Have you ever had that moment where your PokéStop submissions didn’t seem to make sense? Maybe they got randomly accepted or rejected without any rhyme or reason? Well, it turns out we might have a culprit: some quirky machine-learning issues!
Niantic has officially announced that they’ve hit pause on their auto-review system named eMILy. Yep, that’s right! This little AI was supposed to help process submissions before they reached human reviewers but seems like eMILy decided to throw a tantrum instead. How classic is that?
The good news? While the auto-reject feature is still in play, they’ve disabled eMILy’s auto-accept functionality until they can sort out these hiccups. Here’s what Niantic shared:
Hello Explorers,
We have identified an issue impacting eMiLy, our Machine Learning system, that was causing some incorrect auto-accept and auto-reject decisions. To prevent any further disruptions, we temporarily disabled both auto-accept and auto-reject features while we investigated the issue.
We have since re-enabled the auto-reject feature. However, the fix for the auto-accept issue will take some time to develop and deploy.
In the meantime, all nominations and edits that are not automatically rejected will continue to be reviewed by the community.
We appreciate your patience and understanding during this time. We want to express our sincere gratitude to the community and our Ambassadors for bringing this issue to our attention. Your valuable feedback played a crucial role in helping us identify and address this problem.
The Wayfarer Team
If you’re scratching your head wondering who eMILy is, don’t worry; you’re not alone! This machine learning model has been lurking in the shadows of Niantic Wayfarer for years now. They keep things pretty close to their chest when it comes to updates about her progress.
The first whispers about eMILy popped up back in April 2023. There was another update earlier this year on April 9th:
We’re excited to announce a recent update to Wayfarer’s ML model!
Our Machine Learning models, affectionately known as “Emily” by some of you, have been enhanced to better evaluate submissions, including wayspot submissions, images submissions and text edits. This means faster processing times and potentially more streamlined reviews for Wayfarers.
- Auto-Accepts: The improved ML models should be better at identifying high-quality Wayspots and Edits that meet our acceptance criteria. This means more eligible submissions can potentially be auto-accepted, freeing up your valuable time to focus on the trickier reviews.
- Continued Reviewer Role: Wayfarer reviewers remain an essential part of the Wayspot review process. Even with the updated auto-accept system, your reviews are still crucial for ensuring Wayspot quality and adherence to our guidelines. The ML models are trained on and learn from data provided by the Wayfarer community—reviews, appeals, takedowns—you name it!
Additionally we have increased how often you can perform wayspots appeals; you can now appeal rejected wayspots every 20 days! That’s down from 25 days last month—a nice change from waiting a full month previously.
We’re confident these updates will make Wayfaring smoother for everyone! Stay tuned for further announcements as we continue developing wayfarer!
If you’re curious about how all this affects your gameplay or if you’ve gotten tangled up in submission woes lately, you’re definitely not alone! With so many trainers relying on these tools daily, it’ll be interesting (and maybe slightly chaotic) to see how things unfold once Emily is back online with her fix!
