That's a Wrap! - The Global Wayfarer Review Challenge is ending ahead of schedule

[NianticTintino]

Hello Explorers,

Thank you all for your incredible contributions to the Global Challenge, we have been blown away by the response we have seen. Your efforts have broken records, and the Wayfarer submissions backlog is at an all time low!

We have also heard your feedback and know that your experience has been slow and frustrating. While we never want you to experience this, we also want to share that this has been the result of the lack of available submissions for review. In full transparency this is not something that we anticipated, but at the same time we are not surprised by the power of this community.

Because there are not enough submissions for everyone to continue reviewing at the break-neck challenge speed, we have made the difficult decision to wrap-up the Global Challenge early.

We understand this may be disappointing for some of you, but as we get closer to eliminating the backlog, the long loading times you’re experiencing will continue to worsen.

The Challenge will end on Apr 22, 2025 5:00 PM PDT.

In order to compensate for the reduced length of the challenge, and shortage of submissions throughout it, we have also decided to adjust the individual tier rewards as listed below. This is in addition to the previously announced change to the Individual Reward tier.

We appreciate your patience as we learn and adjust how to run a global challenge. Our promise to you is that we will take our lesson not to underestimate you all!

Rewards and Tier Updates
Community Rewards: Tier 3 Reached!

Community Rewards will be given to all Explorers who participated in the challenge by reviewing 40 nominations/edits or more during the period of the challenge if a tier goal is reached.

Individual Rewards Tiers

Individual Rewards will be distributed to individuals who participated in the challenge and reviewed the number of nominations + edits specified for each tier.

All rewards will be distributed between April 24, 2025 and April 30, 2025. If you experience any issues with your rewards, please reach out via the forum or a support ticket.

Thanks again for all of your amazing contributions to this challenge!

-The Wayfarer Team

[vartanm]

This was a shitshow. I got nothing but lag and bouncing Niantic logo. Barely managed to do 100. I don’t think I will ever want to participate in another challenge.

[Ferrothorn]

Would have liked to know this a bit sooner…I was counting on reviewing tonight to reach the individual milestones as I’ve been so darn busy during the earlier parts of the challenge that I’ve barely had time to review.

Sigh…

[smantz0rZ]

Due to the lack of advanced notice of this event I was personally unable to join until quite late, and by that time the system was so laggy that there were almost no nominations to uncover. It seems like the bar of 75 reviews would be impossible to achieve. A three hour notice of the end of the event guarantees I won’t be able to reach 200 reviews, despite volunteering several hours of my time to reviewing.

Food for thought.

[NianticTintino]

Thanks for your feedback. I’ll be sure to share it with the team. Unfortunately with the number of participants, the number of unresolved reviews, it really impacted your and the communities experience. We’ll be sure to learn from this for next time.

[NianticTintino]

This is included in the announcement above.

• Community dropped from 50 to 40
• Individuals Tiers dropped from 100 → 75, 250 → 200, and 500 → 400

[crazyren123]

Very odd that there was so few nominantions… I posted 30 on the first day of the event (Right before it was announced which was funny.) My brother who was reviewing nominatations got the error for days. It would take hours for him to get a nominantion, while I had 30+ ready to be reviewed… I dont see how a lack of nominantions could be the problem since Im sure many others posted a bunch of nominantions BECAUSE of the event. Would love to clarification! (Also I wanna say I loved the concept of the event! I hope we see this every month or few months with better rewards. I was so excited for the lucky trinket and I know basically 90% of the community was as well. So I hope the team fixes the long wanted desire from the community to get this item free to play!)

[Falenone]

The first few days it was all good but halfway through it got super laggy with the bouncy balloon and demotivating. I only managed 1700.
Wish you extended it and made the range of area bigger so we can clear the backlog instead

[Petr000rteP]

Good afternoon,

We’ve uploaded many new nominations over the past few days in my community, but there are still quite a few stuck “In Queue” even after the one-day quarantine period. Have you considered disabling the quarantine entirely? I’m sure it would increase number of open nominations to review again.

Additionally, it would be great if you could reset the nomination limit of 40. This has become another bottleneck for me. I’ve prepared many new nominations, but I’m unable to submit them due to Pokémon Go’s restriction of 40 nominations and giving only one new nomination possibility per day.
Thanks for the feedback.

Petr

[mikie]

considering the success of clearing out the queues in this challenge, why wasn’t this just done every time instead of country specific challenges? I would swap all the rewards for one lucky trinket just saying

[crazyren123]

Bro 1700 is insane, why couldnt you quit after 500 for the rest of us LOL

[Ferrothorn]

“Only 1700”

Save some for the rest of us!

Now that I think about it, why don’t challenges have an individual cut off? If someone is this far over the max rewards but keeps going it’s bordering on hoarding.

[crazyren123]

I think the 40 bottlecap is fair, they have to combat bots from being able to submit joke nominantions somehow. I think disabling the quarantine would significantly help tho!

[dot37]

Hi, is it possible that I have about 350 Records waiting to be reviewed by other players?
I’m really close to the black medal and I don’t really know how much I can stop

[0wnedbycats]

Checking in - so does the 48 hours to change our home location start at 5pm today or does it start tomorrow? And if we want to continue bouncing around to help clear edits can we continue to do that or will be locked back into locations in 2.5 hours (from the time of this post)?

[Falenone]

Well I’m still 8000 short from the onyx ingress badge so I failed. Who knows when the ingress specific system will come. Instead the invisible circle around your chosen location should’ve been made infinitely large so that if I plop it down in the middle of EU for example I still get stuff from New Zealand for example. I too still have stuff “in voting” So there’s still stuff to be reviewed

[NianticTintino]

I hear you. Some things to consider is that in the past, we had 2 weeks to distribute the number of reviews and reviewers so when we usually start hitting some errors related to numbers of reviews, it was condensed into half the regular time. The same goes for the number of reviewers. In the past we’ve had about 35,000 reviewers spread out for 2 weeks and this time we also had 35,000 reviewers but reaching similar goals within 1 week. Those two things in combination with other factors such as unlimited hopping vs honing into 1-5 specific countries definitely added to it. We’ll definitely be learning from this one and continue to improve. Thanks for participating!

[Musik]

Ending it early is really disrespectful both to reviewers who have planned their time, accommodating the holidays and their other responsibilities, and still trying to help out. It is also disrespectful to those who may be able to make additional nominations (although Ingress players are excluded from that).

In the future, instead of having the system give time-outs to those who sometimes are only one or two reviews in, maybe time out those who have greatly exceeded the personal goal levels, so that others may have a chance.

[Petr000rteP]

That’s a valid point. However, to make it truly fair, the nomination counter should at least reset at the start of each Challenge. I’ve been consistently submitting nominations, and it was frustrating to see the announcement when I only had 5 open.

[NianticTintino]

WOW, that’s a ton of reviews. I can see your side regarding extending the challenge and at the same time, this would prolong the issues for those who struggled to get anywhere near even half the amount you got.