AMA:202204
From Wayfarer Wiki
Hello Explorers!
Here are the final results of the April 2022 AMA! Enjoy!
Better consequences for abusers.
We completely agree with you that it is only fair to ban Explorers for abuse on both the in-game submission features and the Wayfarer website. It’s reasonable to think that abusive reviews will also mean abusive nomination behavior. We are actively looking into the trends here and need to complete that analysis before we decide how to implement the solution.
Why can’t we withdraw “in voting” nominations?
Again, we don’t disagree with you. This has always been in our backlog and it’s something we haven’t gotten around to.
What happened to the “written explanations from Niantic” that were to be included with appeals?
Great question. While the initial communication stated that these would be included in the email, we are now considering showing the written explanations from Niantic in the Contribution Management page. This will help with keeping all of the information regarding your nomination in one place. Please bear with us as we continue to roll out the bits and bobs of this feature.
Why aren't appeals being used as a way to identify, evaluate, and educate poor reviewers?
Great minds think alike! We are waiting to get more appeals processed to start identifying major trends and seeing how we can use this data to support the community as a whole. As of today we have 20K appeals processed, and we think we need about 150K appeals processed to kick off the analysis.
How will Wayfarer recover from being compromised by bots?
Great call out and thank you to all who have brought light to this issue. At this time, all we can share is that we continue to investigate the severity, impact, and those involved. Similar to other investigations, we cannot share in great detail but we will inform you once our investigation has concluded.
What percentage of Appeals have been approved and are you tabulating the rejection reasons?
Love the data questions! We’ve processed about 20K of the appeals submitted since Dec 2021 and we are seeing about a 50/50 split across appeals being accepted and rejected. Also, we are definitely tracking the rejection reasons and we still want to process much more for us to start thinking about how to use the trends to inform what educational materials we hope to create (see #4 response above).
Communication Improvement.
We feel you on this. We see a great conflation of feedback to Wayfarer between followers of Niantic (as a company), Pokémon GO, Ingress and Wayfarer communities; for example, we receive a lot of feedback and community expects us to respond to questions around gameboard decisions, or game items, or gameplay design but that is not for Wayfarer team to fix or respond to. Please let your fellow community members know that there are actually different teams with specific communication goals across games, Wayfarer, and the Niantic company communication channels. We definitely try to align ourselves across our general outreach strategies where possible, but we (Wayfarer) don’t call the final shots on anything other than our official Wayfarer channels. We've been trying to increase our presence and differentiate our identity as a specific product/program/team, to reduce the conflation and confusion. Our twitter account is a specific response and strategy toward doing so. It’s our way of differentiating ourselves. We also have more IRL engagements lined up that we’re super excited about (announcement coming soon). On cut and paste responses, while we do our best to not do so, the reality is that it’s common practice across all companies that have millions of users across multiple products. You’ll always see some level of similar responses. If we added a personal flare or specific details to each response, you’ll start to see a massively slower response rate. If, however, you feel like our Twitter or Community Forum have too much cut and paste responses please share so we can make improvements.
When will we be able to see the edits in the contributions page?
This is at the top of the backlog of features we want to add that will make your Wayfarer experience smoother and easier for you to navigate.
Why hasn’t the “2 mile pin-move” exploit while reviewing been fixed?
We have been watching this and are re-prioritizing this bug. You can see the initiation of that work taking place in the map improvements announcement we just posted here. If you know of any Wayspot abuse resulting from this, please continue to let us know and we will look into it.
Where is the 12th ambassador and why was the community outcry about the lack of one ignored?
As mentioned before, we needed to move forward with the program as there were many other internal processes with deadlines we had to meet. Realistically, a program like this for us to support (Tintino and Danbocat) usually has between 6-10 people, and we extended this to 12. Frankly, we met with the current 11 and they definitely have enough enthusiasm as 12 people! We will be meeting the Ambassadors again next week and will be announcing some of the work we hope to address as the first cohort of Ambassadors. As you know, this is our first year, we are learning so much already, and we will definitely consider talking about the size of the Ambassador program with the Ambassadors.
20m rule, is it needed?
Alright, so looking past the “this is NOT Wayfarer related” for a little bit, we already have systems in place that address the abuse the 20m rule mentions to ‘encourage’. At this time, games continue to be able to set their own inclusion rules and abusers will be addressed accordingly. Wayfarer does not dictate how games choose which Wayspots to include in games. Lastly, Ingress recently responded to this too. Please check out the response from Ingress here.
Why so few Criteria Clarifications answered by the Wayfarer Team?
Thank you for asking. This is also an area that the Ambassadors brought up in our very first meeting as an area that needs addressing. This is a super hard problem to solve because with global community mapping you need to set standards for data quality but also be flexible for cultural nuance. It’s a matrix of humanities, geography, and geodata science principles to balance in the program’s design. Wayfarer’s program and mission is unique in the world and we’re learning as we go. While we will work with the Ambassadors to improve the understanding of the criteria, we do also think that the concept of the criteria itself, and the questions asked during a review need an overhaul in the future. What’s important is not to have ‘law’ that applies globally (as it feels like today), but to have ‘principles’ in which we all abide by as a global community. In the meantime, we’ll be taking notes on some of the hotter criteria issues in the Criteria Clarifications threads.
Ending the Auto-Upgrade Curse.
The feature update that was planned was exactly what you’re suggesting: the ability to let you turn off auto-application of Upgrades and instead manually apply them to your nominations at your leisure. Unfortunately, this is still in our backlog as we had last minute team changes (again, sorry). We are aiming to give you a roadmap update in May.
Will Wayfarers who have had a high number or their own submissions approved receive any bonus perks?
This is a great question. We are already engaging with game and marketing teams across Niantic to think about additional perks and how you’d qualify for them. As of right now, Upgrades aren’t on the table but are very much interested in things like poses, avatar items, and IRL swag. It’s all still in the early stages so as more become solidified we’ll be sure to let you know. Trust, we’re very excited about this to thank you all for your continued support.
How can Niantic motivate people to submit Lightship-only POIs?
The Niantic Wayspots are like the kitchen ‘pantry’ of Wayspots for our existing games and games in development to bring you new experiences. Even though you don’t see it in Pokémon GO, Ingress, or Pikmin Bloom, they could and will be used across other games that we intend to publish. For example, Catan (although sadly sunset) had an amazing feature where the gameboard changed every month (and selected alternative Wayspots each time). These rules are entirely up to the game, so consider that the fact that they are available in the database means there’s opportunity to re-enliven or reshape the gameboard with them. There is no concept of ‘Lightship-only’, but there is the concept of a Wayspot ‘ready in waiting’ to be used across one or multiple games. In terms of being able to see all accepted Niantic Wayspots (whether they are used in none or all Niantic games), we are discussing the concept of a standalone Wayfarer app and will share more when any plans are solidified.
Thank you all for the great questions this round and we look forward to another AMA later this year. Check out the discussion here.
Safe Exploring!
