Microsoft’s Visual Studio gets badges, achievements and leaderboard | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft’s Visual Studio gets badges, achievements and leaderboard

geekwire.com

104 pointsSlimy33 comments

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A quick look at the list:

- Field Master: Have 100 fields in a single class.

- Overload: More than 10 overloads of a method.

- Potty Mouth: Use 5 different curse words in a file.

These are funny, but they miss what achievements are good for - encouraging new users to adopt good behaviours.

I'm sad they don't have an achievement for writing >= N lines of code and having it compile (and not crash) on the first try.

Given that Visual Studio underlines all your compilation errors and lists them in the Error List as you write your code, I don't see how this would work.

It would be part of the upcoming Hardcore mode, in which not only are intellisense and on-the-fly error checking disabled, but if your code fails to compile first time, it deletes the entire source tree.

Wouldn't that be more aptly named 'Nightmare mode?'

Or perhaps the slightly longer "Better Get It Right The First Time" mode?

Commodore mode.

I found "Hardcore" more appropriate; reminds me of Diablo 2's Hardcore mode where your character can't be recovered after any single death. "Nightmare" takes me back to Doom where it was just a harder mode, without the extra "permanent death" rule.

Sorry, that's my pedantry out of the way for the morning :)

I gather GHC actually used to do more-or-less this[1] (delete your source if you had type errors). Now that's a way to build discipline :)

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/kmk6q/the_best_ghc_...

Do notice that these achievements give exactly 0 points. They're not discouraging bad behaviour, but not exactly encouraging it either.

Still encourages in the sense of wanting to obtain all of them, which can be pretty powerful, although I'm sure anyone would just do those for jokes (you could even write a script to win those achievements for you! :).

If I saw achievements in my text editor though, I'd feel it's a bit patronizing personally. What I want in new releases is to help me do my work faster and better, anything else just gets in the way.

And the badge itself is an icon of someone running with scissors.

This ongoing trend of "gamification" is starting to drive me up the wall. Seems like some brainiac in marketing won some battle to sink their claws into the VS team. And I feel bad for them, because I'd hope they'd want to be spending their team actually improving VS (which is still an excellent IDE) instead of adding a layer of crapola lipstick.

What next -- achievements for the taskbar?

This was not done by the VS team. It is an extension developed by members of the Channel 9 team inspired by this post on someone's blog -> http://blog.whiletrue.com/2011/01/what-if-visual-studio-had-... , and the associated Reddit thread.

My mistake, then. And thank goodness. Full ignominy goes to those guys, then.

This is a great way of driving people out of teams with poor code quality.

There's a similar problem with games and achievements. The parody game "achievement unlocked" is a pretty good take on it.

(http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked)

Oh man, someone actually did this? I remember reading a hilarious thread about this a year ago. http://blog.whiletrue.com/2011/01/what-if-visual-studio-had-...

Gamification: The shark has officially been jumped.

That is pretty funny.

Reminds me of the time I was working on a .net project and the lead developer wired up a call in the OnApplicationError method to log the machine name origin of each error to a database. Every week he would hand out an award to the person with the most errors.

The interesting part was when he did the same thing for the bug tracker, the list was inverted. Those with more errors in development had fewer bugs in QA.

Thinking back on all the colleagues I've had who seemed to believe that 'debugging' is just another word for 'getting it to compile', that inverse relationship does not surprise me at all.

I would like to see something like this in Eclipse.

Of course, the Java equivalents would be slightly different. For example, "More than 4 pattern names in a single class identifier."

I wouldn't. Gamification of things like a build tool, where you can compete in fixing tests, adds some value.

These achievements just seem gimmicky. Unlocking the 'loner' award after a good night of saturday night coding is just adding insult to injury.

Or what kind of company would want 5 different curse words in a file, (very childish)

I don't understand the leaderboard aspect of it because, if I'm reading the article correctly, each of the achievements is a one-off, which means that the leaderboard will quickly be dominated with a few developers who happened to hit all of the achievements.

Also, a lot of these rely on analysis of the code. In that case, will every team member who has the code checked out receive every award that is unlocked by the project?

These seem to be sending mixed messages. Some of these very much seem to be lampooning certain negative behaviors, some of them seem to be encouraging certain positive behaviors. Overall it seems to be ridiculous and an unhelpful distraction.

Check out the icon and the point scoring for the lampooning badges: zero points and a picture of a guy running with scissors.

I couldn't find the badge for "negative code". They should give it the highest point.

We doan need no steeenkin' badges!

github has this for month: http://coderwall.com/

Wow. Thanks Microsoft for cluttering up yet another product with more UI Craptastic.

Honestly I know it's all done in fun but really, people using the product are trying to concentrate, they're trying to solve really hard problems and you're going to pop up some crap telling them they achieved some stupid "award".

You morons, this is akin to the marketing joker in the office that annoys alls the programmers by interrupting them all day with stupid jokes, you know the guy, he's the one you want to punch in the face everyday.

And to the guys that actually coded this up, learn to say no. Put your job on the line; fuck it it's not worth making the world a worse place by adding this kinda crap to a developer tool.

It's not part of the IDE itself. It's a plugin you have to go out of your way to install.

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