Competitive Duolingo Is Miserable

Duolingo's Competitive scene is a jungle. Constant online controlled feature testing ensures that we are always playing different versions of Duolingo from each other at any given time. And that's before some of us pay an annual fee for the Super tier, which builds several advantages on top of the chaos.

But what unites us all in the competitive scene is a desire to climb the leagues each week. To conquer the Diamond League Tournament Final and earn the coveted gold medal. In that pursuit, only getting the most XP matters. And it's a bad time!

It's not strictly possible to give advice on the most efficient XP-maxing strategies for Duolingo because of the aforementioned feature testing policies! For instance, even though I do not subscribe to Duolingo Super, my experience both in the browser and on my phone is ad-free, and I have unlimited lives. This is not universal. I get a 15-minute XP Boosting potion whenever I complete a set of lessons, and when I complete my third daily quest of the day. This is also not a universal experience. Depending on how far into the future you're reading this post, it may not even be my experience anymore!

But whatever. Life is hard and industrious winners never worry about a level playing field. As long as privilege favours you, reaching #1 at any cost is the goal. But this too is a bad time!

Mastering a language in Duolingo gets progressively more difficult as you progress. Learning to speak at a higher CEFR level is simply harder work than mastering the basics. This stands to reason. But generally speaking, the XP earned per lesson remains static as the difficulty increases. Someone who completes 10 lessons of Beginner Spanish earns the same XP as someone who completes 10 lessons of Intermediate Polish. Can you see where this is going?

If you want to earn 500 XP quickly to climb a few leaderboard spots, you're incentivized to earn the most XP per unit time possible, and this often means reviewing easier lessons (good!) but can also mean splashing out into other languages (okay...?) or grinding out redundant lessons in your mother tongue (bad!) whilst also trying to do as much of this grinding activity while under the influence of those purple XP-boosting potions, which bring their own problems.

I've caught myself deferring progress in my 'main' language (Spanish) because I'm about to complete a set of lessons that will reward me with a non-delayable dose of purple XP drink that I won't be able to capitalize on because I'm too busy for a long session. At any given time I may have a series of languages for which my latest lesson set is but one lesson short of completion. I call this 'loading the chambers'. This means that when I have more time, I can cash in all of these potions and go on an XP-grinding joyride. I am horrified at what I've become and I am going to stop doing it. But this is the best way to grind for XP in Duolingo. It's just a shame that it's also a terrible way to engage with Duolingo as a language-learning app!

A healthy bit of competition can encourage certain player types to get more out of their learning, and lower-level leagues on the app retain this feeling of being a low-impact contest which simply results in a few more language lessons here and there. But the high-level leagues become at best a sales tactic for the paid tier of the app, and at worst a miserable prison for those who lose sight of the real reason we should all be here, to get better at speaking fluently with our suegrita adorada bonita de Madrid on our llamada telefónica semanal.

Why I Don't Recommend Breath of the Wild (to my friends)

In Edge's December 2023 issue, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild ranked #1 in their 100 Greatest Games feature. In their 2017 review, they gave it one of their coveted 10/10 scores. The 2023 top 100 list wasn't merely curated by Edge staff. The votes for the Top 100 were collated from an eclectic mix of 100 representatives from the games industry. But, if you don't trust Edge, or their industry poll, or Famitsu, or Geoff Keighley's Game Awards(!), then you can rest assured that I personally rate the game as an all-timer. It is one of the best games of all time.

I don't recommend it to my friends. 

Before we dig into the deeper reasons I'll deal with some low-hanging fruit. Anyone who would have been excited to play Breath of the Wild probably already has, or at least has some real-world reason that's stopped them from doing so. Not everyone has a Switch. It's one thing to recommend a game, but another to recommend a major hardware investment upfront, which is also why I don't recommend VR games very often. Perhaps the least trivial reason in this grab bag is time poverty. I generally refrain from recommending anything that may require a literal month's worth of someone's free time, especially if I know that a person's leisure time comes at a premium. I love the One Piece manga but I've never attempted to recruit someone into the cult. It's just plain unethical.

It's also a waste of a recommendation. You don't get unlimited swings of that particular bat. Make each recommendation as if it's your last. I'm trying to develop an internal algorithm that takes the friend before me as an input in such a way that the output recommendation will be as close to the perfect fit for that person. If I assume that I only get one swing of the recommendation bat, I'm sure as shit endeavoring to pick something fucking excellent. 

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has never survived the trip through my own personal algorithmic nightmare gauntlet. Dark Souls hasn't made it through. Super Mario Odyssey hasn't made it through. Gunstar Heroes for the Sega Genesis made it through once, but those circumstances were very particular and unlikely to come up again soon. These are my personal favourite games but I rarely take up people's time convincing them to pick them up.

My personal recommendation system is trying to maximise the enjoyment that any given friend (F) has with a game (G) that I've recommended. I do this by decomposing enjoyment into two distinct factors. Factor One: Probability of Play (PoP) which is the chance that my friend will actually play the thing that I recommended. Factor Two: Enjoyment Assuming Play (EAP) which is how much fun I think a friend would have assuming that that they play the game.

So we have Enjoyment of (G,F)  = PoP(G,F) * EAP(G,F)

The method now is to put a list of candidate recommendations through this formula and choose the highest-scoring one, provided that the highest-scoring game (G*) is going to provide sufficient joy for that person.

So what affects each of these factors? Let's start with PoP, using Breath of the Wild as our candidate. We already covered 'they played it already' so let's dig deeper. I got my mum to play it because she likes long walks in the Lake District and the fantasy of riding horses through open fields. I know she hasn't beaten Calamity Ganon or would particularly care to but my pitch wasn't based on defeating evil. It was about riding horses and lovely landscapes. It also didn't hurt that she had ready access to both a Switch and a copy of the game already. Didn't even need to leave the house. On the other hand, it's got 100+ hours of play time which immediately disqualified a friend of mine who was trying to finish their Masters that year. An easy pitch after dissertation submission, but not before!

Now onto Enjoyment Assuming Play (EAP). What affects that? How about 'the game requires a degree of comfort with twin-stick movement controls'. That makes it a non-starter for more people than you might think, as well as a host of other game literacy and accessibility issues the game doesn't address. Not to mention that the Switch doesn't offer players many ways to customise their experiences to their specific needs. What about the vast non-linearity of the game? An appealing feature to many, an anxiety-inducing nightmare for some, or simply too little direction for some players to enjoy. My mum did enjoy the horse riding but she wasn't about to deal with the Divine Beasts any time soon.

A note on using the algorithm. You don't need to be exhaustive. Your best first guess is probably quite good, but by fuzzily running your candidate pitches through the equation above, you can stress test it with a little more structure in mind, and maybe give yourself a framework to attempt to find a better recommendation. Why don't we try it with Breath of the Wild? Let's try it on a friend of mine with a Switch. They had a Wii in the past, and they quite liked Super Mario 3D World but didn't get on well with Odyssey.

For PoP, we're not looking good here. When asked about Odyssey it was the relative non-linearity and vastness of the game that was off-putting. I'm unlikely to sell them on another open-world-sounding game, and even if I did, the EAP probably won't be all that good either. I can see them getting bored and annoyed more than I can see them pushing through the pain barrier and 'learning' that Breath of the Wild is really good. How about I pitch the remake of Link's Awakening Instead? Might not be the best recommendation I could make but it has a higher PoP  *and* a  higher EAP so I may as well forget about Breath of the Wild as far as this person is concerned. 

And you know what, this isn't the first time I've forgotten about it either. I just don't recommend it to my friends.