I confess to some ambivalence about N-fers. That said, the rules on N-fers are pretty clear and N-fers are clearly part of the game for hunters as well as activators.
So here’s my bind: there are some entities (e.g. Ice Age Floods, Lewis and Clark NHT, and so on) that overlap broad areas where I live. Many, many of the parks I’ve alread activated are actually 2-fers with IAF. Without actually counting, I’m guessing half a dozen of the parks I’ve activated are actually 2-fers with Ice Ages Floods Trail. Should I go back, copy/edit those logs where the 2-fer is available, and upload them, so that hunters get all possible credit?
I get lots of awards for hunting. I’m a pretty casual hunter but awards seem to pile up. Activators work much harder for their contacts and awards.
If you said you were activating a single park and we had a contact, then I’d be glad to have that one park. I would never expect you to go back to add QSOs for any that could have been 2-fers. Is that even possible? We cannot edit an activation log so you’d need a second log for the same date and time.
I can see that activators might like the p2p n-fers.
Yeah, I’d need to generate another log with the correct additional park(s).
That, it turns out, is pretty much a trivial task, so that’s not the issue.
It just feels somewhat like cheating to get another activation credit after the fact. But balancing that is the idea that I’m also giving hunters credit they deserve but haven’t gotten yet.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Paul’s question. I have a relatively complicated relationship with n-fers, I think!
When I was pushing hard to hit the 100-uniques mark, I used n-fers in at least three situations and would pick a park with an n-fer over one that didn’t if I needed to choose. I even added n-fer predictions to the POTAmap.
Now, designing PN&R’s inaugural award, I’ve specifically prohibited the use of n-fers.
My approach to activities that are bound by a set of rules is similar to Ricki Lee Jones’ advice in “Danny’s All-Star Joint”: You can’t break the rules until you know how to play the game. I told my students in lecture every year that if they weren’t trying to figure out how to cheat, they didn’t want it enough. Basically, if I am playing POTA, the rules define the game and I’ll use every ambiguity to my advantage.
From a practical standpoint that means if I am activating a know n-fer I will spot it as such. If I happen to see that I was in a second reference that I hadn’t realized before, I’ll go ahead and submit a new log, both for me and for the hunters. I think it’d be silly to intentionally not submit a second log out of some notion of fairness, since you’ve already agreed to play a game that includes n-fers.
Personally, I think that n-fers were a horrible idea and further unbalance n already unbalanced playing field, rewarding players for simply living in or visiting a particular spot that has a bunch of n-fers. It’s why the Pack Mule award requires activators to pick the one reference they are activating when they are in a place with multiple references.