Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast Transcript (Episode 7): Introducing Virtual Rewards
Chris Ronan: Hello everybody, welcome. It is Inside Geocaching HQ, this is our podcast, I’m Chris Ronan aka Rock Chalk. This is a special edition of the podcast, we have some big news to share today. News we hope will make you happy, news that may leave you with a few questions. We are going to try to anticipate those questions and answer a few of them in this episode. But first, the big news, and joining me for that is Cindy Potter, you may know her as Frau Potter, the Director of Community here at Geocaching HQ. She’s a return guest to the podcast, welcome Cindy.
Cindy Potter: Thank you.
[chuckle]
CR: So let’s get right to it. What is Geocaching HQ announcing today?
CP: Okay. Well, I am very, very excited to finally announce what we have to say today. It’s been secret for a while and it’s hard to keep a secret when you have a lot of visitors stopping by HQ. Today we’re launching something called Virtual Rewards. Has the word, virtual in it. Drum roll. Okay, we are launching 4,000 Virtual Rewards. These are unpublished virtual caches given as a thank you or a reward for two special groups of cachers. You can think of it as a limited release of virtual caches. So these two groups are top quality hiders. So we’re actually looking at the top 1% of quality hiders in up to 53 countries or so. And then the other group that we wanted to give a big thank you to, was the group of community volunteers. So the people that give back to the game so much, and that’s gonna be your community volunteer reviewers, the moderators for the forums, and the translators who translate the website, the apps, and the newsletter.
CP: So we really wanted a way to say thank you to… There’s so many people that give to this game obviously, and we couldn’t include all of them in this launch but we’ve been thinking for a while of how can we reward top hiders and how can we define that, which is something we’ll talk about later. But we wanted to especially reward those that put a lot of creative energy into their hides and we wanted to be able to launch some virtual caches.
CR: So for people that maybe don’t know what a virtual cache is, let’s start there, maybe you’re new to the game. Let’s talk about virtual caches, what are they exactly?
CP: Okay. So virtual caches are a cache type that do not have a physical box. So you don’t have to find a container. So you go to a location and often, you have to answer a question, or take a photo, or do a task while you’re there. It offers an opportunity, for example, for a place where you wouldn’t normally be able to put a cache. So perhaps the summit of a really cool mountain that’s got a lot of snow on it in the winter or something, so that it would be too difficult to put a physical there because it’s just gonna get too damaged but it’d be an awesome adventure to share with the community.
CR: This is a beloved cache type for a lot of people and some folks are gonna hear the headline about virtual caches and say, “Great, they’re back!”, but that’s not exactly the case, right?
CP: Right, no. Yeah, we don’t feel that we can open the flood gates for virtual caches. What we’re doing is doing a limited release of up to 4,000. And they’re still a grandfathered cache type, so you will not be able to open up the geocaching.com website right now and go to “Create a cache” and you will not see the icon there for you to choose a virtual cache. We chose these groups of people using an algorithm and only those people have the unpublished cache on their profile. So maybe you wanna take a pause and go look at your profile on the website right now to see if you’re one of those lucky people.
CR: So the community volunteers, that’s easy, we know who they are. But how did HQ decide who the top 1% of cache hiders are?
CP: Yeah, okay. So that’s gonna be a question a lot of people are gonna ask and I’ll say up-front, there’s no way to make a perfect algorithm. There are so many people that make great hides, we are not gonna be able to catch everybody in this algorithm, and we want to be able to thank all great cache hiders and we will look to future projects to be able to do that. In this particular release, we wanted to limit it to a 1% number. So we had to create something that was gonna really narrow it down, and we don’t wanna share exactly what that algorithm is because we don’t need people to try to game the system for the future, but we will say that it very heavily weights towards quality over quantity. So we’re looking mostly at the types of hiders when they put out each of their hides, they put some energy into each of them.
CR: So this is an algorithm that determines these people, there was not human involvement from opinions about whether or not somebody should get one. This was the algorithm determining it, the reviewers aren’t involved, people at HQ aren’t involved, we’re looking at a straight calculation here.
CP: That’s right, it’s a formula. So we used math and various criteria to determine who would fit into that and it’s not gonna be perfect, but it’s our attempt at coming up with the top 1%. And it’s top 1% for each of those countries, so you didn’t have to be compared against somebody from another country.
CR: Looking at virtual caches today, there are something around 4,600, almost 4,600 around the world, but they’re pretty heavily weighted in just a couple of areas and I think one of the neat things about this project is that it opens up that experience of virtual caches to other places around the world.
CP: That’s right. When we were thinking about this idea, I did a search of today’s virtual caches. And you can see, they’re very heavily concentrated in the United States and a few other countries. So it’s no wonder that for 12 years we’ve been hearing from people, “Why can’t we hide virtual caches?” “I wanna find more of these.” “It seems like a great opportunity.” We get those emails, we get those conversations in the HQ, visitors center when people come to see us. And we’ve always said, “Sorry, we can’t do that.” So this is just a limited way to return to that, but also to make it more fairly distributed worldwide and not just concentrated in a couple of countries.
CR: So the virtual cache type is beloved among many people because it is fairly rare now. There are only I think like we said, around 4600 in the whole world. But it is still a grandfathered cache type even with this new release. And I think people that have come into the game since 2005 which is when they were grandfathered, haven’t maybe heard the whole story about why that happened and then why we think this limited release will help avoid some of the problems that led to the grandfathering. So let’s just start by maybe just talking about why were they grandfathered in the first place back in 2005.
CP: Right. Okay. Well first I’ll start by saying that some of the caches people see today, they’re seeing the best examples of virtual caches. They’re seeing the ones that did get published, they’re not seeing the ones that didn’t get published. So it’s hard to judge what the challenges were, but the history from what I understand, is that at the beginning, there weren’t a lot of controls over what people could submit as a virtual cache because of course, they could be almost anywhere. So they were submitting things that were really not high quality, shall we say. The carcass in the woods is the legend I’ve heard. And then there were tennis shoes in the woods as well and every single roadside sign along a highway.
CP: So what happened then later was the “wow” factor was introduced. That the reviewers needed to review based on a very subjective criteria of whether or not this was something that the community would like. And some reviewers maybe were more lenient than others, it caused strife in the forums where people would say, “Well gosh, my reviewer wouldn’t publish my fabulous idea.” And someone else might say, “Oh, well I submitted a similar idea in this state or this country, and my reviewer published it within two seconds.” So that’s not a very healthy community when we have reviewers having to make subjective decisions and then people second-guessing their decisions. So that quickly spiraled out of control.
CP: And we didn’t see… There weren’t any easy solutions to that. However, we do feel that virtuals just like the community, we love virtuals. We love good virtuals. We thought this would be a nice opportunity to say, “Here’s some chosen people in the community. If we just narrow it down and have a limited release and everybody only gets one, then maybe they would spend that energy doing something much more interesting.” Showing people something that’s a hidden gem in their city or perhaps a cool mountain hike or a mountain vista or something that they would like to show people, instead of what would happen if we let them hide hundreds of them.
CR: So assuming that this goes well and we won’t know for a while, but assuming that this goes well, are there plans for more projects like Virtual Rewards?
CP: Oh, great question. Right now, we have no plans at all. We’ve never done anything quite like this before. So it really depends on how the community responds, what the cache owners do with this opportunity, whether or not the algorithm causes more strife in the community than we anticipated. But if things go well, maybe we’ll consider something similar in the future. But it won’t be exactly the same as this.
CR: Okay. So what happens now? How soon before we start seeing new virtual caches out in the world?
CP: Right. So Virtual Rewards were released today as unpublished caches to these 4,000 accounts. We don’t know exactly when they’re gonna get published. They could be published in a few hours. They could be published within a year. So they are being told that they have one full year to submit their cache for review. There’s no guarantee that all of these caches are gonna be published. They have to meet the guidelines. And some people frankly might not choose to not participate. They might feel that they don’t wanna have to monitor a virtual rewards page. But for those that are published, you can set up instant notifications if you’re a premium member. It’s a really helpful tool to find out when these are being published in your area. Or you can use the world wide search tool on the website and just go every few days to see if something new has shown up in your area. And so, you can be one of the first to go out there and experience these new virtual caches.
CR: Well, it’s a very exciting project. And I know you’ve been heavily involved with it and it’s been hard to keep it under lock and key for a couple of months now. But it’s very exciting and I know all of us at HQ are looking forward to seeing how the community reacts and hopefully they have a lot of fun with these.
CP: Yeah, I’m very very excited. I think that it was an interesting project to work on because we know it’s something people have wanted for so long. And we tried to find a creative solution to help fill that need but really the bigger goal was to reward those people that are the top quality hiders and also the community volunteers that give back so much to the the game.
CR: If you would like to learn more about Virtual Rewards you can check out the Geocaching blog. That is at blog.geocaching.com. We answer some more questions there and we will update the blog as more questions come in. So thanks for joining us. Happy caching!
