Niantic has shared an update on the final release of Wayfarer for this year, dubbed Wayfarer 4.4. Niantic’s Wayfarer system is the underlying system used to review Waystop nominations and edits.
The most notable part of the 4.4 version is the updated “categorization” feature for Waystops that launches in US, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and India this month, and worldwide in January.
Here’s the quick summary of the new version:
- Updates to the “What is it Question” (aka category validation)
- Ability to appeal a rejected nomination through Wayfarer
- Anonymous and private abuse reporting through Wayfarer
What’s new
Niantic has shipped the Wayspot categorization feature for Wayspot nominations and edits in Pokémon GO for the US, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and India. They will roll this out to the rest of the world in January.
Category selection will be required on your nominations and will soon also be displayed in the reviews in Wayfarer, so that reviewers have a bit more context from you.
Categories tagged on live Wayspots as edits will be funneled through Wayfarer for others to validate, but will not contribute to your Agreements for now, since there’s technically no collective agreement to be made on these.
Ultimately the categories will be used by all Niantic games for new, more context specific, game mechanics and more.
500k new Waystops to be added in India
In a separate thread, Niantic shared an update on their efforts to make India more Pokémon GO and Ingress friendly:
Today, we are happy to announce that we will be adding new Wayspots to help our current and future Explorers in India.
We heard your feedback on the last time we added Wayspots in Turkey and have made significant changes to ensure that these new Wayspots meet our standards. In the meantime, we have also been accelerating the Niantic reviews of Indian nominations, so that we reduce the backlog before we add new Wayspots.
Starting on December 15, 2021, we plan to add about 500k new wayspots to the platform. These new Wayspots will be added between December 15, 2021 through February 2, 2022. We’ll let you know in advance when we’ll be adding them.
Keep in mind that it is still up to each game to decide which ones will live in the gameboard.
These wayspots will not have any images, and we are excited to see what great photos you submit for these new Wayspots.
