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Some ideas to make the heart system less punishing

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User avatar
AlexanderN844702
Canada

Some ideas to make the heart system less punishing

Post by AlexanderN844702 »

I’m pretty sure that duolingo will never add these, but I was thinking of 3 ideas to make the heart system less punishing. Please remember that some other alternatives without hearts exist, like the web, duolingo for classrooms, and super (Maybe MAX for some users?)

Idea 1 (lesson hearts)
Might as well take candy crush’s(?) idea and make duolingo still discourage binging by making them lesson hearts. You start out with 5 hearts, and every time you do a lesson, you lose a heart. To get more hearts, you pay 350 gems, wait 1 hour, or upgrade to super, which gives you 10 hearts. (Maybe practicing could give you a heart back too)
Each time you refill, you would get 5 hearts, and goodbye binging!

Idea 2 (no quit halfway between lesson)
Let’s pull up some scene you’ve probably heard of before. You are doing a lesson, with 3 hearts, and lose them all, with one question left! You are then forced to pay 450 gems to either keep your streak up, or quit the lesson. How about once you have 0 hearts, you can still continue until you finish the lesson, but all the other lessons are blocked until you get one heart. Super would give you 50 hearts (hey, less binging then unlimited!) and once you have 0 hearts, you continue until you finish the lesson!

Idea 3 (free refills!)
You start out with 5 hearts, (which is the maximum amount of hearts you can get from just waiting with this method) but you can pay 30 gems (or practice) to get 1 extra heart! So you could start off with 5 hearts from being overnight, and then practice, and practice, and practice, (or just pay gems) and you can end up with 107 hearts from doing a ton of practice sessions (or having a ton of gems)
You can have as many hearts as you want! For super, instead of only getting 5 hearts and then having to practice or pay a lot of gems, you can just wait for as much time as you want, so you can wait yourself up 2032 hearts (from waiting a crazy amount of time, maybe work on your streak?) or pay 50 gems to get 2 hearts!

I would also just settle for a reduced amount of gems (like 50 for a refill, maybe 100, maybe even 150)
Or just duo getting rid of the hearts all together (best case scenario)

Anyway, I would love to see why these would work (or won’t work) for you! Also, just a thought experiment, Duolingo probably won’t listen to some random person on the internet.
Have a good day!

  • AlexanderN844702
  • AlexanderN844702 (currently hosting the 2023 Duolympics)
User avatar
JudieLC
United States of America

Re: Some ideas to make the heart system less punishing

Post by JudieLC »

I always quit if I run out of hearts in the middle of the lesson. No way I'm wasting 450 gems on hearts. I'd rather practice to earn them back.

User avatar
Thomas.Heiss
Germany

Re: Some ideas to make the heart system less punishing

Post by Thomas.Heiss »

I read "free" and "less annoying"? Think about it again.

They try to get onto your personal nerves until you finally give up and buy this Super monthly/yearly subscription.

Like with Busuu where further lessons are now suddenly LOCKED after the Web/IOS recent redesign until you A) either buy their Premium (Plus) - Non-lifetime - yearly auto-renewing subscription (you first need to unsubscribe on your Paypal account to make the Busuu Web Cancel button work) or you really complete the current/previous writing/speaking community lesson exercises.
Their broken part1 and part2 exercise code in lesson 29 of A2 French meant I couldn't continue for weeks with lost part1 progress until I finally figured out the workaround how to skip over.
So they now force you into doing them which is also the case on the old Android app with a Non-Premium account which has not seen this redesign yet.

Die Qual der Wahl.

If I had to click the "Pay with Gems" button every time I start a new League challenge or a Legendary challenge I just would be annoyed.

So they - whoever took over and has been "back engineering" all this better written (old) code by corrupting more and more of the original Duolingo idea with new stuff including childish UI looks, overfilled cartoon characters and crazy animations - surely don't want to make it "too easy" to get away or offer too many things for free, not anymore.
Hope I haven't formulated this too hard as I'm translating my direct German thoughts in my head into English as my second language.
But to me it often looks like a complete different business analyst or developer team took over now (like once the original product is sold to someone else who has other priorities) since a while driven by tight requirements / rules.

My wish: I want the more professional classic Web UI theme from 2016/17 back!

The new snake (Web) UI is a mess and it takes some time to create all the uBlock Origin cosmetic filters to remove the dancing cartoon elements.
Unfortunately, I can't remove them from the lessons on the Android app (old tree 5.52.5).
No SuperPlatinum membership option is available to remove them all and switch back to an adult more neutral theme.

Your wish for a not terminating (new) lesson is of course legit and the immediate termination makes zero sense.
In my opinion, binging is just an excuse from staff and health/hearts doesn't make that much sense on the new path or a crown level system where you're automatically forced going into higher levels as another dimension while the difficulty increases
(typing, target translations, full sentence construction, longer sentences, presenting since summer 2018 previously suspended sentences with a higher user error rate and several user reports as they moved up the crowns chain) and not when you're truly ready.
Before you could just hit the Practice button and stay on the current crown level. Pre-crown era had the Re-strengthen button too.

It's somehow laughable that Duolingo just terminates your current session and doesn't even show you the correction / answer solution or giving you access to sentence discussion.
I hope I remember correctly as I'm running on "unlimited hearts" since a longer time and will probably have to retest what I wrote here for the next days and weeks.
But basically it was the same issue with timed practice exercises on the Web until they removed them.
Full stop if time was up; you couldn't read your own typed answer if it was right or wrong and you never got the needed correction.
Of course time was always too short with all the long and ultra complex Portuguese sentences.
Like it is with the Lightning rounds in Leagues were they robbed over 20,000 Gems until I found out how to complete the round on Android without any refills.
It's hardly possible to go over the penultimate Xp point.
Same with Ramp Up challenges and the third or second middle or end rounds.

Another issue is the lack of accepted synonyms and alternative answers in the sentence DB in the German from English (Cefr) course and other courses which maintenance and clearing of error reports have been neglected for too long.

It seems by intent Duolingo staff releases broken code just to annoy its user base and NEVER have them succeed to finish their exercises?!
They make sure that you fall over, to generate full stops to create a hole in your purse so money can fall through, not only once but monthly/yearly, but not because you liked the business product idea and some dedicated features and wanting to honestly support them
(or more the former course contributor team and forum course moderators who patiently answered questions and tried to clear beginner doubts - that was the main selling point for me to get lesson assistance and I don't know why I can't save a super complicated sentence for later review and discuss it and grammar and alternative solutions from sentence discussion with a real linguistic teacher).

More over: I can't even read the quite small lesson text on Chrome Dev on a 6.67" Android smartphone as text scaling / zooming doesn't work with the horrible cartoon characters on the lesson screen.
How could functional testers miss this??
So I have to use Firefox (FF) Nightly in debug mode, manually enter a collection_id to get back addons support on mobile, remove all cartoon elements with "uBlock Origin" cosmetic filter rules and set FF text scaling (Accessibility) fomt size to 155%.

There is a new Chrome Dev Zoom flag which you can activate and restart the mobile browser but it hardly worked with the messed up Duolingo Web code.
Chrome mobile Zoom support also was broken on their community forums.

TL;DR:

As you said it already: Create a school classroom as a teacher as a workable workaround and then you don't have to overthink intentially bad code design and why you're always kicked out of this and that or why no affordable lifetime option exists.

:de: Native | :us: Upper-B2 (BritishCouncil) | ImageL25 (Duo) / A2 (6+y, McGraw-Hill) - Learning (Busuu): :fr: (A1 McGraw-Hill) | :brazil: (interm.)

User avatar
LICA98
Finland

Re: Some ideas to make the heart system less punishing

Post by LICA98 »

yeah the best would be duo abolishing hearts completely but the second best thing is to just create a classroom and they're gone that way 👍🏽

User avatar
AlexanderN844702
Canada

Re: Some ideas to make the heart system less punishing

Post by AlexanderN844702 »

Thanks to all the people who took their time to answer!
Here are my replies to everybody
JudieLC: 350 if you quit the lesson, but I really think duolingo should really change the refill amount. Like, the math works out to 50 gems per heart, or 90 if you don’t quit the lesson. How hard is it to get 50 gems, let alone 350? I only have 6000 gems, which works out to just 17 refills! Ouch. And that’s without calculating how long it would take you to get back those 100 or so gems from legendary practices. So… you can either buy duo super (yay for them…) or use a classroom (it is a loophole, and who knows how long this will last) use the web (and the app when your 5 hearts refill) because I find the web is not as polished as the app, which makes sense why everybody is flocking towards the 600mb app!
TL;DR
Get the classroom, use the web, or read the top 3 lines of this post… (that did nothing)
Thomas.Heiss: this is a long post, I’ll unpack it paragraph by paragraph.
Let’s start. First of all, my nerves are very annoyed because I have to pay a mountain of gems (about a dollar per 350 gems?) we’re just throwing money at duolingo now.
I’ve never used the 2016/17 theme, but it looks really nice. Really REALLY nice. I’d pay money to get this for a year. (Maybe not $100, but maybe $15) but I don’t think that would ever happen…
Yep, it is pretty hilarious (for duolingo) on how your sessions get terminated immediately after you make that final 5th mistake. Just makes you want to throw money at them… (I won’t use that term again, it’s getting pretty old) Speaking of mistakes, the fact that you can make one with a simple typo that the native people that speak ___ would probably be fine with. Want proof? Watch this video:
at 19:32.
If you don’t want to watch it, here’s what he put:
Please don’t feed the animals ❌ With the correct translation being: Please do not feed the animals ✅
i made a mistake, he put Please don’t the feed the animals. My bad.

Okay, I’m done with the rant now.

LICA98: the second best thing is just a loophole that may be closed when you least expect it. For example: https://www-internal.duolingo.com/learn was shut down a few weeks ago, and ailed me for 2 days. Then I gave up and retried the path. (Okay, maybe I’m not the best example)

And then I realized that you could put quotes in here. That would save time.

  • AlexanderN844702 (currently hosting the 2023 Duolympics)
User avatar
JudieLC
United States of America

Re: Some ideas to make the heart system less punishing

Post by JudieLC »

Is it 350 gems when you run out of hearts in the middle of a lesson? I had 450 stuck in my brain. :D Even at 350, I still wouldn't pay it. I average around 400-600 gems now. I had a lot when I came back after a two year hiatus from doing Duolingo, but I used them up reviewing Arabic from the first lesson to where DL thought I should be and getting legendary on all the early lessons I reviewed. DL wanted me to start right where I'd left off 2 year prior, of course, but I didn't remember enough to do that.

What cracks me the heck up is when you run out of hearts in the middle of a lesson and go to quit the lesson, Duolingo says, "Don't quit now!"
Um, what do they expect me to do? Yeah, I know, either pay gems for hearts or pay for Super.

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