Following a series of mistakes and access escalation, Niantic Wayfarer roll out is continuing. Starting today, players from Chile have access to Wayfarer. As of the time of this writing, there is a requirement to have an Ingress account associated with the same e-mail address as the one used in Pokemon GO.
Players have reported that they’ve received an in-game notification, followed by an e-mail from Niantic. Eligible players are still required to pass the Wayfarer Test for Reviewers, but if you passed it during while Wayfarer was available globally, your results still hold.
Niantic is not following the same release pattern as with PokeStop nominations. Countries are being selected in a seemingly randomized fashion, likely influenced by the length of Wayfarer queue. As Wayfarer reviewers primarily review nominations in their area, such logic seems sound from Niantic side.
We’re not sure as to why Niantic is not releasing the product in batches, but a comment written by Andis1 provided some insight into Wayfarer performance during worldwide availability:
Hey, active Ingress player here from Florida – I can tell you that at least from my perspective, that there definitely was a server-side lag issue when it went live for everyone, And I’d like to share how I know this.
My area has a Discord group of dedicated Ingress/PoGo players. We share screenshots of what we submit, what we review, and what gets approved/rejected. We mainly work to flesh out our local parks as well as create good new gym locations, but as a result of this we have gained a lot of insight into how the entire process works.
One of our favorite things is when someone new in the group hits Ingress level 12, starts reviewing and begins working through that backlog. We consistently notice that just one new reviewer often pushes multiple of our outstanding subs through, and we also love watching their agreements pile high. It seems to only take minutes between when that final review gets received, and when the portal goes live and we get an acceptance email for that POI.
When all PoGo level 40 Players gained access to reviews, a bunch our group started reviewing, and at first we did get a few submissions approved/rejected. But then the emails quickly stopped within the first few hours. We alone collectively reviewed thousands of POIs, but only saw a few POIs approved at the start of the rollout. Between then and when Wayfarer access was revoked we saw pretty much nothing. Then a day later, we collectively woke up to about 100 approvals/rejections. I personally got thirteen. The system clearly couldn’t handle the volume of reviews, and the reviewed POIs going live was clearly slower than usual. If I had to guess, the reviewers probably broke it entirely for at least a little bit.
Hopefully they can fix that issue and begin enabling it for more countries faster.
Niantic has been silent about the roll out schedule, but did share that everyone should get Wayfarer by 2020:
We’ll be rolling this out to eligible Pokémon GO players before the new year, stay tuned for updates.
You can learn more about Wayfarer with Niantic’s official introduction video: