Scoring

[Redfist]

How Are teams going to be scored?

Do you mean teams as in 1 account for multiple people (like a family) or teams as in multiple accounts who go out and find the cache together?

If the former, those accounts will be treated like any other account.

If the latter, every cacher who finds the cache will share in the points available for that cache. WRT first day finder, they will all split the point for that cache. That also doesn't strictly mean "the group of cachers who went and found it first", it means "any cacher who found it on the same day when it was first found". So if FTF-Hunter-Bob (made up name) finds a cache 32 seconds after it is published, and LaidBack-Larry finds it at 11pm later that night, they'll each get .5 points for sharing that "first day find".

[Corfman Clan]

How Are teams going to be scored?

Geocaches will receive points based on age. In a nutshell, a cache's total points will be 100 * (number of days old) / 365.25. Essentially, a cache will receive 100 points for each year it is old. A cache's score will be the total points divided by the number of finders. Finds by the cache owner and duplicate finds per cacher will not be counted. This will be very similar, if not the same as what the DGP did.

Geocachers will accumulate points based on finds. Geocacher points will be accumulated per Geocaching.com account. There will be no "teams" per say. That is, we will not be grouping multiple Geocaching.com accounts together. We also will not be distinguishing between accounts used by more than one person and those that are for individuals. Again, this will be very similar to what the DGP did.

One thing we're planning on doing, but haven't got to yet is to have three categories for geocaching.com accounts. For now, I'll call them: standard, private, and excluded. Most every account should be standard. An account marked private would be if someone, for some reason or another, does not want his/her account ranked in our leaderboards. The account would still be used for affecting points but would not be displayed in the leaderboards. An account would be marked excluded if, for example, it is for someone's geopet. So any geopet "find" would not impact a cache's score.

[rocketsciguy]

Cool. Thanks for the update on this topic. I agree that it would be difficult (if not impossible) to have accounts grouped together as "teams" in any logical manner. It might be interesting to view a composite score resulting from combining the hides and finds (not sure whether AND or OR logic is best here), but you couldn't place Cacher A and Cacher B and Team A+B on the same leaderboard.

One thing we're planning on doing, but haven't got to yet is to have three categories for geocaching.com accounts. For now, I'll call them: standard, private, and excluded. Most every account should be standard. An account marked private would be if someone, for some reason or another, does not want his/her account ranked in our leaderboards. The account would still be used for effecting points but would not be displayed in the leaderboards. An account would be marked excluded if, for example, it is for someone's geopet. So any geopet "find" would not impact a cache's score.

Obviously, this sort of information cannot be gleaned directly from geocaching.com (which you were trying to avoid). What mechanism do you have in mind for designating accounts as "private" or "excluded"? Only a small fraction in the coverage region are going to be aware of or care about LCP to initiate an action to mark their accounts (or their spouses', children's, or pets') as either private or excluded. I admit that a certain dalmatian living nearby is a much better hiker than I, but I severely doubt he's as much a better puzzle solver than I am as the DPG stats would indicate... so I would be inclined to "nominate" his account to be changed to "excluded" to keep him from affecting LCP ₧ calculation and showing up on the leaderboards.

In a related note, since you are going to incorporate some data external to the API, are you going to allow a division of "Unknown" cache types into "Challenges" and "Puzzles" as recommended/voted on by the community? I'd highly recommend doing that. But I would not go down the "Haystack vs. Standard" road if I were doing this. Just another 2¢.

[Corfman Clan]

Obviously, this sort of information cannot be gleaned directly from geocaching.com (which you were trying to avoid). What mechanism do you have in mind for designating accounts as "private" or "excluded"?

I anticipate very few accounts will be marked private or excluded so it may not be worth the effort to try to automate it. So to start, I imagine it will be by user request.

In a related note, since you are going to incorporate some data external to the API, are you going to allow a division of "Unknown" cache types into "Challenges" and "Puzzles" as recommended/voted on by the community? I'd highly recommend doing that. But I would not go down the "Haystack vs. Standard" road if I were doing this. Just another 2¢.

I don't consider marking an account private or excluded as incorporating data external to geocaching.com. On the contrary, I consider it honoring the wishes of someone that does not want to be part of this site's statistics.