Geocaching, geocoins and the many roads of life.
This is made up of stories from my caching and my reviewing. It is a collection of those along with comments and thoughts. Photos, and maps of some adventures and lists of some of the oldest caches.
I took the time tonight to put together a list of the first challenges. Well kind of.
The list is for the 100 challenges that are active. When archived they vanish completely. So all I could get were those that were still active.
There are a handful that don't seem to meet the requirements, so I guess a few may vanish. I may have some errors as well.
Here is the list.
CHALLENGES
Well we can say welcome to the new Geocaching Challenges. After months of waiting and seeing what is in store we can now see the advent of the new system for handling Virtual type challenges.
People will get them confused with challege caches. Where there is a cache waiting at the end of the trail. Try and meet a certain challenge and then sign the log. However geocaching challenges are different in a few ways. You are challanging someone to Perform an action at a particular location, or to take a photo at a particular location. There will be a third type that groundspeak forms known as a worldwide challenge. Perform some action anyway in the world. (think locationless caches).
The first thing that you will notice is on your profile page that your finds, hides and challeges are all broken out under your name. And if you hover your mouse over challenges you see the challenges that you have accepted, completed and created.
It is a good idea so people can break down those things seperatly. Some cachers do not want their finds "polluted" by the find count from the challenges. So this lets them see those numbers without them being combined
The next thing that pops is on your personal page that everyone can see. This time you will see three numbers again, Those that you have found, trackables, and challenges completed. Similar to the other without the caches placed, now you see trackable info.
I created a few challeges, but the bugs and the up and down of the website keeps me from writing more.
I will follow up soon with more info.
I was pointed to a number of Jeremy's forum posts on challenges. So I thought I would assemble a number of them that have some good info in them.
I know that things are always in flux, so remember things change weekly.
In reponse to someone wondering what the guidelines are.
....there are no guidelines, though there will be some encouraging text.
They (challenges) are location-based and for everyone to do.
When you complete a Challenge (the new virtual) it will now be included in your overall "find" count. That's the only change to my original comment. I was resisting but was worn down by my fellow lackeys.
To clarify, it isn't going to be a cache listing at all, so posting a new cache listing as a placeholder for a virtual would have no point to it.
Just who will be allowed to list virtual listings on this site? Lacky's? PM's? Any member?
Premium Members during the initial release will have the ability to post them, and even then they only post one every 24 hours (max). This will open up later, based on how the system is holding up.
I will add follow up info as something shows up.
Well someone threw it out on the forums, so I thought I would throw a little bone out here. This new geocaching.com update added some of the backbone for the challenges/virtual system, and some forum discussion is going on about it.
http://www.geocaching.com/my/challenges.aspx
I know they have spoken about it at a couple of events, but I really do not know what has been discussed. Without knowing what can and cannot be discussed I will stop my personal discussions here.
Here is a clip from Jeremy Irish:
In the UserVoice updates I never said that virtuals were coming back in their previous form, but instead something would be available that should capture the interest in virtuals without the baggage (such as the subjective review process).
To me, this is the most exciting project that we've worked on in years, but it will take some time to iterate through the idea and I know we'll get some things wrong, but the framework is solid. We'll be investing a substantial amount of effort with this project moving forward.
Some points:
- It will be on Geocaching.com, not a new web site. It will be a separate section in the beta, but I expect it to be integrated into a joined search at some point.
- Currently they will not go towards your find count, but it might at some point. It won't at the beginning though.
- It will be a visible statistic, so you will see them on the profile, on the logs, etc.
- We'll be hopefully launching with mobile applications to compliment the activity. I expect that the majority of participants will be using smartphones, but we will have components (Pocket Queries, GPX file downloads, etc) for traditional GPS devices.
So that is what I have to share. Some who went to Mega Events might want to share info that you have heard.
My GUESS as to the release. End of the month, I would also think at the same time all the phone apps will be upgraded to them as well.
Population 81 Million people, 138,000 square miles, Nearing 200,000 geocaches
Comparison to California
Population 37 Million people, 160,000 square miles, Nearing 100,000 geocaches.
It is amazing to me to see a country where caching has taken off like Germany. So much so that groundspeak is doing a series of videos highlighting caching there.
The thought I had was a country the size of Montana or New Mexico. With 81 million people in it. (That is a lot of people) and not a lot of country and mountains has nearly 200,000 geocaches. Making it the biggest group of cachers outside the United States.
There is a large group of reviewers for Germany. There are about 35 reviewers in Germany, and they review a vast number of different kinds of caches. On a day to day basis 15-20 come across my queue in Utah. Sometimes far more, and in the winter maybe 5-15. I think about 15% are puzzle caches, and 2-3% multi caches, it is rare that I see anything else.
However Germany is full of creative puzzles and multi caches. The sheer number make people take the time and look at what they are doing. Make something that people can talk about and stand in awe of.
I notice the difference when I look at the map. In Utah and many of the other states in the US you see a sea of green tiles with some blue tossed in. here you see the yellow of the multicaches as well.
That creates a huge challenge for the cache placer and the reviewers. there are far many more caches where you may not know where the physical stages or the finals are. You have to be much more careful and expect to be told that there is a problem.
In any case I recommend that a cache page be created with the approximate coords then email the reviewer asking if there are issues. Nothing is more depressing than someone traveling 50 miles up into an area and finding out that there is a cache located nearby.
Well. That is it for today. See you soon on the trail.