Creating country souvenir

[joaoialima]

Hi, I would like to help geocaching.com creating souvenirs for countries here in South America where I use to travel. I went to Argentina and, for my surprise, there's no souvenir. As I plan to travel to other countries I would like to increase my 13 countries. As I like to draw/edit things, it would be a pleasure to help the community.

João Inácio (from Brasil)

[+cerberus1]

I guess you could contact Groundspeak directly, through the Help Center with your idea.

Back in '10 or '11, I remember seeing a form letter from Marketing, looking for artists.

Not sure how they pick their artists today...

[joaoialima]

Thanks!

 

I guess you could contact Groundspeak directly, through the Help Center with your idea.

Back in '10 or '11, I remember seeing a form letter from Marketing, looking for artists.

Not sure how they pick their artists today...

[RuideAlmeida]

... creating souvenirs for countries here in South America where I use to travel. I went to Argentina...

 

Most probably Argentina will be one of the 5 in the next weeks... for the rest of our neighbors I would wait seated.

Argentina has 1580 published caches, the next south-american country is Chile with 1180, but there are many from other continents in between.

[joaoialima]

OK Rui, but, despite the popularity of geocaching in these countries, can I contribute proposing designs to these countries to accelerate/help the process of creating these souvenirs? Or should I wait to Groundspeak to create it internally?

Thanks!

 

... creating souvenirs for countries here in South America where I use to travel. I went to Argentina...

 

Most probably Argentina will be one of the 5 in the next weeks... for the rest of our neighbors I would wait seated.

Argentina has 1580 published caches, the next south-american country is Chile with 1180, but there are many from other continents in between.

[+niraD]

FWIW, I get the impression that the limitation is not caused by a lack of artwork. Rather, the limitation is based on the capabilities of their computer systems. Even if they had artwork for every country in the world, they wouldn't be able to support souvenirs for every country in the world yet.

[+Ben0w]

They then should upgrade from Zilog Z80 processor systems to some modern hardware like Motorola 68000 maybe with ~20 MB additional diskspace and get rid of their magnetic tapes (BTDT).

[Pup Patrol]

OK Rui, but, despite the popularity of geocaching in these countries, can I contribute proposing designs to these countries to accelerate/help the process of creating these souvenirs? Or should I wait to Groundspeak to create it internally?

Thanks!

 

Groundspeak already has employees that create the souvenirs.

 

Look at the souvenirs you have in your profile. A lot of them will have the artist's name.

 

Many countries already have souvenirs created for them. GS just hasn't launched them all yet.

 

 

B.

[+SheepOnTrip]

I went to Argentina and, for my surprise, there's no souvenir.

 

That's no surprise - Geocaching.com tend to skip souvenirs in the world outside North America, Europe and Australia-New Zealand. There's only one souvenir for all South&Central America, One for all of Africa, and 3 for all Asia. No souvenirs for huge land masses like China, Russia, Indonesia and so on.

[+NYPaddleCacher]

I went to Argentina and, for my surprise, there's no souvenir.

 

That's no surprise - Geocaching.com tend to skip souvenirs in the world outside North America, Europe and Australia-New Zealand. There's only one souvenir for all South&Central America, One for all of Africa, and 3 for all Asia. No souvenirs for huge land masses like China, Russia, Indonesia and so on.

 

I wouldn't say that that they've skipped souvenirs for the world outside North America, Europe, and Australia as much as they just haven't created souvenirs for those countries yet. The criteria they've used for selecting countries is primarily based upon the number of geocaches in the countries, not the size of the land mass or the total population of the country.

 

Several years ago they released several country/region based souvenirs at once and it caused some server issues that resulted in a lot of people not getting one for which they retroactively qualified. The problem isn't so much in the awarding a souvenir that is available when someone finds a new cache, but the retroactively awarding a country to those that have previously found a cache in the country/region. That can be very compute intensive.

 

It certainly wouldn't hurt to propose artwork for a specific country, but as was mentioned previously, GS has several graphic designers on staff that can create the artwork.

[+The A-Team]

The problem isn't so much in the awarding a souvenir that is available when someone finds a new cache, but the retroactively awarding a country to those that have previously found a cache in the country/region. That can be very compute intensive.

Is that really a problem though? It's a one-time operation. In late 2014, 2015, and again this year, the system has been capable of performing the retroactive awarding of 5-6 new souvenirs at a time. If it can handle that batch size, why couldn't it do the same thing each week, for example? At a rate of 5 per week, the remaining souvenirs could all be released and retroactively awarded in about 8 months.

 

I think the biggest stumbling block is the artwork. Not necessarily the creation of it, but rather the content. Groundspeak has graphic artists that can create some great artwork, but how many of them are familiar enough with Guinea-Bissau or Wallis and Futuna Islands to come up with some appropriate content for the souvenir? Someone who isn't familiar with a country can easily be caught up in stereotypes, which seems to have been a complaint of some residents in the past when new souvenirs have been released. The Lackeys would need to do lots of research to come up with content that uniquely depicts the country but isn't offensive/stereotypical, and I can see why this could take quite a bit of time.

 

Honestly, we need to figure out what needs to be done to help speed up the process, or scrap it entirely. At the current rate of 5 souvenirs per year and assuming they continue releasing them in order of most caches, I can expect to get a souvenir for my finds in the Vatican City State in about 2047. Papyfilou won't get a souvenir for their find in Wallis and Futuna Islands until 2058. If that's the way things are going to continue, why bother at all? After all, if the feature will never be completed within a reasonable timespan, why not stop wasting development time on a dead feature and put that time towards other more critical features (of which there are many that are in desperate need of developer-time)?