The issue:
As a developer, it’s currently very hard to properly order badges under my game because the badges are ordered by creation date, which creates issues with ordering consistency across the entire platform, even for top experiences. If for example I create a game with a currency such as coins and I have badges for coin milestones(or perhaps points or any integer value that acts as an achievement) I may fail to realize how huge the said game will become in the feature, and only create badges for let’s say until the 1M coin milestone. If the game starts growing and I have to create other milestone badges after them, It’s currently impossible to place the new milestone badges under their related ones and because they’re ordered by creation date, they’re placed all the way down the badges page.
This is an example of what I’m talking about and what you may encounter across the entire platform:
- Welcome!
- 1k coins!
- 1M coins!
- You found an easter egg.
- 5M coins! --this isn’t placed after the 1M coins milestone, because the dev created it after the easter egg one, even tho it’s related to the above one and players expect to find it after the 1M one.
This creates organizing issues for experiences with large amounts of badges and causes player confusion(because a player might not check the last badge all the way down, and think the last milestone is the 1M coin milestone, even if a 5M exists but it’s under other badges).
Apparently, it’s also impossible to just reconfigure badges because the badge that got reconfigured may have previous owners(that got it by finding the easter egg) which we can’t bulk delete. So if we reconfigure an old badge we end up with some players having it without actually having reached said milestone. Also, we can’t rely on disabled dummy badges either because this will spam our badges page and also not be reliable(because we have no way to know how many badges our experience will have as it updates).
Solution:
My solution acts as a copy of the ZIndex system UIs have and is the following:
-
Each badge gets a new property named “Priority” which can have integer values that are either negative or positive and defaults to 0. Badges that have higher priority are placed above the badges with lower priority, that way devs can also highlight the important badges of their game.
-
The game/experience gets 2 new properties “Badge ordering” which can either be ascending or descending and “Badge ordering type” which can be either alphabetical or by creation date. Those 2 properties describe how the game should sort badges when they have the same priority value and act as an easy way for developers to sort a large number of badges without having to manually set their priorities. The default values should be ascending and the creation date.
I think this will give us much more freedom over how we handle our experience badges and be able to correctly show them to players through the game page.
Will this impact old experiences?
Well, no. As long all badge priority settings default to 0, ordering defaults to ascending and type defaults to creation date the behavior should be exactly the same as the old one, so developers don’t have to worry about that either.
Use cases
- Showing new badges on the top of the page, for players to quickly notice them.
- Correcly ordering milestones or related in any way achievements.
- Showing the important badges(for example current event ones) on the top of the page.
- Alphabetical ordering to make players find badges more quickly(like a dictionary).
- More I can’t think of.
Also, 2 buffs coming in mind are sorting by how easy/hard it is for a badge to be claimed and also by if a player owns or doesn’t own a badge, but those seem dynamic and may update frequently so if those 2 features are added they should be after the main ones I talked about are properly implemented.
And, of course, a feature request can’t end without some charts/votes, so here they’re:
- This is an issue and it impacts me directly.
- This is an issue but doesn’t impact me.
- No this isn’t an issue.
0 voters
- Yes, I find it annoying.
- No, I don’t find it annoying.
- I don’t even check the badges page.
0 voters
- Yes, this will solve the issue.
- Yes, but it needs a few modifications(reply).
- No, but I think there’re other possible solutions(reply).
- No, this will cause more issues.
0 voters
If you have a real experience of this issue causing problems for your game(like player confusion) or have figured out better solutions to tackle it, replies and constructive criticism are always welcome.
