Previously when creating badges for my games, I would upload badges all at the same time. Which would naturally lead to badge IDs that are close to each other. It makes perfect sense, not many badges could possibly be created during the short amount of time between uploads.
Today I went to create more badges and was left speechless by the absolutely massive length of badge IDs. Badges in November were 10 digit IDs, today I created one badge that had an ID length of 15 digits… not only that, but during the 20 or seconds it took me to upload the next badge, the ID length increased to 16 digits.
In the couple of minutes it took to create 5 badges, it appears roblox generated almost 4 quadrillion badge IDs (3,915,175,908,135,432 exactly).
This seems like a serious problem, and I’m concerned about the sustainability of the badge system if this continues unaddressed.
No, we reshuffle the entire ID space but it is not duplicated. This avoids being able to iterate items as easily (can’t go +1 on the ID to discover new items as easily) and has some performance benefits in our database if the keys are more evenly distributed over the space like this. The mathematics guarantee that no ID will ever be used twice, similar to if we were to simply +1 constantly.