The Most Favorite Caches in Florida

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.

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ePeterso2

Who I Am ePeterso2I’m Eric Peterson, and my email address is epeterso2@puzzlehead.org. I’m a software engineer who lives in a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I’ve enjoyed solving puzzles for years, and a few years ago I began constructing puzzles of my own. If you’re ever in Broward County and would like to get together some time, please send me a note by email and let me know. I love the opportunity to meet with other puzzleheads, especially if it involves lunch. Puzzle Testing I believe that the best way to make a puzzle even better is to ask someone else to solve it. You learn so much about how people think, how people approach your puzzle, pitfalls they may encounter, and outright errors in your construction by having someone else try it before you unleash it upon the world. If you’re a puzzle constructor, I would be honored to test your puzzle for you. Send me email with your puzzle or a link to it, and I’ll try solving it, as long as I have time available to do so. I’m a busy guy, so my time is limited … but I’m always open to a challenge. My Public Profiles * My Linked In profile * My Geocaching.com profile * My FloridaCaching.com profile Puzzles I’ve Written * Geocaching puzzles Puzzles I’ve Solved * Geocaching puzzles (solved and found) What Happened to ePeterso1? ePeterso1 was a horrible experiment gone wrong that had to be hunted down and killed before he claimed the lives of any more innocent victims. Most of the bugs that caused ePeterso1 to go haywire have been corectted in ePeterso2.

6 thoughts on “The Most Favorite Caches in Florida”

  3. 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…

  4. 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.

  6. 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.

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