I need a place to vent. Duo, ya botched it.
Problem #1: PURPLE CROWN CREDIT NOT DONE AS DESCRIBED (PER-UNIT, >=50% FOR FULL CREDIT)
A recent DuoLingo article about the change-over to the 'Path' system read that if a person had earned purple crowns in at least 50% of the topics in a unit by November 1st, they would be given credit for purple-crown level for that entire unit in the new system.
Well the course I'm doing had 4 units, and back when the article was released (late September or early October) I had already turned 2 of the units completely purple, and 1 of the units 75% purple (and 0% for the last unit). Based on the DuoLingo article I worked hard on the 4th unit to get it from 0% purple (it was just all gold) to 50% purple before November 1st. This means that on November 1st I should have woken up to seeing a fully completed course---100% purple. ...but NO.
It turns out the article must have been referencing the upcoming definition of 'unit'. The course I'm doing had 4 units (and 69 topics) pre-Path, but under the Path system those concepts have been muddled together and there are now 45 'units' (which I'll now refer to as topic-units for clarity). How was anyone supposed to know that they were using a new and very different definition of 'unit'? Beyond that, how exactly were 69 topics boiled down into just 45 topic-units? It gets worse...
Problem #2: PURPLE CROWN CREDIT NOT EVEN DONE FAIRLY (USERS SHORTCHANGED)
Before November 1st I had purple crowns for 10/10 Units 1 topics, 26/26 Unit 2 topics, 12/17 Unit 3 topics, and 8/16 Unit 4 topics. That's 56/69 topics purple, or 81% purple.
(I actually got a 9th topic from Unit 4 purple on November 1st but before I saw any updated, Path, DuoLingo interface, so really it was 57/69 or 83% pre-Path, but I'm trying to be fair and only count what I had before the change-over date.)
As outlined in 'Problem #1' above, if the DuoLingo article were correct that should have resulted in 100% purple in the Path system, but no. OK, well surely they would at least convert things over fairly? Nope. In the new system I have 34/45 of the new topic-unit things purple, or 76% purple. Why any difference at all, and why a shortfall? It took a lot of scrimping and saving gems or lingots just to be able to do the 4 'challenges' required to earn a single purple crown, so any backsliding here is painful. Once you've brought everything in your language of choice up to the gold level, getting gems or lingots is extremely slow unless you jump into another language where you can actually still level anything up.
Oh but it gets worse still...
Problem #3: EARNING A PURPLE LEVEL NOW REQUIRES TWICE AS MANY CHALLENGES (8 INSTEAD OF 4)
What a joke. Yes, there are fewer topic-units in the Path system as there were topics in the pre-Path system, but it's not half (45/69 = 65% as many). To turn everything purple pre-Path would take (694=) 276 challenges. To do the same in-Path would take (458=) 360. This 8-challenge thing combined with being shortchanged on the conversion means whereas I had only (134=) 52 challenges left to complete the course before (and it should actually have been 0 more challenges if the article were to be believed), now Duo is trying to make me do (118=) 88 more challenges.