Reward Badges factory

Donator stars are hidden on Userpages. Devs are only really credited on github. Long time players are indistinguishable from nubs.

There have been ideas to reward donators by showing their status everywhere in the game, give devs some kind of special decoration and allow higher level players to garnish themselves with rare unitpics.

Instead of having different rewards for each of these things, I'd like to suggest giving out badges that work for all of those achievements. These would be displayed in the player list ingame, on the users' profile and maybe also next to their forum avatar.

This could look something like this:

Develob:
Donator:
Firepluk:

I got hungry so I rushed the last one and forgot to include the zk moon, will need to fix :|

There could also be different levels, but I wouldn't go too detailed as these should already be rare. (Except for dev, but after steaming those will become less common as well)

quote: Something is still needed for neuroplebs as an unlockable goal to work for

That's the one labeled Firepluk. For people far from ridiculous levels there are the rank icons. There could also be different levels of this badge to unlock. I'd go for a similar system with donator badges.

My problem with unlocking unitpics is that they currently make for easy identification on the forums which would be harder if everyone is a det and if freely chosen they wouldn't correlate with rank. Then I don't see the point in unlocking them either because I'm pretty sure most of us wouldn't go for the expensive things.

quote: However it would be trivial to generate avatarbadges using the buildpic generator (just use avatarbadge template instead of ground/sea as a background).

Go ahead. Maybe post an example?

But ElStorage will ragequit!

The purpose behind badges is to be a lot simpler to recognize and understand than avatars + donator stars + entry on dev wiki page.

When you have a list of players of which each player has some small unit, you first need to recognize each unit (of which there are over a hundred different ones) and then sort them by metal in your head. Keep in mind dirtbag costs more than flea, scorp is more than annihilator, dante and catapult are equal(?). It'd take forever to pick out the good and bad players in a team, compared to what you can do just using the rank icons which are very easy to recognize serving that purpose much better. After that, avatars still haven't solved the issue of rewarding devs and donators, which you asked for yourself.

On the site, badges would replace the donator stars that are currently displayed on the forum below the avatar and on the userpage. Ingame they would supplement the rank icons. There should only be a small set of badges, making them easily distinguishable even when scaled down.

Sprung
[Spoiler]

Why do you want the avatars on there? Did you even read my post?

The badges should be easy to recognize, even at icon scales.

There has been some discussion regarding dev badges. Suggestions were:

• Additional Core dev badge
• Additional external dev badge (Maps/Missions/AI/Artwork?)

I think it's very important to reward all contributors as this'll encourage new peoplers to try their luck at improving the game. The first step is always the hardest and every bit of encouragement matters to take it.

Having a second tier to distinguish the ones who've spent many hours in this project would also be reasonable, although I doubt a little badge does much in the way of encouraging them anymore. Two badges would still be easy to differentiate and assign.

Once we start splitting the devs by categories it starts getting complicated. You'll probably only want to count categories where somebody has done notable improvements. Keep in mind that for the average steamuser the devs are just a distant group making everything. Three badges would still be possible without problem, but I'm wondering if we need the complexity. If an easier solution can serve the same purpose I'd rather go with it.

Besides rewarding people, the dev badge will most likely also (even if not intended) serve as a "trustworthy/knowledgeable person" marker. Thus giving it out to everyone may actually backfire and result in negative impressions of the devs as a whole. Whether they're split into categories or not will help as much as asking randoms to report bugs to the correct github (=Categories will be ignored).

I'd still be generous, but not give any guarantees that every single fixed typo is rewarded.