(First I was thinking to invite "hynek1" to our group/community on Campfire for him to see some of the things we have done, as a community, through the years, and know that I'm not speaking as an individual but as a representative of a group of motivated people that have enjoyed -for the most part- PokemonGo and wants the best for it. But then I decided against it and chose to put it here instead and link our Instagram https://www.instagram.com/gomiraflowers/ that shows even more of our history.
There'll be 2 parts, one regarding PokemonGo and the other regarding Wayfarer. The products of Niantic that I have mainly used.
About PokemonGo
This is my last attempt to make Niantic aware of our perpetual predicament, trying to improve the gaming experience of the trainers from the community I helped to build throughout these last 5 years. I've tried by the "regular way", but the answers I got were always unsatisfactory and I'm not even sure the info gets to someone that is able to take decisions, I mean, these problems have been since 2016, how the hell do we still have them on 2023?
Our main problem has always been the existence of local spoofers, or "flys" as we call them. Many people were bullied out of the game by this kind of players that, not even being part of our local community came in order to "golden GYMs", from the comfort of their WC or wherever they decided to open the game, but nowhere near the GYM (because of course they were multi-account too). Well, to do raids the 50 coins every day were essential, so a lot of trainers, even friends from the community left the game as they were no longer able to get passes.
It got so bad that in 2019 we began to keep a LIST of players that were perpetrating this toxic behaviour in our area, and only if we had evidence that they were spoofers. Note that list is NOT of every Fly in existence that we know of, just the players that were bothering trainers from our community, as we (or I, in this case) don't give a damn if any player goes to Mongolia to get a wild shundo Mewtwo(?). And you can be sure that we are completely positive that every account there was indeed spoofing at the time it got registered, because in many cases we know each other in person and they had admitted to our faces that they've done cheating. Others were less blatant, but still, they were in "Fly Whatsapp groups" so they became infamous among the city trainers.
As a community, we almost singlehandedly "made our map", where we play, always with the idea of making a safe, comfortable (and nice looking in some cases) environment to play. Some of us even tried to "help" other communities by sending good nominations in strategic places, (and we despair seeing the bullshit that gets accepted thanks to your criteria in letting people take decisions that affects the game, but more on that on the Wayfarer part).
I feel the maxim in your games is "the power to decide on the way other people play is earned", but you forgot that is very important HOW that power is earned, and in reality, almost all the people who has power in your games do for the wrong reasons. First it was mainly because they were high-level on Ingress (NOT PkmnGo!), and later high-level trainers were added, as if there weren't stupid or selfish people that could "do well" in a game. And of course, your system didn't discriminate between people who cheated up to lvl40 (or 38) and legal trainers.
Another example is when the Trainers couldn't influence the map yet, the only way to make sure a GYM was well located was to have an Ingress account to give "likes" to a particular portal. And worse even before that, among our first GYMs in the area, almost all of them are now in places that aren't very safe (not because Niantic's fault, but post-pandemic problems), but the same didn't happen with the locations we as a community chose, because WE know our territory.
Now an idea: Although it can be said that big communities show the most activity during monthly events, the small local communities are the ones that "keep the game living" for the rest of the year, and Niantic has never (to my knowledge) give any "candy" to the local small communities. On that note, how about giving more power of decision to those communities, via Campfire for example. If this is not possible, maybe you could help build relations between the small communities and the larger ones so we as smaller local communities have someone to send our requests, like PokeStgo (in our country's capital city) or even better in our region: PGoVregion for example.
About Wayfarer
Orthography criteria (or requirements before nominating)
I don't know English-speaking people have the same problem with "bad writing" as we do with our native language because in Spanish orthography is VERY important. Man, my eyes bleed every time I see "Descanzo", "Maquinas" or "Plazita" on a Pokestop, and believe me that there are A LOT of them where we live. But more importantly, how are people reviewing favorably those monstrosities?
Is it a requirement to be a trainer or an agent to have a complete disregard for our Spanish language? That's a rhetorical question ofc, I know many Chileans have awful writing skills and really don't care, but it could be so easy to have more control of that with the criteria, a test (like the one to begin using Wayfarer) or something, but before giving the chance to nominate, so we have less bad nominations waiting to be reviewed.
Since the beginning of PkmnGo I thought of the potential that this game had, but as it is right now, the educational or touristic contribution of this game is near non-existent :^/
Add Edits on "Contribution Management"
As simple as that. There's nowhere to see the progress of the Edit proposals until the decision is made, and that needs to change. It would be even better if you add the option to Withdraw edits too.
Separate Edits from Nominations on "Review" Window
The ratio between new nominations and edits must be 85-15 (in my experience) when I was reviewing, and note that as time passes there're fewer existing wayspots waiting to be discovered because they are already on the map. But the number of players with access to send nominations is increasing, and they don't necessarily follow the criteria when they "feel the need" to send a nomination.
Reduce the area to review
I lost count of the times I had to review nominations from another country! What do I care about shit in Mendoza? Please reduce the radius. There are too many trainers/agents nominating "wrong things" on my country to be adding trainers from other countries too (btw, many of the foreign nominations were also fake).
Wayfinder Ranking
The only way that having a ranking based on the reviews on the community makes sense is if you make sure that the majority of reviewers are following the criteria. In my experience, that's absolutely not the case. Most reviewers do so to have more portals, pokestops or Gyms near a specific location (their room more often than not xD), earn rewards, or just plain ego.
DON'T REWARD IN-GAME!
The idea that players will do a better job reviewing or nominating because there are rewards in-game (Ingress or Pkmn) is very flawed. That motivating tactic only helps the quantity but not the quality, and that only ends up giving more trouble to the reviewers.
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