Many of you have done our "Informal Introductions" virtual cache (GCAB5C).
For those of you that haven't, it's a very kid-friendly hunt that requires
the seeker to provide us with the answers to five questions. Finding the
answer to the fifth question is a little bit trickier than most virtuals, so
we rated the difficulty at 2.
I've become surprised by the number of people who have sent emails that
contain either an incorrect answer to question 5, or an admission that they
were unable to find that answer; these cachers then log as "finds". The
cache page states "emailing incomplete or incorrect answers may result in
our deleting your log entry without notice".
On one hand, the purpose of answering the questions to a virtual is to prove
that the seeker was in the right place. So if you get four out of five
correct, it's pretty obvious the seeker was there. And we did let one guy
skate because he was visiting from out-of-state, and had already left town
when he emailed his answers. But many people have returned a second time
after being told that they got it wrong, and they were then able to find the
correct answer.
So whaddya think? Should we strictly enforce our own rule out of fairness to
those who have gotten all the right answers or have gone back to finish the
hunt, or should we say "it's only a game" and let them take the credit for
the find? I should point out that finding the correct answer to the fifth
question brings the seeker to a particularly clever aspect of this entire
area, which is why we set the question we did.
We talked about using only that question instead of five, but we followed
Highpointer's approach to his museum cache series, where finding the answers
to all the questions takes the seeker around the entire area, which is what
we want them to do. We don't want them just running in, finding one answer
and taking off for the next cache.
We've also discussed raising the difficulty level to 3 and/or modifying the
cache description to state specifically that the correct answer to question
5 must be submitted, but I'm afraid that making any modifications to the
cache page might result in it's being re-evaluated under the current
guidelines for virtuals, and then we might be forced to archive a cache that
always gets positive log comments.
We welcome your comments and suggestions, but please avoid posting anything
that might be a spoiler. TIA.
Steve
Team Tierra Buena
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