Reply To: XP Ideas and Suggestions

[Markus Berg]

I was contemplating this topic on my way home from work, and hopefully I am able to express them coherently now. I think that “spending” or “trading” XP is the wrong way to view it! Would that mean that some XP would be subtracted after “spending”? Saying that reaching a certain level of XP could give you some kind of privilege would be more accurate, but to a certain degree I still see some issues with that. I love the badges and the ranking and all that. Watching videos and tutorials, answering questions, joining live streams etc could earn you XP just like it is now. It indicates how active someone is on here, and the more XP someone has, the more experience with this community they also have. I’m not sure what more XP could be good for, except for maybe limit some things for a user (nothing critical to the CG Cookie membership of course!), but more like….what kind of exercises you could grade and so on. Since the courses are divided into difficulty levels, perhaps you would need a higher amount of XP to properly grade the more advanced stuff. And maybe find other things in the same spirit to this.

So what about things like a private critique lesson etc.? XP doesn’t indicate success or even hard work. Because you could easily just open every course on here and just click “watched” and guess your way through the tests and gain a whole bunch of XP and then get all those “privileges”. (Not sure why anyone would be so bored, but who knows!) So instead, let’s introduce the “cookie”! So what’s the cookie you say? It could be seen as a kind of community currency that could be spent on different “privileges”. I have joined a few (although those are free) programming communities where you complete a whole bunch of challenges and contests and you earn coins. With those so called coins you can “buy” things to help you if you get stuck with some challange/exercise, or even in some cases (if you collect a really large amount of coins) can get a free T-shirt with their logo. While those examples wouldn’t necessarily work here, they might give some ideas as to what could be done. Different privileges could cost different amount of cookies and you could pick and choose how to spend.

While watching videos and participating in general on the website could earn you some XP, completing exercises and winning contests and other similar things that actually would require REAL work and effort could earn you XP plus some cookies. Smaller amount for a simple lower level exercise and more for advanced stuff, and then a bigger amount for the top 3 of a contest, get your stuff marked as “Staff Pick” etc. This could be taken much further. But the key point here is, it should never interfere with the normal membership or there will always be some backlash.

So buying a private critique lesson, maybe get some “upgrades” for your profile page, a t-shirt or a mug or whatever “merchandise” whether real or virtual. I’m sure you guys will have tons of better ideas than I can come up with at the moment. So basically XP is for participation and being active in the community and learning, cookies are for effort and using what you have learned by actually creating something.

…I feel I’m forgetting to mention something, but anyways, these are my main ideas on this topic. And I’m sorry for the long post.