User Setting: Hard Mode

Ideas
26

I think I may in the minority but I’m kinda against Hard Mode for a couple reasons.

  1. Even if Hard Mode was activated for all accounts, if a user completes 100% of nodes of a street, it still doesn’t mean they ran the entire street. It just means they came within 25 meters of all nodes. An example is laid out in example A in this thread. So we wouldn’t be any closer to verifying if a user has ran/walked the entire length of a street.

  2. For those that live in very dense urban environments, tall buildings can make accurate GPS recordings impossible. From my own experience running down a street with buildings ~20-30 stories on each side, my GPS recording ended up having points where I was running through buildings or being two blocks away. Below is just a small example of where I started on left going right on Bush St., made a left on Market street and another left on Pine Street. Pretty straight line running on each street but you wouldn’t know it from the GPS recording.

CS

  1. No one in thread has mentioned it specifically but I think it’s a fair assumption that if Hard Mode is implemented, users at the top of the leaderboard would want the rankings re-calculated based on these new completions percentages. But what about users with streets they marked as manually completed? Should they be removed altogether? Have an asterisk put next to their name? Manual completions are a legitimate need for some. For example, re-using the tall buildings causing GPS wobble or there may even be some CS users who don’t have a device to record GPS with. They run/walk each street and then manually mark off each when they are done.

If Hard Mode was implemented, my opinion would be it is an individual opt-in setting that only affects that user’s account. So if a user enabled it on their account, their street & overall completions would be re-calculated without affecting others. Essentially it would most likely cause a number of streets to be marked as incomplete & their overall city completion rate would drop. At that point, it was their choice to do so to themselves. In addition, if a user does enable Hard Mode on their account, I don’t think their account should be labeled or identified differently than others. ie Hard Mode users get a separate leaderboard or a star next to their name.