idratherbehiking
12-05-2012, 11:16 PM
Here is a post made from Geocahing.com yesterday on their decision to retire the Challenges:
In our effort to inspire outdoor play through Geocaching, we are often faced with decisions about what to focus on next, and what to focus on less. It is through these decisions that we explore opportunities to grow the global game of geocaching.
Occasionally, during this process, we are faced with the reality that certain ideas don’t catch on as we had hoped. In these situations we owe it to ourselves and to you to make tough decisions about the future of every project and the resources to be applied to each. Sometimes, as a result, cool features must become casualties.
In this spirit, we have decided to retire Geocaching Challenges.
This means that, effective today, we have disabled the ability to create new Challenges. We have also removed the Challenges application from all mobile application stores. In approximately 7 days, we will be removing all traces of the Challenges functionality and related content from Geocaching.com.
On an office wall here at HQ is a sign that reads, “Let’s make better mistakes tomorrow.” By accepting that we will sometimes get it wrong, we can allow ourselves to learn from and imagine new opportunities in the world of Geocaching. Our hope is we can take the lessons from Challenges and create better tools to guide you on your next adventure.
In my opinion this was just their way to try and give us something to replace the Virtuals that most cachers wanted them to bring back. I feel like it was a very poor substitute. I know that a lot of cachers out there worked really hard at getting the challenges out there and I greatly appreciate their efforts.
Hopefully they have learned a few lessons on what we want and don't want and maybe their next idea will be something that helps make the game even more enjoyable.
In our effort to inspire outdoor play through Geocaching, we are often faced with decisions about what to focus on next, and what to focus on less. It is through these decisions that we explore opportunities to grow the global game of geocaching.
Occasionally, during this process, we are faced with the reality that certain ideas don’t catch on as we had hoped. In these situations we owe it to ourselves and to you to make tough decisions about the future of every project and the resources to be applied to each. Sometimes, as a result, cool features must become casualties.
In this spirit, we have decided to retire Geocaching Challenges.
This means that, effective today, we have disabled the ability to create new Challenges. We have also removed the Challenges application from all mobile application stores. In approximately 7 days, we will be removing all traces of the Challenges functionality and related content from Geocaching.com.
On an office wall here at HQ is a sign that reads, “Let’s make better mistakes tomorrow.” By accepting that we will sometimes get it wrong, we can allow ourselves to learn from and imagine new opportunities in the world of Geocaching. Our hope is we can take the lessons from Challenges and create better tools to guide you on your next adventure.
In my opinion this was just their way to try and give us something to replace the Virtuals that most cachers wanted them to bring back. I feel like it was a very poor substitute. I know that a lot of cachers out there worked really hard at getting the challenges out there and I greatly appreciate their efforts.
Hopefully they have learned a few lessons on what we want and don't want and maybe their next idea will be something that helps make the game even more enjoyable.