Some people do a lot of walking or hiking with their Garmins.
Some ideas for badges Walking Walk 5 miles Walk 10 miles Walk 15 miles Walk 25 miles Walk 50 miles
Climb 500, 1000, 2500, and 5000 feet while walking/hiking
Place 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in the weekly step challenge (repeatable)
70,000 steps in a week 140,000 steps in a week
500k steps in a month 1,000,000 steps in a month
I also agree the half marathon should be repeatable, it's not relatively easy, what's easy is having a shload of connections and winning a 1 day step challenge against them. I have a couple connections that have received that badge over a thousand times.
I would like to see a way to get notified when a Limited badge becomes available. I browsed the badges today and saw two new ones for running events in San Francisco and Brussels, not that I'd be able to attend either one, but it'd be nice to know they were available.
Also - these two new limited event badges made me think that I'd like to be able to easily inject a badge for a special event somehow. We have these races and such all the time - why did the events in San Francisco and Brussels get the badges and not all the others? Were they sponsored by Garmin or something? Okay - I just visited both race websites and Garmin is sponsoring the San Francisco race. I couldn't tell who was sponsoring the Brussels race, but I have a hunch Garmin may be among them.
San Francisco has the Bay to Breakers 12K badge and Brussels has the 20KM de Bruxelles badge in case you missed them.
Probably because the half-marathon badge is relatively easy to get. Some runners would get it almost daily.
True, would be too easy to level up. But it could be done another way - the badge could be given for each half-marathon, but points would be given only once (repetaing would give 0p, or maybe it could be 1p).
This way we could easily count runs on every distances (just by looking on number of badges).
The badges system has so much potential for Garmin and us, the users. And it's a little disappointing to see that potential wasted.
Here is an idea, which I believe would greatly enhance the Garmin community ecosystem. The source for that ideas is from a real world game that managed to motivate thousands of players worldwide to walk unbelievable long distances and keep connected to said game over many, many years. I'm talking about Ingress, which few people might know. But many possibly heard about its successor: Pokémon Go.
The Ingress badge/experience/level (they are all connected) worked something like this: There were two types of points to gather:
Routine Points:
You basically had to walk a lot. For Garmin that could be just overall steps, intensity minutes from any workout or a combination.
Tiered Achievements Points:
This is the interesting part. There were lot's of badges, but they were grouped into different levels: Bronze, Silver, Platinum, Black. While bronze or silver badges were relatively easy to achieve, black badges required an enormous effort and a lot of preparation. Some badges required you to stay active for many years(!). An example for a tiered achievement could be Running Distances for a single training/event:
Bronze: 10km
Silver: HM
Gold: Marathon
Platinum: 70K Ultra
Black: 100K Ultra
For a normal person it requires quite a lot of effort and preparation to even achieve Gold level. And you need to really get into an activity type to get Black.
The kicker though, was the way the level requirements were laid out!
First, you needed a (quadratic+) increase in Routine Points for each of the 16(?) levels. So for example:
L1 : 100K steps or some other generic activity metric
L2 : 200K steps
L3 : 500K steps
L4 : 1M steps
L5 : 2M steps
L6 : 5M steps
.. you get the idea.
But, combined with the routine points, youalso needed a number of badges of some tier for each level. Example:
L1 : 5 Bronze badges
L2 : 5 Bronze badges, 5 silver badges
L3 : 7 Bronze, 4 silver, 1 gold
L4 : 6 Silver, 3 gold, 1 platinum
.. you get the idea.
The main effects of that tiered system were:
You need to exercise or be active regularly
You either need to excel in some area (gather a lot of running badges of different kinds and levels) or you need to try something new!
I believe both of those effects would go perfectly hand in hand with a fitness program. It would also avoid the weird fact that right now a person can achieve level 5 by just doing a huge amount of (possibly useless) group challenges while others achieving that by doing ultra marathons, 100km bike races or.. wingsuite flying (wtf? :)
I would like to propose that all repeatable badges get a point cap (depending on the difficulty of the badge).
This would open up the possibility to award repeatable half marathon (or even 10K) badges and people running this distance (almost) daily wouldn't get too many points. Same goes for the Challenge Champ badge.
Also getting a notification when a Limited badge becomes available would be much appreciated.
beside monthly badges, it would be nice to have badges you can earn for golf. Golf is one of the big sports on garmin, so it would be nice if you can earn some bagdes for it.
