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This is an idea I came up with tonight wondering "How can we get people to play zomg--and play it for a while?" Then I remembered badges. At this point, badges are purely cosmetic. But what if there were a reward for completing them? If the reward was good enough, I can see people attempting to complete them, and 5k badges take a while to complete.

Here's my idea:

50 badge--small reward. Maybe 1k gold. IDK, something very small.
500 badge--a little bigger--maybe a random recipe reward. Something small, but worthwhile. With alchemy using recipes, it might be worth it.
5k badge -- huge reward. I'm thinking maybe a few different rare recipes or items--so that once a person completes one 5k badge, they have an incentive to go after the other ones. Make the item(s) crafted have either lots of poses or incredibly pretty, so the value stays high. Either way, I think if the item is worth enough, it'll be worth it.

I know JK said the "point of zomg is not to gain gold" but unfortunately, its why alot of people PLAY zomg--if we play up to that and make new features where a LOT of hard work will earn you a lot of gold, it might be able to attract more users. Badge rewards I think might help with this.

Hmmm, wouldn't be fair to not reward those who already have badges o.o

Hmmm, I thought I had already replied to this. sweatdrop

Anyways. It'd be nice to make the rewards happen according to specific types of badges rather than give one for every other badge. In fact, I don't think we should be handing out anything for badges like "kill 50 of X" because those are too easily abused with mules.

I'm not saying that all rewards should be expensive either. I'm saying that it could be better to give rewards for reaching specific thresholds.We'd have a page with different lists like: "# of badges for killing 50 of a monster type" "# exploration badges acquired", or non-counting ones like "Got all of Goof ball badges" or "Got all of Hive Waves Badges". The same way Alchemy tracks how close you are to finishing each formula, we could have the list tell us how close we were to getting all the badges. When we did, we'd have a button unlocked we can click once for the reward. Most would be simply gold rewards, but the hardest one (5k kills or getting all badges for each group of areas) would actually give you unique stuff.


Also, the largest issue with badges is that they're bragging rights rewards and you can almost barely ever brag about them to start with! I've seen the idea suggested a few times and I agree with it: Making zomg badges appear on the achievements bar under our avatar. That would help with visibility. That would let a lot of people boast about their badges in a way that isn't too much "in your face!"