Why are rare badges rarer than ultimate ones?

Exercism
1

I was going through my badge collection and when clicking on my badges, I noticed that my rare badges of Mentor (earned by 0.29% of Exercism users) and #12in23 Participant (0.53%) are percentage-wise rarer than my ultimate badges Conceptual (1.46%) and Contributor (1.66%).

However, the ultimate badges seem to be of a higher value than rare badges - I thought this partly because of the color scheme and the below wording: ultimate badges come before rare badges, which I interpreted to mean that ultimate badges are better than rare badges. This wording is the same in other ocassions.

image
image1370Ă—450 39.3 KB

I was wondering why this is. Perhaps the correlation I’m assuming between common-ness and value doesn’t exist? What do you think?

2

The order is, from most common to least common: common, rare, ultimate, legendary

3

@ErikSchierboom Given that Growth Mindset is marked as common and Contributor as ultimate, one might expect that the latter is rarer than the former. However, 13229 people have earned Contributor and only 8544 have earned Growth Mindset.

I don’t mind this, by the way.

4

Yeah, we often have to “guesstimate” the growth of the number of users of a badge. It might be that we changed the rarities at some point.

1 Like
5

But because of the estimation, this might not always be the case, as with my badges?

6

Yeah, we probably need to go through and check the rarity at some point in the future and add bounds. I imagine vaguely it should be:

  • Common: 25%+
  • Rare: 5%+
  • Ultimate: 1%+
  • Legendary: 0%+

Or something along those lines.

2 Likes