EDIT: Just to clarify, this isn’t me…I realized after the fact that it might sound like I’m fishing for my own upvotes…
Good job, Duolingo… your fun event went over so well your volunteer community managers over on the subreddit are having to cut out complaints (while allowing multiple posts of people posting about how they only had to spend 2k gems to win back 5k gems).
Keep in mind Suggestion 0 is always this: never use gacha.
No One Can Use Gems to Get Pieces
Absolutely most important.
Easy enough. Some countries (and maybe some people) can’t use gems to buy pieces — and therefore get gems back — so make it where no one can.
I cannot stress this enough: no one buys pieces with gems.
Too many people online seem to be forgiving the game because they can cash out and get everything. Everyone should suffer equally if you want honest feedback because gacha players lie about being free to play and nothing wrecks a gacha fan base like FOMO. Make it so everyone is free to play and the truth shall set us all free.
No Gem Prize
Likewise, absolutely no gem prize at the end. Maybe, if you insist, give people 200 bonus gems a day for unlocking all that day’s nodes. At the end, people end up with 5k gems even if they don’t get all of the suits.
In fact…
Add in Too Many Suits
There needs to be more suits than any one can win even if they are absolute God-Tier in their luck. No one can collect them all. Everyone will have gaps.
As it stands, Duolingo has incentivized people — in most countries — to spend gems and wear the same two or three top tier suits which negates any reason to have those top tier suits. Hell, I imagine most players will have discarded wearing the suits in a week or two and it is basically just way for some people to game the system for a few free gems.
If you have it so that there are 10+ suits and people can only likely get 6+ then it means someone might miss the unicorn but get the Hawaiian Shirt and that is way better.
Duolingo Needs a Better Dupe System
Duolingo’s biggest sin after the allowing some people the chance to spend gems to make gems was the duplicate system.
Rather than getting five pieces to unlock a new piece which is probably a low tier piece that you will just get the next day and then it goes into the dupe pile itself you should…
either (a) Allow people to cash in dupes at a later date to give them some control over it,
or (b) [preferred] allow people to spend dupes directly on the suits with lower tier suits being something like 20-30 dupes while the upper tier suits maybe costing 50-60. This way folks eventually get the one or two suits they want.
Suit Pool That Returns
If you are going to emulate better and more profitable gacha, steal a core mechanic: you have more styles/suits/characters than anyone could win or ever need and most of them return in subsequent iterations.
This means the unicorn, etc, will be next time probably at a lower tier.
I would never suggest that Duolingo is anything like vital to anyone wanting to learn a language but it can be fun and helpful especially if you are also learning a language in another way. On its own, it gets a lot more variable depending on the language.
Then, this past month (give or take), they decided that what we needed was for them to add in a whole gacha mechanic. You play every day and then you unlock a certain number of pieces which then might unlock suits. There are six suits (+ 1 bonus if you get the rest) and from 1 through 6 they get a bit rarer and harder to get.
The suits are fun and whimsical and pretty optional and it doesn’t really matter, right? Just bonus content?
No.
And let me tell you why not.
Gacha mechanics in games are all about abusing human addiction-forming tendencies. They primarily exist to make money off people by triggering FOMO. People have suffered from gacha enough that I am generally never going to approve it being added.
Duolingo already uses multiple gamification metrics. Adding gacha is an awful choice on top of the stack.
I cannot imagine a proper gacha-centric system that would actually make game play more user friendly because the definition is that someone people will be lucky and some will not. Even if all it takes is time to complete, random chance means some will spend less time than others. This is BEFORE we get to the real world expenditure of some currency to speed up the process [which this, of course, has].
Like in this case where you need two “gold pieces” to unlock the rarest suit, the unicorn:
You have a 2% chance of getting a gold piece. There are, I think, 4 you need in total (could be 3, hard to tell at a glance at this point since I’ve already unlocked the majority). I’ll talk about this in a second, but I could personally get 4 pieces per day for I think 30 days. 120 pieces. At 2% odds, I can’t get there without luck being on my side and there is no guarantee that the gold piece you get won’t just be one you already have.
There is the standard stupid gacha duplicate system where every fifth duplicate you unlock a guaranteed-to-be-new piece. This improves the odds and makes it possible, but still not guaranteed. In the above, the purple pieces have a roughly 20% chance of showing up. Purple as rarity, not individual. I have something like seven days left so 28 pieces which should mean around 5 purple pieces. There’s no guarantee at ALL that it will be the purple pieces I need. Statistically, they will not be.
At this point, without getting at least one new purple, maybe two, I have no chance of winning.
“But, Doug, in this case, it’s just…”
No. Absolutely not. Because in this case it is like every other stupid gacha system and the lucky folks will get 5000 gems on top of their “just cosmetics” while others will not:
And sure you can earn gems on the daily by all sorts of things and in a few weeks (or months?) build up to 5k, but you know how else you get 5k of them at once? Cash…
Completing this month-ish long gacha event is the equivalent of spending around €15 in game (minus the gems you spent before going on reddit and claiming to be “free to play” because I have no idea what is up with gacha players and that pretense). All or nothing. You can miss a single piece and you are just as unlucky as someone missing 10 or refusing to play at all [unless you really want to dress as a lava lamp and frankly I respect that about you].
If they had cut the gem prize out and just said, “Hey, here are 15 suits and no one can win them all but if you don’t win your favorite then you can spend €2-€3 to unlock the one you want,” then I would have considered it more user friendly. It could have been comical just to see what kind of horse or sheep you end up getting.
It is also feels like some sort of test to figure out mechanics to be implemented elsewhere.
Some people (like me) can get 4 pieces a day but cannot buy additional pieces [probably thanks to Belgian law]. Some people seem to only only get 2 or 3 pieces per day (no clue why this might be). A lot of people have the ability to spend gems to get pieces (which seems to be the default). Some people started days later than others. There are a variety of glitches where people aren’t getting all their pieces.
This means you have all sorts of sub-pockets. Will people spend gems on such things. Is 5k worth it for the 4-per day crowd? How about the 2-per day crowd? There will be a PowerPoint slideshow about this presented at a board meeting.
Wave to the board, everyone!
HEY, DUOLINGO HEADQUARTERS, IT IS ME: SEMI-ANONYMIZED USER!
We have two options:
It is a real gacha and there will be some portion of the user base1 too unlucky to win the 5k gems and all seven suits OR
It is a fake gacha and eventually everyone should win which means anyone who spent real gems, and possibly real money, lost.
In this case, option #1 is technically better but it’s also pretty damned awful for any company to be injecting into their games. I have no doubt that someone is already typing up a report if this should be a new regular business model for them to try and use despite it having to be a failure.
This simply cannot win them any new customers.
I refuse to believe that people on the fence about language learning or who have never heard of Duolingo installing it to play for the toy hunt but there will be people who ABSOLUTELY will leave the app because of it.
They only way that Duolingo wins is if enough people either become more entrenched into the app because a unicorn avatar cost them time, possibly money, and effort OR if enough people bought/spent gems to get bonuses pieces that it triggered a slight uptick in monetary gain that outweighed the folks who are now unsubscribing or just putting put off by it.
That and/or selling addiction-forming-behaviors data to other companies who are trying to figure out how to gamify daily tasks while making profit.
Oh, by the way, buying pieces does not guarantee you won’t just get duplicates. For around 5k of gems spent, you are only guaranteed 3 new pieces, total. But hey, at least some people have the option.
snagged from u/wistfultyrant on reddit, used without permission
I did get the two I wanted (Rex and Mech). Even getting the two suits I wanted just makes me kind of distrust the game, though. And once the “learning app” adds in a game like this and makes it front and center, it is clearly defining itself as edutainment over education.
The tool I share below that sentence but above this footnote calculates actually the majority won’t complete it even if they do their lessons like a good little userbase. ↩︎
I won’t really go into great or mighty detail about the ins-and-outs of Duolingo. But, there is a regular exercise where you repeat back a phrase it says to you — and has shown on the screen, as above — and then it…judges. I’m not precisely sure how, but it highlights a number of words that you said right versus not and then if you get a certain percentage of words or certain key words correct then it passes you. It’s something that can be very useful to practice while learning a language.
But, it’s often quite buggy. At least on my phone. Sometimes it fails me before I can speak. Sometimes I get a pass despite mumbling. I have occasionally had to figure out how to say the word incorrectly in the “expected” way to get it to register I was speaking.
THEN, Space Pilgrims, we have the phrase: Zij is zeventien.
It’s one of those Dutch phrases that I think is pretty immediately understandable by folks who can read English, but let’s save that for half a second down the road.
It failed me with that a week or so ago. I passed all the other glitches and mistakes I made, but not that phrase. There’s a place where you can visit your past mistakes and correct them — it’s a bit odd since you tend to do that in the lesson itself, but it’s a nice way to see things that maybe tripped you up — and it has sat there the whole time. No matter how I say it, it doesn’t register. I have recorded Duolingo itself saying it. I have used translation text-to-speech apps to say it.
I even one day, this past week, reached a near breaking point where I just shouted it in a variety of pronunciations.
Zij is sayvayteen. ZAY ES SEVENTY! ZI AS ZEBENTAN!
Etc.
It was only after I had had my several minute shouting match at my phone that I realized that my windows were open, and drapes pulled back, so it was quite probably audible to anyone walking by on the street (and our neighbors) that I am shouting variations of “Zij is zeventien!” on loop.
Which meant I was shouting, in Dutch, “She is seventeen!,” on repeat. For minutes. And anyone who glanced into the window would have seen me holding my phone while doing it.
I would like to apologize to my fellow Americans abroad that I am doing absolutely nothing good to improve our relationship with the lovely Belgian people. Whoops.
Bonus fun fact, though: If I tell Duolingo that “I can’t speak right now” it auto-passes the exercise for 100%. Which I 100% abuse on almost daily basis to get all the dang Daily Missions speed cleared.
First off, and last in the title, I am still recovering from the two-fer. The cold feels in retreat but we’ll see. The ankle is still a problem. Here’s hoping tomorrow continues to improve both.
Second in the title, and second in the post, today (2025-12-05, een vrijdag), is a Bandcamp Friday. Those are days where (at least supposedly) 100% of the proceeds go directly to the artist. They are nice moments and another reason I like Bandcamp as my central hub for acquiring music. Some musicians time releases to show up on them, or have other promotions.
In this case, it wasn’t one of those I was interested in, but I had been eying Fabo Music for a minute and saving it up for one. Lots of albums which are unofficial soundtracks to Dungeons & Dragons adventures and the like. Kind of stuff I like to play while engaged in solo roleplay. One slight wrinkle is that Fabo Music often includes one-hour loops of their songs which makes sense in the context of playing as background music for RPG scenes. The downside being that it makes the zip files of the albums bigger so it is taking some time.
While fiber ever approaches (at least is showing up on the streets near us), we are still under the auspices of the older Belgisch internet. These downloads will possibly be an all morning task. I even gave up on my usual Snag-the-FLAC habit because some of them were in the 6gig range. AAC, only, for now.
And now to first part of the title. I have been using Duolingo to help learn Dutch, though it has been the, well, Netherland flavor of Nederlands. Last night, something happened where not only did my Duolingo lessons jump several degrees of difficulty but also started including more stuff about Brussels, Bruges, Leuven. Etc.
I think in technical terms I got added to some AB testing or whatnot. Who knows? It is kind of fun, though. The speaking and listening exercises are now less “De eend draagt geen schoenen” (the duck is not wearing shoes) and more, well…
This means they are less about listening and saying words and phrases I know and more about parsing sentences I do not know. The kind of thing where you jump straight from “Mijn naam is Doug” to “Je speelde als een poffertje zonder suiker!” I am very rapidly learning a lot of edge cases of the Dutch language.
At the same time, I have no idea if these are anything like actual phrases but I like them. “There’s no polder without a leevee.” “I am playing like a poffertje without sugar.” The third one is from some sort of Amsterdam noir.
“It was a quarter to eight and I was waiting at the canal…”
This means the practice rounds went from taking me around a minute to taking me more like 8-10 minutes each, but so it goes.
In the middle of this I have learned some things. Like how to say “the boys wear dresses” and “no pants, please” in Dutch. My favorite so far is: Vanwege het weer hebben wij een bakje troost nodig.
