Board Thread:New on Marvel Database/@comment-1713281-20130524150326/@comment-1713281-20130529053309

Wile I like giving users opportunities to get badges for contributing to the site, I do think ADour brings up a good point. There's a fine line between having a variety of badges to keep users interested and having such an overload that users earn three badges for each edit they make.

However, I'll honestly say that I think the badges are a little bit of an uphill, or even pointless, thing for most users. I mean, look at the Leaderboard. In order to even get on this Wiki's leaderboard in the 19th (last) position, at the time of writing this, a new user to the site would need to get 10,690 points. That is insane, and really, most average users are never going to do that. And God help you if you want to see yourself in the top 10 or top 5; that's essentially admin land. I would love to see Wikia give wikis an option to show more then the first 19 positions on the leaderboard, but that doesn't seem likely to happen.

All that being said, I think that having extra badges is sort of our way to compensate for that. It allows users to earn badges a little more often, so it doesn't make the points race seem so...pointless.