Treasure hunts

I've got to get back to useful things, I haven't been in the mood to get all the things I want together for something that, to me at least, will be insanely useful for actually making things without quite so much trial and error.

But I wanted to collect my thoughts on this now, while I was still thinking about it.

I like a good treasure hunt. I end up throwing away half or more of the things I get, but the looking can be fun, as well as the potential for bargains. I love me a good sale, even though I don't really have any plans to hold any myself. But to be brutally honest, I don't think the grid wide Valentine hunt was as successful as it should have been.

1) It was over too short a period. One weekend, with that long a list of participants, means people are just going to be running through. As I would assume the entire point here was a marketing/visibility/traffic thing, having people scrutinizing underneath your furniture and up in your rafters and then running to the next location isn't as useful as, say, having it go for a week bookended by two weekends, so people can look around and oh hey, what's that over there, I rather fancy that.

2) It was a tad disorganized- I know we're not official hunt coordinators here and things go wrong, but at least one person had nothing to do with it and didn't know how they ended up on the list (and was probably pissed when people kept IMing them "where's the box? can i have a hint?"). One person didn't realize they were in it because they thought they missed the deadline, and so didn't make anything for it, and hurriedly threw something together to put out in another manner as an apology. One place had an old LM and had moved locations (and, I heard chatter than their box was broken or somesuch). Am I the only one who thought they would have double checked everyone on the list to make sure they were ready?

3) Some items were hid too well. If you've got a small shop area, yeah, feel free to shrink your box and stash it behind something. When your shop spans half a sim, put it in the back, or upstairs, fairly obvious. Make them work enough to wander through and see things, but not so much they get frustrated and pissed- remember, you want to make a good impression on these people so they think of you and come back when they have more time. One place apparently hid boxes inside of prims, which is dirty pool. Added on, the short time period meant people were likely to get frustrated and pissed in fast forward. Honestly, I don't think the places that made the boxes tower over people with big blinky arrows did it right either- while they didn't get people irked at them, neither did they encourage any looking around and seeing what they had.

4) There was no clarity as how many boxes were where. A couple of shop owners placed out signs "there's one here, and two over there" or thuslike, but otherwise it was a total crapshoot. Is there a valentine or an anti here? Are there both? And some places there were more than one of one type. With how hard some places hid things, you were left unsatisfied not knowing whether you'd finished that place or not.