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When is a hint a good hint?


Team Noodles

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Actually, with hints like "kunta kinte" - I love them if I know right away what they mean! Then I think "what a clever hint".... but I get frustrated if I don't "get it". Like one where the hint was "overdrawn", and GZ was showing near a bank.... but in fact the hint meant the phone box ("in the red").

 

Think I remember this one and did not like the hint. Thankfully an easy find with warnings of not on bank.

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I like hints that only make sense once you have arrived at GZ. It adds to the "ah-ha" moment when finding the cache.

 

A couple of mine that people have enjoyed are "between the path and the hum" and "at the back of twelve". The first is near an electrical substation with a noisy buzzing transformer, and the second is at the base of a tree, but with a post which has the number 12 in front of it.

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Some of the best hints are those that make you stop and think for a few moments, look at your surroundings and... 'Ding'

 

I agree with that statement 100%...

What I'm not fussed on are caches that are rated (for instance) '4 for difficulty and 1.5 for terrain', and have 'no clue/hint'. Then, when you get to GZ you spend an age searching, before progressivley expanding the search and finding the cache 30 or more feet from where the co-ord's took you! The punch line being it really wasn't a good, or particularly well hidden cache at all.... it was just that the cache wasn't at GZ, it was 30 odd ft away, hence the rating of D4. In real terms the cache is more like a D2.

Even worse when its just one of a series of caches placed with similar intent...

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One cache I did was about 100 feet from the road but needed to be accessed by a footpath from further away. The hint contained the coordinates of the start of the footpath (in the form of "north fifty one degrees nineteen point..."

 

Which would have been fine, had they been accurate. They pointed to the middle of a field. In the end I found the footpath on Google Satellite View.

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Something which helps you narrow down your search area... particularly if coverage is poor and accuracy bad.

 

Something which just indicates the general area you should be in isn't helpful. After all, that's what the co-ordinates are for!

 

I did the Rammstein multi-cache series near Southampton recently which had 3 levels of hint for each cache, starting with hard and ending up with easy. Each difficulty level of hint was separated by line breaks on the page so that when viewed on the GPSr, you were presented with increasing levels of obviousness, which allowed the user to choose just how hard they wanted to make things for themselves. A nice touch.

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