Hello Explorers!
Recently The Niantic Wayfarer AMA results were published, and this time around the Wayfarer team decided to follow a different format than a traditional AMA. They asked Wayfinders to submit their answers via a Google Form, and then they compiled answers based on those questions.
While the format of the answers didn’t really have any questions, it would appear that they’ve answered most of what I expected the questions to be. There is a lot of interesting stuff here, we covered it this week on The Wayspotters Podcast, We have both audio and video versions so go check that out.
You can check out the original post on the Wayfarer forums as well.
Let’s get into it!
Accomplishments
These are the items that the Wayfarer team has chalked up as wins, things that they have been able to accomplish in the first half of 2023
Backlog Reduction / Nomination Resolution Speed
Niantic: “As you all know, we kicked off the year with our backlog reduction work, targeting the oldest nominations up to December 2021. This initiative allowed us to reduce our backlog by 600,000 nominations, of which our team manually reviewed 120,000. By removing these from the backlog, we saw a decrease of 30% time needed for nominations to reach a resolution. We are exploring the possibility of repeating this work to reduce the backlog further and resolve more of your oldest nominations.”
My thoughts: This is amazing. We heard a lot of Wayfinders saying that their nominations were flowing through quicker. 600,000 backlogged nominations resolved is amazing. Another round of this would be more than welcomed by the community.
Coal Submissions and Duplicates Detection
Niantic: “In our last Roadmap update, we shared that we shadow-launched a new system to better detect and deflect very low-quality submissions (coal). We have now had this system working in the background for several months and we ramped up the amount of submissions it deflects.
Now, we’re able to deflect low-quality submissions, like those with pictures taken from a car or with blurry photos, etc. before they are presented to the community. We also introduced a similar system to better detect duplicate submissions, including from our live Wayspots and previously rejected submissions. We are now able to auto detect some duplicates and will continue tuning and recalibrating as needed to avoid any inaccurate flags.”
My Thoughts: Robots!! Having AI detect and automatically reject coal submissions before they ever get into the system is amazing. Anecdotally I’ve been seeing less coal than I normally do lately, and there have been reports of Wayfinders having their nominations come back as rejected without them ever noticing they went into voting.
Appeals Velocity
Niantic: “Our most recent update to you was that we were changing the way we process Appeals from First In First Out (FIFO) to half First In First Out and half Last In First Out (LIFO). We made this change so that we could attack the issue from 2 fronts and allow some of your Appeals to be resolved sooner. We have heard the feedback and the sentiment around “missed” Appeals. The LIFO approach continues to be a moving target as more Appeals are being submitted than can be resolved in one day. We’ve had some conversations with our team, as well as with the Ambassadors, and have decided to shift our approach back to FIFO as of a couple weeks ago. Since the start of the year, we have resolved over 91K Appeals and will continue tackling the issue as we near a healthier Appeal processing speed. In the second half of 2023, we plan to increase the resources and process efficiency for appeals. Additionally, the duplicates detection system mentioned above has been running on appealed submissions to deflect some old appealed submissions.”
My thoughts: I need to get this out of the way first: Automatic duplicate detection on Appeals is going to be HUGE!! With appeals taking as long as they do, there’s a good chance a lot of appeals nominations have had a separate nomination approved and gone live in the time the appeal has been waiting because appeals take forever. I currently have 6 nominations that I have submitted an appeal for, the oldest is 6 months old.
From reports, they are processing appeals that are about 11 months old. Having more appeals submitted every day that can be processed is frustrating, for obvious reasons. I am glad to see they’ve addressed it, and resolving 91,000 appeals is huge don’t get me wrong but I am looking forward to them moving faster.
Wayfarer Challenges
Niantic: “Global Reviewer Challenges have resulted in some amazing, never-before-seen successes for all Explorers and the host countries. More than 120,000 Wayspot nominations were resolved between the two challenges this year; an amount that has never been accomplished before. We simplified the challenge opt-in: a new Wayfarer Challenge user setting in your profile replaced the manual Bonus Location switch. Additionally, we switched the way we present submission for review by pulling them from the entire country.
We also changed how we reward participating Explorers where previously we only rewarded participation with a focus on Agreements. Now, we are focusing both on individual participation and community tier achievements. We are grateful for the amazing partnership with the Pokémon GO and Ingress teams, who came to the deck with some awesome in-game rewards.
We know you requested to better track your individual contributions, we are planning on improving this behavior for the next challenge.”
My Thoughts: The last challenge was amazing, over 100k nominations resolved. While it had its challenges, the Ambassadors and the Wayfarer team were able to change gears and pivot very quickly to ensure that the challenge was able to keep going.
That said, there’s a lot of noise surrounding the tracking of the individual reward tiers and a lot of people are saying they missed out on the reward tier they should have been at. So I hope that the Wayfarer team is able to sort that out and give us a way to track our contributions to the challenges right from the Wayfarer website so there’s no guessing about what reward tier you are at.
Community Engagement
Niantic: “Thank you to all who have voiced your observations about our improvement in communication over the last couple of months. We have made communication a top priority this year and will continue to keep it a priority while we introduce other improvements to our community.
In the coming weeks, you’ll see some exciting changes to the forum, including a new look and feel for the landing page of the forum, improvements and focus on the Bug Reports category to not only ensure we stay on top of new bugs but also to more proactively communicate our progress on addressing bugs.
We will continue to partner with our outstanding Ambassadors and internally we will be looping in different teams within Niantic to discuss ways in which we can improve your community experience.”
My Thoughts: The Wayfarer team has done an outstanding job with communication lately, and it has improved a LOT even in the last few months, especially on the forum. The team from Niantic and the Ambassadors are all on the forums a lot, interacting with the community and trying to solve problems as quickly as they can. I really think that other Niantic properties could take some notes here.
Anti-Cheat Efforts
Niantic: “In the first half of this year, the Ambassadors, Wayfarer Team, and many other Niantic Teams have partnered to tackle the abuse present in Wayfarer. It is a top priority as it impacts not only Wayfarer and our Community, but every player of Niantic games. With this deep cross-functional collaboration, we’ve developed new approaches to identify, administer, and prevent abuse from impacting us all and the integrity of the platform as a whole.
In the next couple of days, we will activate our new policies and administer consequences for abusive behavior that apply not only to using Wayfarer, but across ALL Niantic games and products. When this new policy takes effect, it will address not only all new abusers but will also work retroactively for up to a year. Additionally, over the next couple of months we will devote a lot of our resources to building new automated detection tools.
We’re excited to see how this new work makes Wayfarer and all Niantic games a better place to explore the world together. As we finalize details and approach different phases of implementing this work, we will share more details and make announcements as we are rolling out this new Abuse management process.”
My Thoughts: Combatting Wayfarer abuse is something that is very near and dear to my heart. So, this is the biggest win of the entire AMA. I feel like combatting Wayfarer abuse, while important, didn’t really have the teeth to really combat it. Reading that they are going to start administering consequences to not only Wayfarer accounts but game accounts as well is huge!
Also, they are going to start applying consequences retroactively?! Amazing. Plus they are working on automatic detection tools too? Bonkers! Having an accurate map is so key to the enjoyment of all of the Niantic games, I am very excited to see what happens with this one.
The Misses
Now, these are the items that they were not able, or won’t be able to deliver in the back half of 2023.
Edits
Niantic: “We hear you. Edits, like Nominations, can take too much time to reach a resolution, and we agree that it is longer than we would like as well. While we resolved around 51,000 location edits from the backlog, we will continue exploring ways to address all types of Edits. With our current resources, we are prioritizing Nominations to continue our progress and when that work is complete, we will redirect our resources to address Edit velocity. Similar to Nominations, we also plan to introduce a system to detect low-quality edits and deflect those. There is currently no exact time frame from when this work to address Edits will be done, but we will keep you updated in a couple months and we apologize for the delay.”
My Thoughts: I get it. It sucks, but I get it. Edits to already existing Wayspots aren’t the priority, and I can totally understand why. Getting new Wayspots on the map will always be the top priority. But edits are important too. I have 75 edits pending, with the oldest being from February. I normally get Wayspot nominations resolved within at most 2 weeks, so having edits pending that are coming up on 5 months is frustrating.
Just give me a tab for edits on the contributions page and I’ll forget all about how slow they’re being processed for at least a little while longer. Please?
Contribution Management + Other Features
Niantic: “The Contribution Management tab was a great feature announced to the community that we have yet to deliver on. While this will not be a prioritized feature within the next couple of months, we hope to have this ready by the end of 2023. Some of the other features mentioned in the AMA questions such as incorporating Street View, Review History, and the ability to withdraw In Voting nominations and appeal can be considered.”
My Thoughts: Upgrades to the Contribution Management tab are absolutely necessary, I’ve been asking to be able to withdraw In Voting nominations since I had 2 of my nominations appear on the Pokémon Go map, someone had beat me to both of them yet I had to wait for them to get rejected as duplicates. Bogging down the system with a nomination that I knew wasn’t going to get approved, wasting time and delaying other nominations that had a chance.
Criteria
Niantic: “We know that we’ve gone back and forth on what the next steps are for updating or changing the criteria. After spending time internally exploring different solutions, finding out the original intent of the criteria as it’s been set, we’ve decided it’s best to refrain from making extensive changes to the criteria.
With these criteria, we aim to ensure that the community is able to bring unique and significant places we may have never discovered. Niantic is not a fully global company, and as such we know there will be gaps in our knowledge of the culture’s significance and nuance when it comes to building the map. With the criteria as they are, we’re ensuring that we do not push our limited view point and lean on the community to help identify what should or should not be added to the map.
With that being said, as part of our new review flow we do plan to improve onboarding and resources to help guide new users through what should and should not be considered as they review nominations to create a better sense of consistency.”
My Thoughts: I can understand not wanting to dip into the cultural nuances of certain aspects of the criteria, being a North American-centric company. But, and this is a big but, their team of Ambassadors is very multi-national and has representatives from all over the globe. There are also aspects of the criteria that could stand to be clarified that are not cultural at all. Disappointing, but I do sort of understand.
Wayfarer App
Niantic: “Last time we shared on our roadmap we had planned to bring you the Wayfarer App to the Explorer community this summer. We spent the first half of the year with renewed leadership and focus on the Wayfarer team, and have determined it’s critical to first improve the overall Wayfarer experience and review flow before moving to a new dedicated app. This means that we have deprioritized the Wayfarer app and will not be releasing it to the Explorer community this year.
Instead, our focus and resources will be spent enhancing the existing platform and experience by improving the review flow and making the entire Wayfarer experience more enjoyable by taking a firm stance on abuse across the platform and the community. This approach will allow us to focus on addressing any challenges or limitations before potentially duplicating them by launching a separate app experience.
We apologize for this change and understand that for some it may be disappointing. We understand the convenience that an app could offer, but feel it is not the right thing at this time. In the future, we may revisit this decision or look for other ways to make Wayfarer easier to access in different games or mobile environments, but first we want to prioritize our time and resources to ensure we provide the enhanced and improved Wayfarer experience that you’ve been asking for.”
My thoughts: *Play Price is Right loss music* The Wayfarer app is the only way to consistently see all of the current Wayspots on the Lightship map. So hearing they are shifting focus away from a public rollout of the app is frustrating and disappointing.
Yes, when you nominate something in Pokémon Go it shows nearby Wayspots on the map where you drop your pin. However, if you move away from where you currently are to remotely nominate something, it doesn’t show you anything.
Niantic needs to give us something. A way to see all of the Wayspots on the map in real-time, out in the field that will populate no matter how far away from where we currently are. It is a sure-fire way to reduce duplicate Wayspot nominations that clog up the nomination queues.
Updates
Review Flow
Niantic: “We are incredibly grateful to all of our Explorers who take the time to and find joy in reviewing Wayspot Nominations. It has truly become a part of my virtual exploration; getting to know more of my local community and the larger global community. With that being said, we’re excited to share that there will be a new reviewing experience coming to you all in the next couple of weeks. This new review experience will change how you evaluate a Nomination by shifting the 5-star rating system to a simpler rating system for each question about the nomination. You will also see some other changes such as easier reporting of abusive nominations and quality of life improvements. Of course, our Ambassadors will be testing it first in the upcoming weeks followed by a global community launch. You can expect the new review experience by early September 2023.”
My Thoughts: The reviewing experience needs an update bad, really bad. It’s exciting to hear that this is finally coming. It’s fallen behind the updates to the criteria, and the direction of the three pillars. I wish it was sooner, but I was gently reminded that in Wayfarer terms September isn’t that far away. 😆
The reviewing experience is the backbone of the Wayfarer system, it drives what nominations make it through and appear on the Wayfarer map so the Wayfarer team needs to get this right. I have faith that between them and the team of Ambassadors, they are going to smash this out of the park. But until we see what they’ve come up with, it’s neither a hit nor a miss.
Final Thoughts
I honestly think this was about as good an update as I could have expected from the Wayfarer team. A little bit of an odd format, but they managed to hit on all of the topics I thought they would with updates that had either substance or a passable answer on the lack of an actual update. There was some really awesome stuff, like the review experience update coming in September and their new anti-cheat methods that are coming and there were some disappointments, like the lack of criteria updates and the pause on the development of the Wayfarer app.
I was very pleased with the update to the roadmap and the answers to what were likely the most popular questions submitted to them. They didn’t answer my question about the K-12 basketball courts, but with NBA all world being sunset I’m not shocked there. haha
Overall, 10 out of 10. The wins far out way the misses, and for me the efforts they announced for the anti-cheats more than make up for the misses. Yes, even the Wayfarer app. Until next time, stay safe out there Explorers!
