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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-09-08)
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Most accomplishments on Duolingo aren't competitive - you can earn them yourself at your own pace. One series, which involves moving up the leagues, involves some competition, but isn't a big deal if you put in 15-20 minutes a day.
And then there's "Unrivaled", which requires placing 1st in the Diamond league, the highest league.
These accomplishments are very well designed, hooking me in even though I know I don't want them. It's why most games I play don't have accomplishments - I don't like getting drawn into stuff like this, and I know I will if I play games like that. So I generally don't.
The last few weeks I've been sticking around the Diamond league, certainly not winning, but not getting relegated either. Normally someone stakes their claim on 1st with a few thousand points on day 1, and every day thereafter. That's more than I'm normally comfortable playing, so, well, I don't even try.
This week, the person in 1st after day 1 had around 900 points. I was 2nd with 750ish.
You can see where this is going.
That first day, 750 points. The next day, another 3000. Then another. Then another. I'm currently sitting at 13000 points, almost 10000 ahead of second place, and I'm checking my phone hourly. Is someone going to make a move? Try to catch me napping on the weekend?
I've been spending a couple hours per day maintaining this pace, entirely so that once I get this achievement, I can get back to a good cadence, and start looking at other resources, too. I like Duo because it's easy. But I hate how carefully (and how well) the gamification mechanisms have been integrated. I'm ready to slow down with it and I know that to do that, I need to get that last competitive achievement out of the way. I'm ready to try different things: watch videos, watch dubs and subtitles, read simple books. But I need to scale back this app to ten, fifteen minutes a day. Táim tuirseach.