Hello,
I have a request that has been pending for 5 months. Is this normal?
When a request is denied, we receive the information very quickly, but for other requests, it’s frustrating. We don’t know if they will be accepted, and even when they are, there’s no guarantee they will be included in the game.
@Bofi thanks for contributing to wayfarer. The time to resolve submissions is highly dependent on the area and the number of reviewers there. 5 months sounds like a lot but there are people with older submissions, in this case I would not yet be too worried. I see that you applied an upgrade, how long ago did you apply that?
I think it was done automatically.
But as I mentioned earlier, it’s frustrating because we have no information on the progress. We should be able to access requests from all over the world. There was indeed an event a few weeks ago where I saw requests from Japan, Germany, and the USA. Why not continue like that?
The better the player’s reputation, the more they should be able to vote globally each day.
Ah okay don’t you have a rough estimate of when the upgrade was applied, because you would expect those to resolve within weeks?
Regarding wayfarer challenges those are indeed great to help reduce backlog but are also temporary. As you can imagine reviewing local nominations also helps motivate people that they are actually contributing to some area that they might actually visit.
The ones that were rejected quickly were probably decisions by Niantic’s ML (machine learning ai) model. Those emails will say the decision was by “our team” rather than the community and they usually come around 20-24 hours after the nomination was made but that time can vary if upload later was used. ML can also accept nominations.
Pokemon Go uses S2 cells to determine which accepted Wayspots are added to that game. A good article about that is here: https://pokemongohub.net/post/article/comprehensive-guide-s2-cells-pokemon-go/
I always recommend turning OFF automatically apply upgrades in settings. The default is ON. I would rather chose which nomination I want to use an upgrade on rather that having to mark something “Upgrade Next” or have it apply to the oldest one.
Five months does not seem to be a long time to me fwiw. It used to take much longer in my area if I did not apply an upgrade.
I am not in favor of permanent worldwide reviewing. There are too many wayspots that require local or regional understanding to be accepted. If every submitter was perfect at describing their nomination and every reviewer was thoughtful about reviewing, it could work. Unfortunately, too many people don’t think deeply about something novel they are presented with and reach for a rejection reason. On top of that, far too many people don’t actually understand the criteria or the point of Wayfarer. While Challenges help reduce the backlog, they also increase the need for appeals.
