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Decline in value of premium membership


Hynr

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Not everything goes down in price over time. Look at cars and houses.

 

If we are talking about a service here and not a product, which I think is what Groundpseak is offering, when was the last time anyone saw the price of a service go down over time. I can list quite a few that continually go up like phone, cable, internet, cab fairs, plane tickets, rentals of just about anything. Not to mention fitness clubs, insurance, back service fees, park admission, trail permits, and camping permits.

 

I am very thankful inflation hasn't affected my PM.

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As in a monopoly. Bingo.

I agree that Groundspeak is a monopoly in this particular market. More on this later.

 

Anyway, you ignored the part about bandwidth costs. That's a service, just like this one. And the cost of the equivalent service has decreased (as I pointed out in the part of my post you snipped).

The part about bandwidth is only incidental. You were going on about how people are deluded that the value of computer hardware purchased in 2003 remains unchanged today. If any part of the discussion fails, I think that is prime candidate. How did you put it again? Oh yeah, that is just disingenious. You plucked something out of thin air and insists that people are wrong because they believe that.

 

The number of employees per premium subscriber has decreased a great deal since 2003. If we assume that premium subscribers are a constant fraction of the total number of members, then the former has gone up by a factor of maybe three while the latter has gone up by a factor of around 30. Sorry, your argument fails. By a lot.

Unless you're privy to information I don't have, which is entirely possible, I don't see my argument as a fail, let alone an epic one. Don't forget also that, while the number of premium members may have gone up, the number of non-paying non-premium members have also gone up.

 

Right. In a monopoly market the cost of services is unrelated to their value, because there is no competition. The value to cost ratio tends to decline, which is what Hynr perceives.

No. In a capitalist market, the price of a product is not related to its cost. You have a point there, that some people may feel that value has declined partly because Groundspeak does not appear responsive to their needs and concerns, and that is typical with a monopoly - no competition, so no need to change.

 

(just want to add that Groundspeak is not a true monopoly, and does change and respond to the market)

Edited by Chrysalides
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Not everything goes down in price over time. Look at cars and houses.

 

If we are talking about a service here and not a product, which I think is what Groundpseak is offering, when was the last time anyone saw the price of a service go down over time. I can list quite a few that continually go up like phone, cable, internet, cab fairs, plane tickets, rentals of just about anything. Not to mention fitness clubs, insurance, back service fees, park admission, trail permits, and camping permits.

 

I am very thankful inflation hasn't affected my PM.

 

I'm not really contributing anything to the actual topic, so apologies, but I have to pick you up on this point. Almost all of your examples in the first list have actually gone DOWN in price, at least here in the UK as far as I've seen (I don't know about cab fairs, or anything in the second list).

 

So the argument that "when was the last time anyone saw the price of a service go down over time?" fails. Phones are cheaper to own than they used to be, internet and cable is now ridiculously cheap and you can fly for £1 on Ryanair (well, so they say - we know it's not just £1, but it's still a lot cheaper than it used to be!). In addition, cars have also gone down in price over time - that's why when buying a car you must always check its expected depreciation. The same car in 2003 is worth a LOT less now (so perhaps the same PQ service in 2003 is worth a lot less now....? Hmmm, I preferred the ice cream analogy!)

 

Anyway, that is all.

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If the OP's issue is with the total number of pq's available so that he can cover an area half the size of the moon because that's where he may travel over a week's time, then it's pretty obvious that the pq limit is an issue for him. If I ran a pq, the radius likely be well over 100 miles. So let's not compare apples to oranges.

 

Has the OP's value for his PM decreased based on the PQ limit and his range of travel, yes. No fault of Groundspeak (like the ice cream store that has 400 flavours instead of the original 5), but that of the OP's need to cache while travelling. Absolutely not related to the $30 cost for the PM. To the contrary, without the PM, he has zero PQ's available.

 

How fresh does your data need to be, really ? Can you function with week-old data, or does it have to be fresh, baked today ? I'd be curious to the percentage of caches in a given area that go unavailable/archived over a 1 or a 2 week period. The database of caches I keep of 400 caches (50 of which my wife and I own) covers a range of driving of 500 miles, easily. I have been able to hand-load caches for a year without the NEED for a PM. The WANT for a PM has come recently, with the purchase of a new GPS, a Triton, which accepts GPX files direct from GC.com, so the PM is coming soon.

 

The other reason I WANT a PM is to be able to contribute to the collective good. We live in a "user pay" society now. You want to go skiing at the local hill, $25-30 per day, each. Movie night, $12 each, plus snacks. Get the picture, right ? 30 bucks a year is cheap. We want it, so we pay to have it. he OP feels that his pay is less than his get due to his work/play/travel habits. No argument that he's getting less for his pay than I do.

 

So the question is : how do we fix it so that everyone gets what they want ?

 

I think that data 1 week old is reasonable, especially if you get instant notification of new cache hides on top of that. So an urban environment might have 5000 caches in LA, for example. Set a weekly maximum of 25,000 caches per PM, anywhere you want. More ? Less ? Why not work from that as a starting point and see what kind of GOOD PRODUCTIVE discussion can come from here.

 

Bickering and arguing don't create solutions, but good thoughtful comment will surely go a long way towards bringing a solid suggestion to Groundspeak that they might be inclined to accept.

 

(And for pure respect, let's not go about bashing one because of his/her PM status, or lack thereof. Everyone is entitled to geocache, I'm glad I started, and without the freedom to try it first for free, I wouldn't have tried it. My PM is coming in the next week.)

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Bickering and arguing don't create solutions, but good thoughtful comment will surely go a long way towards bringing a solid suggestion to Groundspeak that they might be inclined to accept.

 

Agreed!

 

Personally, for me to get a PM I would want access to the entire database whenever I want - no daily/monthly etc restrictions. This is 2010

 

For this to happen, as is obvious from the forums, the PQ system needs a MAJOR overhaul (end this 'your-PQ-will-be-emailed-to-you nonsense for a start - just serve it up!). Also, the price of a PM must increase to enable Groundspeak to upgrade their SNES which they seem to be running the site off of. I'd be happy to pay $10 a month for unrestricted access, and I'd be happy knowing that that sort of serious money would go to upgrading and keeping the servers up to date.

 

Summary: Groundspeak obviously can't handle the demand at the moment. Increase the price, upgrade, and get up-to-date with the services.

 

My 2 pennies.

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Summary: Groundspeak obviously can't handle the demand at the moment. Increase the price, upgrade, and get up-to-date with the services.

 

My 2 pennies.

I've been reading this thread with interest, and have felt no need to add my thoughts until now. here's why:

Although your contributions to various threads are always intelligent and well thought-out, I believe you are missing a key point. GC.com is designed to be (mostly) a tool for people who go out and find stuff, not a technology showcase. It handles the demand for most of us just fine. I don't want the price increased just so some folks who are technologically more sophisticated than I am can have a bigger or fancier database to play with on their computers. I am genuinely in awe of your computer savvy, but I am sure there are other places for you to play those games... Thanks for listening! :D

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When the premium membership began 6 or 7 years ago, the store had five flavors of ice cream. So my premium mebership entiltled me to taste every flavor of ice cream in the store every day. They now have 50 flavors of ice cream. But the premium membership still is only 5 samples per day. It now takes me 10 days to sample all the flavors in the store. Clearly the premium membership has declined in value. :D

I was thinking very much along this line and was glad to see toz's exposition. (Markwell made similar points.)

 

Both PM and non-PM have increased greatly in value due to the increase in number of caches (flavors). But the ratio of the values has decreased, since the value is dominated by the number of choices. And this is what is perceived.

 

At the same time, the number of operations required to run a PQ has increased, since more caches have to be scanned to find the ones requested. This is set off against the lower cost per operation; I do not know to which side the offsets balance. But we can't just say that cheaper and faster equipment means cheaper PQs; that has to be balanced against the cost increase due to more caches.

 

Raising the PQ limits will help some of the vocal, high-tech-oriented people for a while -- the ones who don't particularly mind jumping through hoops like setting up time-sliced PQs. However, it's clear that the entire system needs a complete rethinking.

 

I have hopes that the GS staff is in fact rethinking. The Geomate Jr and the iPhone represent radically new ways of addressing the issues of concern, and they are radically different from each other. (And in fact I believe that I posted a proposal similar to the iPhone app some time before it came out, but I'm not going back to try to find it.)

 

These new concepts could be extended. The Geomate Jr basically relies on updating from standard universal PQs covering large geographic areas. I see no reason this could not be extended to let PMs update from similar PQs which include all caches and include logs (and any other info missing from the Geomate Jr). The possible argument against is that this releases an entire slice of the database for local use, something prevented AFAIK in the Geomate Jr system -- either by loading directly to the device, or a proprietary format, or by inadequate data, or just because you can't download it unless you've bought a Geomate Jr. I forget and haven't studied it. But clearly neither generating the universal PQs nor downloading them is a problem for GS. In such a system, of course, filtering ends up being done on the user's computer. Those who already use GSAK would already be acquainted with this concept. For others, some new software might be required. But this only applies to PMs anyway -- anyone who just downloads directly from the cache page into a GPSr isn't affected. And perhaps the filtering could be done in a JS or Java applet, running directly from the browser, virtually invisible to the non-technically-oriented user.

 

I could also see extending the iPhone app to use these universal PQs. The app could see that you are moving toward the edge of the area already loaded, and the next time you're connected, load the relevant universal PQ in that direction (the next time it has a data signal, for those who often go to signal-less areas). If you want to scroll into an area not already loaded, just ask for it.

 

On a different axis, the UI for setting up a PQ is poor -- marginally OK for those of us in IT already, but downright bizarre and intimidating, I'm sure, for non-engineers. In the first place, the PQ setup should be exactly the same as the setup for any other search. There's no need to have two completely different search methods. (Instead of allowing only PMs to the PQs, as now, that interface would enable certain search criteria, results, limits, etc only for PMs.) The entire setup needs a good UI expert to look at it. I could also see an optional JavaScript-driven setup which would at all stages communicate with the server and give you an estimate of how many caches the query will return. This could also disable certain meaningless choices. In addition to providing the estimate, this would either prevent logic errors ("I have found" AND "I have not found") or at least make then obvious without needing to run the full query ("query will return no caches", "query will return 1, 234, 567 caches").

 

I'm certain I don't have the final word. Let the rethinking continue. But let it be a real rethinking, not just a call for higher limits, though those will be useful in the short term.

 

Edward

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i am more than happy with the current size of the PQ, and the Premium features in general, if it will increase than great, we get better value for our membership, but i don't feel the need for bigger ones

2500 caches to load for a trip is more than enough

Let's say you drive your car from Kitchener, Ontario to GW8 in July and perhaps drive home by a different route. Give it a try and let us know how many PQs you will need to run every day so as to be able to stop at any spot along the road where the mood might strike you. Indeed, it can be done and the tools we have are great. But at any of the big urban areas, you will have the issues I describe.

maybe the OP can enlighten me how he/she has run out of data

Generally when I am traveling on vacation or business I know which area I am in, but not usually how I will drive as that is frequently dictated by traffic conditions and detours related to work or pleasure. Many times the location is dictated to me by the situation. So I may be in various locations within an area over the course of the day. In urban areas, such an area may contain 5000 caches (that is the case in my home area). I would like to treat caching information in the same way as all the other POIs in my GPSr. There are hundreds of thousands of those and I have access to the ones that are near where I am.

 

This summer I will be traveling through Oregon and Washington. I won’t know exactly where I will be on any day except that I do plan to connect with a few hundred of my friends in Carnation WA; I don’t know where the winds will take me before and after that, but I plan to see some of Washington (and perhaps Canada). Based my experience last summer, I am pretty sure that I will have to start generating PQs sometime in May and not get too hung up on stale data. Every night in the hotel room I will have to run PQs for wherever I am likely to be the next day. Personally I would rather be out with friends than sit in the hotel room battling crappy network connections.

 

I do need to underscore that I am well aware of all the workarounds. My point is that if I change to using those methods, then I won’t be needing my premium account anymore. I can browse the website with a Basic Membership on my phone and head for the coordinates that I see there.

 

I do Know for a FACT that it took 13 PQs Strategically arranged to cover the entire state of WA. That is JUST WA. ID was 9, and OR was 9 or 10.

 

Would be nice IF you couldset up a PQ to download ALL the geocaches from an entire STATE(exception being CA, and TX**Would be 2**) every 6 Months, with a download of All Updated caches in the last week for the State weekly. This would take up the equivalent of 1 DAYS PQ allocation.

 

The Steaks

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Summary: Groundspeak obviously can't handle the demand at the moment. Increase the price, upgrade, and get up-to-date with the services.

 

My 2 pennies.

I've been reading this thread with interest, and have felt no need to add my thoughts until now. here's why:

Although your contributions to various threads are always intelligent and well thought-out, I believe you are missing a key point. GC.com is designed to be (mostly) a tool for people who go out and find stuff, not a technology showcase. It handles the demand for most of us just fine. I don't want the price increased just so some folks who are technologically more sophisticated than I am can have a bigger or fancier database to play with on their computers. I am genuinely in awe of your computer savvy, but I am sure there are other places for you to play those games... Thanks for listening! ;)

 

Intelligent and well thought-out??! Sir, I thank you - I usually just write the first thing that comes into my little head, but I'll take any compliment! Have a smiley for your kindness: :D

 

I agree, GC.com (i.e. the website) should remain simple, so everyone can join in. That's the point, after all! Technology showcase? We are using GPS, which is kinda latest technology - perhaps features should reflect that?

 

BUT: I do wonder whether $30 is enough to to even keep the site and features going as it is currently - loads of PQ problems at the moment, by all accounts. It's not a popular opinion - most on this thread are happy with the status-quo, which is fine. I'll go back under my rock now, thinking of intelligent contributions... :D

Edited by tiiiim
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On demand PQ's, raised limits, and downloading an entire state. These have been asked for for years. What I am seeing on some of the posts is that people want to be able to down load far more than they intend to find and are complaining because they can't do it the way they want to.

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On demand PQ's, raised limits, and downloading an entire state. These have been asked for for years. What I am seeing on some of the posts is that people want to be able to down load far more than they intend to find and are complaining because they can't do it the way they want to.

 

I hope people intend to find all those caches in their pocket queries that they were not getting this past weekend! I hope they intend to find all the cache that come through their queries when the PQ server is working properly again. <_<

 

John

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I may not intend to find all of the caches I get in a PQ but that doesn't mean that I don't want them. When we cache we never know where it might take us. That is what we love about caching! We might not get a certain cache but then again- we just might. Since we don't know which ones we will need we get as many as we can.

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Wow. That was one humdinger of an opening post.

 

The entire post seems to hings on the opening sentence:

I am generally amazed at how many threads in the forum reflect sentiment by some users that the value of the premium membership has declined to the point of being a disappointment. ...

For the life of me, I can't remember one other thread that took this position, even though the OP states that there are many. Strange.

 

When I became a premium member, there were absolutely no features that a PM recieved that a regular member did not that I was even remotely interested in. Since then, lots of great things have been added and no premium features have been removed. Therefore, it would be impossible for me to take the position that PM status has gone down in value. It has actually gone greatly up in value.

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I first signed up for a premium membership to be able to have more than 100 caches on my watch list. I was watching all my finds and had reached that level after a year of caching. Yes, it was worth $30/year to me to be able to watch all my finds.

 

Since then we've had many additions as have been detailed above. The value of my membership has increased so much that I demanded that they sell me another membership so I could pay them $60/year.

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So, any guesses on how long it will be before a thread is opened whining about stating 5000 caches a day is less than someone can find needs in a day?

How long until we have a post whining about people who ask for new things?

 

Oh. It already happened. Wow, that was fast!

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So, any guesses on how long it will be before a thread is opened whining about stating 5000 caches a day is less than someone can find needs in a day?

How long until we have a post whining about people who ask for new things?

 

Oh. It already happened. Wow, that was fast!

ROTFLOL!!

 

Oii... I REALLY Like that I will have PQs with 1000 results, but that only decreases the Number of PQs for my "Specified Area". It'll make trips all the better...

 

WOOHOO!!! I Guess I got MY Birthday Present EARLY!! Course, its only a few years Late... YEAH Anyways!!

 

The Steaks

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In what wierd maths world do you live ?? there are more caches so you can get less % of them for your PQ you can still only use 35 a week

In what plane of existence did Groundspeak ever say they would offer a percentage of the caches to be available in a PQ?

 

most caches have the wrong or no attributes set.
Did you know that once when I was in elementary school, I didn't like the color of my black Schwinn Bike. So I took a spray-can and painted everything (including the chain and handlebars) blue.

 

Both of those two statements have about the same relevance to this discussion

 

When you removed or ignored the quote i was replying to of course it made no sense / had no relevance :) .

 

However as has been repeatedly said throughout this thread and has now been confirmed by Jeremy himself pq's are going to be increased.

 

I will now say that the value of PM to me is going up as pq's are the main benefit for me of a PM.

 

GC's history has been to revisit the pq's every few years and i am pleased to see them do this again. They obviously know more about which PM features are most used and react accordingly over time.

 

Good work GC :huh:

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I will now say that the perceived value of PM to me is going up as pq's are the main benefit for me of a PM.

 

With that fix, I'll agree with you.

Why? Mark (or Lynn) said the value to him (or her) is going up - is there any need to add "perceived" to that statement? Seems rather superfluous. Sort of like my post.

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One could always argue that the value of a PM just went down. Instead of giving me something that I want, I now get to download even more caches that I have no use for because there is no way I can find 5,000 caches in a day let alone 2,500.

 

:):huh::lol::lol::lol:

Edited by Keith Watson
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Since then, lots of great things have been added and no premium features have been removed. Therefore, it would be impossible for me to take the position that PM status has gone down in value. It has actually gone greatly up in value.

 

I would tend to disagree with the No Premium Features have been removed... We lost a few cache types, and although gained another site (Waymarking) for those to be placed in to still can not query and produce a mass PQ like file for therefore I have lost a segment of Points of Interest that I could query for and return in a pseudo automated fashion. I do agree that this is a GREY area as a cache type is not a PM feature (outside of PM Only) but the ability to query those types was a Feature of Functionality of the PQ generator...

 

Now with that being said, I do not see that as a huge burden to the perceived value. It is a hit for me as I really enjoyed searching for virtuals and being able to log them on the same site. Now I have to manually search Waymarking (actually the wife does..) and then log them on a completely different site.

 

Once again, I reiterate that this is not an absolute example of loosing a PM feature depending on you perception...

 

I can see the limits raise offloading some of the burden users experience, but it is just a band-aid from my perspective.(as stated earlier in this thread my focus for desired improvement is on trip planning not my home area query ability) What I would have liked to see, is instead of an upper bounds on tool limits changed, is to offer more fidelity in the way the limit is imposed. I would like to see the tools not having defined tool bounds, and instead having an overall Data feature bounding. In other words I would like the ability to run as many or few PQs CAARPQs etc until I reach the Data feature upper limit.

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8 cents a day. That's how much it costs. And that's a steal. I know there's been problems, but they arose when GS was trying to IMPROVE this site.

 

I guess GS could officially start a platinum level and charge $10 or $20 a month and give those people even more perks.

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In other words I would like the ability to run as many or few PQs CAARPQs etc until I reach the Data feature upper limit.

 

That would be awesome. Run one 5000 cache PQ if you want or fifty 100 cache PQ's. That would eliminate most if not all of the hassle dealing with date placed ranges I think.

 

I'd also love to see Archive logs be added to the "Updated in the last 7 days" option. Server load could be reduced if more people used that option to keep their databases updated instead of continually pulling all caches for an area. I think most people probably avoid doing it that way currently because there's no way to tell when caches get archived.

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Since then, lots of great things have been added and no premium features have been removed. Therefore, it would be impossible for me to take the position that PM status has gone down in value. It has actually gone greatly up in value.

 

I would tend to disagree with the No Premium Features have been removed... We lost a few cache types, and although gained another site (Waymarking) for those to be placed in to still can not query and produce a mass PQ like file for therefore I have lost a segment of Points of Interest that I could query for and return in a pseudo automated fashion. I do agree that this is a GREY area as a cache type is not a PM feature (outside of PM Only) but the ability to query those types was a Feature of Functionality of the PQ generator...

 

Now with that being said, I do not see that as a huge burden to the perceived value. It is a hit for me as I really enjoyed searching for virtuals and being able to log them on the same site. Now I have to manually search Waymarking (actually the wife does..) and then log them on a completely different site.

 

Once again, I reiterate that this is not an absolute example of loosing a PM feature depending on you perception...

 

I can see the limits raise offloading some of the burden users experience, but it is just a band-aid from my perspective.(as stated earlier in this thread my focus for desired improvement is on trip planning not my home area query ability) What I would have liked to see, is instead of an upper bounds on tool limits changed, is to offer more fidelity in the way the limit is imposed. I would like to see the tools not having defined tool bounds, and instead having an overall Data feature bounding. In other words I would like the ability to run as many or few PQs CAARPQs etc until I reach the Data feature upper limit.

The ablity to see archived caches on the maps has been eliminated. but overall map quality as gone up, so perhaps that is a wash.

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