Geocaching Challenges – Virtuals Officially Return
It’s official. Virtuals have returned in their new format and now Geocaching.com calls them “challenges”. For anyone who logged on to their profile today, you would have noticed a few new things, one of which is how challenges have been added into the game. According to the official geocaching.com release notes, challenges are, and I quote
“Go somewhere, do something. That’s the basic idea behind Geocaching Challenges. You might be challenged to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, sing a song in themiddle of Times Square, or take a picture of yourself walking through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.”
Further to that, Jeremy Irish, CEO and co-founder of Groundspeak and geocaching.com, also goes on to describe how challenges came to be in a post on the Latitude 47 blog. Here’s a snippet from his post:
“Finding a geocache is fun and rewarding, but I’ve always been frustrated of the limitations of a geocache. As a physical object, some places are inappropriate for placing a cache. They can’t be hidden close to each other to reduce confusion, many locations have to be regulated by land managers, and some locations just can’t support a hidden container. But there are lots of cool and interesting eureka moments in the world. So how can we get people there without a cache?
We tried this before. Our early attempt was to support virtual caches, which weren’t geocaches at all but unique locations on the world for people to discover. The best of those virtuals still exist today as grandfathered listings, but there was a time when virtuals were hard to qualify. The biggest reason was that we were applying the guidelines of geocaches to virtuals, which required a reviewer to publish them. No one could determine what the subjective threshold for what was a virtual was and wasn’t, so the constant angst resulted in the retiring of virtuals. For years we have focused on the core game of geocaching, but have always wanted to find a way to bring virtuals back.
Spring forward to 2010 when we added the feedback section of our web site. It became quickly apparent that the community wanted virtuals back as much as we did. However, knowing the history of virtuals, we couldn’t just flip a switch and have the same process again. So we sat in a room and tried to distill the idea of virtuals into one sentence. The result was “go somewhere and do something.” This evolved into Geocaching Challenges.”
Challenges do not fall under the standard guidelines that geocaches do, and are not reviewed before being published. Currently there are two types: Action and Photo.
The challanges you have completed get added to your TOTAL find count, but your actual geocache finds are separated from challenges so when viewing a person’s profile you actually see the challenges separated from your geocaches. This allows you to know your numbers of caches vs challenges quite easily. Contrary to what some people on the forums seem to think, it does not actually increase the geocache find count, only the challenge count (at least in my tests anyway)
As it stands now, there are already a few challenges issued with NB including two in Fredericton, and one in Moncton. I suspect that this is going to increase dramatically within the next few weeks. There are also worldwide challenges that anyone can accept and complete. I did one just to try it all out and see how it works.
Lastly, these challenges are NOT part of the whole “Challenge Cache” thing, but I suspect that challenge caches are somehow going to be rolled into this and it would seem to make sense in some ways.
Truthfully, my first impression of this is actually good. I know there is going to be a LOT of junk get created by people who just want to make Tim’s and other locations silly challenges, but I also think that by having the ability to vote DOWN a challenge, it will quickly become apparent what challenges are worth doing, and what are not. I think this is a good first attempt by GSP to bring back the concept of virtuals and locationless caches, without getting into the entire “WOW” factor issue that killed virtuals in the first place.
For those who would whine that this is NOT bringing back virtuals, you should be aware that the reviewers (to my knowledge) have made it very clear to GSP that if virtuals returned in their original form, there would be a mass exodus of reviewers and thusly crush the ability for anyone to get a cache listed. The entire fiasco of managing virtuals previously is why this new route was chosen.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be looking at how challenges are growing, and how they are being utilized, and will post an opinion piece further to this one at that time. For now, it’s up to you how you want to work with challenges. I would ask that anyone considering creating a challenge think about the specifics first, and don’t just go out and create something lame just for the sake of saying you created a challenge. I’ve already seen that happen and it doesn’t encourage people to be creative. It encourages people to be lame. Think before you create.
I’ve been pretty vocal about this on facebook groups and other organization pages. I feel like this is a big cop-out by Groundspeak in terms of bringing back virtuals. I mean really, they have guidelines out the wahzoo for cache types, placements, distances, even event listing, and they couldn’t come up with rules for a virtual? As far as I’m concerned, the criteria/logging requirements are essentially the same as an earthcache: find a unique area, answer a question, send the answer to the cache owner, log the cache.
The challenges so far seem to promote armchair caching (Kiss a Frog), which to me defeats the purpose of geocaching: getting outside and going somewhere.
I am not whining, I am just not interested at this point.
http://www.geocaching.com/challenges/view.aspx?cx=CX3
So what will the voting up or down accomplish? can you get a stupid challenge turfed with enough negative votes?
Sort of. A challenge is more or less auto turfed if somebody “flags” it. If it’s super negative, the hope is that people will not make similar challenges. The hope is that if it gets a lot of negative, the one who issued the challenge will archive it.
But, the only way to get one turfed is to flag it.
I still haven’t found one, not sure if I will. Having to search by city and seeing no point kinda makes it difficult to grasp.
I think of these in the same way others think of the Cache Challenges. Boring, stupid and not interested
I like to old virtuals, I’ve seen some really neat things. Plus the little ghosty icon is cool, and they count as finds. These new challenge ones don’t count for anything, and you don’t even get a nifty little ghost, plus having to search using the application on the phone… I might do one if I’m there and I know about it, but if it comes down to finding a cache or one of these things, the cache is going to win out every time.
I just want to share that I’ve had a BLAST doing the challenges. I’ve done 15 so far including all the Moncton and Halifax ones and all the worldwide ones except the most recent (“I’m on a boat.”) The one where you go to the giant lobster in Shediac and pose as though you’re being attacked by the lobster, a la B-movie style – I took the time to go to the dollar store to get fake blood and props, got my pic taken in one of its claws with about 15 people watching and laughing (with me, not at me). I shared it with my friends on facebook who thought it was great…
When my brother and I went to Halifax a few weeks ago, we stopped at the citadel to take a picture of the firing of the noon cannon, and stopped at Peggy’s Cove to get our pictures taken doing a hand stand in front of the light house. We would not have stopped at either location if it was “just to grab an extra cache or two” as our main purpose was to pick up a large cooler full of Roberts Donairs and to go find Canada’s 1st Cache.
I think the challenges have potential to be fun if enough people participate, but they’re a bit slow taking off. It doesn’t help that they are difficult to search for and don’t show up in map view.
Anyway, that’s my take on it but I understand it’s not for everyone.