Discussion: Control points evaluation

Over 20 or more years courses and best practices how to design a good course changed a lot. SI, new formats, IOF format guedelines, following issues (butterflys...), OCAD, ISOM, detail terrains has changed technical aspect of courses.

Now everyone wants to orienteer (if possible) on good maps, detail terrains and tricky courses. Course setters have difficult task to make the best courses, legs possible on a given terrain. Control points have changed from hill to spur, reentrant, vegetation border, knoll, etc.

The question?
Does anyone collects courses for organized events on specific area/region or for whole country and made an analysis how many times each symbol/object/control point (reentrant, hill, depression,..) have been used in one year. It would be interesting to see what objects of all ISOM objects were used more in the past and today.

No.

As far as I can see our controls point features are not or should not be challenging. The challenge is how to get there, fast. Legs are challenging, not control features. To set challenging legs you pretty much just pick any features you happen to have available closest to the ideal start and end locatins of the leg. Sometimes you build fake fodder rack to make the perfect leg happen. From this perspective I don't find such study much interesting. You use that ever you have available.

More interesting would be to study the size of the features in the past vs now. On my course today there was a reentrant use as a control site which was simply a tiny crook below a knoll on a spur.

On an older map there is no way that spite would have been on the map let alone used as a control feature.

It also depends on the terrain. Our Easter three day event at the moment is in terrain where the predominant features are gullies and watercourses so naturally 80-90% of the control sites are these features!