There are a lot of top 10 rankings in Salem already, and as I was wandering the wilderness last night I thought to myself that it'd be cool to have a ranking for explorers as well. What I propose is ranking with two levels, one level being the all-time top ten players with the most exploration events found/harvested/triggered as far as the server knows, but I guess the person that triggers it should get it regardless of having found it.
The second level would be last season's top10 explorers with a similar count except limited to last season. The seasonal ranking would reset each week, and while the all-time ranking would be hard to implement rewards for (unless you re-check it every 6 months or so and throw something at the winner), the weekly one could easily have some simple reward to incentivize going out even more.
What I suggest for the seasonal rankings is a reward for the best explorer in the form of a [insert creative item name here] that basically rolls a random type of exploration event and then points to the nearest one, locking onto that one once it's been used. I feel like one of these items existing once per season isn't too game breaking. The other reward would be a bit more trollsy, for the last classified in the rankings. The 10th person would get "Compassionate Compass" which, out of pity, points the user of the compass to again, a random type of event, then checks for the farthest one of that type from the location it was used in, and also has a 10-20% chance to just point to nothing >.>
The first item could be something like an indian buffalo skin with some native folklore that the explorer quickly understands is really an exploration event. For flavor you could even make a few variations of scrolls that open up like a book UI while also pointing to the event.
"This is the tale of the mighty brave Runs with Caterpillars , as he takes his journey towards adulthood and communes with the great spirit of the giant eagle! The elders tell that ......." (the scroll is sadly smeared with buffalo poop, but luckily you can read the rudimentary map at the bottom pointing to the location in the tale)