We’ve been listening to a lot of user feedback about our global challenges lately. We’ve been grateful to hear how important our challenges are to many of you in the community, but you’ve also told us there is a lot that should be improved. Therefore, we’re taking the new year as an opportunity to make some changes to our global challenges. We hope these changes will improve the experience for everyone.
So, here are some upcoming changes to Pacer’s global challenges in 2021:
New Badges!
We’ve updated our badge designs! We know many of you love the badges, but we haven’t changed them in several years and felt it was time to try something a little different. We hope you like them.
We’re also adding new opportunities to earn badges. We’ve added a “28 Days” badge to all of our Monthly Step Challenges (except February, except on a leap year). We are also adding a “Perfect Score” badge for Group Challenges that replaces the “Top 100” Badge. All groups with at least 5 members who achieve a perfect score in the monthly group challenges will receive this badge.
Out with “Top” Badges
We are removing the “Top” badges for all of our challenges. We will now only be issuing badges based on personal achievement, and not on final ranking.
We felt that the overly competitive atmosphere was crowding out the supportive and motivating atmosphere we hope our challenges can provide to all users. Moreover, the competitive nature of the top badges also created an environment that rewarded unscrupulous behavior in the challenges. We were spending too much time combatting a very small number of users who were dedicated to finding ways to exploit the system. This cat-and-mouse game to find cheaters was both a drain on our limited resources and also ultimately unwinnable.
We know some of you absolutely loved competing for the top 100 rankings each month, and we hope that someday we will find a way to sustainably reintroduce these badges (or something better!).
Changes to the Leaderboard
Challenge leaderboards will be updated to show the Pacers that you follow, as well as the other challenge participants directly around you on the leaderboard.
New Limits on Activity
Distance Challenges will have a new limit of 200km per week. Weeks will start counting from Day 1 of the challenge (not calendar weeks).
We are also going to be limiting posting within challenges to 1 post per challenge per day. You can still post to your own feed or in your groups as much as you like. We don’t want users feeling they need to be posting all day long.
Your Feedback is Welcome!
We hope these changes will make our challenges more fun, supportive and motivating for the entire global Pacer community in 2021. We understand some users will feel these changes have gone too far, and others will feel that have not gone far enough. In either case, we always welcome your feedback. We will continue to make adjustments to our challenges in 2021 based on your feedback.
