Challenge difficulty

What is it?

For every Challenge checker in the system there is a Challenge difficulty calculated. The difficulty is based on on how many Geocachers fulfill the challenge or not. Project-GC is running Challenge checkers in the background for tenths of thousands of Geocachers in the background, this process is a part of the Auto-Challenge-Checker System. The result of these runs is used to calculate the Challenge difficulty.

How is it calculated?

Basically the Challenge difficulty tells us how big share of the Geocachers fulfill a challenge or not. The rating is an integer between 0 and 100, but should not be confused with percent. First off it's important to understand that the automatic challenge checker runs aren't automatically executed on the average Geocacher, but more likely on the more hardcore Geocachers. It's primarily executed on Geocachers with more finds, regular users of Project-GC and also paid members of the site.

Then the Geocachers the checker has been run on is divided into three categories:

• Region - Geocachers that are determined to live in the same region as the Challenge itself.
• Country - Geocachers that are determined to live in the same country as the Challenge itself, but not in the same region.
• World - All others

For each category a percent of how many fulfills the Challenge is calculated. Then the results for each group is weighted different in the calculations, basically a list is created and the percentages are added into that list. The percentage of world geocachers are added into the list 3 times, country 5 times, and region 10 times.

It should also be noted that there usually are more cached checker runs in the system from more local Geocachers than from those living far away.

Example

• The Challenge is placed in Texas, United States.
• 80% of the Geocachers in Texas fulfills it.
• 40% of the Geocachers in the other states of the United States fulfills it.
• 30% of the Geocachers in the rest of the world fulfills it.
• Then to weigh these differently using coefficients a sum is created like this: 3*80+5*40+10*30.
• This sum is then divided by 18 (3+5+10).
• The Challenge difficulty ends up being 740/18 = 41.11, which is rounded down to 41. The values are always rounded down to the closest integer.