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Badge Pundit has been achieved by 37 people, Epic by 44 people. I'm not saying that difficult badges are bad!! I'm just noting that the silver badges with the next least achievement rate are Strunk & White with 463 people and Guru with 780 people (except Generalist :P). It's my understanding that the badges are awarded to people who've met the requirements even before the badges were implemented.

The other progressive badges Nice Question, Nice Answer, Good Question, Good Answer, Great Question and Great Question go 10-25-100 (10 bronze, 25 silver, 100 gold). Enthusiast - Fanatic go 30-100, but Epic to Legendary goes 50-100.

Should we reduce the requirements a little? Pundit is probably OK where it is, maybe make Epic require 30 days of hitting the rep cap instead of 50?

EDIT: I've just learned that upvoting comments is a newish feature here, so it would've had more people with it if that had been implemented earlier.

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2 Answers 2

up vote 5 down vote accepted

I think these badges have been introduced to encourage particular types of behaviour. So if they want more people to be voting on comments, they put a badge out to congratulate that. If they want people voting on questions, they do that. If they want people answering old questions, they do that. If they want people deleting their crap questions, they put a badge out for that.

So any new badge will generally start off with a very low number of awardees, which will grow in time as people aim for them.

A better response would be to suggest new types of badges that encourage types of behaviour that you think would improve the site, rather than criticise badges for being too hard.

For example, how about introducing a badge for a number of Feature-Implemented resolutions on meta? (Or maybe a ratio of implemented to rejected once a threshold has been reached)

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That last has been gone over before: you neither want a flood of crap feature-requests (hopefully a few get through, right?) nor require someone to manually tabulate them and correlate to implemented features. –  Gnome Jan 4 '10 at 3:05
Right, so it should be about a ratio, where "already implemented" counts as a rejection. Besides, I'm pretty sure Jeff already goes through everything on meta and marks it as "implemented" or whatever. –  Rob Farley Jan 4 '10 at 3:33

I observed my progress to the Epic badge with a greasemonkey script (search around for it in meta). Now I stopped. But even before I got it, it was an established behaviour for me to hit the daily rep cap. So whenever I get the Legendary badge, it will be a "pleasant surprise" (as Jeff said somewhere)

As for the pundit badge, it happens after a long time.

Whether these are difficult to achieve or not, ask the ones who got them. The Epic wasn't at all hard to achieve for me, for example. Pundit still is.

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