Major flaw
Hello,
Whilst I believe GeoGuessr is absolutely one of the very best games available to play on the Internet, there is one major and extremely annoying flaw which could be easily rectified and whilst your responses, from having this pointed out to you as far back as 2014 in the forum, indicate you would consider addressing this issue, four years have passed and you have done nothing.
On what level do you consider it advantageous to induce players to complete 4 rounds in different countries and then present them with a fifth and final round where the footage is taken by a pedestrian and there is no possibility to travel any further than the pedestrian has walked? Why not just offer a blank screen if you want to make it impossible to complete a game? Is this some kind of in-house joke? I would appreciate your reasoning as to why you believe the ridiculous inclusion of photo spheres into an otherwise enthralling and time-consuming game, is a benefit to the game or to anyone playing it?
Whilst I believe GeoGuessr is absolutely one of the very best games available to play on the Internet, there is one major and extremely annoying flaw which could be easily rectified and whilst your responses, from having this pointed out to you as far back as 2014 in the forum, indicate you would consider addressing this issue, four years have passed and you have done nothing.
On what level do you consider it advantageous to induce players to complete 4 rounds in different countries and then present them with a fifth and final round where the footage is taken by a pedestrian and there is no possibility to travel any further than the pedestrian has walked? Why not just offer a blank screen if you want to make it impossible to complete a game? Is this some kind of in-house joke? I would appreciate your reasoning as to why you believe the ridiculous inclusion of photo spheres into an otherwise enthralling and time-consuming game, is a benefit to the game or to anyone playing it?
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Being able to put photospheres in custom maps isn't the problem. It's more in the official maps where you spent hours getting 4 perfect rounds and get a last round in a photosphere where you can't even move, blocking you for getting clues and ruining hours of playtime.
Adding to this, photospheres are:
- not loading most of the time (black screen), or loading slowly, sometimes staying blurry
- being misplaced very often as it's not Google but the photosphere creator that manually places them on Maps (or with the GPS data, which is sometimes not precise)
- being disoriented, creating wrong clues for players (you see the ocean north while it's actually south, making you guessing in the wrong place on map for example)
- often with low quality when done with cheap 360 cameras
- often blocking all movements as it's often a single view
- being removed by their owner, leading to more black screens
It's really ruining the game and devs don't seem to understand that. A setting to disable photospheres when starting a game is a solution, so people who likes them can still have photospheres and other players will finally enjoy a game free of photospheres.
@Roger Dunk :
The only reason they include photospheres is to get more locations in the world, especially where Streetview isn't available (like China or India). But I guess it's also more work to do on the game to detect photospheres being not regular Streetview and we all know how slow their are to work on Geoguessr lately.
We're aware that the photospheres is something that's been discussed for years.. Sadly we haven't had the time to address it. A setting to turn them on or off is a reasonable solution.
We are trying to filter out removed locations but we can do better..
best,
I would also suggest that another improvement would be to remove those locations where the Google photography is in low resolution, so much so that it is not possible to read any of the road signs. It can be incredibly demotivating and boring to have to travel 20 miles or so down a road in the Australian outback or in rural USA before you reach a destination that was photographed in a higher resolution and thus enabling players to determine where in the world they are. Sorry to be picky but the challenge the game offers should not be because of low-resolution photography.
In the mean time, with all due respect, I think many of people's problems are related to their own compulsive need to get a perfect score. If it's boring and demotivating to travel long distances down dirt roads, then maybe just take a guess for that round and move on. If the fun is in exploring the world, do more of that, and less worrying about numbers.
Killermapper, I can't believe it still takes you hours to get 4 perfect rounds.
It's easy to know if a place is a photosphere with Maps API. Everything depends on the way Geoguessr selects locations. We know it's a database of millions of pre-saved coordinates so it would require to add a photosphere tag for each location and in order to do this, they will probably have to check all the locations and see if it's a photosphere with the API. This will take lot of time...
Eighty clicks (a similar game) is able to detect photospheres and even blurry pictures so it is possible to detect and disable photospheres.