[Feature Request] Prioritize more local reviews for Great/Green reviewers

edited January 2020 in Wayfarer (Archive)

I have 29 POIs waiting for review. Half of them are in Voting. Some of them are more than two months old. At one point I had 46 waiting, and since then I've dialled back my submissions to only the most viable, because I can't be bothered waiting forever for portal reviews to be completed.

I live in Los Angeles, one of the largest cities in the US....

Request: Allow us to indicate with an option, or do it permanently, that Great/Green reviewers get more stuff within the 9 cell region around them to review.

I review quite a bit. I get reviews from all over the US, in pretty much every state. I get a lot of reviews from rural California. What I don't get, is a majority of reviews from directly around me. This is discouraging for my reviewing, and I've fallen back to doing about 30 reviews a day to keep at it but while I have so many portals waiting for review, and apparently none of them being reviewed unless upgraded (and then still it takes time).

Please let me focus more on my local area when there are a considerable number of reviews awaiting us here. Don't send me to rural Alabama to review yet another church, when there's a two month (or more) long queue within my local area. Please let me help my direct region clear out it's queue, even if I review every other portal but the ones I've submitted.

I really feel less incentive to review, if you're telling me that to clear my queue out, I need to get 3000 agreements (about 4200 reivews), without submitting a new portal in order to get upgrades to push them all through.

Comments

  • Does LA need another portal?

  • There are still thousands of POIs not yet reported. LA is a big city with large areas that have no portals/pokestops still. But all of that it irrelevant, because if Niantic wants us to keep reviewing Egypt, Alabama, they're going to find that the places with all the reviewers, are going to stop because they don't get to review their own area.

    The benefit of reviewing is to expand the network. But that's not a benefit if you never get anything near yourself.

    On average the Greater LA region gets 2-4 portals per day extra. In 7200 sqkms, and nearly 20 million residents. And the queue of waiting portals is growing.

  • Back in the early days, OPR worked this way... reviewers were shown more candidates closer to their home location. The trouble was that in rural areas, submissions would languish for months upon months. The system does still favor your home area, but not to the extent that it once did.


  • The problem now is that in some urban areas, submissions are languishing for months and months. The spread of reviewers should factor in how fast your local stuff is processing, and shrink the area the slower your local submissions are taking.

    In an area with lots of reviewers and low submissions, give them more of the US to review. But when people in rural Kansas say "It's great how it only takes a week to get a portal reviewed", yet the places where reviewers are it's taking 2 months, despite them reviewing those rural Kansas portals... it's broken.

  • I don't think urban/rural makes a difference anymore. I have portals in NYC that were approved within a week, and portals in NYC that are still in queue or voting 9 months later. I had portals in remote New Mexico that were approved within a week, and portals in that same area that have been in voting for more than a year. I have candidates in Atlanta from early 2018 that are still in queue, the rest took about a month.

    In urban areas, though, there may be one flaw that is playing against you. It's been noticed that when multiple candidates are very close together, they get moved into voting one by one. So if you submit four portals in one tiny park, they only get considered one after the other. And it's suspected that if multiple people submit a bunch of portals in one small area, the same thing happens.

    From my experience, I estimate that 15% of my candidates come from my home area, 10% from my bonus area (a different part of the world) and the rest are scattered across the US. So the system does, to some extent, favor your local area.

  • edited January 2020

    The problem isn't individual portals being blocked. It's that there are thousands of submissions and barely anyone reviewing them despite having quite a number of Great reviewers here in the city. Because all those Great reviewers are dispatched to review far flung places, instead of the local area.

    LA should be like NYC and gaining 20-30 a day. It's getting almost nothing.

  • GendgiGendgi ✭✭✭

    I'm very conflicted with your suggestion, @Perringaiden. On surface, it frankly sounds a little selfish and like you're leaving those areas without reviewers high and dry. I don't know the number of nominations being made in your area, nor exactly how many or the ratio of which you review local vs non-local.

    I don't think I agree with having an option to change to only seeing local things. That could allow local people to force though bad/illegible nominations and leaves rural areas without support or (worse) only people who are reviewing with bad ratings.

    I do 100% think that something needs to be changed, though, because the current system isn't working. There are dozens of local nominations in my area that are in voting, yet the biggest complaint I hear from locals is that they spend x amount of time and don't see anything local. Personally, my primary region has nominations over a year still in voting (even queue) and upgrades several months old, while driving 5 minutes across the city into a different region can see a nominated portal go live in as little as 3 days.

    The current system might be working as intended when there were far less nominations and reviewers, but with the current numbers using Wayfarer, it has exacerbated some of the minor problems and frankly is harming many regions.


    To be clear, I enjoy reviewing and helping rural areas. Many of my nominations are made where I drive over an hour to help some of those areas. But I also like seeing my own local nominations go through, and that isn't happening.

  • EvilSuperHerosEvilSuperHeros ✭✭✭✭✭

    OPR/Wayfarer queue has never been anything logical. I don't see why they would suddenly start doing it that way.


    Example.

    I have a church that I submitted on April 15, 2018 that is in queue and has been listed as upgraded for several months now.

    I just got another upgrade and that portal was submitted 12-31-2019 and shows as in-voting and upgraded (why does this one go before the one from over 1.5 years ago?)

    I also have LFL that I submitted on Sept 16, 2018 that still shows as in queue, but someone else's nomination went live over a year ago.

    Bunch of stuff from 2015 was marked as duplicates or denied a bit back, but no emails were ever sent to note this.


    Granted we did have people complaining about locals gaming the system and rural stuff not being looked at, so stuff was shifted. Not sure why they just can't switch to a chronological order for submissions. That should take care of the backlog and then push forward the current subs. With the hordes of Pokemon Go trainers out there reviewing, it should make short work of any backlog. Then again, without that cycle counter, we can't really tell how many people, err, accounts are currently reviewing anything.


    I'm in St. Louis, MO. Both my home and bonus locations are near here. Most of my reviews are from states at least 1,000+ miles away. Just wish you could say no, I don't want to review nominations in another language, because I'm getting tired of using Google Translate when trying to review nominations (Mexico, Cuba, & Canada)

  • I don't think I agree with having an option to change to only seeing local things.

    I would prefer it to be an evaluated process that assesses how long the local region of the reviewer is taking to be processed, and manages it directly, but I don't know if that's possible.

  • AgentB0ssAgentB0ss ✭✭✭✭✭

    I feel like the system needs a change. I am not sure if the suggested one is the correct one but some sort of balance needs to be struck between local and not local.

    The other problem is the system doesn't care how long a submission sits out there. You could have 50 people see the same 2 day old submission and not ever see the 1 year old submission despite both being "in voting". This is a problem, once a submission is "in voting" the system should prioritize resolving oldest "in voting" submissions first. Ill see hundreds of brand new submissions before seeing someone older submissions all the time.

  • They should just change it to FIFO instead of random.

  • GendgiGendgi ✭✭✭

    Even FIFO just long enough to clean anything older than 1 year. It certainly help with duplicates. I've made several nominations and seen even more that need to be withdrawn due to the POI being accepted by a different nomination when multiples are in voting. It also wasted review time because now their reviews were for nothing.

  • FIFO wouldn't change the selection of where unless you mean FIFO among all possible candidates that someone could be shown, which would generate a massive amount of work to select and index.

    I'm not going to see a submission in Italy whereas my neighbour might, but my neighbour isn't going to see a submission in Australia either whereas I might.

  • AgentB0ssAgentB0ss ✭✭✭✭✭

    If they did FIFO it would of course need to be your normal review area (8 cells roughly 250 KM). Obviously upgrades would have to still work similar but maybe 25% upgrades 75% FIFO for your area could be a good number to help reduce the back log and review more effectively.


    Lets say the system has 10,000 active reviewers reviewing 100 submissions a day (1,000,000 total review), but the back log is 200,000 submissions. Currently those are spreadout randomly and review randomly. If the System focused on FIFO and every submission required 50 reviews 20,000 submissions could be resolved daily. Now I know this isnt exactly how it works but instead of spreading a million reviews over 200,000 in a random order the system needs to focus those more than it currently is to resolve more outstanding nominations instead of allowing the System to add to the back log.

  • EvilSuperHerosEvilSuperHeros ✭✭✭✭✭

    FIFO based on location. Simple radius based on your chosen home and bonus locations should be able to do this. Then add a thresh hold into the mix of say after 100 reviews you start getting stuff outside of your radius, but within your chosen language(s) or countries (if they were actually able to do this) at a rate of maybe 5 per 25 reviews?

    We are submitting, err, nominating GPS coordinates, it really isn't that hard. It would be worse if they did it based off addresses but they don't thankfully (addresses often are misplaced or duplicated on Google Maps for newer homes/businesses).

  • The current system works as a slew of queues, one for each cell (scoring region). You semi-randomly get selected a region to review a portal from (weighted by an unknown system).

    Then you get a randomly selected portal from the 'In Voting' group because if you get an ordered assignment, it's far easier for a group to collude by reviewing at the same time.

    The "FIFO" part should be the entering into In Voting, however, because of proximity exclusions, that would result in very few portals at a time in voting, which again makes it easier to collude.

    If FIFO were to work, you'd have to dramatically reduce the cell used for each FIFO queue, so that your FIFO queues would not interfere with each other when they shouldn't, and prevent a large pool of portals from being reviewed. Which makes the randomized selection mechanism of which queue to look at even more wide

    It could work but there'd be larger load implications..

  • @EvilSuperHeros

    FIFO based on location. Simple radius based on your chosen home and bonus locations should be able to do this. 

    That would imply that every portal in the system is in voting at once. That'd be a far too large body of items to sort through to find your "earliest in your region" portal for every user, every time.

    Also it would allow easy collusion, because a group of people in one area should all come across the same portal at the same time if the FIFO was on your review.

  • EvilSuperHerosEvilSuperHeros ✭✭✭✭✭

    That would imply that every portal in the system is in voting at once. That'd be a far too large body of items to sort through to find your "earliest in your region" portal for every user, every time.

    Not really. Only limits are what their devs can actually design and if their infrastructure can handle it. Potentially also how the data is structured.


    Also it would allow easy collusion, because a group of people in one area should all come across the same portal at the same time if the FIFO was on your review.

    Because that's not currently possible and OPR/Wayfarer cannot be gamed already, right? lol Could still easily be randomized.

  • grsmhikergrsmhiker ✭✭✭
    edited January 2020

    I'd be leery of any solution that adds an additional layer of complexity to an already broken system. The current system appears to be "last in first out" based on the complete list of all the candidates in a cell of whatever size, based on how some candidates seem to breeze right through in a couple days while others that should be easy slam dunks (churches, etc) sometimes get caught in eternal limbo. I don't know how else to explain the fact that many people have submissions "in queue" from two years ago while resubmitting the portal can result in the new submission getting a decision within a week. That could also be a possibly way by which, in a busy area, candidates get pushed down the list by new submissions and don't get presented to reviewers after a while.

  • From my experience Wayfearer/OPR manages submissions also on smaller S2 scale.

    If you submit two waypoints relatively close to each others, from my experience and what I have seen while doing Wayfarer, only one of those waypoints will go to voting, while the other will wait for first one being processed. I assume this is to prevent people submitting/accepting duplicates on "fresh POI's" by accident.

    If my theory has any merit your submission might get stuck queue because something has been already submitted nearby.

  • While that's definitely happening, the issue here is that the portals "ahead" in the queue, aren't getting cleared out to unblock that other one. Meanwhile people in the area are spending large amounts of their time clearing a queue in Nowhere, Nebraska.

  • GodZillaz88GodZillaz88 ✭✭✭
    edited January 2020

    I have over 200 POIs waiting to be voted on...

    Smaller cities lack players and require use of outside voters

    I wish geography be dammed just keep queuing up oldest portal requests regardless how far away they are



    Also since someone else mentioned it;

    I submitted (while on vacation) a portal in Niagara Falls area. It went live and ingame in LESS than 24 hours

    Back home I submit an upgrade and it usually takes a month to make it in game

    A normal portal takes forever

  • GendgiGendgi ✭✭✭

    I had a similar experience, @GodZillaz88 - I was on a 16 hour car drive home from rural Montana and made a nomination that got approved before I got home.

    It felt super good, and I was really happy for them, but it's super annoying, too, that I have yet in the 8 months I've submitted had anything in my local region approved without upgrades, and even as of lately had upgrades without response for over a month.

    Oh, but Niantic Support suggested that I encourage more people to review. "Don't worry, Agent, your nomination is in voting!"

  • JosmanuJosmanu ✭✭✭

    or they could incentive people in reviewing too like giving some ingame currency for x ammount of agreements in every game, just my idea so people will do more wayfarer, i mean normal companies pay to their employees

  • I wish geography be dammed just keep queuing up oldest portal requests regardless how far away they are

    If people continue to review and have no effect over their own environment, they grow disaffected and stop reviewing. The alternative is another post I made:


  • GearGliderGearGlider ✭✭✭✭✭

    I think you need to go sit in the 'calm down' corner for 5 minutes.

  • 0X00FF000X00FF00 ✭✭✭✭✭

    NF is in a "sweet spot" between several fairly active clusters of players: Toronto, Hamilton, Buffalo

    So out of curiosity what did you submit? My furthest afield is currently from a daytrip to the CNE, submitted something that had been neglected in 2+ years of OPR/Wayfarer. (Weirdly, THAT submission took months of being ignored before assigning an upgrade.)

  • I had parked at a tourist place to hop on the WE GO people mover. While waiting for the bus I noticed a large rock with a Niagara Parks Commission Plaque on it so I snapped.

    I got home and noticed I had an extra portal key as soon as I logged in so figured one of my local submissions went through but search search search nothing approved... checked my email and saw Niagara lol (I was scrolling through local keys hadn't gone far enough down list)


    Its at the tourist parking area just up the hill beside Dufferin Islands

  • The only other legit way to change this is require more reviewers in a heavily populated area (eg Buffalo / Toronto) or allow less votes to approve small town portals (esp those in the queue for a year with a couple positive votes; where I live we have less than 10 dedicated players, when I went to the field test (about 30 min drive) we had nearly 200 players show up)

  • No, the legit way is to allow reviewers to branch out, after their own area is going smoothly. Requiring more reviewers in a dense regions won't help because we don't get to review our dense regions while we live here.

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