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At one place I worked we didn't have badges but we did have a live leaderboard showing the top bug stats (top fixers of the day, people with the most bugs, etc.

At one place I worked we didn't have badges but we did have a live leaderboard showing the top bug stats (top fixers of the day, people with the most bugs, etc.). It didn't take long before people found it meaningless. Why? Because it always showed the same people. Some people had lots and lots of tiny bugs as the nature of their job. They were always the top fixers. Others always had two or three big tasks and they were never on the board. Some people had a large number of tasks to see to but didn't get many more bugs over the whole length of the project. These people showed up on the board as continually having the most bugs until 3-4 days before the ship date, when they'd finally whittled their stack down to zero bugs.

petervandijck 16y ago
In terms of game mechanics, badges != leaderboards. Your system might have worked better without the leaderboard, but with the badges?
- teamonkey 16y ago
  Perhaps, but I suspect the main issue would remain: the same people would always have the same badges, just because that's how they worked or that's what their job entailed.
  - petervandijck 16y ago
    Think about stackoverflow badges. It's more about getting individual users engaged, less about comparing users with each other. It's about making filing bugs more fun, which should result in more testing being done by more people. This link explains this better: http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/social/people/reputation/achievements.html http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/social/people/reputatio... It's not about comparing yourself against others.