The Depths of JetPunk - Badges
First published: Wednesday May 5th, 2021
What are JetPunk Badges?
JetPunk currently has 31 badges that you can collect. You can find them all here or under the "More" dropdown in the navigation bar. There are a variety of topics and quizzes covered by badges, below you can see just a selection of the badges on offer.
Badges were introduced to JetPunk on November 9th 2016. Their purpose was simply a way for users to show off their knowledge to others, having a prominent placement at the bottom of a user's profile. In the first two months, 9 of the current 31 badges were created and introduced. Let's take a look at the them.
The First Badges
1. The 196 Badge
The very first badge introduced. The requirements were simple, you had to name all 196 countries within 15 minutes. That was it!
To this day that still is it.
Over 72,000 users have currently achieved this feat so far, being by far the most achieved badge on JetPunk.
The 196 Badge2. The USA Badge
Also released on November 9th alongside the 196 badge. This one had more requirements, however. You needed to know all 50 U.S. states and state capitals, as well as 90% of the U.S. Presidents.
Over time, this badge has been relatively well-achieved, not quite as many as 196, but still 15,000 users have achieved this so far.
The USA Badge3. The British Badge
Released two days after the original release of badges on November 11th, the British badge now sees the requirement of a wide variety of quizzes to be completed. From UK Cities to English monarchs, there's lot's on offer for you to achieve!
Thankfully for some, only 20 out of 55 British PM's are currently required, far more generous than its U.S. counterpart! With 9,000 users currently having completed it, it pales in comparison to the biggest badges, perhaps because it isn't U.S. centric for once.
4. The World Capitals Badge
Also released on November 11th with the British badge, this badge brings it back to basic geography, simply naming every capital city of South America, Europe and Asia. Why only those? I have little idea to be honest. I would have thought this would include Africa, Oceania and North America as well, but perhaps they were deemed too difficult or were unfeatured at the time.
This badge has fared better than the British badge, with almost 14,000 users having earned it.
The World Capitals Badge5. The Movie Maven Badge
Our first proper non-geography badge: Movie Maven. This released November 15th, and is still one of the badges with fewer achievements to date. It seems naming Disney and James Bond movies as well as Oscar-winning movies and actors isn't such an appealing topic to many users.
That being said, some 4,000 users have still earned the badge in more than 4.5 years since its release. Not too bad given the context.
The Movie Maven Badge6. The Population Badge
Ah, back to geography. Ye olde familiarity!
This badge was released alongside Movie Maven, and was actually fairly generous in its requirements compared to some badges. Although needing all 24/24 of the most populated countries, you only need 80% on the quizzes of the biggest cities in Europe and the World.
With over 11,000 achievements to date, this badge has done rather well for itself.
The Population Badge7. The Math Wizard Badge
Fast forward a whole week to Tuesday 22nd November 2016. The JetPunk community are enjoying their 6 badges; they feel spoiled. Out of the blue, a wild Quizmaster appears! He comes bearing a gift! This time, it's in the form of a Math badge. Rejoice!
With almost 10,000 completions and the only requirements being 100% in the Addition, Multiplication and Roman Numerals quizzes, this badge is easy for those who are quick on their mental arithmetic. Although I'm sure for some this may well be one of the harder badges for them to achieve.
The Math Wizard Badge8. The Scientist Badge
We've had a short break. One week passes - nothing. Two weeks pass - still nothing. Then outta nowhere on December 8th, Quizmaster drops yet another badge for us! The community goes wild! Until they realise it's non-geography.
This one has even fewer earnings, with just 3,500 achieving it. For a 4+ year old badge, that's not many at all. Perhaps the variety of quizzes has put people off, or the fact it requires 75 / 118 elements of the periodic table. Guess we'll never know!
The Scientist Badge9. The Random Geography Badge
Just in time for Christmas, on December 15th 2016, the Random Geography badge appears on JetPunk for all to enjoy. Back to old reliable geography, at a time where randomized quizzes weren't possible for non-QM users to create. The choice was very limited.
With 6,000 achievers, this badge boasts quite the mental challenge. You have to complete two random capital-country quizzes as well as two different word scrambles. If you're dyslexic, you'll probably have a hard time completing this badge, sorry.
The Random Geography BadgeA Closer Look: The World Capitals Badge
We're now going to take a look at the stats of one badge in particular. That badge is the 4th to have existed: World Capitals. Why this one? Well, the first 3 badges all had quizzes reset, which makes calculating the stats of when a user completed the badge a lot more difficult for me to do. Thankfully, the 3 quizzes of the capitals badge have never been reset, so we can use the stats without worry!
Below you can see the number of users who achieved this badge each month since it was created.
As you can see, the first month was obviously much larger as JetPunk had to backdate previous statistics, so the badge started with a solid 1981 achievements by the end of its first month. Coming back down to more sensible numbers, we see it levelling off at around 170 or so a month until 2019, when we see a strong uptick.
We even see a bit of pandemic influence in the March-June 2020 area, where we reached over 400 new achievements of the badge in a month. Pretty impressive.
As of the end of April 2021, 13,800 users have achieved the badge, of which 5.5k did so since the beginning of 2020.
Which quiz was the hardest?
You may be wondering which quiz of the three was the hardest to achieve. Well, below is a plot of the total number of users who had achieved the requirement for each quiz by month.
So for example, by January 2019, 13,000 users had completed the requirement for the Europe Capitals quiz, 11,000 for South America and just 7,000 for Asia.
So, as you can see, Asia appears to be the hardest quiz from first glance, having the fewest total users achieving the minimum requirements (100% for this quiz). This makes some sense, since Asia has lesser known capitals than Europe, and South America only has 12 answers. However, perhaps this data is misinformative. After all, the three quizzes have different total numbers of takes, and there's no guarantee users taking one quiz have taken the others.
To make these three results more comparable, let's normalize the data by dividing by the current total takes of each quiz, that is:
632,000 for Europe
247,000 for Asia
183,000 for South America
Doing so, produces the following graph:
This graph may be a bit more confusing to understand, so let's unpack it.
Firstly, the left-hand-side represents the % of current total takes where a user with an account reached the required amount to achieve the badge (i.e. 100% for each quiz of this badge).
Secondly, we notice that South America is far above the rest, this is simply explainable from the fact it has the fewest takes, so likely reached the fewest number of casual users without a JetPunk account (which are not included in our data), as well as having the fewest answers as well, making the quiz easier to memorise and achieve 100%.
Thirdly, Europe has gone from top to bottom, and this is easily because Europe has so many more takes than Asia and South America, that it attracts many more casual users who increase the takes but aren't included in the requirements data since they don't have an account.
What can we take from this?
Overall, I think it's pretty clear that South America is the easiest quiz of this badge to achieve. With only 12 answers, it is easy to memorise and thus simpler to get 100% on the second take.
Europe is likely the next easiest. It has the most number of unique users with the requirements, but also the lowest percentage of users. However the latter is deflated due to its much higher casual takes than the other quizzes. Logically, this makes sense, since the average score for Europe is 32 / 45 (71%) whereas for Asia the average is 32 / 48 (67%).
With only 15,500 users having completed the requirements for Asia, this means over 90% of the users that have gotten 100% in the Asia Capitals quiz have the World Capitals badge, compared to 63% for South America and just 53% for Europe.
A Closer Look: The Random Geography Badge
Why this badge of all badges, you might ask? Well there's lots of comparisons we can draw within this badge. First off, we have the fact the first two quizzes required are:
Being direct opposites of each other means we might be able to draw some interesting conclusions from them. However, a preface to this already is the fact that the first quiz has been taken 3x as many times as the second quiz. We'll have to remember this as we look deeper.
First, as we did before, we'll look at the number of users who gained the badge each month.
Just like before, we have a massive influx at the start of almost 600 users gaining the badge immediately from backdated calculations. Although, with the World Capitals badge we had more than 10x the daily average, whereas here it's about 8x as much, since we're averaging about 75 users per day after the initial spike.
One thing we do notice here though, is the pandemic pick-up is a lot more noticeable, jumping to over 200 achievements in a single month during April 2020.
Now, as of the end of April 2021, 6,056 users have completed the badge. Of those, 2,500 gained the badge since January 2020, a similar proportion to World Capitals.
Which quiz was the hardest?
As before, it should be useful to analyse which of the 4 quizzes was the hardest. This should be especially interesting, since the stats of the quizzes suggest Country to Capital is easier than the reverse.
However, since we noticed the normalized graph was more useful and telling that the original, we shall show both at once. On the left, you have the original graph by total number of users, and on the right we have the normalized graph using the following numbers for the total takes of each quiz:
1,210,000 - Random Capital to Country
934,000 - Word Scramble - Countries
396,000 - Random Country to Capital
212,000 - Word Scramble - Capitals
As you can see on the left, they all follow a similar trend, although it's distinctly clear that Scramble Capitals is the hardest quiz of them all, or seems that way.
Now, on the right-hand graph, before you complain there's only 3 lines - look closely as the blue and green are actually almost identical!
Let's take a closer look at just how close blue and green are:
This is remarkable, as they're completely different quizzes, being Scramble Countries and Random Capital to Country. They also have rather different amounts of total times taken, and yet the % of current total takes which resulted in JetPunk users meeting the requirement was almost the same.
We're now at a range of between 0.4% and 1.9%, much smaller than the 0 to 5% scale previously. There is some noticeable deviation, but overall we have a clear picture that these quizzes are remarkably aligned. This is almost certainly a coincidence.
Anyway, back to the graph with all 4. I think it's fair to say blue and green are seen as equally difficult. However, with their wildly different takes, it's hard to judge between yellow and red. From my view, it seems that the national capitals quiz (red) is more difficult, since with less takes it should have less of an influence from casual users, and so the average score should be greater. However, being below yellow, it seems this is probably justifiable as the most difficult quiz of this badge.
Visualising All Badges
Now's the time for some funky graphics, all with the help of a tool named Flourish. This tool allows you to visualise various data based on spreadsheet input.
First up, we have simply a bubble for each badge, sized by the number of users which have been awarded this badge. It seems clear that Geography is pretty dominant here. To counter for this, let's categorise the badges by type. These will be "Geography", "Country" and simply "Other", doing so gives us the right-hand image, which shows that Geography is of course dominant, but what's perhaps more interesting is how similar the circles inside the non-geography are.
Let's take a closer look at the two non-geography circles of Country and Other:
First, we see that many of the countries have a very similar number of users. This is despite USA being released many years beforehand as well. The two odd balls are China and Country Trivia. Now, these are 2 of the newest badges, but also China contains some pretty difficult quizzes for casual users, so may prove a challenge. However, it definitely isn't as challenging as Country Trivia, featuring a whopping 198 quizzes inside it!
Things are not too dissimilar over in the green bubble. The big winners here are the approachable and more generic badges such as Puzzle, Picture and Welcome. I guess the outlier would be Math Wizard, being more specific, but this is one of the older badges in this category and also features quizzes which have been taken by hundreds of thousands of users.
That small dot on the right-hand side is "Generalissimo", this is the newest badge having been released not long ago in March 2021. It features 100 quizzes, comprising of the first 100 General Knowledge quizzes. It's a pretty mega challenge, but thankfully you only need 15 / 20 on each, not 100%.
Final Thoughts
Overall, we see badges have come some distance from the early days. However, we also see that the total number of badges is "only" 31.
Why?
Well, there are several reasons. First of all, there has been no evidence that the creation or introduction of new badges has led to any noticeable changes in takes or traffic to those quizzes selected. This tells us that although the "core" JetPunk base cares for them, beyond that... not so much.
After all, the biggest non-196 badge is the USA badge with "only" 15,500 users achieving it. JetPunk itself gets many more unique visitors than that per day, that is despite the fact that this badge has existed for over 4 years now. It shows the wider community aren't participating with badges that much, which is slightly disappointing and disheartening.
The other main reason is saturation. We don't want to flood JetPunk with badges, because this would lessen the importance of the original badges. We want badges to be something everybody might be able to achieve, so making a badge for every small niche topic isn't something we would want, because you immediately alienate a portion of your audience.
I think we may see the ocassional badge introduced in the future, but I wouldn't expect huge numbers of them. Maybe if the old badges were suddenly achieved by users a lot more numerously, we'd have justification to create more, but for now it seems unlikely to change much.
And with that, I would like to leave you with some questions:
What badges would you like to see in the future?
Which badges have you not yet achieved?
What do you think of the badge system overall on JetPunk?
And as ever, we like to steer clear of controversy :)
I'd also think that since sports is so vast, and has so many subdivisions, it would be impossible to limit the badge to 5 or 6 quizzes without causing displeasure.
There are 28 summer olympic sports, and you have to draw the line somewhere
1) I have no preference, maybe an A-Z badge for things like animals with the overwhelming amount of "Animals A-Z" quizzes there are.
2) I have taken a really big break from featured quizzes, so I've only gotten 7 badges xD
3) I've gotta say...idk, I'm still not completely sure how Badges actually work lol
Anyways, nice blog Stewart :>
I find it quite surprising that Scramble Countries and Capital to Country have almost no deviation. I think it's due to a skewing by the casual user. If we take your reasoning, these would be the "easiest" of the four quizzes due to being the highest two quizzes in takes. This would mean there are more casual users than the other quizzes.
I guess that these users only know a small number of countries and only list these off. (USA, Mexico, UK, France, Italy, China, etc.). They only know a limited amount of the 196, and they suck at the country scramble. The same thing happens w/ Capital to Country. They only know a handful of really big cities. (NYC, Washington D.C, London, Paris, Milan, etc.). So then the same thing happens. Actually, I'm surprised that Capital to Country isn't lower, as the biggest cities aren't always the capital.
That's just my theory, though.
I would say you're correct. The "casual" users of JetPunk are those that like to have fun and play some random quizzes, without taking them too seriously. So coming across something like Country Scramble is just too difficult as they don't know ⅔ the countries, and also struggle with the unscrambling perhaps.
I think the thing with Capital to Country being the highest is that it's generally easier to name the country than to name the capital. If you're a casual and know, say, 4-5 big cities in the U.S., then you could be guessing all of them as you may not know the capital. Whereas if "Washington, DC" comes up, you know it's USA.
It means we could change the requirments for a badge entirely and you'd still have it.
I do enjoy the badges because they add another element of “earning something,” which is always fun. In particular I’ve enjoyed the longer series (Country Trivia, State Trivia, and now “Generalissimo”). Another one of those would always be fun.
I'm still yet to claim 4 of the existing badges: Generalissimo, Movie Maven, Music and U.S. State Trivia. Perhaps these just don't match my taste or my knowledge on those topics are too poor :P
The system is pretty good at the moment but I think the addition of a few history related badges in the future would be great!
That's why I chose two badges where the quizzes had never been reset or changed.
A sport badge and badges for other major countries such as India or Brazil should be considered. Even if sports can be controversial, naming the teams of every major league seems as objective as naming capitals to me.
Anyway, I hope we'll see new badges some day. It pushed me to takes quizzes I would have never tried such as 'Provinces of China' or 'Minecraft mobs'.
Cheers!