Just noticed I’ve been earning moedas, alongside my ‘on fire’ status. Looks good but what is it all about?
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You noticed! 
We just started playing around with the “on fire” streak-tracking and earning moedas (coins) for completing Lessons, Learning Notes, Smart Review, etc.
For right now, there’s nothing to spend them on. 
But if you click on the icon, you can compare the # of coins to the average for other users. You could use it as a way to try to meet / beat the average, or just to try to rack up as many as you can for your own personal satisfaction.
We’ll keep building this out over time, to make it more meaningful, so keep an eye out for more updates in the future!
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Yes they really stand out! I remember how addictive the days completed streak was on duolingo, so good to see something similar here. Consistency is key and it’s easy to let days slip by without realising work hasnt been done!
Booh! Sooo duolinguish… NOCD. 
As a competaive person, the stats and strikes keep me going.
I am stucked with Drops for a lifetime. It’s a really bad app, but I do my 15 minutes every day
I’m a self-motivated person and so I don’t enjoy this kind of “encouragement / reinforcement” which feels fake. I guess it’s a personality thing and you can’t please everyone.
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Out of curiosity, do these sort of motivator tools have a negative effect on your self motivation, or are they just annoying for you because you dont need them?
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Haha but are you learning anything from your daily action? I feel bad when I get that email from PP that says ‘we havent seen you for a while, this is what you’ve missed’. That’s enough to get me working again!
Hey all, just wanted to drop a line regarding the gamification features we’re exploring.
As you can imagine, some kind of game element has been requested for a long time. We know everyone is different. Many of us are motivated by a few streaks and rewards to keep the learning experience motivating. On the other hand, we’re fully aware that if we overdo it, it can cheapen the experience and make things annoying.
We’re not about to sell coins or make things too manipulative, since Candy Crush is my own personal definition of hell for a learning platform.
Our goal is to help members get as much out of their subscription as possible, and for many, that means a subtle push to keep logging in each day, (as opposed to a Candy Crush, where their motivation is to sell you coins and power-ups and… anxiety?)
Other benefits we see of letting members earn rewards is to help bring attention to new and existing features and activity types that might otherwise go overlooked, (and onboarding new users).
We’ll be listening to your feedback and tweaking as we go, so bear with us as we slowly explore some new ideas 
(Also, forgive us in advance if you’ve been with us for months or years. We aren’t currently planning on retroactively rewarding long-time users with thousands of moedas and badges, even though many of you certainly deserve them!)
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Interesting that you call it gamification, never thought of it that way!
Personally I think it’s useful to get gentle reminders to practice regularly - maybe users could set their own schedule or target and then you remind us if we fall behind and praise/recognise when we are on track.
Personally moedas don’t do much for me, getting better at Portuguese is reward enough.
I would like to see something that shows progress through the A1/2. B1/2 levels and maybe a percentage of verbs learnt, shorties watched. Sometimes it can feel a bit endless, so would be good to have a reminder of what you’ve done. Maybe a badge or something to show when you’ve completed all the units for each grade?
Excited to see what you guys come up with next.
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These don’t seem to add up. I start up daily with 0
It never changes. Don’t enjoy these things so much. Feels cheap.
But love this app.
The trouble with gamification, and I see this a lot with friends who use Duolingo, is that it changes the objective. Present humans (most humans anyway) with a prize and they will start to maximize their prize winning performance. Duolingo folk seem more concerned with whether they are in the Diamond League than they are about how much language they learned that week.
I had a good example today. I was struggling to get your voice analyser to understand me saying a word that started with a ‘d’. I then spent a happy fifteen minutes reading your pronunciation guide and flipping backwards and forwards between that and the exercise that I was stumped on. I got a lot better at ‘d’, but there was something nagging at the back of my mind about Not Getting Points. And I don’t care about points.
And, lo, my daily total was the lowest it had been all week.
Is it possible to get a user option to turn off the points display? You can count them all you want, but I’d rather not be presented with them on my screen.
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I understand that some people need a coin system for motivation. Like another user said these coin systems are not able to prove who works really hard or who only tries to feed the system to get coins.
That’s why for me it’s just a little gimmick and no help to learn a language seriously.
Your App is the most important but not my only tool to get in the language … Since I join you 9 months ago I spent a lot time in the App. I worked through the exercises from A1 to end of B1 and though all shorties and whatever you put to listen. But before I end with all lessons of B2 I feel that I have to change my way of working.
Because my biggest problems are understanding and speaking I force myself to watch dayly 45 to 90 min of a portuguese telenovela.
Listening, stopping, looking up important words … hard work. But I try to continue a dayly little work in this App too.
In this moment it makes me kind of angry when the coin system says “Good Gabriele, you worked three days in a row.” Fuck you - I worked now 9 months in a row!
I motivate myself by feeling the progress and by the fact that I can always decide for myself which tools and which Apps I use to move forward. However, what really motivated me and made me incredibly happy was the moment when you wrote to me that I’m “User of the Month” because I’ve been using your app for the longest time. That was a great recognition for me.
But of course with this tool you can only motivate one person each month and no one but you can see who’s ahead and who’s behind during the month.
I know that this conversation is a little old, but I have recently rejoined PP after about a 2 year break to complete my studies. A few thoughts on this:
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Love the Moedas and streaks system. Encourages me to come back daily which is great. I don’t need it and won’t put my record streak on tombstone but it does add a nice kick of dopamine which puts you in a better mood to study.
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Thanks for removing that count of how many phrases you still have to review after finishing each Smart Review because that was heartbreaking and had the effect of making me want to give up now.
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Despite what I said in 2 and what is missing in the new system: some sort of way of tracking progress would tremendously powerful, especially for those us languishing in the intermediate plateau. I would say some type of “how many words do you know” count, like they have in Linq (sorry for swearing), can at least make us feel like we are making progress, even if somewhat slowly.
Either way, thanks for an amazing platform that continually gets better and better!!!
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