25 people fighting over FTF ? Agreed. This could be painful and while not specifically addressed in the OP, an influx of people may have a detrimental effect on the site and the game. Over time, this will happen anyway, but the sponsorship deal would make it happen a lot faster.KevL wrote:I've only been caching for a little over 12 months.
The following is some mental ramblings on what is a tough subject.
Picture , if you will, a popular park /location on Saturday afternoon with 25 people trying to get a FTF?
How hard will that virgin parkland cache be to find after 2000 people have worn a path to it?
Part of the charm of geocaching is the "underground" nature of the 'sport'. The nonchalant glance under a rock, the casual look in a hole in a tree. Who hasn't had a phone conversation with their gps. How much fun will it be if everybody in the park knows what your up to. And yells ,nah the other rock!
Whilst we certainly don't want any sort of limit or control on who plays, advertising on national scale to encourage participants may be going too far. Is this a sport that can handle vast numbers of players?
Word of mouth and stumbling upon caching has worked so far.
But it's hard to say no to financial security. This will be an interesting topic in the coming weeks.
Kev
Your point of virgin parkland and many people trudging over it to find cache is a most excellent point. I have no answer to this. Whether we agree to sponsorship or not, the number of people playing the game will increase and the problem will arise. We just get there faster with a sponsor.
If people starting calling out to me that it was the "other" rock, on some caches I might appreciate that Humour aside, this answer is the same as above. It will happen. Not now, not in a few years, but will happen sooner or later. Remember that GC will continue to grow regardless of whether the website called GCA has a sponsor or not.
Financial security is nice. It's partly about the potential regularity of money and not having riblit, CraigRat or I come out every 6 or 9 months and beg for more. We like to go geocaching as well and we (or someone else) will need to invest time in raising money in future years.