Hello Wayfinders,
We’re incredibly excited to share our new Wayfarer Roadmap for 2025-2026. This roadmap is a testament to our commitment to a more rewarding Wayfarer experience for all current and upcoming Wayfinders. Your dedication to building and maintaining our shared map is at the heart of everything we do and this roadmap is a direct result of collaboration with your Wayfarer Ambassadors, your feedback, passion, and countless contributions.
Over the coming months we’ll be rolling out significant changes, new tools, and awesome features aimed at improving your contribution experience both in Wayfarer and in our games. These additions will make it more intuitive for new and existing Wayfinders. All of these features and tools will be built with the following pillars in mind: Empower, Growth, and Joy.
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Empower: You are at the heart of our maps, and we want to give you more power to make them better. Imagine having additional control over your contributions and smarter and more accurate auto-decision systems. We are significantly improving the automated review with new technologies. We are thinking about new ways for the community to own and leverage the map for better game play.
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Growth: The Wayfinder community is growing, and we’re bringing Wayfarer to new places. We’re excited to announce that we’re revamping the player eligibility requirements, inviting more users to participate in Wayfarer. We are also exploring ways to support remote and rural players and making it simpler for all Wayfinders to discover new areas to nominate and review, resulting in an enriched game experience for everyone, everywhere.
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Joy: Wayfarer should be as rewarding as it is impactful. We’re introducing more fun into the experience with brand new recognition systems and a new opt-in leaderboard. We’re also making the entire platform smoother and more intuitive, so you can spend less time on tasks and more time on what you do best: shaping the world of Niantic games.
You may have already seen some of our recent changes, such as lowering eligibility level in Pokémon GO and the fantastic new recognition email that you’ll be receiving soon. But, this is just the beginning, check out more of what’s to come below:
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Increased Opportunities to Appeal
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Increased Distance for Submissions
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A Wayfarer Map
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Web Wayspot + Edit Submission
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Surfacing High-Quality Wayspots
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Wayfinder Center and Hub
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Improved Auto-Resolution
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New Wayfinder Rating System enabling Tiered Contribution Limits
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A Regional and Global Opt-In Leaderboard
We can’t wait to get these features into your hands! We especially want to extend a huge thank you to our incredible Wayfarer Ambassadors, whose invaluable feedback was and will continue to be crucial in shaping these updates. As we get closer to shipping each one, we’ll be sharing all the details here so you know exactly what to expect and how to use them. As always, we’ll be eager to hear your thoughts and feedback.
With so many exciting changes happening, we know you must have questions. That’s why we’re planning an AMA (Ask Me Anything) to kick off on October 8, 2025! We want to hear from you about the new roadmap and anything else Wayfarer-related. Stay tuned for more details on that in the coming weeks.
Check out the discussion HERE!
-The Wayfarer Team