Thursday 29 January 2015

Geocaching.com's New Advanced Search

Geocaching premium members, check your email mailboxs. Yesterday you should have received an email telling you how you as premium members get a sneak peak at the new advanced search that Groundspeak is rolling out. I personally think that it is great except for one thing, and that is filtering caches based on minimum favorite points.

I find that to be rather offensive because it takes away from the element of just getting out and caching. Let's take the video game Little Big Planet 1, 2, and 3 for example.

The credo of this game is "Play, Create, Share", which is not that different than geocaching's credo.
The players of this game can play the main story levels, collect bits and bobs, and then create levels for other players to play that are published to the Little Big Planet servers.
But the players of this game only seek out levels made by the community that have 500+ hearts (favorite points) on them to play. This gets those levels more plays and  more hearts, and in turn buries the levels of other less experienced community creators into obscurity. 

A new creator of levels can put in just as much time and effort into learning the in and out of level creation as a master builder, but will not get the same level of plays or hearts in return. And this can be very disappointing.

It is the same with geocaching,and even more so now. I feel for the new cachers, it's not right. Don't be a cache snob and only find caches with a minimum number of favorite points. The point of geocaching is to get out, have fun, and explore... Not to find perfect caches at the expense of not having an adventure.

As a side note, you as a premium member if you have found 1000 or more geocaches have more favorite points to give out than you can ever do in your caching lifetime. People look at the cache and think "Well it's just a lock & lock under some moss, not worthy of a favorite point.
But think for a moment, step back and look around.. Maybe the location is the reason why the cache is there, maybe it is the point of why the hider brought you to that spot. Maybe something close by is the reason too. Look at the big picture, not just the cache itself when determining the worth of the cache!

2 comments:

  1. I have never been a supporter of favourite points as they favour urban caching. Some of the best caches I’ve been to are the ones that the majority of cachers think they can’t get to. So IMHO the best caches are not represented by favourite points so largely ignore the favourite point thing. In my brief review of the new search engine, I note a search for Victoria puts me on the opposite end of the earth though. I expect this will be resolved soon though.

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    1. Thank you for your comment Ralph. You are quite right how the favorite point system favors urban caching and takes away from the adventure that geocaching is supposed to represent!

      As for the bug you discovered, I'm sure that will be ironed our soon too!

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