Streak system issues and potential tweaks
As a casual bike angel, I’ve recently come across a particular annoyance I’ve had with the current streak system that has the potential to penalize riders for taking more positive rides earlier in the day rather than spreading them out. Here’s a situation that happens to me often, and causes me to lose my streak by taking extra rides.
If it’s the early evening and I have one more positive ride required to reach my goal, the situation often arises that after taking the ride, my schedule the following day is shifted later, causing me to be unable to reach 4 rides before that same time in the early evening. Thus, I often will take a neutral ride and delay that last positive ride to later in the day in order to be able to reach the goal by the end of the next day. Ideally, I would just be able to complete 4 rides during every calendar day to keep my streak, and not have to worry about shifting the schedule or changing the times of my rides so that my streak resets at the same time every day. Here are a few ways I’ve come up with to make that possible:
- Personal Favorite - Completing the 4 rides could extend the timer by 24 hours instead of resetting it. Streak time would max out at 2 or 3 days (maybe more?). Going from 2x to 3x would still reset the timer, not add 24 hours.
- Pros:
- Doesn’t penalize riders for completing 4 rides early in the day, or in quick succession
- Gives extra rewards to riders who complete more than 4 rides per day in the form of extra time
- Riders can build up time and take a short break without resetting their streak.
- Cons
- Time of day of rides is still an issue, but can be easily mitigated by grinding to reach 48 hours, then taking 4 rides per day.
- Alternate solution: taking 4 positive rides extends the streak for the entire next calendar day
- Pros
- Taking 4 positive rides every day is guaranteed to continue my streak
- Cons
- Could be worse for night angels, or people who ride at weird times depending on when the timer resets.
- Taking 4 rides early would give almost 48 hours of streak time, taking them late would give only slightly more. There is a discrepancy based on ride time of day, which is not ideal.
- Alternate Solution 2: Every positive ride resets the timer, assuming the last 4 rides taken (including the ride in question) were positive, and taken within 24 hours.
- Pros
- Very similar to current system, just not favoring every 4th ride
- Wouldn’t allow more than 24 hours of streak time (maybe a con)
- Definitely better than the current system but not ideal
- Cons
- Streak could be reset if rides were early one day but late the next, this was already a problem though.