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Bad Puzzle Idea?


Bunganator

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I have a few puzzle caches that I have published where it seems like a great idea on paper, but once it is live, it seems rediculous and unappealing. To many twists or ideas that just don't work long term that force me change the puzzle around. Has anyone ever had one of their own puzzles backfire on them?

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I have a few puzzle caches that I have published where it seems like a great idea on paper, but once it is live, it seems rediculous and unappealing. To many twists or ideas that just don't work long term that force me change the puzzle around. Has anyone ever had one of their own puzzles backfire on them?

 

I just solved a ultra hard puzzle last week and found it this weekend.

The puzzle took me 2 weeks to figure it out and it was tough. Its not been found much and I figured that most people just don't care.

Another cache by same cacher is proving much tougher on the wife and I believe she has already given up on it.

 

Some just don't like it. I know what may be simple for you to figure out, might not be for others.

 

Simple puzzle caches are good too, but then again, its up to you, the cache owner.

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I have a few puzzle caches that I have published where it seems like a great idea on paper, but once it is live, it seems rediculous and unappealing. To many twists or ideas that just don't work long term that force me change the puzzle around. Has anyone ever had one of their own puzzles backfire on them?

I'm not sure what you mean by backfire. Many cachers flat out ignore puzzle caches no matter how easy they are, so maybe you're lamenting the lack of Found It logs? :unsure:

 

edit: spellin'

Edited by 9Key
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I have a few puzzle caches that I have published where it seems like a great idea on paper, but once it is live, it seems rediculous and unappealing. To many twists or ideas that just don't work long term that force me change the puzzle around. Has anyone ever had one of their own puzzles backfire on them?

 

Puzzles, no, but caches, yes. Just like battle plans don't survive contact with the enemy...cache plans don't survive contact with finders. That you have payed attention puts you ahead of the curve. You can adapt your caches to reality.

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I have a few puzzle caches that I have published where it seems like a great idea on paper, but once it is live, it seems rediculous and unappealing. To many twists or ideas that just don't work long term that force me change the puzzle around. Has anyone ever had one of their own puzzles backfire on them?

 

Backfire? Nope. Never had that happen. We did come up with what we thought was a great cache idea! And we still think it's a geat mystery cache idea! It's had fifteen finds in two years! :unsure: And none since February. :ph34r: Beautiful area. Fun cache. Mile hike each way. Two or three hundred feet of climb, each way. Requires a hiking permit. Bear chewed up one of the waypoints. But we love it! And that's what counts.

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Wow, these make me feel a lot better (Seriously). Most of my caches are puzzles, but I have placed a few traditionals in some pretty neat places and, was surprised that more people went for them (though I should have expected it). Maybe I should give an example of one of mine. I placed a puzzle that I wanted to be tougher. But it wasn't tough in that sense that it was a creative method of disguising coordinates, but rather the method was tedious. You first had to decrypt a string of letters. Then with the decryted string, break them into pairs to get state abbreviations. From there you just use clues on the page to get the coords. I talked to a few of the infamous puzzlers from the area (they are very hardcore about difficult puzzles) to discuss it and they agreed that it was a little to out there. So I reworked the puzzle to just have a map of the necessary states. It still stumps people, but it isnt quite as obscure.

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My personal rule(s) of thumb for puzzle caches:

- innovative puzzle (e.g. reading #s off airport runways using GE for coords, not the 15th cypher variation)

- Quick to understand (figuring out the question/point of the puzzle)

- I have an idea on how to get the solution

gets me started to work on it.

 

I

- usually don't work longer than 15 min on the puzzle unles I am really getting somewhere.

(To me GC is an outdoor experience, I spend way too much time in front of this *§&$ screen anyway. As demonstrated by this post ;-) )

- give up quite easily

 

So out of 10 I usually discard 5 right away, 3 I would read description, 2 I would start and out of those 0,5 to 1 make it to the search.

And I do agree that some puzzle caches are more about the puzzle than the cache... And while I understand that that is the purpose of a 'puzzle' cache, for me it defeats the purpose of the puzzle 'cache' and that's what I am in for.

 

Thore

 

and yes I am a little jealous of the people with the smarts to figure out the puzzle and the time to go hunt the cache. T.

Edited by Thore
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I just solved a ultra hard puzzle last week and found it this weekend.

The puzzle took me 2 weeks to figure it out and it was tough. Its not been found much and I figured that most people just don't care.

Another cache by same cacher is proving much tougher on the wife and I believe she has already given up on it.

I don't think a puzzles difficulty is proportional to the quality. There are some well constructed and clever puzzles that are difficult to solve and there are some difficult puzzles that are hard to figure out primarily because they are poorly constructed. For example, I have encountered puzzles in which a correct answer to a piece of the puzzle produced an incorrect digit in the coordinates. Some puzzles are convoluted that don't seem to follow any sort of theme and thus one would have to know what the OP was thinking in order to try an make any sense of it. Howevever, puzzles such as the Key to the Cryptonomicon is extremely well constructed, yet very difficult (it took me over a month to solve it).

 

Some just don't like it. I know what may be simple for you to figure out, might not be for others.

 

Simple puzzle caches are good too, but then again, its up to you, the cache owner.

 

It's hard to construct a puzzle that will be equally easy or difficult for everyone. I don't really care for puzzles that require some obscure specific knowledge to solve that the CO assumes everyone has.

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I thought of something that might be interesting to find out. Take the puzzles listed around smaller metro areas - eg, we only have about 140 or so caches within 10 miles of my home - and see if those puzzles have a higher percent of cache finds or logs (including DNFs) etc, you know, "hits", compared to larger areas with more caches to choose from.

 

My thinking is that locals might eventually turn to the local puzzles simply as a kind've 'act of desperation'....just to have something to go after when there's not much else available.

 

Hmmmm. :unsure:

 

~*

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