I’ve been wondering about this for a while. Is there a specific reason why road names are visible in WorldGuessr, or is it just something that hasn’t been changed yet?
To me, it feels like it makes cheating way too easy. Someone can simply Google a road name and immediately find the exact location, which kind of defeats the purpose of the game.
Even if people don’t use Google, having road names visible still removes some of the challenge. The language and road numbering often give away the country, and after playing for a while you can just memorize certain routes instead of actually reading the landscape and using clues from the environment, which is what I think makes these games fun in the first place.
I’m not trying to complain just for the sake of it—I’m genuinely curious if this is an intentional design choice. Has the team ever considered hiding road names, or is there a reason they prefer to keep them visible?
I do think that on NMPZ or on NM it is easier to get the country (or atleast the region) correct with the language on the road but the point you made with cheating being easier definitely stands and now i am too wondering if they should remove road names.
Worlguessr is very similar to google maps and that’s probably because it uses Google’s API to show the world. However, since it uses google, it requires money to do extra things with it such as removing road names. As a result of worldguessr being free you can’t afford to use it for every match. Since NM only has one picture you can get the benefits of no road labels for much less money.
It’s true. On one hand, I agree that since the product is provided for free, it must be difficult to cover additional costs.
On the other hand, I think it’s something that should be taken into consideration because, at least in my personal experience, it makes me very suspicious of my opponent, especially when they somehow manage to find the exact route in the correct country with little more information than the name of the road.
The issue isn’t in casual matches. I think the real problem is in ranked games, where your Elo is on the line. I just wanted to know whether this is something that has already been taken into consideration or if it’s actually an intentional decision by the developers.
Thanks for bringing this up. It’s a fair question.
Right now, road names are visible because of a limitation of the free Google Maps Street View Embed API that WorldGuessr currently uses. It is very restricted and provides little options for customization and currently has no way to remove road labels.
Hiding labels requires me to use the Paid JS SDK that GeoGuessr uses, and that comes with huge costs upwards of $0.01 per panorama loaded, so it isn’t something we can apply to every duel while keeping the game free.
We definitely understand the concerns, especially for competitive and ranked matches where road names can make it easier to identify a location or even encourage players to look things up.
Looking ahead, one of the features we’d like to add is dedicated No Move (NM) duels for ranked which doesn’t have this issue.
We appreciate the feedback, and discussions like this help us prioritize what to work on next.
We do have an active moderation team that takes a look at every single report, prioritizing those against users with a significant amount of reports against them
No, since that would be against Google’s policies sadly. This is what I used to do before back in the initial stages of WorldGuessr and I soon got an email from Google asking me to not use workarounds to remove road labels…
