Pokemon Go Players Will Soon Be Able to Nominate and Evaluate Their Local Stops With a New Tool

If you’ve ever been frustrated with your local selection of PokeStops, or wanted to elect a new one a little closer to home, it looks like you’ll get your say soon. Niantic announced the launch of Niantic Wayfarer today; a program for nominating and evaluating Waystops, which translate into important points of interest in both Ingress and Pokemon Go.

The idea is that average users can elect certain places and landmarks as a Wayspot. Others can then review the locale, and over time, they might become official PokeStops or Gyms. Theoretically, this should create an influx of new places to Pokemon Go, and probably help out a lot of areas currently underserved by Niantic’s selection.

It might be doing Niantic’s work for free, but considering how massive Pokemon Go is at this point, it’s not a terrible idea to put some tools in players’ hands to curate things a little more. Wayfarer is an evolution of a similar tool for Ingress, called Operation Portal Recon, but this one looks to span both Ingress and Pokemon Go.

Years after that one blissful summer when everyone was visiting their local parks looking for new monsters, Pokemon Go is still surging. Niantic is currently teasing more Team Rocket trouble alongside the recent addition of Unova-region Pokemon. Wayfarer, which will be rolling out to eligible Pokemon Go players before the new year, should hopefully make it even easier for Trainers still combing their local haunts to curate a solid selection of PokeStops (even if it will definitely result in some joke landmarks).

If you’re on the hunt for some Pokemon this weekend, be sure to check out our guides section for all things Pokemon Go.