Sixteen marks, none of which is worth anything.
You did a thing, here is a mark saying so, and you may show it to people. That is the whole feature. No badge here unlocks a discount, gates a page or shortens a queue, because a badge that does those things is a pricing mechanism wearing a rosette.
The sixteen, earned and locked.
Seven earned, nine locked, and every locked one shows its condition. A badge you cannot see is not an incentive, it is a surprise.
Badges confer no discount, no priority, no access and no cash value. Two of them are self-declared and we have no way of checking either, which is fine.
Why none of them unlocks anything.
The moment a badge unlocks a discount it stops being a badge. It becomes a price, and every honest person who has one starts working out whether the effort was worth the money — which is a calculation that ends badly for us, because it usually was not.
Worse, gated badges push a scheme towards the behaviours that are cheapest to fake. If reading forty chapters unlocks ten per cent off, forty chapters get scrolled rather than read, and the mark stops meaning anything to the people who did read them.
So they are decorative. They go on your profile, they go on a share card if you want one, and that is the end of it. The one that matters is the three-year mark, and it is deliberately impossible to accelerate with money.
- 0
- that unlock a discount
- 9
- visible while locked
- 3 years
- the one you cannot buy
How each badge is actually checked.
| Badge | Checked against | Fakeable |
|---|---|---|
| Through the gate | A check-in record with a site attached | Only by going there |
| The whole archive | Forty page views, in order, over at least ten days | Yes, tediously |
| First harvest | The plotting ledger, at delivery | No |
| The bad year | A season in which the substitution policy triggered | No |
| My barley is now beer | A patch reference matched to a brewed batch number | No |
| Three years in the parish | Account age. Nothing else | No |
| Fifty pints of your own beer | You tell us | Entirely, and we do not mind |
Sixteen badges
Seven ordinary, six hard, two on your honour and one that only time earns.
Locked ones stay visible
With the condition written out, and a bar if progress is measurable.
Share cards
Any earned badge can be turned into a card, in the house grammar.
Or hide the lot
One switch. Hidden badges are hidden from you as well, which is the point.
The one badge that cannot be bought.
Three years in the parish is granted on account age and nothing else. Not spend, not tier, not activity. Somebody on the free tier who has never bought anything gets it on exactly the same day as somebody who has spent four thousand pounds.
That is the point of it. Every other mark here is a record of doing something, which means it is ultimately a record of having had the time or the money to do it. This one is a record of having stayed, and staying is the behaviour that actually matters to a business like this one.
It is also the only badge anybody has ever emailed us about.
Boasting, questioned.
Only the three-year one, and only by closing your account and starting again. Everything else is a record of something that happened, and things that happened do not stop having happened.
Because in February the car park has four cars in it and the person behind the counter would genuinely like to see somebody. It is the most sincere badge on the list.
No. The board is a separate thing, it is parish-level, and it scores turning up rather than collecting.
Yes, entirely, in one switch, and it hides them from you as well as from everybody else.
Streaks, which are the same idea done more carefully.
Because a streak is the one game mechanic that can genuinely make somebody feel bad.
