You have a valid point on the poor advertisement.
The ingress team posted a news item on their site which was picked up by all the ingress information telegram groups which the majority of ingress players are subscribed to.
It’s been a while since I’ve played pogo and I’m only in a local discord, so I don’t even know if there are any worldwide information channels, but I don’t see anything on the pokemongolive news feed about this challenge.
Just my opinion, if the reviewers are unable to hit the goal, that’s on the reviewer.
But if niantic decides to close the event due to lack of submissions, that’s on them on this.
The backlash of cutting the event short due to poor communication Vs the backlash of not having enough nominations in the system, the first will be worst to manage.
Not everyone is going to drink the kool aid and claim it’s ok for them to do it.
Very glad i powered through the 500 in the first 2 days.
Mess of a challenge and its not like Ingress players will be able to see any system improvements. All Niantic can do now is drop the high requirements for the OPR tick.
What was the goal?
Was it to hit 230k resolutions or for each player to get 500 reviews.
We hit the 230k resolutions.
From my point of view, there was definitely a nomination supply problem outside of the control of contributors.
I have consistently found that ML makes decisions (just rejections these days) around 21 hours after a nomination is submitted. So after that time period, in my view, with reviewers waiting for nominations to appear, these should have been going straight into voting once ML had cleared them. However, many of my nominations stayed “in queue” for days.
The worst example was one nominated on Friday 18th 1:45am UK time, which wasn’t decided until Tuesday 22nd at 10:28pm UK time, having changed to “in voting” a couple of hours prior to the decision.
This ought to be rectified in future.
If you haven’t done any of the previous paid events then only 16 more challenges to go for onyx. 1 a quarter right 
Going to go off topic but sort of related to wayfarer, and indirectly the issue this challenge highlighted, Once the split happens does spatial build up nominations to a level that reviewers can review without running out of things which would have an impact on new portals approved or do they go live with minimal things to review and reviewers in the new system get annoyed and rage quit.
*Edit the opr ticks to onyx
The goal was met but goals are meant to be broken given the last few challenges that the community exceeded expectations. Not to mention it’s rather lame imo to say they didn’t see this coming as always.
Anyway, some of the possible things they could do in the future.
One area of improvement I felt was the short amount of time between the announcement of the Review Challenge and the start of the challenge. I still made about 15 submissions from the announcement. I know that this is essentially an initiative to resolve submissions that are awaiting review, but I would have liked more time to suggest new submissions.
Same man
This proofs the point that there are still nominations available in the system for individual rewards.
Most of the reviewers aren’t buying it that there is a shortage of nominations. With proper restrictions and limitations on those who have completed the challenge, it might be possible for those who started the challenge late to be able to get the individual tier with no issues.
All they have to do is just lower the requirements for the rewards and don’t cut the event short. That’s as simple as it can get.
Yep but previous challenges were exceeded because they opened it up which wasn’t possible in this one.
** Limit daily reviews per day to ensure most of the community can hit the individual target*
What do they set it to? Target/expected participants. Or just a you need x so x/days which will limit the resolutions and maybe not hit the target if their expectations of participants is off
** For those who hit the contributions target, reviews will be limited to ensure everyone gets to complete it*
Limit the players that hit the goal early, so that an unknown amount of reviewers can pick up the slack. What happens if the unknown amount of reviewers don’t hit the community target?
** Fix the darn servers to ensure better performance during challenges*
Yep, and Im guessing now as I don’t know how it works
each time we finish a review it will look for the next available one. I’m assuming during a challenge we are stressing the dB and the flag from needs review to done keeps changing several times a second. It’s one hell of an issue to solve if it is solvable
** Don’t conduct this during the holiday period and have someone on standby(just personal speculation that the team are on their Easter holiday which is why issues took longer to fix as usual. If they are trying to fix it during the Easter holiday, that sucks too as well)*
You don’t think they have people monitoring 24/7. As I said earlier I think the issue with this one was I was global and they didn’t haven’t any countries to fall back on. Which they have done with previous challenges
** If you want to make sudden changes to the event which results in implications, ensure there is sufficient time for the community to react.*
I’m with you on this one!
and there’s also INDIVIDUAL goals
Your comparing people reporting dozens of nominations meanwhile the challenge has thousands of reviewers at any given time.
I don’t understand.
I’m just focusing on the the number of total nominations reviewed before and after. (From 7781 to 8286 is a total of 504 reviews done)
Base on this fact, it’s possible for someone who have yet to complete the challenge to catch up within the day. Though temporary restrictions might need to be in place for those who have hit the individual target to ensure other individuals will be able to catch up. However, this takes time to implement which is why it might not be possible to do so.
This might be something the niantic team can look into for future challenges to ensure individual reviews is possible for late comers
Yes but honest question as a community should we be going for the community goals or the individual goals.
I guess this is a question challenged across the ages.
It’s ok to do you though.
For anyone wondering where we could have gone compared to the last events, the geo-fencing could have simply been removed. During the hopping, I didn’t get any outside nominations aside of where I’ve traveled and the bonus location.
I can’t say how the backend database is structured, and won’t pretend to, but lifting a calculated restriction to filter output would result in faster response. That’s just a database given. (between Mongo and SQL at least) There’s a world where the backlog could have actually hit zero. That would have been pretty cool.
It was only good in the first days
Let’s analyse this post for a second. In the past they have seen 35k reviewers spread over 2 weeks so shame on them that they didn’t realise the same 35k reviewers wouldn’t do it in the 1 week time given. We after all are the most passionate players of their games.
With this backlash and the scopely/spatial split, I wonder will there be even 35K reviewers in the future.
Unlimited hopping basically killed the challenge as compared to previous challenges where nominations are limited by a certain region as well as slowing down reviewers from hopping aggressively for reviews.
Not that it’s wrong for them to do so but it pushes out the casuals from this challenge as nominations reviews are at the first come first serve basis
Others can argue that you should start early and you can avoid this pull off the rug situation but niantic by cutting off the time at short response time is the first time (if I recall correctly) of them doing so. You should not be penalising them for participating this event but rather figure out solutions or alternatives to resolve this issue. (Example either time extension or a make-up session after they resolve the server performance issue)
A point mentioned that part of the reason for the short deadline was due to the recently split which they are arranging but this event which was run badly has broken the trust of the community toward niantic for future events where it will be known that they can cut the duration just like that
Agree with everything you say.
We don’t know the percentage ingress/pogo reviewers. I guess we will find out after the split. Many players play both games and after the split I guess they will review in whatever system they nominate in, and some will continue to review in both.
Did unlimited hoping kill this challenge? Or because it was a worldwide challenge, hoping was essential to get reviews.