Badge Difficulty Analysis

This table measures difficulty of Kongregate badges in a few ways.

  1. Earned Count
    This is the absolute number of people who earned the badge. Fewer people = harder badge (generally). Simple.
  2. Percent earned = earn_count / plays
    This normalizes earn count by the number of times the game was played. A 50% earned percentage means 1 badge was awarded for every 2 plays. A lower perecentage typically means a harder badge, assuming that harder badges take more plays to complete (usually they take more time and hence, more plays). The inverse of this statistic says how many times you can expect to play this game before earning the badge.
  3. Points per play = earn_count * badge_points / plays
    Instead of ranking the badges in difficulty, PPP ranks the easiest (or hardest) points to earn. This says on average how many points you could expect to earn (from this badge) each time you play this game. Note this doesn't take into account game plays that may be incurred trying to earn different badges (if the game has more than one badge), or game plays simply because a user likes replaying the game.
  4. PE * rating
    This is the same as (2), but multiplied by rating. The idea is that higher rating means a more enjoyable game and hence "easier" to play. It also helps offset a high gameplay count for the more popular games, where people may continue to play even when not trying to earn a badge.
  5. PPP * rating
    This is the same as (3), but multiplied by rating.

This project was partly inspired by daelyte, who originally computed a list of easiest badges based on a sampling of users.

How to use this table: Click on a header to sort by that column. Click again to reverse the order. For most columns, higher number means easier and lower means a harder badge. If you want to see which badges you already own in the table, enter your username in the box above.

Sorting data... If you still see this after a few seconds, there may be an error with the script.

History:
2012-09-16: First public release
2012-11-??: Add ability to hide your owned badges from the list.
2012-11-11: Fix table not showing in IE9. The badges file is now consistent with the plays count file (both updated weekly), so new badges shouldn't get hugely inaccurate percent earned stats anymore. Add sidebar.
2013-02-01: Open game links in new tab.
2014-02-16: Kongregate server is having intermittent problems, occasionally throwing 502 and 503 errors. This is affecting my ability to fetch the data for gameplays and ratings. You may see "-1" for these values until the problem is resolved.
2015-03-22: Fixed issues with Chrome and IE not working with username. Added caching layer for user badges.

Credits:
Made by: zAlbee
Badge Data: Kongregate badges.json
Play counts data: game/metrics.json
Questions? Email me, post in this thread.