Introducing Badges

Greetings Spheroids,

Ever since Cardsphere's inception, we've planned a robust reputation system. We know it's often important to the community to get a feel for who someone is before engaging in trades. That's why people usually provide little snippets about themselves on their profile pages, after all.

Today we deployed the first phase of reputation by introducing badges. These are collectable achievements that get displayed on your profile page to show other traders how you've used Cardsphere. Only positive activity earns badges, and we felt it was a good idea to start the reputation system off on a positives-only basis.

Your Profile

A new section at the top of your profile page shows the ten best badges you've earned so far. These show up as "pill" icons with the badge's name and rating:

Mouseover or tap on mobile to get a description of the earned badge. Following this list, there's a link to your gallery which also shows the total number of badges you've earned so far. Click the link to view your gallery.

When viewing your own gallery, you'll also be able to see the unearned badges you can collect:

However, when you view another user's gallery, you'll only see the badges they have earned:

The Badges

As you've seen all the badges are Magic cards. This helped frame the call to action to the community as we started designing the acheivements system.

And I'll stop right here to underline how much help the community was. I put out the call for people to come up with badges on Reddit and Twitter, and we got an unbelievably great response. Some really creative stuff. Unfortunately we had to draw a line somewhere, and so we're starting with around 80 badges. We'll add more in the future, and try and get to some of the really cool ones suggested by the community.

Badges have up to five levels, indicated by color and rating. We used the closest match to card rarity colors that still looked presentable (brown for common, silver for uncommon, gold for rare, orange-gold for mythic, and purple for timeshifted). For some badges, this means you progress through a category.

Above you can see the trader has gotten up to the mythic tier in sending non-foils. They have all four badges, but only Magus of the Bazaar which show up as a pill on the main profile page. It will be replaced with High Market there once the trader has sent over 5000 cards.

Some badges do not level up at all. For example, the badges that show to which countries you've sent cards:

Other badges that don't level up are for doing things in service of the community. For example, we have badges for people who have contributed to Cardsphere directly (people who have written code, run community initiatives, etc.) and people who have authored blog articles.

We will also be using Tolarian Academy badge to recognize community members for outstanding contributions to Cardsphere. I'm not sure yet with what frequency we'll be giving these out, but I think a bi-monthly basis sounds about right. If there's anyone you feel has earned this badge, let us know on social media.

We also listened to the community and canceled some of our original plans. One point that came across loud and clear was that everyone should be able to earn every badge. So we dropped the planned "Fight Club" badge to recognize our first 250 users. It wouldn't be fair to have really active, involved community members locked out of getting this badge while users who signed up then but never actually traded did.

So this one's for you, Fight Club:

And yes, we did choose Black Lotus for premium members.

/ted