2014/15 Moveable Challenge/Race

For all your general chit chat, caching or not.
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spatialriq
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Re: 2014/15 Moveable Challenge/Race

Post by spatialriq » 02 November 14 4:21 pm

Owls ... now that would be a hoot! :lol:

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caughtatwork
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Re: 2014/15 Moveable Challenge/Race

Post by caughtatwork » 03 November 14 3:05 pm

It's not likely that there will be a moving cache race this year.

GCA is still wandering along at around 2% of all geocache finds in Australia when GCA taking up most of the remaining 98%. We're not falling behind, but we're not making headway either. The cache races started off a way to encourage people to get more into GCA, but they seem to have become a thing to do to get a pathtag, then everyone heads back to GC.

Code: Select all

Year	Year   Caches    Finds  Average
2009	2010	 35        683 	 20 
2010	2011	 254 	 4,496 	 18 
2011	2012	 504 	 9,351 	 19 
2012	2013	 940 	12,307 	 13 
2013	2014	 164 	 1,591 	 10
The average number of finds for each cache during the game has been decreasing from the very first year at 20 finds per cache during the game to last year where there were only 10.

A number of people have commented (over the years) that the caches clog up their queries, they aren't interested in moving caches, the quality has decreased, the fun has gone out of it, it costs too much in petrol, "my" cache didn't get moved, "so and so" cheated, my cache was trashed, my cache went missing too early, 2 months is too long, 2 months is too short, can we do it in November rather than December, etc, etc, blah, blah, blah.

Australia is too large a country to effective run a race. Especially in QLD and NT where there are very few GCA cachers, so any participants there feel they don't get value from chasing down a cache 200km from home which once it gets moved, never moves again. Sydney, ACT, Tasmania are great places for this game. Melbourne somewhat. Adelaide and Perth less. QLD and NT are dead :-(

Basically when something stops being fun, I stop doing it. The game isn't attracting the players to GCA, so while it was an interesting 5 year experiment, I'm not sure it will continue.

I'll see if I can think up something utilising the dragonZone code to leverage more for those who play the game year round at GCA and not just during the "fair weather".

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rogerw3
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Re: 2014/15 Moveable Challenge/Race

Post by rogerw3 » 10 November 14 11:37 am

:(

A sad decision but not unexpected, interest has decreased even in Sydney where moveables had been getting plenty of moves. I don't know how you can increase interest in GCA, there are plenty of great caches but GCA tends to be thought of as something to ignore.

There are a few ardent cachers willing to go out of their way to place and find GCA caches but they are few and far between. If we could find a way to increase the number of good GCA caches around it might help. How to achieve this I don't know perhaps somebody can come up with a brilliant plan.

:cry:

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ziggiau
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Re: 2014/15 Moveable Challenge/Race

Post by ziggiau » 11 November 14 12:14 pm

I'd love to add some GCA finds but a) there aren't many near me and I don't have the opportunity to travel regularly and b) there are more than enough non-PM GC caches to keep me busy for a long while.

Maybe people value a GC :D higher than a GCA one?

Laighside Legends
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Re: 2014/15 Moveable Challenge/Race

Post by Laighside Legends » 12 November 14 8:00 pm

Perhaps the fairies time could be better spent getting a new (faster) server organized? :-k

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