Crown mysteries

[Karl664899]

Again my crown count went down dramatically overnight (minus 176), after it was increasing continously for some weeks. Mostly courses that I didn't touch for longer are affected.

I would like to understand what exactly is happening here. So here an example:

My German->English course I fínished long time ago, apart from some legendary lessons. The numbers were until yesterday:

378 crowns according to the extended profile (321 crowns today)
342 crowns according to Duome (upper right corner, did not change)

When looking at the course, I saw that it changed completely since I used it the last time. I'm now in section 30 of 89.

I did some lessons that should result in an additional crown in the upper right corner of Duome, but the number didn't increase. I looked at the Duome progress page and recognized that it absolutely didn't match with my current course. On the progress page I'm basically finished with the course, so it looks like I will never get any crown anymore if I continue with this course.

I wonder what I should do. Leave the course as it is and probably lose more crowns in the future. Or reset the course, lose 300 crowns immediately, but gain some back over time in a more consistent manner. Any recommendation would be appreciated.

Karl

[duome]

It looks like the path and the tree data is getting out of sync, and it's probably a decision made by Duolingo - to not maintain the data "integrity" or whatever you may call it. We've seen more examples like this, yet we don't know if it's just a glitch on some accounts or will it be the same for everyone sooner or later.

[Shypharagy]

@duome

I am in the process of testing it on a new course but it seems that while language_data\skills\num_levels is set to 6, the actual max is 3 for levels_finished and maybe what happens is that when levels_finished was higher for a given course as it was completed before the snake climbed the tree, due to overwriting this parameter with lower value people are losing their crowns. I still have some work to finish the course to make sure but if that is the case, perhaps it would make sense to cap the num_levels value to 3 as people who have fully finished their courses would keep their crowns (but wouldn't have more than currently achievable) and data would update for everyone across the board correctly. I can imagine for people who would want to keep the status quo it would not be happy days at first, but with the new Duolingo design you have to do a lot more practice to finish a course so it kinda evens out and the ranking should really reflect the current state of affairs rather than some past states, just like with XP which nowadays is so much easier to get to the point that I can get in a day what would earlier take me months but so be it, the ranking is for XP and not for the effort one has put in to get it.

[Karl664899]

It looks like the path and the tree data is getting out of sync, and it's probably a decision made by Duolingo

Not sure. This course (English from German) is of course completely out of sync. But there were already massive updates before the snake was introduced. As I said, according to the progress page I basically finished the course, but according to the Duolingo tree I only finished about a third.

I checked another course that I finished before up to Level 1 (Spanish from Portuguese) and the progress page matches pretty good with the tree, apart of some problems that had to be expected. The progress page still shows at least one crown for every skill. But there are some skills with two crowns, that I passed on the tree already and so I never will be able to get the third crown. On the other hand I will repeat lessons (Level 1) that I did before without getting a crown, because I already got it before.

I probably will restart the German-English course and try to jump sections as far as I can. I'm testing this with another account right now and it looks good so far. Crowns are showing up on Duome (upper right corner), but are not yet accumulated for the account itself. I don't know how this mechanism works. In my experience it takes days to weeks until this happens, but it almost always happens. Can you elaborate a bit on this?

[duome]

upper right corner crowns are just skills multiplied by their levels - duome doesn't take the total somewhere but calculates it based on your extended profile (old) tree data

[Karl664899]

I don't understand. Upper right corner shows for my current course (Spanish from Portuguese) 188 crowns. On the Duome list (Languages by...) this course shows 181 crowns. Usually within maximum two weeks these two numbers are in sync, if I don't continue to work on this course.

So. who syncs this? Duolingo or Duome?

[duome]

Upper right corner value is calculated by Duome - it counts "[levels_finished]" values from our extended profiles.

"Languages by..." value comes from Duolingo - these values can be higher because Duolingo respects some extra crowns from previous versions of the course, but these extra crowns are invisible to duome - it simply gets the total amount. I cannot tell why this value can be lower, like it is in your case.

I see that currently it's 181 vs 188 crowns - please tell us if/when these numbers become equal.
This particular "syncing" should happen inside Duolingo. There's nothing we can do to force such an update.

[Karl664899]

For most of my courses that I used recently, the number of crowns in "Language by..." is lower than that in the upper right corner. I keep these numbers in an Excel, not 100%, but as good as possible, because I want to find out why and when they get updated in the "Language by..." section. Here are some more examples:

Portuguese from Spanish: 149 vs. 161
Greek from English: 2 vs. 10 (I started this course last week)
Russian from Spanish: 40 vs. 42 (I started the course after the snake has been introduced)

As I said, last week I lost 176 crowns overnight. 13 courses were affected, but not the three courses above. For these 13 courses the value is now of course also negative.

Usually when I'm practising a course, first a new crown is added in the upper right corner of Duome. After some time I see this new crown also in the "Language by..." section. But it can take days or even weeks until this happens. Intuitively I would say, there are batch jobs running and doing the update in regular intervals, for popular courses more often than for others. And I suspect these batch jobs are flawed and thus result in those sudden crown losses that I see regularly.

[Karl664899]

@duome

With my second account (Karlcito) I started the English-from-German course a few days ago and just jumped several times to the next section. In the upper right corner of Duome the account has now 65 crowns, in the "Language by..." section still zero crowns.

I keep you updated.

[Karl664899]

@duome

Now crowns for my Russian-from-English course have been updated. Before 41 (upper right corner) vs. 28 (Languages by ...),
now 41 vs. 40.

[duome]

How did it happen? Did you do some lessons in a certain manner to get the crown count updated or would it be enough to simply wait for the update while doing nothing?

[Karl664899]

No, I didn't touch this course for at least two weeks, I think. I learned Russian last week, but from Spanish.

Today another course, that I didn't use for longer, has been updated... Portuguese from Spanish:

Before 149 vs. 161 (Language by vs. upper right corner)
Now 161 vs. 161

Yesterday I only learned Swedish from English. I deleted the course and started from scratch, because it had changed completely and I didn't know some words during legendary lessons.

Before 69 vs. 69 (Language by vs. upper right corner)
Temporarily 69 vs. 0 (after delete and first lesson)
After 69 vs. 86

Now I'm waiting for the update.

[Karl664899]

For my second account (Karlcito) the English-from-German course, that I started about a week ago, got also updated.

The numbers are now:

93 crowns (upper right corner)
87 crowns (Language by..., was zero before)

[Karl664899]

@duome

Another update for my main user today.

English from Spanish:

Before 390 vs. 398 crowns (Language by... vs. upper right corner)
After 422 vs. 398

About a week ago I did some lessons and got some crowns (in the upper right corner only) for this course.

This is also a course for which I always calculated myself with "extra crowns", 24 in this case. I don't know where they come from. I bought in the past for gems those extra proverb and flirting lessons, but those are only courses with English as from-language and the "extra crowns" for these courses amount to 4.

Still no update for any of the 13 courses, that were affected by the "razzia" that led me to start this thread.

[Karl664899]

@duome

In order to find out why I lost so many crowns overnight (see beginning of the thread) I made some tests and went into details. For this I chose a course that is relatively short, where I didn't lose so many crowns and where I was not so much advanced.

French from Dutch

Before the crown loss I had 67 crowns in the upper right corner of Duome, as well as in the "Language by" section. I lost 6 crowns overnight. I didn't work on this course for months beforehand.

On the progress page there were some skills with 3 or more crowns and many with less than three. I started to jump sections and the crown count in the upper right corner quickly increased.

The numbers are now:

Upper right corner: 92 crowns
Language by section: 61 crowns (same value as after the crown loss)

I examined the progress page. In the beginning of the tree nothing changed, more down there were now many skills with three crowns. But in the middle there were still some skills with only 1 or 2 crowns. The respective lessons have been obviously skipped during the migration from the tree to the snake.

I counted the missing crowns from these skills and they are 6, exactly the number that I lost.

It seems as if Duolingo changed the calculation here. For skills for which I had already more than 3 crowns beforehand, nothing changed. The number of these crowns amounts to 20 and they are still there.

I have to verify this result with another course.

BTW, according to Duome the French-from-Dutch course has a maximum of 360 crowns (based on 6 crowns per skill). For my actual course I counted 97 skills (291 circles that should result in a crown).

[Karl664899]

For every course that I didn't use for some time and make just one lesson, I lose crowns now. There must have been an algorithmic change in Duolingo.

[Karl664899]

@duome

For one of the courses (French from German) that I lost crowns 2 weeks ago without doing anything, they have been restored now.

Two weeks ago: 230 vs. 230 (Duome Language by vs. Duome upper right corner)
In the meantime: 213 vs. 230
Now: 231 vs, 231

I did a few lessons since then, therefore probably the extra crown.

This confirms my suspicions that crowns are updated by background tasks running in regular intervals and that there was a software bug.

[Shypharagy]

I also lost a few crowns today while going forward with my Spanish course and noticed that some of the skills I had on level 6 are now on level 3. I have not found a language yet for which the obtainable skill level would be over 3, so in my understanding of things, level 3 is the maximum.

I noticed as well that for the courses I fully completed before the switch, if I just do standard practice, the skill level is kept. What this indicates is that everyone who was lucky enough to finish the course before the snake was introduced will always have a higher crown count, no matter how much effort the new learner puts in. For the courses that were not fully completed but had some skills on 6 level there is a point at which it doesn't make sense to proceed with the material if one was looking to maximize the crown count, the better option would be to leave the course as it is.

The only way around this problem that I see is to set the maximum level for a skill at 3 on Duome side. This would ensure that all the people who finished their courses earlier would have the maximum possible count achievable so although it would decrease for them, the principle of what stands behind the crowns would remain the same. In the end, what crowns measure is how much of the course somebody has completed, no matter when this was done, so the max should be the same for old and new learners. Keeping the status quo produces the effect where the new learners are at a great disadvantage as they can at most get half of the crowns that old learners could and on top of that, the ranking does not reflect the current reality as it is a mix of what was and what is.

Please check this on your end as well to see if there are any skills that you can currently get beyond level 3 if they were not there before. I haven't found such examples, but maybe I missed something, for the new system to work with cap being placed on level 3 this rule should hold true ubiquitously or exceptions would need to be made, although that, in my opinion, would still work much better than what we have now as the current system is broken and needs to be changed to work, as I believe, it was intended.

[Karl664899]

I don't know where exactly these crowns are removed, but it happens almost surely (but only once), if you do a lesson of a course, that you didn't touch for longer. Just tried it again yesterday and lost 7 crowns immediately. On the other hand it seems that these crowns will be recovered later (up to 2-4 weeks I guess). From the 18 courses for which I lost crowns during the last weeks, two have been fully recovered until now.

I finished two courses during the last weeks by jumping through the sections, in order to find out what's the maximum number of crowns I can get. On Duome (upper right corner) the crowns are already visible, but Duolingo didn't do the update yet, so I have to wait.

I can confirm that there are no courses where you can get beyond level 3. You can also see this very clearly in the Duome progress page. And I agree, the crown ranking on Duome doesn't make much sense anymore, especially for new users. By the way, there are lots of users in this ranking whose accounts don't exist anymore or are set to private since years. Doesn't make sense either.

[Karl664899]

Now, after 18 days, the 50 crowns that I lost with my German-Spanish course on August 20, have been completely restored. This course was already finished apart from some Legendary lessons.

[Shypharagy]

I noticed my crown count jumped up by 50 or so for a moment, but then I did some learning on English in Spanish and I swiftly lost more than that. I think I started learning again something like 4 months ago and had over 5000 crowns back then, being ranked somewhere around 1200, and since then I lost 500 crowns while dropping to 2000th place. When the system was working, I was gaining 30 odd places a day with the same amount of learning. With the current system, as soon as I gain some crowns, I lose them somewhere else so I am effectively stuck in a loop of going to 4600 crowns and back to 4500 crowns, which resulted in my far greater appreciation of the story of Sisyphus with the now personal touch to it.

[Apsa25]

My crown account jumped up by around 60 one of last days. I had 5599 when I last checked, I earned some crowns since (might be around 10 or less) and today I suddenly have 5672.

[Apsa25]

Today my crown count fell from 5999 at 9.30 am to 5986 at 10.30. It was the Italian course in which I did some lessons - it showed 80 crown earlier and shows 67 crown now. BUT there are 10 skills @ L6, 2 skills @ L5 and 2 skills @ L2 - so when I do the maths i get the result of 74 crowns. So why is Duome showing 67?

[duome]

67 is what Duolingo reports - duome sees this part of the data regardless of the "cached" mode (some little bits of data are still available).

I can't remember exactly why - maybe in the upper right block I specifically wanted to show what Duolingo thinks - 67 would be equal to what you would see on duolingo.com if it still showed crowns, so yes, I think the reason for showing 67 was to avoid this particular confusion.

It can be changed if now it's a different kind of confusion )

[Apsa25]

I'm afraid we cannot avoid confusion with what happens to Duolingo now

[Karl664899]

This is what I found out so far...

Crowns get lost when you work on a course that you started before the snake was introduced and when the number of crowns on Duome "upper right corner" and "Language by" section are equal at the time you start working.

The number of crowns lost is for every course different, but always the same for the same course.

For example yesterday I began working on my French-from-German course and lost 17 crowns immediately after finishing the first lesson. This was the second time for this course that I lost these 17 crowns.

For my Spanish-from-German course I lost 41 crowns. That happened 3 times already. For the Spanish-from-English course the amount is 50 (two times), for my other courses the numbers are lower.

These crowns get completely recovered later (between 1 and 6 weeks), plus the crowns you eventually acquired in the meantime. If you thereafter work on the course, you'll again lose the same amount (17, 41, 50 respectively).

I have no idea where these numbers are coming from, but I think I could find out, if Duome wouldn't give me cached data 95% of the time. Anyway, it seems like Duolingo has two methods to calculate crowns and one of them has a bug.

[Apsa25]

What I found out today is that the crown number differs depending what software you use. In my French from English course the web (with the Fiddler trick showing the tree) showed 450 crowns. At the same time an old app version showed 400 crowns. When I installed a newer, but still outdated app - it showed yet another number of crowns. I guess these differences were caused by the fact that the old app versions don't have the special grammar skills. Still, even Duolingo itself shows various numbers for the same user in the same course.

Btw, today my profile on Duome updated and showed a nice round number of 6000 crowns in total. I made a screen capture because I don't know how it would change, so I can admire the number whatever happens with the data provided by dl
I don't care that much about the crowns, but I like to watch my personal stats go up, as this is motivating me to go on. If those numbers start to change unpredictably I need to search for another motivators.

[duome]

I need to search for another motivators.

I have ideas for more

[Apsa25]

Today my profile shows 5993 crowns, so some of them evaporated again
New ideas for motivators are welcome

Edit: 4 days later the cout is 6092. I admit I gained at least 3 new crowns, maybe even more I need to check if it depends on which course I'm in at the time of checking