Update Jan 3, 2020. If you decide to reset your badges, but you’re also going for the 366 days in a year badge, then you’ll run into an issue, because your badges will start counting from the day you reset it. Email us at hi@smashrun.com and we’ll manually adjust the reset date to Jan 1.
For many of us there’s this kind of honeymoon period with the badges on Smashrun. You earn a few badges, it seems silly, but fun. You set your eyes for some harder ones. Before you know it you’re running a streak, you’re building a staircase, you’re piling on longer and longer runs each month. And what started out as just a little fun, has ended up transforming you into altogether better runner. It’s the Smashrun magic.
But then you run out of badges to earn. The magic wears off a bit. Sure you don’t need badges to motivate you to run, but it might be nice to have something to shoot for again.
Starting today, we’ve got a pretty good solution to this problem. If you’re a Smashrun pro user you can go to your Settings page and select reearn badges.
What this will do, is take all of your existing badges and add a +1. That’s it. All the badges will start again with your next run. Run a mile or more for your next run – You’ll get the 1 mile badge. Good on ya!
Now, let’s say, you do this, and suddenly you think: “Good lord, what have I done! I only had one stair left in my Towering Staircase. Now I’m back at the first step!”
No problem. Just click Undo. This will get rid of your +1’s and flatten everything out just the way it used to be.
So, let 2020 be a year of badges! Start your staircase. Kick off your streak. Or just take the simple pleasure of counting off each new month with 10 days of running.
Yay! Thank you! I’ve been starving for badges to earn 🙂
This is a nice idea – I did the option you’ve listed and it gives me the option to “relive the joy” on the badge that I had previously but currently do not, and it just refreshes the page. You might want to gray this out until the badge is earned a second time? Also, it would be nice to filter and show badges that you had previously, but not currently. Thanks!
That’s a bug! I expect there will be more. This feature was particularly hard to test. Keep the reports coming, and we’ll sort them out.
I reset my badges from today – looks like I’ll have to wait for another leap year 😂
I just backdated your reset to 1/1/20. You’re back on track.
Is it possible to evolve my badges or put them in gyms and fight other badges for my team?
I did chuckle at this mind
I almost want to do this, but I don’t want to lose progress on some of the harder to earn badges that I’m close to getting. I wish you could only reset the ones you’ve already earned, and let the ones you have progress on continue as they are.
I completely understand this. We thought about several solutions to this problem: ignoring the reset for harder badges, only reseting badges you’ve already earned, allowing you to select badges not to reset. But all these solutions were just too complicated from both an implementation and user perspective.
So we added an undo button. It’s not great, but at least it’s straight forward. Once you’ve rearned all the badges you want, you can always undo the reset (lose all those rearned badges), but everything will be flattened again, and you can keep working toward the hard to earn badges. The badges are meant to be fun and motivational, not competitive. I say reset them, enjoy the pleasure of getting a dozen badges in your first couple months, and don’t worry too much about the hard to get ones. If you want to get them later you can always discard your badge dupes at some date in the unforeseen future.
Oh crap! I did this but I forget if I did it on January first or later! Could you check for me?
I updated your dates. You’re reset as of 1/1/20 now. Good luck this year!
Cool ideia. But… wouldn’t also be possible to add new badges? New series, for instance, that get unlocked once you fill one of the existing ones, or… hey, speaking of new badge series, who are Travis and Kelly? 😀
Happy 2020! Thanks for making smashrun so great!
Big Plus to this idea! I would love a new series (or two 😀 )
Gotta love this.
I wonder if, in the social feed when folk get a badge, could it show how many times they’ve done it?
Agreed. That would definitely be cool. Adding it to the list..
I think this is a good idea to get people motivated again. It seems a bit confusing in terms of what will be around vs what would be lost. My suggestion: Smashrun already has historical information e.g. Year-wise breakup of how many days of running each month. This could be used to automatically add badges where possible. The settings page can have another option for calculating badges start date.
Okay, I know I’m late to the party, but how to the non-pro subscribers get to do this? I’d like to re-earn my badges..
I know working with existing data structures and programming makes this harder, but I see this as unusable for me until I have all harder badges accumulated once. The idea of “reset just this badge” is nice, but highly manual on the users part.
Best would be if we turned on an “auto-reset” setting which cause it to restart the day after achieving a badge, and accumulate a total count of how many times each badge has earned. I know some badges this makes less sense for, but I think the majority could work in this way.
Would probably also require a recalc routine which would play back all your runs for purposes of figuring out past reset points and getting to the correct current progress. Some seem trivial such as the run every day and leap year where you already have a display that essentially shows number of times earned. Some already display the counts as well, such as “2 by 33”.
We compared a number of different options for how to implement this. I think main challenge is that for any automatic earn badges again scenario, we need to handle all these specific cases. Can you earn 5 for 5 again? Do you earn it every 5 days of your longer streak? How about run a 5k? or run 10 miles total?
The main goal is that we don’t want badge fatigue. The badges are fun precisely because they come easy in the beginning and get harder over time. But the problem is eventually they get too hard. The “reset badges” solution has a lot of flaws, but it solved the main issue we wanted to solve. Allowing people who found motivation when they first started earning badges, to reset and hopefully find that motivation again, while keeping a consistent paradigm that wouldn’t be too confusing or muddled.
Coming up on 2022 and a “Natural” point to consider a “reset” on January 1. With a two year plus streak of consecutive days does a reset also “Cancel” that streak or just badge progress?
The only things affected are on the badge pages. Of course that includes the streak badges. So, a chance to earn the 5 for 5 again.