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00:15 Chris Ronan: Hello everyone. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ, Special Edition. I’m Chris Ronan, also known by my Geocaching user name which is Rock Chalk. So what makes this a special edition? Well, we’re announcing Virtual Rewards 2.0 today. You can read about it on the Geocaching blog or hear all about it, right here, right now. I am joined by Cindy Potter, who is the Director of Community at Geocaching HQ. So here we go, talking in Virtual Rewards 2.0.

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00:54 CR: Well, the last time, Cindy, you were on our podcast, was this exact same subject. So apparently, we only bring you on here when it’s time to talk about Virtual Rewards. So, Virtual Rewards 2.0. Let’s talk about this project and just an overview of what this is all about.

01:12 Cindy Potter: Okay, sure. No, that’s funny that I guess I have nothing else to talk about besides Virtuals, but that’s okay. We’re very excited to announce another round of Virtuals. We’re calling it Virtual Rewards 2.0. Still using the same name but it is different. We’ll talk more about that. It’s more similar to the process of what we did for Adventure Labs. So there’s going to be a page going live either today or very soon thereafter, where people can opt in to receive a virtual reward if they meet the minimum qualifications and those will be visible on the page. And then we’ll randomly select up to 4,000 individuals by geographic distribution.

01:55 CR: So compared to the first round of Virtual Rewards, I think with any project, we try to learn from it and see if we can improve on it and make it better and certainly the process here is a little bit different than the first time around, and a lot of that is because of input, both from the community and volunteer and community volunteers and so forth.

02:15 CP: Right. Yeah. We heard what people said. There are lots of very passionate responses. We tried not to get too hung up on like does that mean we can’t ever do Virtuals again? We listen to the feedback and we did promise that we would do it differently for the future. We didn’t know if we were gonna be able to do it but we did say that if we did it again, we would do it differently so, it would target different users. So this time, we know everybody loves Virtuals, we do too, but we’re not going to try to target “top hiders” since there are challenges with doing that, this time, we’re making it more open. By our estimates, about 40,000 people worldwide would qualify for the criteria that we’ve come up with. It’s gonna be more putting the power in the hands of the cache owners that they will know if they qualify. They can see the criteria visibly so there’s not some secret algorithm like we had before and they can sort of make a promise to the community by opting in saying, “Yes I’m committed to this. I would like to make a virtual.”

03:30 CP: The last round, I think most people know about two-thirds of the people ended up making Virtuals and that felt to the community like that wasn’t enough. They would like to see closer to the full 4,000 being used. So we’re gonna see if this process helps to improve that. And so with the random selection too, it’s kind of acknowledging that this game is made up of all kinds of cache hiders and we need everybody to help participate. Yes, there’s a minimum quality of hides we’re looking for and quality of participation but it’s easier to qualify this, go around.

04:07 CR: Why did HQ decide, “Let’s do this again.” What were some of the things that contributed to saying, “Hey, it went well the first time. Let’s give it another go.”

04:16 CP: Right. I think despite people’s dissatisfaction with the algorithm, they were really happy to see new Virtuals come out, and so we thought, “Let’s just try to find another method that might work.” We also saw that the overall quality of Virtuals is much higher than your average cache that is put out so both the total favorite points, the percentage of favorite points, if you look at log length or the frequency at which they’re found is quite high. So, we looked at lots of different data and it was quite clear. Now maybe some of that is because Virtuals are rare and people like to go find them, but I do believe they do have a place in geocaching and it helps us to show something in a community that we’re maybe a box, just isn’t really appropriate at that location.

05:09 CP: The other huge factor was that the reviewers said, “The process went fairly smoothly.” We had some pretty tight guidelines but then kind of loose guidelines like not too much work on the reviewers. No standard of quality that they had to assess going in. And so they were really open when we presented them with the idea, but even more importantly, they were the ones that came up with the opt-in idea that we tried first with Adventure Labs and now we’re doing with Virtuals. We started with Adventure Labs as a test to see how it went. Reviewers felt like that’s what they heard from the community was, “Let’s make sure people really want to make a virtual and so they’re probably gonna put a little more effort in than if we had just selected them based on a secret algorithm.”

06:00 CR: Are the goals of 2.0 different from the first round of Virtual Rewards?

06:06 CP: Yeah. So they are somewhat different. Like I’ve said before, we’re not trying to identify top hiders and reward top hiders, although we’re still keeping the word reward in there because we feel that we are rewarding cache hiders in general. So yes, there’s a huge range of cache hiders and we hope we can always find fun things for cache hiders to do like we also gave some cache hiders the opportunity to do the Adventure Lab. So it’s a thank you to those cache hiders but it’s also another attempt at geographic distribution so we’re looking at, when we do the random selection, being more mindful to do it by country. So you’re competing against your peers, within your own country and we’re trying to stretch it to more countries world-Wide.

06:54 CR: We’ve talked a little bit about how things are different this time than the first time. Is there anything else about 2.0 that people will, for instance, you talked about the opt-in process and then the criteria is visible, what kinds of criteria in general are we talking about?

07:12 CP: Well. First and foremost, people might be glad to know that if you receive virtual reward last time even if you didn’t publish it, you’re not qualified or you don’t meet the criteria to get one again. So this would be a fresh set of people. So, some certain number of favorite points total on your caches, a certain number of hides. You need to have logged a cache within a certain number of months and I’m trying to think of, you need to have publish to cache within a certain time period. And I’ll be honest, this criteria is not super high. Like if you’re in a country like the US, or Germany you might look at this criteria and say, “Oh my goodness, all my friends qualify for this. Well, in some of those countries that might be true, but consider that we’re trying to make a criteria that works for the whole world. And so in some of the less active countries, we still want them to be able to qualify for virtual so although there won’t be quite as many qualifiers it’ll be easier for them to earn one.

08:20 CR: So you were here when we announce virtual rewards. You’re back for 2.0. Am I supposed to schedule a 3.0 interview in the future? I think that’s something people will inevitably, well, I will certainly ask about it over the last couple of years. Is there gonna be another round of these? And alright, now there is. Does that mean there’s gonna be another one in the future?

08:37 CP: That’s the million dollar question, Chris, I can’t answer that.

08:41 CR: That’s why it’s a million dollar question. That’s why I have to ask.

08:45 CP: Yeah, I think, we’ll see how this round goes. Hopefully, the community will feel like this is a positive change that we’ve made. I’m sure there will be things about it that they might not like. I think the tricky part people wonder if… Well, so, answering your specific question, yes, there might be another round in the future, but the other question that is even the bigger million dollar question is, why don’t you just open it all up? Why have these rounds at all, right?

09:15 CR: That was gonna be my two million dollar question later, but yeah.

09:17 CP: The two million, that’s a lot of money.

09:19 CR: Sure, short-circuit to it, go for it.

09:22 CP: So it’s possible that we will have opportunities in the future that will be limited releases. I think it’s almost certainly not likely that we will ever release virtuals, the way they were before where it was just open season. And if you think about it today, that was 14 years ago when we grandfather them, we had far fewer cache hiders back then, today we have hundreds of thousands of them and so if we opened it up today, we would end up back where we were in the dark place where basically people were hiding very low quality Virtuals and there’s not proximity rules and it was hard for reviewers to assess. Is this a good quality, is that a bad quality? And we will also wanna be careful that we are sticking to the core of what geocaching is about, which is mostly about the container and being able to sign and trade swag and stuff like that. So if we open up Virtuals too much, it seems like it would potentially harm the rest of the game but we do think that this type of limited release and keeping an eye on the statistics and how the reviewers are feeling, it’s possible we could do something like this again.

10:46 CR: Well, for people like myself, I started geocaching long after Virtuals were grandfathered. And what I see tends to be fun experiences and I think, “Oh this is great. Why would they ever have grandfathered this?” And then after you learn a little more, and especially once you talk to some reviewers who are around back then, well, what’s left are the good experiences and most of the ones that caused the problems, and caused them to be grandfathered aren’t around anymore, so yeah.

11:17 CP: Right. Yes, I’ve heard some horror stories about the dead carcass in the woods.

11:22 CR: Yeah, right.

11:22 CP: The tennis shoes dangling from an electric power line and things like that. Yeah, the ones that are left are the ones that are quality, and the cache hiders are still in the game and probably put out something reasonable in the first place. But yeah, it’s really hard to judge quality. And the way we did the last release, the reviewers didn’t need to judge the quality.

11:46 CR: Another question I hear from people sometimes is, “Okay, you’ve done a limited release of Virtuals, what about other grandfather cache types like web cam?” That’s something that I hear a lot about.

11:58 CP: We have talks about web cam, some… They have a lot more challenges, I’d say than Virtuals do and it’s harder for us to say, that they’re part of the core of geocaching. Also with the privacy laws that have come in place in the last year, a couple of years. I’m not sure about the privacy issues of having increase number of web cams out there and encouraging people taking photos and doing videos of other people. And what are they gonna do with that? So we’re not quite as enthusiastic about bringing web cams back as we have been with Virtuals. So there’s your honest answer.

12:38 CR: Well, we are enthusiastic though about Virtual Rewards. So where can people get more information and what are some of the important dates that will be coming up here in the next several weeks?

12:49 CP: Right. May 14th is the day that the opt-in page goes live, we call it an opt-in page, but you can think of it like an application page. It’s very similar to what we did for Adventure Lab. So it’s gonna be on geocaching.com/play/request/virtuals2019 and that will be open for about two and a half weeks until June first. That day we’ll close the page, so you can still see the page, but you won’t be able to opt-in anymore. And then, on June fourth, we’ll do the random selection of up to 4000 users and they will then have one year to submit their virtual for publication.

13:32 CR: Well, this will be a fun thing to watch and see what people will come up with. It certainly has been fun. It was fun the first time around, wasn’t it? To see some of the new places that people sent their fellow cachers out to see.

13:46 CP: Yes, and some of them got published really fast. In that case, I think there were a few reviewers that knew it was coming and so on their player accounts, they already had a few things going. So we’ll see how quickly this happens. I suppose in a way, when you opt-it on May 14th, maybe some people already have something in mind, so it’ll be fun to see what it is.

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14:10 CR: That was Cindy Potter, Geocaching HQ’s Director of Community. If you wanna learn more about Virtual Rewards 2.0, there is a blog post all about it, just go to blog.geocaching.com. The blog includes a link to the opt-in page where you can find out if you qualify to apply for a Virtual Reward. May the odds be ever in your favor and from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.