The hundred and sixty one meter rule
I recently set up a Wherigo and some of you probably know how excited I was to get it out there (and even more excited to see that it was already completed the first day!). I wondered what the problem was in getting the final cache published but later heard that it may have something to do with the final coordinates of a nearby puzzle. Like some of you out there (eh Rev!) I am not all that interested (at the moment) in doing puzzles so I was not aware of these coordinates. Anyway, once I finally got a message from cache tech that my cache was within the 161m no-go-zone, I realized this was indeed the problem.
Now here’s my dilemma…
How the heck am I able to place a cache within 161m of a location I am not aware of???? (since I wasn’t about to do the puzzle). An easy answer may be to stay away from an area where a puzzle is listed, but the finale of a puzzle could be ANYWHERE in comparison to the starting point.
My wise wife just said, “What’s the problem you idiot? You just contact the cache owner explaining the situation and I’m sure he would give you the coordinates!” I then wondered if I should even post this in the end but I thought why not, it’s an interesting topic and I like to over-express myself in the true tone of Grandpa Simpson! Besides, I would like to know how others deal with puzzle/Wherigo finale locations when placing caches nearby as I am soon going to embark on my next Wherigo.
AMEN BROTHER! I like puzzles, what I don’t like about puzzles is the fact that unless you solve them you don’t know if the cache you are about to place is going to be ok. I understand that there isn’t a good fix and they are not going to get rid of puzzles so we have to live with it. My only advice is to send the coordinates to the reviewers before you place the cache if you think there may be a problem but most of the time you will be ok and the reviews may get upset if you do it every time you want to place a cache. Maybe groundspeak could come up with a system that would allow you to check on the availability of a spot before placing a cache, now that would be cool. If I place a puzzle I try to keep the fake coordinates as close as possible without giving away the hiding spot.
The problem with GSP giving you a means to “check” is that it could be used by folks to brute force solve the final for a puzzle. I think this is the reason such a functionality does not exist
I got lucky this time. Tiger kindly offered to archive his cache considering the work involved in putting out a wherigo – not to diminish the work involved in putting out a puzzle (I kinda feel bad about this). I’ll be more careful next time. The only thing with a wherigo or a puzzle, is that sometimes you need to be in a particular area for it to have all its meaning. If that area seems to be cache free, then you put a lot of effort into putting the puzzle or wherigo together for that specific location. What a bummer when you realize there is a cache there that you did not know about. I guess one way would be to create a random micro, secure the location asap, put together your puzzle/wherigo, then when all ready you just archive your random micro and voila!
What I usually do is I look to see if there are any puzzles within a couple of kms of the area. If there’s any puzzles nearby, I usually try to get them solved or beg the owner (or other ppl I know) to let me know where it is so I can be sure of distance restrictions.
I attended Zor’s Wherigo event and gained an appreciation of the work involved in creating a Wherigo cache. Turns out that my puzzle cache “Ring Ma Bell” (GC1GZMQ) was based on the number of puzzle caches that local geocachers had found. It was published in 2008 and as a result, the numbers had become dated. Archiving this cache was not a serious issue and I will be creating a new version soon elsewhere based on current numbers. Looking forward to playing your Wherigo Adventure.
Tiger Tracker, that was a really gracious thing to do in archiving that cache so Nemo’s could be published. THAT is the kind of local cacher cooperation that makes caching in our province MUCH more enjoyable.
I think I have a love/hate relationship with wherigos. Lately my wife hates this whole thing, as I have been working more on my cartridge than doing anything else!
I just love the idea, the games, the possibility to interact with the real world, and the fact that you can make the game such that if you do not play it the right way, you will not get the coordinates for the geocache. The minute I got out of Zor’s presentation, I had downloaded the builder and was already working on a wherigo.
Now here is where it makes me hate the whole thing and quite frankly today, I think I am done building wherigo (at least for a while!).
The builder sucks, and the Garmin and perhaps others too (I only played with the Garmin so I can only comment on this device) sucks even more.
Working on a complex game with a lot of fun possibilities takes time (ask my wife!). I would guestimate perhaps 20 hours of work on the last one I did, and possibly twice as much on the first one. The builder is crappy. It does not allow you to copy complex script that you may want to use more than once, it crashes way too often for no reason and of course it has to be when you did not save for the last while. It just sucks in so many aspects. Now as far at the playing device, the minute you get the game a bit more complex (and more fun), it just crashes for no reason. As an example, it doesn’t want you to show a particular screen to the player: then why the hell is there a script for it! If the game is a bit complex, it’s either so sluggish that it doesn’t make sense, or it just crashes the machine (while the game works perfectly fine with the emulator).
I guess that I am just so frustrated that my last cartridge could have been so much more interactive with so much more possible interaction, but the Garmin would not play it!
When my wrath goes away, I will perhaps try another builder, but my soul, either it’s me that is a complete idiot, or the builder program needs to be re-vamped, let me rephrase: Needs to be destroyed and re-built!
I fear that there is a good reason why Garmin did not put the wheigo feature on their last model! Sad.
as i have never tried the groundspeak builder i can’t compare it. but I’ve used the online builder earwigo for all of my whereigo building adventures. as for the garmin issue I’ve seen my whereigo’s crash on the garmin platform but fly trough easily with the iphone/android apps and have no trouble so while some aspects of this particular game are frustrating there is still good coming out of it.
Okay this is it! I am soooooo done trying to put caches out in an area where there are more than one cache per 5 km! I was going to put some cache out in the Moncton area now that I live here (as all of our caches are up north). But no, I am done at trying that in the Greater Moncton area. Soooooooo done!
Man it sucks. I had a good look at the map and there was only two “?” caches in the area but far enough that I thought I would be ok. I ended up sending an email (after the fact) to the owner of those two “?” caches and I lucked out, I was way beyond the 161m. I thought Cool, although I did not email the owner first, I am still in.
But guess what? Publication was denied. There is a cache nearby. A “?” cache posted at the other end of town! How in hell am I supposed to know that before making a container that would fit/blend perfectly in the environment; went out and got stuck in the snow hip deep, screwing and fixing things up so it would be a perfect blend; and now nope, you will not get published!
Perhaps I should have emailed all the owners of “?” caches in Dieppe…or in the Greater Moncton area…or in Westmorland County….or in New Brunswick. That is a lot of emails.
I have nothing against the cacher who placed the cache there and I also have nothing against “?” caches, but I find it way too frustrating to go out, put a very nice cache, and then getting an email saying “I am reviewing your cache submission for Geocaching.com and have found that your cache submission is to close to other caches in the area. The proximity to exiting caches is one of the many criteria used by the Volunteer Reviewers when listing a cache. The general rule is not to allow any cache to be hidden within 0.1 miles, 528 feet or 161 meters of an exiting cache, unless there is a natural barrier between the two locations. Your new cache is currently too close to a nearby multi/puzzle cache’’.
I guess what bothers me the most here is that I went out and placed two caches. A random one that is just a lock’n’lock container with camo duck tape, and another one that took me a while to work on, and most of all gave me hard time to put together at the actual site. Well, there is no problem with the one that took me 30 seconds to put out and it is now published. BUT the one where my family jewels got frozen solid in the snow trying to put the cache together just got refused!
Perhaps I should have waited a bit before posting my rambling. Ah well, it just feels good to let that out fast and coarse, like I’ve let things out over the weekend. LOL.
Thank you for taking the effort needed to place a quality cache. It’s unfortunate that you did not have the favorable outcome you were looking for. Please consider publishing your cache over at another site such as opencaching if you have not yet removed the container…
There are so many caches in urban areas that it is tough to find nice places to put caches, even if there were no puzzles. I look for uninteresting places to put my micro logics in Gatineau and in Moncton and I have problems finding any.
Opencaching would be OK, but nobody would find it
This will always be an issue until the geocaching.com site has a way for you to check possible new coords for other caches that might be within the saturation limits. Until that happens, a lot of people just like Nemo are going to have the same problems. Unless you have already found the puzzle caches in your area, it discourages others from trying to hide regulars because they have NO idea where the others ones might be.
This is part of the reason I am not a fan of puzzles. Ya, it’s great to have something for people to do outside of the box to figure out coords, but it is also extremely frustrating to want to hide caches in an area but you have no idea if where you are hiding it is valid because you haven’t solved the puzzles.
That’s biggest reason why I tend to re-use some of my hiding spots since I know there’s no puzzles nearby.
Groundspeak needs to get us some type of little widget on the side bar where you would enter coordinates and get right away a little message saying: As of now,There is no cache within 161m, or there is a cache within the 161m. This way they do not say where the cache is, just if the spot you chose is available. It would save everybody lots of time! Zor, since you have connections everywhere, you need to work on this LOL
Don’t I wish. Apparently this has been asked repeatedly and the answer always comes back that this won’t be done because too many people would use such a feature to “cheat” at solving puzzles. By having something like that, someone could enter repeated sets of coordinates and have it return a true/false telling you if it hits the saturation limit, and thusly reveal where a final cache is actually hidden.
I think the amount of people who would use this tool the way it’s intended would far exceed the few who cheat. Once again I find myself irritated at the fact that the minority seems to dictate what gets done. It really irritates me.
The simplest solution, which few have been able to fault, is have an auto check in place when submitting a cache. If it’s too close, it will warn you, and prevent you from submitting a cache for another 24 hours (officially to get you to go and move yours to a new place). Only real fault is how limiting that would be for some people (submitting series, for example).
I mean, wouldn’t it be possible for them to limit it to 2-3 tries per hour or something ? Every attempts could be saved in a database with the time/date the check was triggered and the username of the person who did it. They could have a script that would delete the tries that are older than an hour so that the database doesn’t grow out of hand. That way, it could not be altered since it wouldn’t be stored in a cookie. Just my two cents.
Maybe we could get all our members to list the actual coordinates to their puzzles on a page we make here and then we could check our coordinates ourselves before going out? Sure would save a lot of time when hiding ;)Or we could send our new potential coords to Jim52 or Incepit and they could check it for us since they have found almost every puzzle around here and are likely to be the FTF on the new one anyway. Could a GSAK macro do it if you had all the solved puzzles in it?
I dunno. If you had a master solve list, I don’t see how it would be too hard to do something like that.
The question is who gets the master list…..
Ya, plus there’s a maintenance thing on top of that. You have to maintain the list and be sure that the caches you verify against aren’t archived.
the macro would be very simple to set up and even the master list to reference could be encrypted by and for the macro only. a web site could be set up (similar to geochecker) that allows users to enter their final coords and would go into a database. the macro could then reference that database. but it’s true the archived cache problem would pose some troubles. (unless someone had access to the fabled API that is.) hmmmm maybe a use for the future release of the API??