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=][= ACHIEVEMENTS, BADGES, AND RANKS NOW SHOWING =][=


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The system has completed rebuilding the achievements and ranks, so you should be able to see them when viewing profiles. You should also see rank images inset to avatars.

In addition, I've begun manually awarding some badges. So far I've done those for three contests/challenges that I've run. We'll see about retroactively awarding badges for other contests/challenges that have been conducted here over the years, depending on whether or not the contest/challenge organizers are able to create those badges and submit them to me so I can enter them into the database.

If you open up anyone's profile, you'll see their rank and recently awarded badges in the Achievements section. If you hover over the "Recent Badges" area, the area will be highlighted as an active link. Click on it to see all of the badges that the member has been awarded. For the image below I am using NovemberIX since he received some manually awarded badges this morning.

image.thumb.png.63926ab369a0742574c84fada8279f3e.png

Most of the badges are automatically awarded by the system based on rules that we have created. For example, the New Album 1 green achievement (and badge) is awarded the first time a member creates an album in the galleries, and the Comment Reply Posted 1 green achievement (and badge) is awarded the first time a member posts a reply in a discussion topic. Other achievements are awarded at different thresholds for creating content and engaging with the community in a variety of ways, such as receiving THANKS reactions, giving reactions, downloading files, creating calendar events, etc. Most of these achievements have five levels of progression, earning you a green, blue, bronze, silver, and gold badge in order the more you perform a certain behavior. Gold is the highest level. There are a few badges that have only a single level award, and this is typically green.

Of note are badges for longevity. The first time you login and have reached a certain level of longevity (1 year, 5 years, 10 years, and so on in 5 year increments), you will be awarded the corresponding longevity badge.

The three badges that you see at the top of NovemberIX's profile have been manually awarded. While badges can be awarded for a variety of things, the three you see in NovemberIX's profile are related to the Legio Bolter & Chainsword, the site's mascot Chapter. In this case, NovemberIX participated in the Chronicles of the Legio competition back in 2017.

In that competition, members were challenged to submit a picture of their Legio persona. NovemberIX took the effort to submit an honour shield for his persona. So in addition to earning the badge for participating in the competition, NovemberIX earned the badges for submitting both a Legio Mini Me and a Legio Honour Shield.

You can learn more about Legio Mini Me submission here:

I'll be going through that discussion to award the Legio Mini Me badge to all members that submitted their Legio Mini Me.

You can learn more about Legio Honour Shields here:

We have prepared a range of badges for events, contests, and challenges. I hope that we'll see even more created to cover events, contests, and challenges that have been conducted over the years as well as in the future.

In addition, members that serve in staff roles here will be awarded badges for those roles. These members perform and incredible amount of work on behalf of the community so recognizing that work with a badge is a small token of appreciation.

In addition, you can see the rank that NovemberIX has earned through participation at the site. He is currently at the Novitiate rank. The corresponding badge shows on the Badges Earned page and a smaller version appears inset in the lower left corner of his avatar. As NovemberIX continues to participate, he will achieve higher ranks. As with the achievements, ranks have an increasing progression:

  • Aspirant - 0-10 points
  • Novitiate - 11-100 points
  • Battle-Brother - 101-1,000 points
  • Veteran - 1,001-2,000 points
  • Venerable Brother - 2,001+ points

Members earn points by creating content and engaging with the community.

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Yes. Post counts under the old software included everything back to 2002. However, we had a number of crashes over the years and lost several big chunks of content. In addition, we routinely delete posts when they become obsolete. Normally this post deletion wouldn't have an effect on post counts because the post counts were continuous. In the recent database rebuild, however, everything was reset so post counts, reputation, and achievements are based solely on content that remained in the database. Quite a few of us saw our post counts reduced as a result (mine dropped by at least 7,000, and I think it was actually much more than that). This was unexpected as it didn't happen in the beta testing.

As far as a guide to achievements, we might do that in the future. If so, it's very low on our priority list. The best advice I can give right now is to do things. If you get a green badge for doing a thing, you'll probably get more badges if you keep doing that thing. The progression that we've built into most achievements means that you won't get a badge each time you do a thing. Instead, each additional badge in the progression requires you to do more of the thing than you did to earn the previous badge, with the gold badge covering X+ (i.e., there's nothing after gold).

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Most of them should be pretty obvious from the names, with the progression described in the first post.

The only ones that might need an explanation are the SUPERSTAR (received for having posts marked as the best answer), GREAT SUPPORT (voting in polls and posting reviews), HELPFUL (for giving reactions), and the GREAT CONTENT (having content promoted to social media by mods/admins) badges.

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5 hours ago, Aramis K said:

These are nice, but getting above Noviate rank seems tough. 5 years and hundreds of posts and still a trainee.

We're looking into whether or not we can fix members' post counts by referring to the backup taken just prior to the conversion.

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We may have found a way to (sort of) restore post counts. The problem is that the best we can do is revert people's post counts back to what they were when we took the site offline. This means that any posts people have been making since that time won't be counted. Also, there is considerable diversity in how many posts people lost. I lost over 10,000 posts while other members didn't lose any. The disparity, I think has to do with how much content each individual lost during the crashes (will affect those of us that were here prior to 2006) and how much has been deleted over the years (I've built a ton of stuff that was later removed). For most people, the posts that were lost outnumber the posts that might be made in the meantime, so they'll still come out ahead.

It will take quite some time to do this, so I've started at the top of the list (highest number of posts prior to going offline) and am working my way down.

Actually, I think that I'm going to adjust that. I'll look for members that have been active since going back online and start with them. Once those are done, I can take care of the rest. This will make it so that the fewest number of new posts aren't counted.

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I do have to echo brother Aramis in saying it seems like a hell of a stretch to get to battle brother. Several years on the site, over 2k posts before it was recalculated and a reasonable reputation score and I’m still only on 16 points out of the 101 necessary. 
 

I know it sounds petulant and whiny but getting to the next rank kind of seems unattainable if that’s how slowly points are accrued.

Hopefully they’ll move faster under the new system :)

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19 minutes ago, MARK0SIAN said:

I do have to echo brother Aramis in saying it seems like a hell of a stretch to get to battle brother. Several years on the site, over 2k posts before it was recalculated and a reasonable reputation score and I’m still only on 16 points out of the 101 necessary. 
 

I know it sounds petulant and whiny but getting to the next rank kind of seems unattainable if that’s how slowly points are accrued.

Hopefully they’ll move faster under the new system :)

Hehe same, i cant see my own points (Or im an idiot) but with a lot more posts and likes im still only at the newbie rank, i guess gallery use is important? 

*EDIT*
Apparently you can win the day too? Didnt remember that! :D 

Edited by Noserenda
days
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20 minutes ago, Noserenda said:

Hehe same, i cant see my own points (Or im an idiot) but with a lot more posts and likes im still only at the newbie rank, i guess gallery use is important? 

*EDIT*
Apparently you can win the day too? Didnt remember that! :D 

On mobile you can see your points by clicking the three white lines menu at the top. At the bottom of the menu it doesn’t state your points but it does tell you how many you need to get to the next level so you can work it out :)

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2 hours ago, MARK0SIAN said:

On mobile you can see your points by clicking the three white lines menu at the top. At the bottom of the menu it doesn’t state your points but it does tell you how many you need to get to the next level so you can work it out :)

Ahaa! Cheers brother, its currently saying i have 0 points so i guess its not all updated yet? 

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When we established the ranks during the beta phase, they broke down as:

  • Aspirant (0-10 points): 29,116 members
  • Novitiate (11-100 points): 14,094 members
  • Battle-Brother (101-1,000 points): 6,194 members
  • Veteran (1,001-10,000 points): 1,087 members
  • Venerable (10,001+ points): 37 members

When the site did the rebuilding, it reset everything and calculated based on the content that remained in the database. This resulted in the new rank breakdown looking like:

  • Aspirant (0-10 points): 47,738 members
  • Novitiate (11-100 points): 2,386 members
  • Battle-Brother (101-1,000 points): 524 members
  • Veteran (1,001-2,000 points): 18 members
  • Venerable Brother (2,001+ points): 11 members (and this only because I adjusted it down from 10,000 points to 2,000 points, otherwise there would have been 0).

No, the numbers won't add up because we've had a lot of new members join, including old members creating new accounts (I guess they don't care about those achievements/ranks).

We pulled a report and we know that the post counts were the main factor. We know that the legacy post counts included all content back to 2002, even though we lost/deleted a bunch (lost in crashes, deleted when obsolete). While some members saw little or no change, and a few actually gained posts, the vast majority of members saw their post count reduced. I lost 11,854 points, and there were 12 people who lost even more points than me. So we're in the process of correcting post counts as much as is practical (people that had fewer than 100 posts total are at the bottom of the list). The bad thing is that this has to be done manually, so it's going to take time.

What's puzzling is the members that gained posts in the conversion. :blink:

Once that is done, we'll look at the LIKES/REACTIONS. They will have a much lower impact since counts were much lower, but it would still be nice to get them back where they were.

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6 hours ago, Brother Tyler said:

When we established the ranks during the beta phase, they broke down as:

  • Aspirant (0-10 points): 29,116 members
  • Novitiate (11-100 points): 14,094 members
  • Battle-Brother (101-1,000 points): 6,194 members
  • Veteran (1,001-10,000 points): 1,087 members
  • Venerable (10,001+ points): 37 members

When the site did the rebuilding, it reset everything and calculated based on the content that remained in the database. This resulted in the new rank breakdown looking like:

  • Aspirant (0-10 points): 47,738 members
  • Novitiate (11-100 points): 2,386 members
  • Battle-Brother (101-1,000 points): 524 members
  • Veteran (1,001-2,000 points): 18 members
  • Venerable Brother (2,001+ points): 11 members (and this only because I adjusted it down from 10,000 points to 2,000 points, otherwise there would have been 0).

No, the numbers won't add up because we've had a lot of new members join, including old members creating new accounts (I guess they don't care about those achievements/ranks).

We pulled a report and we know that the post counts were the main factor. We know that the legacy post counts included all content back to 2002, even though we lost/deleted a bunch (lost in crashes, deleted when obsolete). While some members saw little or no change, and a few actually gained posts, the vast majority of members saw their post count reduced. I lost 11,854 points, and there were 12 people who lost even more points than me. So we're in the process of correcting post counts as much as is practical (people that had fewer than 100 posts total are at the bottom of the list). The bad thing is that this has to be done manually, so it's going to take time.

What's puzzling is the members that gained posts in the conversion. :blink:

Once that is done, we'll look at the LIKES/REACTIONS. They will have a much lower impact since counts were much lower, but it would still be nice to get them back where they were.

We appreciate the work you’re doing to restore the counts but the primary concern for myself (and I think others) is that even with the post counts that remain it feels like they’ve conferred quite low scores. I only lost a couple of hundred posts in the transition so it’s taken me over 4 years of regular posting to accrue just 16 points. It feels like progressing to the battle brother rank is not achievable at that rate.

Edit- Thinking further it might be partly an issue with the naming of the ranks. I think most people familiar with 40K would consider ‘Battle Brother’ the ‘Standard’ rank. The rank the vast majority of marines sit at in a chapter. This might be a cause for some of the despondency.

Edited by MARK0SIAN
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If you look at the LEADERBOARD: http://bolterandchainsword.com/leaderboard/

 

I think --  I don't know for sure -- that reactions to your posts generate more points than just posting. Content that people react/interact with would appear to be the driving factor on that. 

I don't know for sure but I suspect that is by design within the software. I also don't know how the old LIKE system carried over through the software upgrade, if at all. 

 

So if you look at just today (6/30/22) you see these leaders so far today:
image.thumb.png.522ff25dacf5138a4a4c82c69fa09f1f.png

 

And then under that you can see "popular" content and you'll note that the leaders above all have interactions with their posts:
image.png.80d14ed75fdc94198b7c7b54c119d665.png

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Yes, LIKES were definitely a big factor. Those, too, were affected by the data loss/purges. The "up" side is that most people didn't have a huge amount of LIKES because we limited them so much. The even more "up" side is that we have raised that cap significantly (from 20 to 100) because reactions are so important and because there are so many options. And we may raise the cap on reactions even further if we think that 100 is insufficient (I'd definitely like some feedback on that - mostly knowing when people run out of reactions for the day). And another thing done as part of raising the cap on reactions was to impose that cap on the other groups, especially the Moderati, so that they would feel the crunch, too, and would better sympathize with the Fraters and be more likely to support raising the cap.

The reactions drive JeffJedi's comment - it's the quality that matters. Luckily, it's much easier to regain ground in the rank progression with getting LIKES and THANKS (the two reactions that will earn points). Just as important, giving reactions also earns points (but at a much slower rate - it's far easier to give reactions than it is to receive them).

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