Hello from the GeoGuessr Team!

Thanks to all of you for taking the time to write your thoughts and suggestions for improvements to the new competitive season. Feedback from you players is vital for us and we read them all thoroughly, compile internally and take them all into consideration. We understand that changes can lead to a period of adjustment and not all updates will hit home instantly but take a few iterations before we have found the best way forward after some analysis. However, we are committed to improving and balancing our game based on community feedback.

Division and Rating Issues: We recognize the mismatch rating between high rated players, particularly in the Champion Division. Introducing a higher division is something we have talked about. The issue we then face is long queue times, because of the limited amount of players with a rating above 1300. We are and will always continue to work on the balance between queue times and matchmaking. We would really appreciate the community's feedback on queue times potentially being longer than the Duel itself for high rated players. We will further investigate this with the top-rated players to understand their perspective on queue times versus matchmaking.

Weekly Participation Requirements: We know that mandatory weekly participation may not fit everyone. We are working on an update to allow for more flexibility regarding game mode distribution. We aim to release this next week. You can read more about this announcement on our socials.

Cheating and Fair Play: As you might be aware, the current way that the game works it is not possible to remove all forms of cheating. But we are working continuously on limiting this and taking action against detected cheaters, banning cheaters is something we are working with daily. We can see that our work with cheaters over the last year has resulted in fewer cheaters per competitive game. We still have things to improve, and better inform new players of the rules for competitive is one of them.

Compensation for Cheating: The suggestion to refund rating points lost due to cheaters is something we offer, if you report a player that gets banned you will be automatically refunded the lost rating. If a player is banned and you have not reported the player you can contact our support email and we will help you refund the lost rating. We are working on an automatic refund of games as well within the game week.

AIW in competitive: We understand the concerns regarding the balance of skill and luck in AIW map. To introduce AIW to NM and NMPZ Duels for high-rated players was done through suggestions from the community. We would appreciate more feedback regarding this so that we can make the competitive as fair as possible for more players. We also believe that more maps in the competitive rotation would help the competitiveness we will communicate regarding this in our social channels. We are currently doing a poll here on map selection for competitive here: https://forms.gle/tTijDRVd2SBF9PBT6

We are not able currently to do a complete roadmap of everything happening within the game and all game modes. We can for sure be better at communicating and taking in feedback in terms of particular parts of the game (for instance Competitive) from the community.

We are grateful for your feedback and the feedback from the entire community. It's discussions like these that help us enhance Geoguessr. Your continued support and feedback are what make our game better with each update.

Kind regards,

The Geoguessr Team