romulusnr

I'd just like to say that I'm already dizzy. I could have sworn NomadRaven grabbed it and placed it last night, less than 24 hours ago. Since then it's been picked up, dropped, picked up again, dropped, and picked up again. Everyone with me? Whee.

Travis, I don't know if it's because you're a lawyer, or if it's your sense of sarcasm, but that is just way too many rules. Travis' rules are four pages long at normal page width. Kiltsurfer's suggested rules are 6 pages long. In comparison, the original 2002-2003 game's rules were 3 and a half pages long at half page width. Nobody who is into this for a hobby wants to have to memorize 4 to 6 pages of stern rules in order to play. I stand by my recommendations as sufficient to create a game that will both ensure fair play, ensure possibilities for recovery, and keep the game FUN. 1. The game piece must be in plain sight, in the main compartment of the cache in which it is placed. 2. Game time stops at 1 AM midnight and begins again at 5 AM. Any time-based action in the game (e.g. the three-hour rule) must be based around (not through) this period. No points are scored during this period. (This of course also makes the point math much easier...!) 3. The game piece cannot be moved more than X miles at once. But for each consecutive day beyond X consecutive days that the game piece has been played in the same territory, the defending team gains an extra mile to their limit for moving the piece. I would also suggest no handoffs, but there's perfectly good alternatives to that concern that work just as well. Now look, I'm usually a terribly long-winded person, but I've managed to put out some IMHO very helpful rule changes, and done it in less than half a page.

A question for seasoned cachers in the Portland/Vancouver/Battle Ground area. NomadRaven and I will be down that way tomorrow and want to score some caches while we're down there (not to mention some Burgerville! ). Can anybody recommend some must-do caches in the area? Clever hides, nice places, curious spots, etc. Preferably terrain no higher than 3. TIA, RomulusNR

I think that was decided the first time someone deliberately decided to hold it for nearly 48 hours. Beyond any of the rule changes to the fundamental game of hot potato, I personally think there should be a "dead time" through the night during which game time is paused. Say midnight to 6 am, or so. Having to have members of your team volunteer to stay up / get up in the wee hours because the other team seems to consist of insomniacs would have been very draining after 100 days. (Did Team South log a single drop or pick up in the daylight? I think we did, at least some that weren't after prime time...)

I'd like to suggest a progressive distance rule for consideration for the next game. Let's say you start with a default distance rule of 3 miles. (This should depend, really, on the dimensions of the playing area.) But for every day beyond one day that the bug is in your team's territory consecutively (i.e. your opponent's gaining points), you gain a distance limit handicap of one mile. So for example if the bug has been in your territory for the past 4.00 or more days, your team gets 3 miles of distance handicap, meaning you're side is allowed to move the piece up to 6 miles in one move. Your opponent still is limited to the default 3 mi. Likewise, once the piece is dropped in your opponent's territory, your handicap is also eliminated and your team's limit is back to 3 mi. This would balance out stalemates where the best possible strategy can't possibly guarantee a win based on where the piece is at a given time. As it stands in the current game, if both teams play perfectly for the remaining 94 days, North loses. This would also add risk and strategy to the game. One side could try to keep the bug in their side for a long time, in order to gain, say, a 10 mile handicap, launching the bug far far off into the enemy territory. So the team who is gaining points might actually want to pull the bug BACK into THEIR territory, to cancel their opponent's handicap. Or perhaps the handicap could be granted based on actual plays made by the team who's territory is currently occupied, during the time the bug consistently there. That way a side couldn't rack up a huge handicap by just doing nothing and letting the bug sit on their side. (Then again, while they're gaining a 1 mi. per day handicap, their opponent could be continually pushing it 3 mi deeper.) Further analysis of this idea (I think I've analyzed my own idea more than enough at this point ) is of course welcome

I see no problem with the time limit, in theory, but if ppl are going to abuse it, maybe at least next game the rule needs to change. That would be sad, though. That means everytime I hear the bug drops, I not only need to research that cache, but immediately look for possible moves, and set aside time for two caches, which are up to 5 miles away from each other. This is not ideal for night grabs, lunch-break grabs, etc. That IMO discourages play. It should be OK to pick up the bug this morning, and drop it tomorrow morning, or no later than the morning the day after (i.e. the current limit of 48 hours). However, when it comes right down to it, abuse of the time limit is going to be balanced out. By playing "you can't have it" with the game piece, you're riling up a growing gang of increasingly RABID opponents, just itching to get you back. In other words, I hope you south-side guys like Graham.

By the way, is this an acceptable place to announce that I'm playing? North team, natch.

There's nothing that says you can't intentionally hold it for the limit. The limit is there, in fact, to prevent you from holding it longer. Whether it's either good sportsmanship (or good strategy) to deliberately hold the piece (i.e. you have no other reason not to place it) in an attempt to maximize points is another matter. It's actually to your team's *disadvantage* to hold the piece. If you were to coordinate, you could place it, with another team member ready to nab it after the 3 and move it even *further*. (Which appears to have happened last night!) If you hold it, it doesn't move until you place it... with a rabid opposing team who's on eggshells waiting for you to drop it, and THEY have no timing restraints. (IMHO there probably should be a rule on maximum amount of time between placing and logging, but ppl are generally good about that.)

Once the bug is logged in a cache, a timer starts, and the amount of total time between having been placed[\b] in caches on one side of the border accumulates points (one whole point per 24 hours) for the opposite side's team. (So even after the bug is picked up, points are counted as if it were still in the same cache, until it is placed in a different one. So if you've picked up the bug to move it back across the line, its in your team's best interest for you to do it quickly.) I noticed that a few rules have been changed. For one, it was permitted to move the bug via ferry as long as total travel minus ferry route was within 5 mi. Also there was no rule against multis or puzzle caches -- one of our best nabs last year was from a multi after dark. And Bull Moose... why do you say you are excluded? [added] Oh... And the reason the bug didn't move terribly far from the border last year is because the teams were very competitive. There was a bucket brigade going on last year on the other side for a bit that almost sunk our side, until we broke the chain.

An awful lot of people unfortunately treat Cache Machines this way, though I don't think that was quite the intention. At least they haven't started cheering the people who finish first yet...

What about a travel bug that itself was a container, and could contain its own tradeable cache items? You could trade items in the travel bug, or just trade the travel bug, or both... If you gave it a goal of circling around (the state,country,world, etc.) and returning back to you, you might get some REALLY interesting items when it comes back to your area.

I live here and wonder why you will never ever return? Well, we just came back from our twice bi-weekly drive to Yakima, which is always preceded by a drive to (and back from) Ellensburg. We do quite a lot of cross-state and halfway-across-state-and-back driving, and aren't eager to do much more Nothing's wrong with Spokane, but there's lots of other cities and towns to visit, many that are quite a bit closer... sorry

Travis, you forgot: > Some folks are cache-purists, and will skip over all the virtuals, putting > them ahead on the cache machine route. Since some of the more prolific > cachers feel this way, even more folks will skip the virts too in order > to keep up with the big names. One of my cache-machine peeves... I especially liked the virts in Spokane, especially since we don't plan to be going to Spokane ever again. It combined caching event and city tour all in one.

quote:Originally posted by mattyhayes:Someone just needs to put an online poll of users to determine the number of days/weeks/months that is the dividing line between temporary and finite... I doubt it is economical or practical to expect a referendum every time a rule is made, though perhaps rules should come more from wide-scale membership grumbling, and be based in the spirit of the concern, not by a strict interpretation of the wording of a rule. Despite this being a social sport, and despite the encouragement to form a community around it, and despite the obvious decentralization of the mechanics of the sport, we're not involved in the control of the sport, as far as this particular site goes. We keep hearing talk of the "honor system", but when you introduce rules, and enforce them with an enforcing body, you cease to have an honor system and instead have a rules system. I think the question of whether an honor system or a rule system is what we want. You can't have both, just as you can't have both a truly open, decentralized sport, and a centrally defined set of rules for the sport enforced by a single set of enforcers. Frankly, to me, the comments of the most recent cache finders are much more useful and meaningful in determining cache quality and caveats, than whether or not it passed through the passive, unverified filtering that is the cache approval process. I'm certainly ignorant of the reasons behind having cache approvers, and of having rules on types of caches. Or, for that matter, why it is that we can have a flag on the cache page for size of cache, and a flag on the cache page for type of cache, and a flag on the travel bug page to distinguish a few certain people's special bugs, but can't have a flag on the cache page to distinguish temporary caches from "permanent" ones -- instead of, say, a hard and fast zero tolerance rule.

quote:Originally posted by sharp88:Screed92 and I (we were the ones in camo) logged 64 caches with one virtual and 63 on the list. Fun story (before MisguidedOne tells it ). We had just found PC II, and while we're admiring it, an oldish man in cycling gear came up to us and said he'd been seeing people come into the park all morning following their GPS's and had finally had enough, and had to ask us what on earth we were doing. Between Team Misguided, NomadRaven, and myself, we probably got a new cacher hooked. But the point of this is what he said afterwards: "The first thing I saw were some Army Reservists looking down below there. I thought they were looking for a place for drilling." "Army reservists?" I asked. "How many were there?" "Oh, about two or three." "Uh, those weren't Reservists. They were more of us."

quote:- How close did the scheduled times come to reality? For most of the morning, we were ahead of schedule, even after we started to splinter. quote:- Did the four Dishman Hills caches take too long? They took notably longer than you had scheduled for them, if that's what you mean. Then again, we were mainly on our own there. The Lincoln Park caches also took a while, and we even ditched the last one. quote:- Which caches took the longest? Of the ones we did, I'd say Pug Cloning, though the one in the same park (Treaty Rock) took us quite a while. Then again, we were on our own at that one. Not to say we didn't love Pug Cloning so much that we decided to go for one other cache by the same hider before we bailed for the 19th hole. quote:I'm so glad to hear you all had another great time. Wish I could have been there. I would have enjoyed being able to stay with the main group, but with people rushing to the next cache, some tough terrains early in the morning, a few people trying to beat the main group and disrupt the cooperative spirit some of us were trying to generate, and a lot of people skipping the virtuals on the route for philosophical reasons, it just wasn't in the cards. We had a lot of fun, and we have lots of great stories to put in our SCM find logs. (unlike Bremerton CM, where Raven and I never got around to logging the finds, we do plan to log these, and with meaningful logs to boot ) Travis, I hope we can arrange it to join you for the next CM, if you'll be there, and I hope we can keep up with the group that follows you around.

There's an interesting propensity here to tell the cache hider that they should play along with the decisions of approvers in the application of vague and admittedly unfinished guidelines. The motivation seems to be that one does not want to attack the actions of volunteers for fear of discouraging the volunteers (perhaps forgetting that cache hiders are volunteers as well, in another sense, and one that is arguably more essential to the sport/hobby of geocaching than the approvers of content on a web site). If we're going to operate in a loosely structured manner, where approvers act as a judiciary, shouldn't there be a way to appeal such judiciary, instead of allowing those volunteers (what is their accountability?) to be judge, jury, and (cache listing) executioner? There is (apparently) none, and the overflow falls into the forums, where it incenses forum regulars and other well-known geocaching names. I've heard (both in the forums and in person) people discuss the application of the temporary cache rule (especially here), and the spirit or reasoning behind the temporary cache rule, but I have yet to see someone make a reasonable connection between the two. The result in this case (and no doubt others) is that a specific sort of problem is being addressed with a zero-tolerance policy. What happens with a zero tolerance policy? The result is that it makes things exponentially easier for the enforcers, as the need for making critical distinctions is minimized, but the number of false positives that result also greatly increase. (Who are the guidelines for, anyway? Are they guidlines for approvers to decide the worth and acceptability of caches, or are they for cache hiders to improve the quality of their hides?) Perhaps thought should be given to what role is more important to the sport/hobby of geocaching -- the cache hiders, the cache finders, or the cache approvers. Now, I'd never tell another person that they should not protest something that they feel is wrong, but I am saddened by vds's "take my toys and go home" method of protesting this disconnect of the rules with the spirit of the rules and of the game. Perhaps it is worth for us to think about how a web site, namely geocaching.com, relates to a hobby, namely geocaching, and whether these two things are vitally tied, or whether one is just a popular vehicle for the other. If splits are to form because of irreconcilable differences over the application and interpretation of rules, the best solution is one where the hundreds of us in the area that cannot affect this decision are not essentially denied the benefit of a prolific cache hider and his caches. And perhaps those who want to apply their own personal standards to this hobby can have their realm to do that, and others with much more flexibile and open standards can still share that hobby with them.

quote:Originally posted by vds:I created a new micro at Fort Dent the other day that was just denied due to in my opinion a misinterpretation of the rules posted on the web site. In the cache description, I included the following text - _"Note - this cache will be removed at the end of October..."_ to let folks know it was a temporary cache with a finite (currently planned) end date, As applied to your cache, this rule would also invalidate any cache placed in a national forest or state park which abides by any of the cache registration agreements which are becoming common as state and federal agencies become aware of geocaching in their turf. Case in point: Superior National Forest Geocache Registration Form, which explicitly requires the cache to be removed after one year. Shame on the site maintainers and/or approvers for letting things become completely arbitrary and being incapable of clearly drawing out their questionable and conflicting rules, and applying them evenly and consistently. It is irresponsible of them to strictly enforce rules that they have not managed to finalize.