Adventure Lab locations counted as found caches

[+Disgeover]

After completing two Adventure Lab caches with about 9 locations, it seems that these separate locations are counted as found caches.

I come to this conclusion after increasing the score for the 'Reach the Peak' challenge too quickly and a difference between the caches found according to Geocaching and the actual number.

On the Geocaching site there are 9 caches more than I actually found.

Known problem?

[+Max and 99]

14 minutes ago, Disgeover said:

After completing two Adventure Lab caches with about 9 locations, it seems that these separate locations are counted as found caches.

I come to this conclusion after increasing the score for the 'Reach the Peak' challenge too quickly and a difference between the caches found according to Geocaching and the actual number.

On the Geocaching site there are 9 caches more than I actually found.

Known problem?

Known.

https://forums.geocaching.com/GC/index.php?/topic/354925-whats-the-logic-of-the-find-count-for-lab-caches/

 

 

Edited January 5, 2022 by Max and 99

[+thebruce0]

Yep. It's kind of a polarizing feature of Adventure Labs...

[+Disgeover]

Thanks for the quick response and link.

It is very unfortunate that this problem has been going on for a long time and has not been solved.

Is this known to Geocaching headquarters?

If not, I'll consider informing them and will at least delete all the logs of both Adventures to get an accurate and real number of caches found

No more Adventures Lab caches for me for now unfortunately! The idea is good but the execution is bad.

If I'd known I wouldn't have started it.

[+Max and 99]

23 minutes ago, Disgeover said:

Thanks for the quick response and link.

It is very unfortunate that this problem has been going on for a long time and has not been solved.

Is this known to Geocaching headquarters?

If not, I'll consider informing them and will at least delete all the logs of both Adventures to get an accurate and real number of caches found

No more Adventures Lab caches for me for now unfortunately! The idea is good but the execution is bad.

If I'd known I wouldn't have started it.

Of course it's known. The help center tells you how to delete the finds if you don't want them, and I suspect the reason is because some people don't want the find on an adventure lab location. 

And keep in mind for reach the peak they even stated in the very first month that each location will give you a find/points. 

 

Edited January 5, 2022 by Max and 99

[+barefootjeff]

12 hours ago, Max and 99 said:

Of course it's known. The help center tells you how to delete the finds if you don't want them, and I suspect the reason is because some people don't want the find on an adventure lab location. 

 

Yes, it's easy to delete AL finds from contributing to your find count and stats if you don't like having them there; it's what I've been doing since I found they were skewing my stats way out of kilter. And it's just as easy to undelete them if you change your mind since the "deletion" isn't actually deleting anything, it's just hiding them. "Deleted" AL finds still show in the app as completed Adventures, it just stops them counting as geocaches as well.

[+Disgeover]

 

On 1/5/2022 at 10:38 PM, Max and 99 said:

Of course it's known. The help center tells you how to delete the finds if you don't want them, and I suspect the reason is because some people don't want the find on an adventure lab location. 

And keep in mind for reach the peak they even stated in the very first month that each location will give you a find/points. 

 

 

For reach the peak they even stated in the very first month that each location will give you a find/points?? (see above)

 

This is what I found on https://www.geocaching.com/blog/2021/07/new-leaderboard-challenge-reach-the-peak/:

Also my Geocaching app (Reach the Peak) is talking about caches and not locations.

All very strange!!??

I'm glad when finding a multi the stages aren't counted as found caches.

I think correct numbers and statistics are important (at least for me) and that's why I go to inform Geocaching and await their response.

Thanks for the comments and advice, but I'm done with Adventure Lab caches for now.

[+Disgeover]

I've had email contact with Geocaching HQ, but I'm very disappointed with their response: 
don't get a (clear) answer to my questions and it seems they don't care either.
I expected more, but alas.
Adventure Labs and now also the contact with HQ: I'm done with it.

[+TravelingBison]

Not sure about them. If they counted as “virtual multis,” I think it would be less polarizing than adding them as individual finds. It would still give credit to the finder, without giving 5 per lab. I’m not sure the help center would be the appropriate group to contact, as it seems like it’s intended that each location is a “cache.” If there’s a place for feedback or suggestions, that might be a better place to suggest it.

[+GeoElmo6000]

On 1/5/2022 at 1:37 PM, Disgeover said:

Known problem?

 

It's a feature.

[+Mineral2]

It's not a problem. If you choose not to complete a full adventure, you still get credit for the stages you did complete. Labs aren't multi caches, so I'm not sure why there's an expectation that they should be treated as such. But they are designed to be a small series of related locations to visit (the Adventure part) which is why they get packaged together instead of each stage being listed separately.

If you don't like the way labs contribute to your find count, you can simply ignore them. They aren't a reason to abandon geocaching altogether unless you're also no longer having fun finding the more traditional hide types.

[+thebruce0]

7 minutes ago, HHL said:

Right. Think of it as a GeoTour for "the rest of us".

 

A GeoTour of single-question Virtuals; though Virtuals are rare, reviewed, cache listings, and handed out selectively - and these are 5+ with each handout and much more prolific already... =/

[+Mineral2]

4 minutes ago, thebruce0 said:

A GeoTour of single-question Virtuals; though Virtuals are rare, reviewed, cache listings, and handed out selectively - and these are 5+ with each handout and much more prolific already... =/

Not to mention that multiple locations can be set at the same coordinates, both in the same adventure and across adventures. But that's not really the point.  Think of Adventure Labs as a hybrid between virtual caches and Wherigo, in which the most common Wherigo format is to visit a location and answer a question to get the next location. Well, it was the most common until the reverse Wherigo became popular.

[+thebruce0]

6 minutes ago, Mineral2 said:

Think of Adventure Labs as...

 

Oh there have been many attempts to "think of them as..."   They've never really helped. But just to be clear, the more prominent criticism isn't what ALs are (most people really don't mind them but enjoy them), but how they're implemented and mixed with geocache listings/stats. (per the thread topic)

[+Mineral2]

1 hour ago, thebruce0 said:

but how they're implemented and mixed with geocache listings/stats. (per the thread topic)

Yeah. I think HQ came up with a solution to that problem and recognized that so solution was going to satisfy everyone.

For anyone who wants to both participate in Adventure Labs and keep track of their "pure" stats (no AL's counted), ProjectGC does that.

[+Wacka]

Like as I said in another thread, If you don't like them, no one is forcing you to do them. Simple. Problem solved.

[+barefootjeff]

9 minutes ago, Wacka said:

Like as I said in another thread, If you don't like them, no one is forcing you to do them. Simple. Problem solved.

 

Except the problem isn't solved if you enjoy doing them and want to do them but don't want them totally dominating your stats relative to all the other cache types, which they do. Fortunately you can exclude them by "deleting" the finds on the website but that has to be done individually location by location. A better solution would be a three-way setting to count all AL locations as finds, count only completed Adventures as finds or not count them at all. That ought to satisfy most people.

[+CAVinoGal]

3 hours ago, thebruce0 said:

But just to be clear, the more prominent criticism isn't what ALs are (most people really don't mind them but enjoy them), but how they're implemented and mixed with geocache listings/stats. (per the thread topic)

I am among the "most people" who enjoy the Adventure Labs - the ones I have done have been informative, and while I don't geocache for the numbers, getting all those smilies seems too easy.  I also enjoy hunting for geocaches and "earning" the smilies!!

[+Max and 99]

I have earned some adventure lab stages, like having to search for the benchmark that's 375 ft away!

[+barefootjeff]

12 minutes ago, CAVinoGal said:

I am among the "most people" who enjoy the Adventure Labs - the ones I have done have been informative, and while I don't geocache for the numbers, getting all those smilies seems too easy.  I also enjoy hunting for geocaches and "earning" the smilies!!

 

Yep, in the last 18 months I've completed 25 ALs, each with 5 locations, making a total of 125 smileys. In the same time I found 175 non-AL caches, yet when I look back on that year and a half or browse through my photos, those ALs make up only a tiny amount of my total caching time. Just counting the AL bonus caches seems a reasonable representation of their proportion, so that's what I do and delete all the AL location caches from my stats.

[+thebruce0]

18 hours ago, Wacka said:

Like as I said in another thread, If you don't like them, no one is forcing you to do them. Simple. Problem solved.

 

As mentioned often, it's not about not wanting to do them.

[+Mausebiber]

23 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

Yep, in the last 18 months I've completed 25 ALs, each with 5 locations, making a total of 125 smileys. In the same time I found 175 non-AL caches

 

Are you really blaming the ALs for not finding more regular cache?

[+barefootjeff]

4 minutes ago, Mausebiber said:

 

Are you really blaming the ALs for not finding more regular cache?

 

No, I'm saying that completing 25 ALs takes far less time and effort than finding 125 regular caches, at least the sort of caches I tend to do. Maybe if those 125 caches were just LPCs in shopping centre car parks it'd be a different story, but such trivial P&G caches are a rare thing here and not something I'd find particularly appealing anyway. Looking at my most recent finds, they were:

• an all-day trip up to Lake Macquarie for a kayak paddle out to the new virtual on Pulbah Island,
• a couple of easy 1/1.5 caches in central Sydney but it was still an hour and a half's train travel down there and the best part of an hour's walking around the harbour foreshore to get to them,
• three caches on Alum Mountain in Bulahdelah (200km north of here), one a P&G at the start of the track and the other two at the top of the mountain,
• a 4km return hike through a rainforest to another cache near Bulahdelah.

Compare those to my most recent AL, a fifteen minute walk of a few hundred metres visiting heritage sites around Wyong which netted me six smileys including the nearby P&G bonus. Regardless of how many regular caches I'm able to do, which is mostly limited by the number  of available caches around here, the scoring for ALs is way out of proportion to them.

[+barefootjeff]

14 minutes ago, HHL said:

9 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

I'm saying that completing 25 ALs takes far less time and effort than finding 125 regular caches

I doubt that.

 

On what basis do you say that? On average, most of the ALs I've done have taken about an hour to complete, so that's 25 hours to complete 25 of them. To do 125 regular caches in the same amount of time would take 12 minutes per cache, including the time it takes to get from your vehicle to GZ, search, sign the log, return and write your online log. Either you have heaps of very easy caches or rapid-fire power trails or I'm missing something.

 

Edit to add: That's just for traditionals. For other cache types, which make up about a third of my finds, the time and effort needed per find is a lot higher still.

Edited February 4, 2022 by barefootjeff

[+barefootjeff]

Just now, HHL said:

That's based on real geocaches tours done in the past. The region you're in seem not very representative related to geocaching density.

 

Most of the caches I've done I've spent more than 12 minutes just composing my online log and the photos to go with it. You don't have to write anything to get your 5 AL smileys.

 

By the way, my sentence that you part-quoted said, in full, "No, I'm saying that completing 25 ALs takes far less time and effort than finding 125 regular caches, at least the sort of caches I tend to do." We all play this game differently, that's why I've always advocated for making it a choice as to how ALs are scored.

[+barefootjeff]

1 minute ago, HHL said:

That's wrong. You'll have to write the correct answer with every single LabCache station.

 

Usually one or two words, a number or tapping one of four multiple choice answers. Even my shortest logs are much longer than that.

[+barefootjeff]

This is my log on a cache I did last week (GC6D4AT). It was one of four caches our group did on a full-day visit to Bulahdelah, and getting from the car park to the cache was about a 1km hike with an elevation gain of 100 metres:

 

 

Apart from the 2 hour drive each way to get there, this is fairly typical of the caches I do and the logs I write when I get back home. I struggle to see how this could be considered in any way comparable to the effort needed to complete just one stage of an AL.

[+Mineral2]

Congratulations?

Some of us as cache owners do appreciate your detailed logs. Many of the logs I get are simply "found it." or "tftc" with many more just being a simple sentence or two. Admittedly, many of my logs aren't as detailed as yours, but then I find that the effort for my log tends to correlate to the effort put into the hide. 

Regardless... that mult that took you a week to complete still only gives you one find count, the same as a LPC that took you 5 minutes to run out and find. So I'm not sure that comparing effort between a Lab stage and a traditional hide is a valid argument against the way lab finds are treated. 

[+Mausebiber]

You as well could have said:

Apart from the 2 hour drive each way to get there, this is fairly typical of the caches I do and the logs I write when I get back home. I struggle to see how this could be considered in any way comparable to the effort needed to complete just a traditional cache downtown.

 

What you are saying has nothing to do with ALs in general, it is the way you carry out geocaching.  What you are saying is just true for you and anyone with the same habits.

Why do you want to change this for everyone?  I think, there are much more players who enjoy ALs the way they are than players who are not happy with numbers or implementation.

 

 

 

[+barefootjeff]

44 minutes ago, Mausebiber said:

Why do you want to change this for everyone?  I think, there are much more players who enjoy ALs the way they are than players who are not happy with numbers or implementation.

 

How many times do I have to say I DON'T want to change this for everyone??? Just three posts back in this thread I said, "We all play this game differently, that's why I've always advocated for making it a choice as to how ALs are scored." How is providing an AL scoring setting to give a find per location, a find per completed Adventure or no finds at all for them changing it for everyone? Those who like the present system can just choose option 1, or that can even be the default option for all I care. All I want is the choice to be able to score them in a way I find appropriate that's a bit less cumbersome than the present method of having to go into the AL records and individually "delete" each stage.

[+kunarion]

1 hour ago, barefootjeff said:

All I want is the choice to be able to score them in a way I find appropriate that's a bit less cumbersome than the present method of having to go into the AL records and individually "delete" each stage.

 

What was the reasoning behind making every stage in an Adventure Lab a separate cache find?   Was it because that's how Lab Caches historically worked?  I've just Found ALs and let the system do its thing, but I might like options as you suggest.

 

I usually hunt an AL with the intention of completing the whole thing, but if each "Find" was set up as a separate cache (even with its own stages), that would feel to me more like individual caches, rather than just a Stage of the AL.  Aside from it being impossible to enter the answer ("OK it is two words, or is it a numeral or do I not count that flag pole as one of the "posts" or am looking at the wrong thing? ...hate typing these stupid answers..."), "Finding" an AL "Geocache" is super trivial.  It's almost like a stage of a Multi Cache, but without any challenge.  Does turning Geocaching into Pokey-Man turn people off?  Or is that what "most people want" today in a Geocache Find?  Just exactly how dry and simple and automatic are "Finds" expected to be in these Modern Times? Inquiring minds want to know.

 

I had "Garmin Chirp" as stages in a couple of my caches.  They didn't count as a Find, but all that was required was to arrive and see the new waypoint.  No answer typing required.  But even those stages were quite a challenge, very nerdy and technical.  Kind of like a manual version of Wherigo.

 

I'm not totally thrilled with Adventure Labs where you go look at a cement pad and type the answer that it's "round" (which is the kind of thing I get when I hunt ALs).  It's not so much that every point grants a Smiley, it's the entire experience.  As in "a letdown".  The cement is round. OK, cool, the sign says that Ray Charles lived nearby for a while.  And when I'm done, that's five Finds!  Um...  Cool.

 

Edited February 4, 2022 by kunarion

[+OliLesp]

I also agree with you, kunarion,  and I can also note that in the new profile stats on the app, I have 806 caches found. When I click on the caches found, I only have 729. For me, while I don't pay too much attention to the stats, it does skew my count a bit. 
Ditto for the poses. 
Some labs are well done, go a few hundred meters, have a very interesting question, others are just collection points for caches, multiple answers, reply like 'the wood is ... 1. yellow, 2. orange 3. brown 4. white', adventures that are sometimes 50m long. I only do the ones that have a real interest.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator

[+thebruce0]

The other aspect to this that now is in a way making it about the numbers and a slight competitive slant - the souvenir promos.  We have a leaderboard, with ongoing scores.  And now we're seeing not only smiley counts soar because of the location=smiley 'feature', but leaderboards of friends are leaving people waaaaaay behind who may not do adventure labs. Repeatedly people are sharing screenshots of their scores in the hundreds of thousands - because these are AL hunters. And those AL locations and full sets are being greatly awarded much moreso than geocache listings, which kind of makes the leaderboard very one-sided, very AL heavy, and in many cases feeling pointless to even worry about normal geocaches for souvenirs or anyone who pays attention to their relation to their friends by scoring...

 

It's one thing to say find counts really are a personal metric and not inherently competitive - but the leaderboard is not; it is competition by placing higher scores above others and awarding gold/silver/bronze to those on your own friends list. Incentivizing users (who favour it) to earn higher scores; thus, competition - not merely earning souvenirs personally. And ALs are a key (an very significant) element of that right now. 

 

 

What if the leaderboard allows you to view scores minus AL points?  Just provide two numbers with the leaderboard loading. Like, full points and geocache points.  The gap between the two is just getting insane.

[+spazierenmitziel]

Well, I'd like to advocate against counting every lab wayoint as "Found", too. Either the game is integrated in the Geocaching ecosystem or not. If it is not integrated, I do not care about the number of points given for ALC stages, distance, speed or whatever will appear in the future - it would be the ALC-world which is consistent in itself.

 

But if ALCs are conidered beeing part of the geocaching ecosystem, the ruels for counting should be the same. A "Cache" is a collection of tasks (often just one task) which needs to be performed to log it as "found" (e.g. solve a puzzle + find the box in the case of a mystery, just "find the box" for a traditional or "visit several stages" in case ol WiGs, multis, etc.). An ALC is such a collection as well. There is no substantial difference. Threfore, an is closest to a multi-stage-mystery with automatic answer checking. And this woul result in one (1) found log.

 

I appreciate that the ALC app marks completed answers as completed, this is a nice feature I would like to have sometimes for multi caches as well, but those should not count as founds.

 

I really do not care if someone makes more finds-per-day than I do, but I like consistent behaviour of systems. And there are several challenges around for which the counting of ALCs can make a real difference! Those are often broken by the current behaviour.

[+thebruce0]

Not meaning to disagree, but the counter point is that if you view Locations in an Adventure as individual Virtual style caches, then that can be a defense for one +1 find per location.

I lean towards the multi example, but ALs themselves a unique thing with no direct parallel to a cache type. So, it seems hq has leaned towards populating the landscape with +1's, rather than treating one Adventure similar to one cache listing.

Historically, their evolution (from individual Lab Caches) implies they're more like individual caches within a geotour than individual waypoints in a multi.

But I still think they award too many smilies