Recently, Groundspeak released a new feature for geocaching that allows users to mark a cache that they’ve found as one of their favorites – it’s essentially a limited-use Like button for geocaching.
A few days ago, one of the volunteer reviewers for Florida posted a note on my Puzzle Solving 101 – The Final Exam cache that said that the PS101 Final was one of the 20 most favorite caches in all of Florida.
Naturally, I’m honored. But I’m also naturally curious. I know some of the caches on that list, and some of them have been found literally thousands of times, while the PS101 Final has been found very few times. Because you can only mark a cache as your favorite if you’ve logged a find on it, caches that are found more often should get more favorite points than those that are found less often.
So that got me thinking – what if we ranked caches by the percentage of finders that marked a cache as one of their favorites? That would get us closer to measuring the overall reward factor of a cache than just a raw measurement of favorite points.
So I took the top 20 caches in the state as of this writing (in terms of absolute number of favorite points), and I sorted them by the percentage of finders that marked each cache as a favorite, and here’s the results:
Name | Type | ID | Finds | Favorites | Percentage | |
Puzzle Solving 101 – The Final Exam | Mystery | GCYXN0 | 49 | 18 | 37% | |
Lemmings Loop | Multi | GC11MA3 | 56 | 16 | 29% | |
South Florida Challenge Quest | Mystery | GCTVT8 | 99 | 24 | 24% | |
Final Florida Challenge Quest | Mystery | GCTVTE | 75 | 17 | 23% | |
North Florida Challenge Quest | Mystery | GCTVT3 | 92 | 19 | 21% | |
M&M-183 Wherigo Whenican’t…Downtown Disney |
Whereigo | GC1Y3HH | 126 | 18 | 14% | |
Where The Green Fern Grows | Multi | GCD459 | 141 | 19 | 13% | |
The Federation MUST PAY! | Traditional | GCGX5D | 277 | 25 | 9% | |
Jungle Bungalow | Traditional | GC1D5YB | 171 | 14 | 8% | |
A Cool Cache | Traditional | GC15RQB | 668 | 34 | 5% | |
FLORIDA GEOCAC BENCHMARK PROJECT | Traditional | GC1MVYP | 488 | 24 | 5% | |
STS-107 Columbia (was Kennedy Space Center) |
Virtual | GCBD49 | 458 | 21 | 5% | |
Wings Over Orlando | Virtual | GC4F78 | 710 | 20 | 3% | |
Animal Kingdom | Virtual | GC3334 | 2480 | 54 | 2% | |
Magic Kingdom | Virtual | GC10FB | 3753 | 72 | 2% | |
USA, all the way South | Virtual | GC2C32 | 2371 | 36 | 2% | |
Hot Shots | Virtual | GCB34B | 1111 | 16 | 1% | |
EPCOT | Virtual | GC3336 | 2981 | 36 | 1% | |
Hollywood Studios | Virtual | GC3338 | 2420 | 26 | 1% | |
That’s Some Whater, Eh? – TDR3v | Virtual | GC9F98 | 2153 | 21 | 1% |
Now, this analysis isn’t complete – a cache with one find and one favorite point has a 100% favorite factor. It’s probably useful to consider a more statistically significant sample of caches that have, say, 25 finds or more, before considering them in this list, given the relatively low rate of marking caches as favorites. But I bet the result would be the same – the easy-to-find vacation virtuals would go to the bottom of the list and the mysteries, multis, and Wherigos would float to the top.
It says 19 favorites now
“Like” 😉
Great job, eP! And I was wondering the same thing myself. I am honored (and proud!) to have Lemmings Loop on this list. It will be interesting to see how this system evolves. I have yet to sit down and mark my owns faves…
eP, I completely agree with your analysis. The ranking of favorite caches definitely makes more sense when you consider those votes in terms of the “per capita” number of finds.
Still, if you want to get ahead, you might consider hiding your next puzzle cache in Disney World.
I would NOT suggest hiding the cache at Disney World. this is not allowed.
See recent bomb scare news stories about Downtown Disney geocache puzzle.
See pg 8 and 9 of this forum here:
http://tinyurl.com/4ha4vsm
I’m pretty sure TinSparrow knows that … all of the physical caches in Disney have been archived long ago, and the reviewers won’t publish new ones there.