While the concept of the goodie hunting competitions is great it seems fairly limited as to who can win. In my area I grabbed all the berries I could which amounted to maybe 30-40. Seeing how many it would take to be number one there was little chance that was going to happen as I don't even know if Scotland as a country had that many.

Perhaps this is because there still isn't a lot of interest in waze in general in the UK. I see maybe one or two other people on waze in a week. Commonly over 50 miles away from me at minimum.

The competition I enjoyed the most was the treasure chest one. It seemed like I had a better chance to win as when I drove over a chest I might get a prize. Perhaps just have chests again with some code on the server that randomly decides if your chest is a winner or not when you drive over it. Sort of like a prize draw that way rather than who drives the most wins. Especially when not everyone can afford to fill up their gas/petrol tank as much as some other wazers can.

I finished #7 in the US. Here's how I grabbed 173 berries:

I drive 18 miles one-way to and from work each workday. On my way, I would take alternate roads, and grab berries. This cost me about 20-minutes each way. Several afternoons instead of going straight home, I would drive further out of my way to get more berries for about an hour. I didn't collect much on the weekend of the competition, nor did I bother collecting Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday after the weekend: I didn't know how I was doing and figured I probably wasn't going to win. Had I known I was in the top 10, I would have driven lots more on the weekend.

I'm lucky that I'm in Colorado where Waze isn't popular yet, so I wasn't competing against anyone else it seems, and a lot of the neighborhood roads had berries in them. Even still, I never left a roughly 30 mile by 20 mile box, meaning there were tons more berries in Denver that I never even thought to go after. I probably could have gathered 4000 berries if I had really wanted to. There were only 3 or 4 berries I couldn't get: 3 behind gated areas and 1 on a walking path. In all, I probably drove less than 100 extra miles to grab all the berries.

One frustrating thing twas the berry layer loading was delayed after the loading of the map. I would be driving and could swear a berry was at a spot but figured I was wrong or someone else grabbed it (haha) and then it would pop up after I'd driven past it. Even if I zoomed out and saw berries in an area, after zooming in and scrolling around, they would disappear until I paused and they reloaded.

Another frustrating thing was I couldn't select berries as a destination point and let Waze navigate me there. I think that should be mandatory next time since this is a navigation client, and it would teach new users (and old users that gave up on the navigation, like me) how to use it better. I'd like to be able to chain them or just have it direct me to the nearest berry, "Berry Hunter" mode.

Now that I've driven all that for essentially nothing, I feel cheated. I knew the prize layout going in, but there should be more prizes than the top 2. The "all-or-nothing" prize layout probably discouraged many from even trying.

I'm lucky I didn't have to compete against others. If Denver was more popular with Waze, I'd be frustrated having less berries I could possibly get. Perhaps each Wazer has their own berry system? There's enough uncharted roads around here to easily have 100 Wazers have unique berries on a road and not have any overlap. This would be more difficult in remote areas.

I'd also like berries to pop up new each day. After I cleared out a neighborhood, there's still 20 uncharted roads (for example) in the neighborhood. Why couldn't there be berries on each uncharted road? Make them worth less the proximity and density? If there's a berry 100 miles from the next closest berry, it could be worth 100 points (since you'd have to drive a long time to and from it to grab it before getting anymore berries), but I've collected 2 berries (one 6 pointer) that were on top of each other. If the next closest berry is 100 feet away, they should be worth 2 points each.

I'm also disappointed to see cupcakes still out there exactly where the berries I just collected. True, the road is under-mapped and could use more GPS data, but a new Wazer in the area is going to be confused why there are cupcakes on charted roads and not on the uncharted ones.

I think 10 days is way too long for the average person. I drove the first several days and then was wiped out and lost interest. A shorter timespan would be better, 7 days tops. It wasn't clear to me at the start that this was open to all platforms. I thought the "berry" for the blackberry meant it was just for the new Black Berry phones.

Lastly, on the two times I drove around for an hour after work, the berries stopped showing up after an hour. I tried restarted Waze, but the berries just stopped appearing. It probably just saved me gas since I now realize I didn't have a chance, but if I had wanted to drive around all weekend, I wouldn't have been able to.

I want more competitions. I'm more of a map editor than driver though, so I'd like to be able to compete that was as well, though being an area manager, I could easily do better since I have more options than someone that depends on getting access via driving.

gregjsmith wrote:I suggest a better model would be for each bonus item to equal once entry into a drawing to win.

+1 from me, I also did not even start once I realised that I had no chance of winning unless I'd drive around my whole country.

The problem I saw in my area is that a LOT of the berries were in gated apartment communities. It's actually caused me to do a bunch of map editing to set roads as "Private Road" so that maybe the next set of goodies will not appear therein.

Hi,
same here; I didn't expect a chance to win. But I did my very best and at least entered the Top50
While obviously achieving one goal of the contest (getting new wazers) it looks a bit strange that in both parts users have won which had just entered the waze world...

Regards

Peter

@tomert:

Regarding the purpose of the road goodies (getting people to drive where the map needs updates) the distribution of the road goodies is comprehensible. But with a contest to win a valuable prize I came to think I had better not done that many map edits around. I would have got more berries around I think...

Regards

Peter

svache wrote:even though we might not win because of the limitations of living on an island, it still was a lot of fun

Well, not getting that much berries seems a small price for living on sunny (I think so) Oahu, doesn't it ?

Regards

Peter

Its totally unfair for UK wazers with Berry!

I understand it the beta version yet the GPS hardly picks up the areas I am in! isnt that the whole point of waze that when you drive the gps pics up the road? and the software starts remembering where you have driven etc! well in my case i rarely see that happening!

I hardly see any munchies nor other wazers around!

When I set of for a destination it always says route found but unable to to take me where i am suppose to! and then if i does find something after a 2 minute drives it says destination reached when the bloody destination is 15 mins away!!!!

Waze really to sort the beta out and get an official release!

Are the road goodies just for the fun or does waze use the information. I always thaught that goodies where placed on road witch needed to be driven, to fix errors,

We understand the issue raised and during the next contest we will see how and if we can modify the winner selection process. The suggestion made by gregjsmith does make sense in that respect.