[Az-Geocaching] Re: Does it really matter?

Brian Cluff brian@snaptek.com
Fri, 7 Sep 2001 12:26:36 -0700


> Actually it does really matter to her or she would not have used her
energy
> or time to email back several times the importance of caches being found.
> According to Psychology and Sociology studies, usually this (competition)
is
> a trait of the male of the human species but not limited to that per se.
> Trisha is really proud of the fact that she has a 100% find rate.  Larry
> (Wyle E) is probably (I am guessing here) proud that he has the most finds
> overall.  Cheryl and Cody (CBX2) are probably (again I am guessing here)
> proud that they have the cache with the most finds.  Each person wants to
be
> the best at something and each of the above named people have earned it
and
> want to be recognized for it.  I can understand Trisha's concern with her
> going to a cache and making sure it is still there, only to find it gone.
> So she logs it (with an unhappy face instead of just a post) and therefore
> it "ruins" her 100% find accuracy.  We all know now that if this happens
> again to use the post instead of the unhappy face....

Thats what we are trying to do at our snaptek page is make a ton of
different stats so that there is more to talk about in the geocaching sport.
Before we posted these stats there was really only one easily gotten stat of
number of caches found.  With the posted stats and the ones coming we will
hopefully be able to give even newbies something to drive for.
We are working on:
-Cache stats weighted by the difficulty so that it puts the people at an
advantage that try for the hardest caches instead of people always going for
the easiest ones just to get their numbers up
-Cache stats based on a time period so that the new people can come in and
after a year or so can compare themselves to someone that has been caching
for a year longer than they have.
-Avarage difficulty found
-Avarage difficulty not found

There are a lot more, but I can't remember off the top of my head what they
are.  If anyone has any ideas for stats they would like to see that they
think are possible off the limited data available off the official site.
Please feel free to pipe in.

As for applying a found or not found, I would say if you went looking for
something and it wasn't there you didn't find it, and it doesn't matter if
you have been there before or not.  In the future we will provide stats that
will take in account if you had been there previously and thats the one that
you should be able to proudly beat your chest and say you found it and not
have the not founds count against you.
The bottom line in all of this is that the only way we can have accurate
stats across the board is if everyone logs honestly.  You can't be a winner
in every category, but you can try.  I would really hate to see people start
to put in fake entrys or start deleteing old ones to get better stats.  If
that happens too much we will consider that we are damaging the sport and
have to take the stats down to stop that.

Brian Cluff
Team Snaptek