'm sorry but this is such a BAD change that I am trying my best not to use every curse word I know. In the history of a company that has made a string of stupid decisions, this one might be the worst one I've seen yet.
I have 40 nominations In Queue and 43 things In Voting. I currently have 1 thing set to Upgrade Next. I have no intention of turning off automatic upgrades because there are plenty of times that I get close to earning an Upgrade and go to bed. By the time I wake up the next morning, I've earned my Upgrade, my Contribution has moved into voting and already been approved. When that happens, it can appear in GO that same day.
Now you're telling me that I have to be awake to click the button to hit Upgrade manually after I earn my upgrade.
And, oh, by the way, I'm screwed if I want to Upgrade a Contribution that has already moved into Voting? So I have NO CHOICE but to set everything to Hold until I want something to be Upgraded?
I live in an area where it takes things 12 - 18 months to go through natural voting. But the beauty of the old system was that I could Upgrade anything at any time despite its Voting status. Now I have to make a decision from the outset whether to let something take a full 18 months or Hold it until I Upgrade it?
That makes ZERO SENSE. You have crippled the system.
To continue from above, I had a whole plan laid out of the order in which I wanted to upgrade my contributions. But now that some of them are already in voting, I won't be able to upgrade them so I'm SOL and will have to wait more than a year to help my community. I found an area that had a lot of cool POI - enough to get a second gym in GO. So I'm working through upgrading them because they're all basically 5 star nominations that even the idiots who review upgrades can't reject (playground, map of walking trails, & a dog park). But, oh well, Niantic has decided that a nomination that's already in voting can't be upgraded so those people won't be getting a second gym for a year (or more).
You cannot make such a fundamental change to how things work without talking to SOME real person who uses Wayfarer for the purpose of improving an actual game. As much as y'all want to believe that WF is its own thing that exists outside of any single game, it's NOT. 99% of the people who participate in WF do so for the SOLE PURPOSE of improving one (or more) of the games they personally play.
Or you could really clog things up and resubmit them, put the resubmissions on hold, and then upgrade those when ready. Which is the monster that Niantic has irrationally decided to create.
Well, I already do that for Appeals since Appeals now take 6+ months!
@NianticTintino i thought things would be different with these new features now that we have ambassadors for feedback... but boy did you miss the mark. Please set up a system to test these so called "features" before you make changes that will upset everyone. I will personally not be reviewing until you fix this mess that you caused. @NianticAaron @NianticDanbocat @NianticAaron @NianticAaron @ace-ING
P.S. @NianticTintino your Boba and Tacos offer is being retracted until this is fixed as well.
Okay Niantic peeps. Don't make me eat my hat! I'm probably the last positive person left on the whole forum, and you are crushing my spirit. Implementing this feature while taking away the ability to set "upgrade next" or, more importantly, to upgrade something already in voting - if I understand the reports correctly - is not a step in the right direction. I'm afraid this is something I can't test myself as I review way more than I nominate, and always have upgrades piling up. But I really sympathize with folks who are in the opposite situation. If this is now "working as intended," let's go back to the drawing board please.
Right. I'm trying to talk myself down to focus on what needs to be done to fix this situation.
We have a toggle to Apply Upgrade Automatically.
When set to On: The current change means that the oldest nomination will be upgraded. This is not acceptable.
Requested change: Allow us to have the Upgrade Next button (maybe it's not available when the toggle is set to Off) so that we can control what automatically upgrades as soon as we achieve an upgrade.
When set to Off: The current change means that we can bank upgrades and apply them when we want. This is a welcome change for many. But for some baffling reason, this also changed our ability to Upgrade something that is already In Voting.
Requested change: Allow us to Upgrade (or Upgrade Next) a nomination that is In Queue or In Voting.
I have so many things in voting that I want to upgrade. :'(
Why would you not allow us to do this? Now if I nominate something and want to upgrade it I am going to have to put it on hold until I get an upgrade. Which is very annoying, but not half as annoying as finding out that I can't upgrade the few things nearest me that are already in voting. :'(
If this was really about letting us better manage our nominations, we'd actually be able to manage them. All the nominations I have in voting are now stuck for months or even years. And I can't just withdraw them and renominate. That cell and everything around it just simply blocked until they resolve.
Please roll back these changes or fix them.
Additionally, Niantic could change their formula for reviewing order, so no place on earth has an average wait longer than a month (upgraded) or two (not upgraded). Then upgrades would be nice, but not as life-changing as shaving a year off wait time.
In other words, nominations should be queued fairly - more-or-less FIFO (First In, First Out). It's madness that some places take days while others take years (200-700 times as long).
I agree. I don't mind helping rural areas to an extent, but the queue times are way, way, way out of balance.
I've started making connections in rural areas to help them get more POI because I can get things accepted without upgrades. What I've found is that there are things to nominate and there are people to nominate them. But the process is so confusing and such a time sink (and, frankly, requires an ability to write well) that they just haven't bothered with it. I found a person this week who is literally living next to 2 POI that can easily create a gym and they were thrilled to discover that. It's been there the whole time.
I'm tired of a system that caters to people who don't want anything to do with it while punishing the people who spend hours working on it every week.
One step forward, two steps back.
Removing the ability to upgrade nominations in voting is a bad move. What’s the point of reviewing for upgrades if all of my nominations have already entered voting?
Removing the ability to choose which nomination to apply my next upgrade on, before I earn it, also sucks.
All due respect, but taking away the ability to upgrade a nomination that's already in voting is...very detrimental. Being able to store upgrades for later use is great, but this won't be very useful if nominations going into voting renders them impossible to upgrade. This change is also a major blindside to folks in major cities where the review time without upgrades is years long.
For reference, right now I have 10 nominations in voting. From oldest to newest, submitted during:
October 2020
November 2020
May 2021 (3 nominations)
September 2021
March 2022 (4 nominations)
For all I know, if I can't upgrade these, they may STILL be in voting come 2030. Unless something changes, at this point I either have to re-submit these, while having the older ones presumably clog up the ability to have newer nominations get into voting once upgraded, or just accept that all 10 are effectively a lost cause. This is not desirable.
That's also ignoring the issue that the one from November 2020 is now a duplicate, because someone else nominated the location after I did but used an upgrade on it before I could. But because it's in voting, I can't withdraw it or mark it as a duplicate myself. Using an upgrade on it (even if I could), would be a waste when there's a bunch of other not duplicate nominations still waiting.
So, if someone could re-enable the ability to apply upgrades to nominations in voting, and make it possible to mark your own in voting nominations as duplicate(s) to clear up space for others to go into voting, that would be greatly appreciated.
"then you can apply it to any nomination prior to it going into voting."
If this means we can no longer upgrade nominations in voting then
Wow!!! What a downgrade.
I submit in a rural areas at least once a year, I've 13 in voting from 2021, 6 in queue from Jan this year & 5 Appealed (2 2021 & 3 2022)
Now that we can no longer upgrade nominations in "voting" I'm 100% sure that I'll be waiting for the results of those 2021 rural nominations in 2023 or maybe till 2024 if we don't get any reviewing challenge.
I lost all the motivation to review after reading that upgrades can't be applied to "in voting" nominations,my nominations will be stuck in voting forever & I can't do anything about it.
I'm sorry but I AM DONE WITH REVIEWING.
I've no intrest in helping communities from big cities, which will get their nominations processed without my help anyway, while the players nominating in rural areas have to wait for years just to get the results.
1-2 years of waiting time is not acceptable, especially when people from big cities with lots of POIs get results in weeks/months.
This is what happens when Niantic fail to communicate properly.
So we now have something that is dreadful because users were not asked for feedback, and presumably little (?) real life resting.
If Niantic had said in a posting
we recognise that X is an issue
we plan to implement a change and give date.
this is what it aims to do
this is how it will change what you see / be able to do
can anyone foresee any issues.
I am a bit tired of having to discover changes by someone posting.
I have over 27 in voting ( some of which are duplicates that I can’t remove) and overall these are mainly from Spring/ Summer 2020.
i sometimes find new local things that I want to prioritise because they are interesting and will improve gameplay and don’t want to wait over 2 years to have either accepted or if necessary appealed. Sometimes as I just did last week I upgraded one that was in the old group to get it through.
Bangs head on desk
deep sigh
and off to take a timeout from reviewing
Well this is dumb. Why remove our ability to upgrade things already in voting? Totally demotivational when I've had things in voting for YEARS. Bring back the ability to upgrade things currently in voting or I have no reason to continue reviewing.
You tried to fix something and made it worse.
I'm struggling a bit to get to post this reply, for some reason it keeps getting saved in Drafts when I hit Post Comment. It's an issue I get a lot in here, but today it's crazy. I finally deleted the draft and now hoping a whole new post will help. So sorry if I end up spamming the old post somehow... But this is actually quite annoying.
The greyed out Upgrade button:
Looks the same on nominations in voting, except they just have the grey button, not the Hold and Edit buttons.
Yeah, that seems daft, you can't upgrade in voting submissions, like, who thought that was the right idea?
You know when I saw this post I really thought that they got something right for once and that it would be nice to have a win for everyone. This seems like a problem that could have been easily avoided by having any idea how the user base actually used these features and it's concerning that Niantic is so out of step that they didn't consider it.
Update new features today. But the next upgrade item has been selected before but cannot be upgraded. Please fix it !