Hello Wayfinders,
Thank you for your participation and patience during this years Wayfarer AMA! We saw some awesome questions and are happy to be responding to some of the top voted questions. I’ll keep it short so without further ado, enjoy!
Wayfarer AMA - 2025 Responses:
Great question! Since the launch of Wayfarer (formerly OPR), the Wayfarer Team and Wayfinder community have built a global map consisting of millions of Wayspots. We know that to ensure its maintenance while also improving the quality of the map is a huge feat. We shared more about our internal processes for maintaining the quality of the map in one of the questions before. For now, I’d love to focus on how we’re empowering YOU–our Wayfinder Community–to continue being part of this streamlining process with tools such as the upcoming Wayfarer Map and Web Submission.
Let’s start off with the Wayfarer Map. With the Wayfarer Map, Wayfinders will be able to:
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View all Wayspots on our global map
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View the Title, Description, Photos, Location
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View the selected Visit metrics for most Wayspots
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Filtering capabilities, including filtering for Wayspots that are active on the Pokémon GO map
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Zooming, Panning, Map and Satellite Views
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Sharing Wayspots directly from the map
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Reporting + adding supporting images to your report
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Etc.
For the first version of the map, the filters based on game inclusions will only support Pokémon GO. We will continue to work with the Pikmin Bloom and Monster Hunter Now teams to consider inclusion for both the map and web submission.
In addition to the Wayfarer Map, we’re also working on a Web Submission flow that allows eligible Wayfinders to contribute nominations and edits outside of the Pokémon GO app. Both of these contribution types will be on mobile and desktop, allowing Wayfinders to:
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Submit Wayspot nominations
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Submit Edits
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Add multiple supporting images
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Go back in the submission process while saving your entered information
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Save as drafts
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Etc.
Connecting back to the streamlining and improving the map quality part of your question, we believe these new tools and capabilities will empower Wayfinders to not only satiate their sense of exploration but also easing the process for submitting map improvements, supporting their nominations and edits, improving the outcomes of their submissions, and finding places to nominate or improve.
Lastly, we know this isn’t a solution that you can use today. Please continue to use our existing avenues to support the maintenance, improvements, and growth of the Wayfarer map. These include the Wayfarer Support Chat, the Wayfarer Forum, and the Wayfarer Help Center.
Glad you asked, and I’m happy to share that we are exploring a more explicit way for Wayfarer reviewers to specify approval and rejection decisions on Wayspots. We’re working with our Ambassadors to ensure the question is appropriately phrased, tested, and then we’ll be adding it to our existing review flow. More to come in the following weeks as we near a more final solution.
The Ambassadors and the Wayfarer Team sought to clarify this after the new reviewing system was implemented. As you can see, the question “Permanent and Distinct” isn’t the only one that has several components to it. Most of the other questions also take multiple aspects into account. Asking specifically about each one of those components would result in the reviewing page having upwards of 14 different questions to give a thumbs up, thumbs down, or “I don’t know” response.
While exploring deeper into the reason for this question, in conjunction with the Ambassadors, we came to the conclusion that many times, a thumbs down response is given to this question as a way to reject the nomination even if it is permanent or distinct, leading to unclear feedback for the nominator. As shared above, we plan to make the rejection of a nomination much clearer by reintroducing a rejection question after selecting a Thumb Down for the last 3 questions of your review. We hope that reintroducing a clear rejection question will alleviate some of the issues with coupling components in our existing questions.
For the Wayfarer definition of both a generic business and restaurant I would invite folks to explore the Criteria Clarification section of our forum and review our most recent update to the definition of Generic/Non-Generic Businesses + restaurants. This addresses your question about the Starbucks and McDonalds in your community.
Lastly, I agree that the generic business part of the criteria has been misused as a rejection reason. Similar to the question above, we hope that re-introducing a clear rejection review question will alleviate the misuse of this criteria as a rejection reason.
Thank you for bringing this up and we fully acknowledge that rejection reason related to abuse can be a source of alarm for the nominator. This is something our Ambassadors have also brought up to us and we believe an initial approach is to revise the rejection reason and its displayed phrasing. We are open to exploring revisions to the current messaging used in these rejection reasons, with the goal of better reflecting the intended rejection reason from our reviewers.
Great question! As you may have seen in our response to the first question, the Web Submission process will allow for a “Save as Draft” option, allowing you to store nominations and edits before submitting them for review. We’re still exploring the needs and differences of this newly introduced Save as Draft option vs the existing Hold option. As always, we’ll be in chats with our Ambassadors and open to hearing your thoughts on this too!
We’re very much open to exploring options for an improved user experiences after receiving an ML rejection. The team is aware that this is a problem and we will definitely take some time to find a viable option for your ML rejected nominations and edits. Feel free to share other options in our forum or with your Wayfarer Ambassador(s).
While I appreciate the intent behind your question, the Wayfarer team do not own changes in any of the games. However, in the upcoming Wayfarer map, there will be a clear visual distinction between Wayfinder generated Wayspots and those that are added by Niantic. While we’re still working through exactly how this will look, our intention is to allow you to see which Wayspots have been added by Niantic vs those that are submitted by Wayfinders on the Wayfarer Map.
We appreciate you and all Wayfinders for keeping up with the changes in criteria that take place from time to time and also for highlighting the challenges Wayfinders face in keeping the map accurate and current with real-world changes. I think many Wayfinders are familiar with thinking about this as “repurposing” Wayspots when real changes happen on the map. While we don’t have a solid response at this time given the time limitations for responding to your questions, we are committed to thoroughly understanding the issue(s), impact to the games, gathering all existing staff guidance, and with input from our Ambassadors, developing an improved and streamlined solution for everyone.
The criteria shared on the Wayfarer Forum are incredibly relevant. While there’s been bits and pieces added over the time, our most recent Wayfarer Criteria Clarification is what should be held as the most up-to-date. Any previous clarifications that conflict with our most recent clarification should no longer be held as a source of truth or relevant when it comes to nominations and reviewing. Regarding the reach of our Wayfarer Forum, I think we can do better to expose recent changes, new additions, etc. We will collaborate with our Wayfarer Ambassadors to thinktank through some of the solutions and share those when we’ve identified some viable options to spread more awareness of our changes and channels of information.
This is such an important question and we hope that the care for Wayfarer, reviewing, criteria, etc continues and strengthens over time. I feel an important aspect to call out for Wayfarer as a program is that Wayfarer is not and has never been a static program. Over time and very recently we’ve kicked off strategic initiatives to ensure the success of the games we support while also maintaining a balance for quality. While I understand errors can be frustrating, it’s important to realize that examples of mistakes surfaced on social channels are not the norm. We’re very happy to share more of our processes to help shed some light on the matter.
Currently, our team processes an average of 100,000 contributions (nominations, edits, appeals, reports, etc) on a monthly basis and we have 2 processes in place that ensure quality in our decision making. I’m happy to report that our team maintains an average quality score of 99% accuracy. When we do become aware of an error, either through Wayfinder reporting or through our own processes, our team receives the appropriate support to ensure they understand the error and work on minimizing future errors.
Hope this helped shed some light on the matter and yes, Wayfarer criteria, both internal and Wayfinder reviewing matter a lot.
We know this has been tough for a while, and with recent changes, we think it’s time to look again at what’s working for our games and our Wayfinder community, and what isn’t. We’ve just started this work, gathering examples of what’s still helpful and what’s not. We plan to give a more complete answer before the end of the year.
Wayfinders have made such an impact on all of our games and we hope that the recent recognition emails help show that in ways we’ve never done before. We will continue to provide a rewarding experience that empowers you with the information to make ever lasting contributions and impact on your community. We understand this information and metrics is rewarding to some Wayfinders but not all. We will continue to gather your feedback on how you like to best be rewarded for your contributions and push to make it a reality.
Give your feedback on rewards HERE.
Thank you all for your past, present, and future contributions!
Love this question and happy to share this will be part of our plan in the first half of 2026. Creating educational material, improving the onboarding process, etc., takes a lot of thorough planning to ensure it’s balanced with information to address different learner styles (auditory, visual, etc.). While this is slated for next year, we plan to build some of these educational materials for our Wayfarer Map and Web Submission process to ensure users know how to use these new tools. Similarly to part of a question above, we’ll continue to work with our Ambassadors on what I feel is a sort of awareness campaign that’ll do more to spread awareness of Wayfarer matters. Lastly, I am also happy to share that we plan to bring a more hands-on educational experience regarding Wayfarer to next year’s Pokémon GO Tours. While this is limited to the users present at the events, we feel it’s still an important first step to help inform people who express curiosity at these events where they have the opportunity to learn from one of our team directly. Hope to see you at GO Tour Taiwan or in Los Angeles with some others from our team + Ambassadors!
That’s all folks! Hope you enjoyed learning a bit more about our plans for the next year or so, some of the internal workings of the Wayfarer Team, and overall, feel like your voice was heard.
-The Wayfarer Team
