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Jul 2016
9:59pm, 27 Jul 2016
19,118 posts
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alpenrose
I think most of my thoughts have been voiced up there ^^^ but some good ideas from CumbriAndy and Meglet there.
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Jul 2016
10:01pm, 27 Jul 2016
1,921 posts
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IanS
I would agree with CumbriaAndy about marking areas - within my 1 mile circle I have 2 army barracks, one private school, one private golf course and a big chunk of the Edinburgh ring road, all of which combine to make it slightly tricky to access a fair proportion of my home area.
As a techy I do also appreciate that this would be probably rather hard to implement 
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Jul 2016
10:14pm, 27 Jul 2016
3,422 posts
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Nelly
Can I disagree with Meglet please, as the rewards would be very heavily biased towards those in the most built-up areas (i.e. London) if it was based on most coins or bugs squashed etc.
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Jul 2016
10:28pm, 27 Jul 2016
1,306 posts
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Teknik
mmmm...coin distribution has always perplexed me. My home circle is in central London, and I get very few coins appearing - maybe 20 right now. Back home in Essex, I live near a Fetchpoint player's home, and there must be 5 to 10 times the number of coins available.
I agree on the bugs though - I regularly get boatloads of them dumped into my circle. Grrrr...
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Jul 2016
10:29pm, 27 Jul 2016
5,685 posts
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BaronessBL
I think there are a few too many icons - I didn't even know cake shop had been added. Personally bridges, postboxes, cakeshops and water stations are unnecessary. I've never quite understood relays but I appreciate they are an integral part of the game.
I've never bought extra traffic lights etc but I do like getting out and taking control of lights so that I can see if anyone is running through my home circle (again not many players round here.) I also like watering flowers to build up their value and will plan a route in order to move bugs from time to time.
I wouldn't want to play it on the go - part of the fun for me is trying to remember while I am out if I am going to cover all the side streets or whatever to get bugs. I also liked collecting Gore-illas and Garmangles. Could you do a deal with OS maps for a prize or two please - which would be quite a relevant one for this game I think?
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Jul 2016
8:38am, 28 Jul 2016
First-time poster!!
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lenglish
Hi fetch, I have been a member for a while but started playing this game in the last couple of weeks yet already a little addicted! I've planned runs around collecting the most coins and running bugs outta my land. It's the only thing that has ever made come in from a run and want to download my garmin straight away, I'm I sad? A bit disappointed that after my first run getting a random 1 million points, and leaderboard position 78 I have gone backwards on the leaderboard every single run!
Anyway what I think would improve the game is on your account when you have done something it tells you how many points you've got for it ie picked flower. If you plan a route, it tells you what it's worth in points, obviously randoms are still randoms but for the stuff it knows. Agree quite a lot of bugs, but I think the more icons the better, I now choose to run in different directions from home if there are more coins that way. Perhaps more balance as to coins and bugs.
Don't understand relays might buy one and see what happens. Also like the check points you run between but in my account it doesn't tell me which two I have got points for. Just 86% or whatever. I don't think I would play it on the go, I managed to remember a ten mile route I 'fetched' so no need!
Good work though, I wish I had the patience.
Lucy
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Jul 2016
8:45am, 28 Jul 2016
49 posts
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philip_m_jones
The biggest bugbear I have with this game is that it does not reward players evenly for playing the game.
As an example, and this is all based on no evidence at all and I am talking about someone I don't know and I apologise in advance if I offend or make false assumptions, xxx yyy is towards the top on the 2016 leaderboard. I pick xxx yyy as if I enter yyy into the search box in the map and zoom out a few clicks, I see rows of flowers as thick as my arm and click on a few at random and you see 5000 point flowers planted by xxx yyy. Follow the link and look at the training, and you see a cycle commute each morning and evening.
So to get high on the board, xxx cycles to work each morning and cycles home each evening. I can see he also runs a very decent parkrun time and it takes about 2 clicks in google to see he ran (insert decent time here) at VMLM this year as a zz year old, well done xxx, solid run! The thing is, does xxx look at the map, see bugs and work out a route to remove bugs, or does he get on with life and barely think about the game?
I work in west London. If I lived 11 miles away and cycled in each day, I'd plant a few flowers at the most as I would cycle through home circle on top of home circle. I could put in the exact same effort and get a fraction of the reward.
The other point I'd like to make is in regard to some of the comment I have made above. Fetch has remarked several times about how relay markers can even out runners and cyclists. A little playing about with the game shows you can drop relays and benefit from them. As an example, if someone cycles 11 miles each day then drop a relay each day on that route. The relay costs 2000 points, and you get 1000 points a mile, so you are plus 9000 points a day, 45000 a week or 180,000 points a month. The other player is better off as he doesn't pay for the relay, so gets 220,000 points a month so if you want to move up to the top of the board you can't do this with one player, you have to do it with a load, say 10 or more. Now you have a recipe to get say 2 million points a month extra from relays. Loads of clicks you may think, but I invested a few minutes in a bash script which uses wget with --post-data and I can repeatedly drop relays using a cron job with no effort on my behalf at all.
The cost of this is that you have to work out the regular habits of 10 or more players and that starts to make me uncomfortable. I now know what xxx yyy's real name is, his marathon time and approximately where his cycle commute starts and ends. One more google search gives me his place of work and that matches the flowers. All this starts to get a bit like an invasion of personal space. The thing with fetchpoint is that it is real people running and cycling real places and it is hard (impossible?) to abstract that into a game with player to player interaction which exists purely in the game and does not overflow into real life.
The game rewards you if you search for places where others have accumulated points, maybe that is what needs changing. Twice this year I have found the Higgs boson and that looks to be a better model. If there were a load more of high value markers that moved each day then the leader-board would be the people who looked at the map each day and found the high level markers.
Having said all that, it is a good game. I have two 5 mile easy runs which I can run in either direction so I cycled through 4 routes for my easy runs. With fetchpoint, I now plan 5 mile routes to eliminate bugs etc and have found a lot of interesting places within a mile of my office I never knew existed (such as the V&A museum overflow repository).
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Jul 2016
9:16am, 28 Jul 2016
17,511 posts
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fetcheveryone
It's good to hear about the tactics that you've all worked out, as I can try to update the rules to take them into account. What this always does though, is introduce new loopholes for exploitation
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Jul 2016
9:18am, 28 Jul 2016
808 posts
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StuHolmes
"So to get high on the board, xxx cycles to work each morning and cycles home each evening"
Or maybe they do it to get to work?
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Jul 2016
9:29am, 28 Jul 2016
265 posts
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Oranj
I look at the map most days to plan a route around moving bugs out of my local area if I can, although some other local people in the game clearly don't, because when I drop those bugs near them, they don't seem to pick them up.
As for flowers left by commuters - it's worth letting them water them for a few weeks to accumulate points and then paying that route a visit so you can pick them and you both benefit from the points bounty
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