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Hope I'm in the right place to raise this discussion!

I'm a big fan of the badge system as it adds a different dimension to the reputation side of things, however I was wondering what the view point is on some of the badge criterion.

I have noticed that there are some badges which no one has achieved.

If they were gold badges it could be understandable and would fit well into the "aspirational" realm, however some are silver badges and I can't help but think: "If no one has attained the silver yet, what is the possibility of anyone ever attaining the gold variant!?"

Examples of this are "Epic" and the gold variant "Legendary". The criteria are as follows:

Epic: Earned 200 daily reputation 50 times Legendary: Earned 200 daily reputation 150 times

No one has attained either of these badges and when you look at the bronze version (Mortarboard - Earned at least 200 reputation (the daily maximum) in a single day) only 27 users have been awarded this.

Is it worth considering modifying the criteria for some badges? Is it even possible to do so?

It would certainly seem that not all alike (e.g. gold to gold) badges are equal!

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SFSE has significantly less activity than some of the other big sites, so you would expect to see a lower award rate especially for the badges that scale with community activity.

I like the idea of badges that potentially take years to achieve and are super-rare, even across all the sites, and think it's a good thing that they are consistent between sites. On Stackoverflow, there are 19,000+ Mortarboards and only 472 (2.5%) Epics and 176 (<1%) Legendaries, so at that same ratio we wouldn't expect to have a single Epic until we have close to double the number of Mortarboards we have (probably quite a bit longer than that since our site is so much younger).

Plus, I am pretty sure it is not an option to modify badge criteria for a single site, so it's probably a moot point :)

I wonder how long it will be until we get our first Illuminator badge recipient!

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    Yeah, they'll definitely be attainable. Just because a badge is silver it doesn't really mean it's 'worth' the same as all other silver badges. Rare and hard to collect badges are a good thing!
    – Matt Lacey Mod
    Oct 7, 2014 at 20:49
  • That's true enough.... I guess I'll have to dedicate myself to SF and strive to get max reputation regularly ;) No doubt as the community grows some of these badges will become more attainable.
    – Cerbera
    Oct 7, 2014 at 23:00
  • There are some participation badges, including gold and silver ones that are relatively easy to earn. Just log-in 30 consecutive days to SF.SE to get a silver badge and 100 consecutive days and you'll have earned a gold badge. The same thing applies here in Meta. You don't need to do anything other than log in, although you may as well read a post or two while you're here. ;) Note: pay attention to the time of day you log in as it's recorded in UTC. You don't want to log in 2x on the same day thinking it was two separate days and have to start all over, so check your profile if you're unsure.
    – crmprogdev
    Oct 8, 2014 at 15:58
  • Ended up being over two years for that Illuminator. :)
    – Adrian Larson Mod
    Jun 7, 2017 at 19:37
  • Nice! Congrats :)
    – jkraybill
    Jun 8, 2017 at 0:00

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