Release Notes (Adventure Lab®: Play nearby Locations) - September 19, 2023

[+Geocaching HQ]

Release Notes (Adventure Lab®: Play nearby Locations) - September 19, 2023

With this release (version 1.15.0), the Adventure Lab® team at Geocaching HQ has made the experience of playing multiple Adventures much easier with a new Geocaching Premium feature. While playing an Adventure, users can now identify nearby Locations for other Adventures, denoted by blue pins on the Location map. Red pins represent Locations you have not found in the Adventure that you’re currently playing.

 

 

 

This new feature, labeled "Play nearby Locations", is found in the new "Premium features" menu that is accessed from your player profile in the Adventure Lab® app. 

If you have Geocaching Premium membership:

 

• Tap into your Profile, then tap “Premium features.” You will see:
  • Play nearby Locations 
    • Toggle the slider to enable or disable

 

 

When the setting is enabled, and a player is viewing the Location map, Locations that you have not completed in other Adventures within the viewable map area are displayed as blue pins. When a blue pin is tapped, you will have the option to switch to the Adventure containing that Location. 

 

 

 

This allows you to avoid going back and forth to the Explore map to check which other Adventures may have Locations nearby.

 

Allison (alikelsea), Director of Product, is watching this thread to answer questions whenever possible.

 

Any posts in this thread should relate to features in this release. Comments unrelated to the release may be removed. Please direct unrelated comments to other appropriate threads. Thanks!

[+Max and 99]

Such a good improvement to the AL experience!

[+barefootjeff]

This does seem a bit at odds with this statement from the Update on Adventure Lab Vision - March 30, 2021:

• We encourage Adventures to contain compelling narratives, for their stages to share a common theme, or for them to unfold in a sequence defined by the content creators. Adventure Lab aims to provide creators with a broad toolset that allows them to create the type of Adventures that they wish to create and to tell the stories they wish to tell. We believe that providing more choices will ultimately result in a broader and better array of Adventures for people to play. Each Location (or stage) of an Adventure is a component of the story the creator is trying to tell and it is in the spirit of Adventure Lab to protect the Adventure creator’s narrative. For this reason, it is intentional that we are only showing Adventure starting Locations on the app map. 

I guess telling compelling narratives with stages that unfold along a common theme is old hat now.

[+CAVinoGal]

Haven't had a chance to check this out yet, but I have tried to do two labs in the same general area at the same time, and this would have made that experience a little less challenging, I think. I'm looking forward to trying this out!

[+Max and 99]

48 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

This does seem a bit at odds with this statement from the Update on Adventure Lab Vision - March 30, 2021:

• We encourage Adventures to contain compelling narratives, for their stages to share a common theme, or for them to unfold in a sequence defined by the content creators. Adventure Lab aims to provide creators with a broad toolset that allows them to create the type of Adventures that they wish to create and to tell the stories they wish to tell. We believe that providing more choices will ultimately result in a broader and better array of Adventures for people to play. Each Location (or stage) of an Adventure is a component of the story the creator is trying to tell and it is in the spirit of Adventure Lab to protect the Adventure creator’s narrative. For this reason, it is intentional that we are only showing Adventure starting Locations on the app map. 

I guess telling compelling narratives with stages that unfold along a common theme is old hat now.

That's a fair point. I only have one story AL but it won't be as cohesive if the player stops to find other stages along the way.

[+J S-B]

This is one of the best improvements in a very long time.

Next step is to include the steps in the official Geocaching app

[+HHL]

Would be nice to have the Adventure's name in the PopUp window as well.

 

Happy Coding.

[+GeoElmo6000]

While my preference is for Adventure Labs to be moved to a separate find count (such as what was done with Challenges years ago before they were removed completely), I do think this is a welcome improvement to Adventure Labs.  I created a separate basic member account for Adventure Labs so I won't be using this premium feature, but that account is really just to help get final coordinates for bonus caches in my area.

 

Since Adventure Labs are not geocaches I really hope to see the find count separated, but since so many people have invested so much time and energy into getting their combined find count up, I don't expect this separation to actually happen.  So I'll just keep them separate myself.

 

Glad to see improvements happening with Adventure Labs, nice job on this one.

[+DougyB]

The radius of the "nearby locations" seems to vary depending on the area covered by the Adventure currently being played. For example, an AL with locations very close together would only show locations that are very nearby, while an AL that has locations spread our of dozens of KMs shows lots of other locations across a wide area.

 

Can HQ provide more I do on how this "viewable area" is determined? 

[+thebruce0]

Seems like it's intended to be locations within the radius of the AL locations directly.

 

My curiosity: It seems to include locations from ALs posted from a farther distance than the AL being viewed, which is good. Cachly only shows locations of other ALs IF the posted AL location is loaded in the current search.

 

For eg: AL with 5 locations spread 500km apart, and posted at one end. Cachly wouldn't display the other 4 locations until the current search includes the posted location at the far end. Can anyone confirm that this update to the official app will actually show the other locations of that AL if a nearby AL to one of them is being targeted, even if it's 500km from its posted location? If so, that is a very good feature to help not miss any (non-sequential) unrelated AL locations.

[+JL_HSTRE]

On 9/19/2023 at 7:58 PM, barefootjeff said:

I guess telling compelling narratives with stages that unfold along a common theme is old hat now.

 

Common theme is still common.

 

Compelling narratives rarely ever happened. Locking people into doing an AL in a specific order usually caused more headaches than it was worth.

 

[+thebruce0]

1 hour ago, JL_HSTRE said:

Compelling narratives rarely ever happened. Locking people into doing an AL in a specific order usually caused more headaches than it was worth.

It takes creativity and an understanding of what compels a person to desire doing things in order, beat to beat. Compelling narratives aren't bad, it's if they're badly implemented.
From what I've seen, people are more upset about badly implemented linear ALs than they are about 'narrative' style ALs; they seem to be more forgiving about so-so linear ALs, and just don't want to unnecessarily/needlessly feel like they had to do something linearly.

 

eta: Another way to put it - those more likely to complain about linear ALs on principle tend to be the ones who just want to sign the log and not do caches, like multis, the way the owner intended (which requires more work).

(emphasis intended)

Edited September 22, 2023 by thebruce0

[+JL_HSTRE]

11 hours ago, thebruce0 said:

From what I've seen, people are more upset about badly implemented linear ALs than they are about 'narrative' style ALs; they seem to be more forgiving about so-so linear ALs, and just don't want to unnecessarily/needlessly feel like they had to do something linearly.

 

Agreed.

 

I can think of good reasons for a linear AL, but I don't think I've come across few of them, if any.

[+barefootjeff]

13 hours ago, JL_HSTRE said:

 

Common theme is still common.

 

Compelling narratives rarely ever happened. Locking people into doing an AL in a specific order usually caused more headaches than it was worth.

 

 

An AL doesn't have to be sequential for it to be compelling with the overall experience greater than just the sum of its stages. None of my ALs are sequential but I've tried to make the experience more rewarding than just visiting five locations and answering five questions. That said, I realise that many cachers don't want rewarding experiences, they just want quick and easy +1s for their find count, and my statistics bear that out:

 

                                                    Stage Visits   Participants    Completions    Reviews

Wreck of the Maitland                   157                   40                       23                 18

Broken Bay Sands                          357                   83                       61                 43

5 Lands Walk                                  186                   46                       33                 22

A Dangar-ous Adventure                 73                   17                       13                 11

 

With the app now encouraging cherry-picking of nearby stages rather than doing complete Adventures, I expect those stats to only get worse. For an owner it can be pretty disheartening, as you don't get any feedback at all from the cherry-pickers, other than the tallies on the stats page.

[+GerandKat]

We really appreciate this feature as this is exactly what we have been waiting for and needed a workaround for a long time.

However, we would like to share a few thoughts about the feature.
The player location icon/dot is way too similar to the nearby ALC stations, a pink unicorn (or a green frog just in case a pink unicorn ist too fancy) would be much easier to distinguish.
Background to this:
while caching in saturated areas and in exzessive use we've tried to open our own dot as location, which led to frustrations until we realized we've clicked on ourselves in several occasions  .

Zoom factor.
as DougyB has already written, the zoom factor is always set to the largest extent of the ALC displayed on the screen.

ALC which coveres a wide area:

 

ALC that covers a small area:


But if this happens in a highly saturated area, the app quickly reaches its performance limit.
However, as we see it, this feature is not needed for ALCs that are distributed over a larger area. We would be very happy if the zoom factor would be fixed as soon as this feature is activated, so that the app is not brought to its performance limit and this feature is still usable.

Thank you for listening :-)