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in Support and help by kuschelchen (360 points)

1 Answer

+1 vote
No tool for doing this exists, the easiest way is probably finding somebody that have logged a challenge with the challenge difficulty that you want to find and check what challenge that is.

As a side note, filling all boxes of the challenge difficulty chart would be a near impossible task for multiple reasons. One being that the challenge difficulty changes over time, an other that archived challenges will/might lose their challenge difficulty number and the final being that only two caches with a challenge difficulty of 100 exists at the moment and if you qualify and log them they are likely to drop to 99.

The two challenges with a challenge difficulty of 100 is https://coord.info/GC1P2N3 and https://coord.info/GC1PNHK the later one would probably be the best choice if you want to get a challenge with the challenge difficulty of 100 since you could in theory qualify and then lose the qualification again after your log if a cache is archived. This should probably make it a 100 again. On the other hand, once somebody shows it can be done, it might as well drop to a 85 because more people targets the challenge believing they will get a challenge with the challenge difficulty of 100 too. :)
by Pleu (43.1k points)
Thank you for your detailed answer and note!
I really do appreciate. Going to Utah for this actually is an option - and a quite adventurous one....
But isn't that what challenges are all about? Enticement to crazy adventures...

Side note : I have startet to harvest challenge checkers using your "Find Checker" tool (https://project-gc.com/Tools/Challenges)
It will give me about 500 at a time. No idea how they are filtered or picked. The "search" filter is working but not in a logically stringent way. When, for instance, searching for GC1 it will give me GC1???? Caches but also Caches whose GC-Code does not contain the digit "1" at all.
This way, I have collected difficulty 1 through 99 but not "0" or "100". Thank you for pointing me to the two caches in Utah all the more!

Question a) is there a difficulty zero challenge?
Question b) what does it take to create a difficulty 100 challenge? I am the only cacher in the world to have found Virtual caches with 80 different D/T ratings. Would that do? (I am expecting to  fill the grid later this year).... But then, I do not know if the reviewer will let it pass.....

Side note2: if ever you where to make challenge difficulty searcheable, I guess a filter to your challenge map would be a wonderful idea...

thanks again for your work for our hobby! It's much appreciated,

Ralph aka kuschelchen
@kuschelchen Sorry if I was a bit unclear about how I know stuff, I don't work for Project-GC, I'm just a forum-addict that have volunteered a little. So my source for knowing the two challenges with the challenge difficulty 100 is facebookgroups, same source as the 10 lowest ones that all round down to zero:

https://coord.info/GC9A8A7
https://coord.info/GC96T79
https://coord.info/GC92R5N
https://coord.info/GC92R5H
https://coord.info/GC92R5X
https://coord.info/GC92R5R
https://coord.info/GC8P1CF
https://coord.info/GC7X39Y
https://coord.info/GC98WJN
https://coord.info/GC92R69

The formula for the calculation of the challenge difficulty can be found here: https://project-gc.com/w/Challenge_difficulty

I would say it's not possible to get a challenge that gets a challenge difficulty of 100 published now due to the new guidelines where CO has to qualify and most reviewers ask for a list of local qualifiers and having people that qualify for the challenge, and getting logs on the challenge, would cause the challenge difficulty to drop. If it wasn't for that problem then yes, I assume that a "full D/T for virtuals" would get a challenge difficulty of 100. Not publishable due to many of the guidelines but a great accomplishment anyway! I think Virtual is the only 81 matrix-addon that nobody have yet then. :) Some statistics about badges and addons can be found here: https://project-gc.com/w/Badge_Statistics

For the question about how the "Find checker"-tool works I don't know for sure, but when I did a couple of searches and checked the caches where the GCcode didn't match they had a GCcode that matched my search in the tags (one was with a list of caches that where excluded from the challenge and one was for an old challenge that forced the user to log specific caches). So my guess would be that the search field on that page don't only search the GCcode and name of the caches but also search the tags of the checkers and probably some parts of the checker script too.
Thank you very much for this additionial information! This is very helpful indeed. And yes, I feel even more motivated and enticed to go for that matrix. I have a question relating to the calculation of difficulty which I will open as separate thread.
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