Well now that the sale to Scopely has been made official, and that Wayfarer is tagging along with most of Niantic’s games, this question is more relevant now than ever.
What’s puzzling now is that Ingress wasn’t included in the package. That now brings with it a couple of additional follow-up questions:
What happens to nominations when it comes to Ingress? Will it become fully disconnected from PoGo’s nominations?
If the answer to the above question is yes, will we need separate systems for PoGo and Ingress submission processing?
What will happen to the IITC and the plugins which rely on it for PoGo and Wayfarer tools? Will they just stop working entirely?
(1) Wayfarers explore by nominating and reviewing places of interest.
(2) The results of that Wayfaring/Exploring is a database named Lightship. (Or formerly named?) The database itself is not Wayfaring.
(2.5) Scans are submitted thru different systems, and saved in a database called Niantic Spacial. (Some scans are connected to Lightship wayspots, some not.)
(3) PokemonGo (and other games) reads the Lightship database to select its gameboard. (Ingress also pulls scans related to portals.)
So the question is, was just (1) sold? or also (2)?
We know that (2.5) was not sold.
So a random question regarding Wayfarer under the new ownership. How will the Global Challenges work moving forward? Will Ingress & Pokemon Go (and other games when they become available) get similar rewards that existed in previous challenges?
Those plug-ins are not made by Wayfarer or Niantic. They are user-made, independent from Wayfarer, so there could be changes that affect them in the future, as the ToS could change. All 3rd party plug-ins have to be in line with the ToS, so if those change, there could be changes to the plug-ins.
The plug-ins though could, which is more of a concern for Wayfarer than Ingress. Many use the S2 cell plug-in to see if a Wayspot will be in PoGo or not.
I think the “wars” are rarer that we think (they don’t happen where I play), especially since they are abusive gameplay. They also have nothing to do with Wayfarer, unless a valid Wayspot is removed, then an appeal can be filed.
But why would they go through the process of adding the duplicate checker that includes lightship waypoints used in the other games if they don’t plan on a sync of the database.
Also the investment in Scopely may be to keep access to Wayfarer.
I can only speculate, so don’t know for sure what will happen. Each Wayfarer implimentation will do whatever checks they wish to do based on their own respective inclusion rules and not based on what happens now. I am not saying that 2 versions of Wayfarer will happen. I don’t think there’s enough information available to know what will happen for sure.
It’s entirely possible that they’re effectively selling Scopely a copy of the database, and that going forward after the spilt, Niantic Spatial will have their own copy that is populated by Ingress and Peridot players (as well as maybe Scaniverse users?), whilst the Scopely copy of the database will be populated by Pokémon Go players (and maybe opened up to Pikmin and Monster Hunter players as well).
Both sides still have more than one game and those games have their own proximity rules.
