JamGuys

Here's another fun sign I encountered earlier this year while returning from a cache run to St. Louis ... Oklahoma!

On a recent FTF run, this sign where the country road I was on petered out onto private property captured my imagination ... and my full attention!

Wow, I've just had a look at your Waldgeist coin and that was an amazing design! Please put me down for a complete set of the dragon series. One to keep, three (or four) to give away ... maybe.

This puzzle (6 Ord) used a similar sliding scale to reduce the D rating with each new hint. When I found it, it was at D4.5, but the CO kept on posting hints and decreasing the difficulty. And on hindsight it does make sense: Without giving away too much, the puzzle relies on local knowledge in the sense that local knowledge actually hampers seeing the solution. Not being native to the area myself, I didn't have that 'block' and found it really easy to crack. But if the CO would have stopped posting hints, my guess is most locals just won't get it. So sometimes it makes sense to continue posting hints, even if the puzzle is already solved. Cheers, Peter Thanks, Peter, this is very similar to what I had in mind even if it's coming from far-off Denmark! The only difference though is that I probably won't continue to lower the D rating after the cache has been found (even if I do add an extra hint or two) because that doesn't quite seem fair to those who would have found it at a higher degree of difficulty.

I share your sentiments to some degree and, like you, I'm maintaining a couple of puzzle caches that haven't been found in more than two years. I was actually planning on leaving this puzzle alone until someone figured it out eventually but I know for a fact that the few avid puzzle solvers in my area are totally stumped and interest has waned. In fact, someone is probably more likely to stumble upon the container by accident (and it's very well hidden, I assure you) rather than by solving the puzzle. With the promise of a hint or two, interest in the puzzle has picked up and I've been receiving queries from a number of newer cachers which I consider to be a positive sign. As a puzzle CO, it's a lot more satisfying knowing that people are actively trying to solve your puzzle rather than ignoring it completely.

Yes, but it's a lot easier to issue a hint rather than adjust the puzzle itself once it's been published.

The last two posts raise a similar but valid point. However, the plan would be to stop issuing hints (or maybe give just one more) once the puzzle is solved. The co-ordinate checker would alert me as to when that's happened. If someone solved the puzzle but decided not to confirm it using the co-ord checker, well, tough! Hadn't thought of that as I have never created a puzzle cache. Does it tell you who solved it? You would probably be sending me an e-mail to find it already. The co-ord checker I use (GeoCheck) keeps track of solution attempts and gives the IP code but not the specific identity of the person submitting.

The last two posts raise a similar but valid point. However, the plan would be to stop issuing hints (or maybe give just one more) once the puzzle is solved. The co-ordinate checker would alert me as to when that's happened. If someone solved the puzzle but decided not to confirm it using the co-ord checker, well, tough!

Thanks, I appreciate the points you've made. There's no easy answer but I can't see how it makes sense to publish a puzzle cache with a high difficulty rating then issue a bunch of hints (I use "hint" and "clue" interchangeably) that render the high D rating meaningless. I'm actually not that concerned with maintaining the high difficulty rating. After an initial die-off in interest, based on e-mails I've received there's been a resurgence of interest in the cache since I announced that I'd be issuing weekly hints. I think it's fair to say that most puzzle cache owners (myself included) relish any kind of attention their creation receives since it tends to fall away fairly quickly after the FTF race is over!

Yes, as far as I know, there isn't an official rating system purely for puzzle caches so most puzzle cache creators just try to make do with the one currently available. Since you usually can't find the container without solving the puzzle, an attempt is made to factor the puzzle difficulty into the overall difficulty rating. My understanding is that this is pretty much the norm but if there's a better way of doing this, I'd be glad to know.

Thanks, that approach makes sense and I may yet decide to do so. But what I'm trying to avoid doing is changing the D rating AFTER the cache has been found. In other words, I won't want someone finding and logging this cache thinking it's a 4.5/3 only to see it being downgraded to a 4/3 or less later on. I'm personally not into high-powered geocaching stats and finding every conceivable combination of D/T rating and the like but I realize that there are other folks in my community who are and I'm trying to be a good citizen here.

So after the 5th clue it is a 1? Where's the puzzle in that? You might as well just post the final coords at that time. No. As I said, the plan would be to stop at 3 stars.

A question for the puzzle-minded cachers out there, especially COs. I'm the owner of an as yet unsolved puzzle cache that was published nearly two months ago and have decided to issue a weekly clue towards solving it. This is something I've done in the past without thinking twice about it. However, the current D rating on the cache is 4.5 and it stands to reason that, as clues are released, the D rating will (or should!) decrease to some degree. Since I'd like to maintain the integrity of the cache rating system, I'm thinking of reducing the D rating by 1/2 a star for ever clue released down to a baseline of 3 stars (which I think would be appropriate for the degree of effort it'll take to solve, even with the help of additional clues) or until the cache is found. This way, no-one's stats should be affected. Is this a reasonable approach and have any of you ever done something like this before?

Answer sent!

Maybe someone can ask GA Cacher what he means ... Penney's Home!

More on this today ... Conspiracy Theory

"What?! In a city (San Francisco) that tries to legalize ever taboo known to man, they criminalize climbing a tree?!" :D

What's become of the Watch list? The number of people "watching" my caches appears to have disappeared.

How about submitting it to reviewers in BOTH states. Whoever publishes it first wins!

Kathy, I do believe that you've just stumbled upon one of the worst kept secrets in geocaching and that is that, unfortunately, it's often more of a hi-tech scavenger hunt than a hi-tech treasure hunt. The fact is that most people lack either the resources, the motivation, or the imagination to trade up or even and the quality of cache contents inevitably declines as a consequence. I've also found that many people seem to have this mindset that cache items are really just for kids, hence the preponderance of McToys and plastic junk, etc. As others have said, the better quality caches (as far as the contents are concerned) tend to be those that are more challenging to find, and that includes puzzle caches as well. I rarely bother to trade items anymore but I do on occasion leave unactivated geocoins in caches that I've enjoyed finding (or been FTF!).

No offence, but could you have made an error in your starting co-ords?

Today I received an e-mail through the gc.com website with the following text: "I've got your geo coin in Woodslee, Ontario, Canada. My town is about 30 minutes away from Detroit Michigan. Your coin has made an amazing journey so far." Now, the message immediately sounded fishy to me as most of the geocoins I've ever released went missing quite some time ago. When I clicked on the sender's Profile page, I discovered that the account was only created yesterday and it was completely blank ... no finds, logs, trackables or anything. So I'm thinking that this might be some kind of phishing scheme. How could anyone reasonably be in possession of one of my geocoins if they've never logged a find, etc? The thing is, this is not the first such message I've ever received. A few weeks ago, someone I'd never heard of sent me an e-mail stating how much they enjoyed working on my puzzle caches and asking me to "be their friend". But when I went to the gc.com site, I could not find that person's Username anywhere. I did not reply to that one nor do I intend to reply to this one either. Has anyone else received similar kinds of messages .... or am I being unduly paranoid?

I could be wrong but your snake looks a lot like the one below which is a northwestern garter snake. Sometimes all of the stripes might not be visible. Here's a recent one of mine, a black ratsnake I came across in a tree while searching for this cache: GC1PTX3

LOL, let's try this again! The largest cache!

Post #24 in the FAQs below walks you through the steps. Geocaching FAQs