Frustration with Nominations Moving to NIA Voting After Being in Community Voting

[V1sionGrid]

Hi everyone and the Wayfarer team ,

I just wanted to share some frustration that’s been building up over the past few weeks.

Lately, a lot of nominations that have already entered Community Voting end up being moved to NIA Review after several days or weeks. As someone who reviews actively, this is really frustrating for two main reasons:

1. We don’t get agreements for those nominations. Once they go to NIA Review, we lose out on that potential agreement, which affects our stats and makes it harder to earn upgrades.
2. The time and effort feel a little wasted. We take time to review each nomination carefully, and when those are taken over by NIA, it feels like our work doesn’t really matter that much.

I know that because of the split, there was more pressure to resolve as many nominations as possible. Now it seems like the NIA team has more time or resources to step in again. It even looks like the system might automatically push a portion of nominations into NIA Review from time to time.

The problem is, this seems to hit slower regions the hardest. In areas where nominations are resolved within 1 or 2 days, most reviewers still get their agreements. But in regions where things take longer, nominations often sit in Community Voting for a while, only to get moved to NIA just before a decision would’ve come through. So all that effort ends up feeling wasted, with no recognition or reward for the reviewers involved.

I want to be honest here: I love reviewing. It was part of my daily routine because I genuinely enjoy it — it’s fun, interesting, and I liked contributing. But I’m no longer willing to keep investing time and energy if I’m not being fairly compensated for it. And I’m not just speaking for myself — I believe this situation is affecting a lot of reviewers, especially in regions with slower resolution times.

I know that upgrades aren’t as necessary at the moment, and in general, it’s actually a good thing that some nominations go into NIA Review to ensure faster resolution times. But I still hope you can see where I’m coming from. Right now, the balance between the time we invest and the compensation we receive just isn’t there.

I really hope something can be done. Maybe:

• Reviewers can still get agreement credit even if a nomination ends up in NIA Review after being in Community Voting
  or
• Once a nomination has entered Community Voting, it should stay there and not be pulled out

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope this feedback helps lead to some changes that respect the effort reviewers put into supporting Wayfarer at this time.

Best regards

[AMG7070]

Just wanted to share my opinion with this topic, but I have noticed too that my nominations who are in queue or in voting get taken over by Niantic reviewing them. There is a consistent time for me, if a nomination has not been decided on after 5 days it gets taken over by Niantic, at least for me, even when my nominations are already in voting.

I have also noticed my upgrade counter going up slower, I review about 150 nominations everyday and usually after 5 days I get around 90-120 agreements, but thst has now dropped to 60-80. Might be that my reviewing is getting a little rusty or it takes longer, but just as another point to notice for me.

[V1sionGrid]

Exactly. I recently changed my bonus location and suspected that something was off. However, after talking to friends who also submit nominations, I noticed an interesting pattern: in several cases, I reviewed around 15 of their nominations, and a few days later, 12 of them went into Niantic Voting. So I’m quite sure that’s why my agreement rate dropped to around 30–40% over the past few weeks — if not even lower…

At first, I genuinely thought something was wrong with how I was reviewing in my new bonus location. But it seems we’re simply losing a large number of agreements due to the issue mentioned above. I’m about 90% certain that agreements are lost when nominations enter NIA (In-house) Voting. If that’s not the case, I’d really appreciate some clarification.

[V1sionGrid]

They are actually not in-game friends — I know them from local Telegram groups. Anyway, I’m looking for an official answer, not speculation. I just want to highlight the issue that a few active reviewers are currently experiencing.

[SlimboyFat71]

As a suggestion to Niantic, maybe voting should not be sent to Friends of the submitter unless it struggles to get enough reviews without them…

• Goes to Emily.
• Sent to Reviews but blocks friends of the Submitter.
• Sent to Friends of the Submitter.
• Sent for Internal Review.

This could also make it harder for Voting Rings to work.
If general reviewers are voting to Reject but their aren’t enough so it goes to friends and they all Accept???

Not sure if they get sent to in game friends so ignore if above is incorrect…

[V1sionGrid]

This is speculation and has nothing to do with the issue I’m pointing out. I review a lot, and it’s normal to see nominations from certain people. I don’t even know who submitted which nomination — and I don’t care, because I review very strictly by the criteria. I don’t let it affect me even if it’s a local Wayfinder I know. And like I stated above, I’m not friends with my local Wayfinders in-game.

[SlimboyFat71]

@V1sionGrid

not speculation

Niantic do not usually state the process for voting as this info could be used to “game the system”.

Suggestions as given by pokemaster4u2 could get others to realise that is what is happenning to them. This “player” gained data could figure out the mechanics ourselves.

[cyndiepooh]

I also have examples of Niantic pulling things from community review, so it isn’t just your new area:

I didn’t notice the five day thing because I had it on hold.

[SlimboyFat71]

As stated, not speculation, just a suggestion.

I was not meaning to imply this is what was happenning to you, sorry if it came across that way.

[V1sionGrid]

All fine! Thanks for your input and suggestion to Wayfarer with this idea. I should read things twice before replying. My bad

[V1sionGrid]

So, two more of my nominations have entered Niantic Voting. There indeed seems to be a pattern where nominations progress after about five days, as previously mentioned. One nomination hadn’t reached community voting yet because it was in close proximity to another that was already in voting, leading to a proximity block.

Definitely waiting for some changes or statements. This is great for submitters, but very frustrating for reviewers.

[DTrain2002]

I’ll give my opinions of what I think about all of this, as I see it a little differently than others.

In the past, staff confirmed that nominations do get pulled from time to time for quality control reasons, making sure that ML is doing its job. Another thing I have noticed is that if some of my submissions still in queue or in voting for a few weeks, they then get reviewed by staff, so it’s possible that it’s done to help keep the queue done in certain areas where there aren’t many reviewers.

Most of my edits used to sit for months before being resolved, as I feel many reviewers in my area (besides myself) don’t like doing edit reviews, even though they’re easy, so they skip them. My edits tend to go into voting for a few weeks now, and eventually resolved by staff. Most, but not all, are approved, and it could be that staff is looking at the previous community votes to make these decisions, as well as doing a review themselves to make sure that the community is also voting correctly.

When ML was put into place, yes, some worried about the agreements, but there still seems to be a good number of reviews to do and get agreements on. I’m still getting agreements at the same rate that I have been getting them at, so having really noticed much of an issue with staff doing reviews causing issues for agreements.

There could be other reasons as well, and these may not fully be told to us, and that’s up to staff to determine if they can share more or not. I doubt that any data related to how voting happens in one’s area will ever be provided, just like how Wayfarer doesn’t share how many votes it takes for a submission to be resolved.

Personally, I don’t work with anyone in my community ween it comes to submissions, and I don’t know any of the other users in my area. I’m also pretty patience with my submissions, so even if I did know others in my area, I wouldn’t go around asking for upvotes; I’d let the process play itself out. Submissions are already anonymous, so unless you are told by someone that they submitted it or you recognize their style of photo taking/writing, then it may be hard for the system to know if you actually know the submitter.

[V1sionGrid]

In some cases, I know my votes don’t have any effect on the outcome. Most of the reviews I’m doing right now seem to lead nowhere. The time and effort spent by reviewers could be balanced more effectively.

The system aims to be as fast and efficient as possible, but at the moment, reviewers are spending time on nominations that end up going into NIA Voting after a certain period anyway. That time could be better spent on nominations that actually rely on community votes for a decision.

If nominations go directly into NIA Voting, I don’t have an issue with that. I could imagine there’s some testing happening—maybe to compare how reviewers rate a nomination versus how the machine learning system predicted it, or to manually verify cases where the ML model suggested “accept,” but the community voted “reject.”

However, it appears that after a certain amount of time, nominations are simply auto-forwarded to in-house voting. Knowing this, I honestly have little motivation to keep reviewing right now.

I also think about new Wayfinders who wonder why their agreement rates are so low or why their in-game badge progress is moving so slowly. It gives the impression that they’re doing something wrong in the review process. I’ve felt the same way myself.

Right now, my agreement rate over the past few weeks is roughly 35%. It used to be between 70% and 80% in recent months, so I’m clearly seeing a significant drop. I understand it’s just a number, and that profile stats can become inaccurate over time.

But if I’m only getting credit for a small amount of my reviews, it also means that new Wayfinders have to review much more just to make any progress toward in-game medals.

[salixsorbus]

There appears to be a strong perception that when wayspot reviews are pulled by Scopely (“Entered Niantic review”), the people who already reviewed the wayspot don’t get an agreement even if their review agrees with the final result.

Confirming that this is happening (and then potentially changing the process so people still get agreements), or clarifying that people already still get agreements, is something that Scopely could do without giving away anything that could be abused.

(It is of course possible that reviewers are getting fewer agreements because they are literally getting a lower percentage of agreements for whatever reasons, but clarity on the issue above would be helpful here.)

[TjoeMi]

Well we will wait for confirmation. But i doubt wayfarer team have time to manually review everything themselves. Thats why we have wayfarer. I am guessing its testing for emily but it should be just small portion of nomination out there

[jokikana]

I’ve been experiencing this too and it’s really frustrating. I’ve had most of my recent nominations go to manual review - some straight from the queue, some after being in voting first. It’s frustrating as I feel that the manual review team doesn’t always grasp the cultural differences when reviewing and while I can resubmit, it does feel frustrating that I have to use my nomination spots for resubmits that would’ve easily gone through voting but that the manual team doesn’t accept. For example, I had a historical building that is a part of a museum complex be rejected just this morning for “lacking uniqueness or historical and cultural meaning” by the manual review team - it’s a historical building that’s a part of a museum! How is that possibly lacking historical and cultural meaning?? This would’ve definitely gone through in voting, but now it didn’t even have a chance to get to voting. Out of my last 6 submissions, 4 have gone to manual review. I have 8 more in queue and if 2/3 of those go to manual review too.. That’s a lot.

Not only that, I’ve also noticed a stark difference in my agreement rates lately dues to the frequency of manual reviews. In one way this is good as we have had quite a bit of low quality nominations even going through lately in my area, but I fear that this change might start to actually impact my rating soon. Agreements should be granted to explorers if they vote on something first, which then enters manual review and the manual review ends up in the same decission as explorers had.