Badge Difficulty Analysis
This table measures difficulty of Kongregate badges in a few ways.
- Earned Count
- This is the absolute number of people who earned the badge. Fewer people = harder badge (generally). Simple.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.