Disabling Beer Karma

My new aspiration is to make it over the moat filled with Corona Light and past the giant flaming Clydesdales to the utmost level-- Beer Drinking Dork!

 

I think that is what they were planning on doing - re-implementing the rules and when they took the current version offline to do that work, they noticed a slight performance boost. I know this version was meant to be a placeholder system from after the big crash until somethign new was implemented.

@Todd seemed to indicate they were soliciting input for the redesign to be included in the next major update of BA (4.0 I think).

 

So its abundantly clear that most people either want karma back or at worst are ambivelent about it begin gone. What is less clear is how the new system should work as only a few people have thrown out solid ideas for a revamp.

I honestly don't know how the old beer karma system worked, so I'm not going to comment on that. However, I do know how the most recent version worked - it was largely based on reaching milestones and did not give out pts for each individual action, but rather for accumulating a certain number of actions. I went and found a cached version of the beer karma for reference:

According to that, there were 150 things you could do or reach to get beer karma points. (continued below)

 

Its seems that the biggest areas which people would like to see change are likes, ratings v. reviews, and some recognition for volunteers/moderators/etc. So here is my working suggestion for a revised system:

​

Now this is certainly not perfect and needs some tweaking. But, I think its a solid start.

You will notice that likes are greatly devalued in this scenario, but not completely. Also, Id leave likes gained in WBAYDN, NBS, and the haul thread as counting towards the overall number - sure you may think its a "cheap" like - but its still active participation on the site. And with the reduced value on likes, it isn't going to make a huge difference.

I did up the floor for reviews to 250 characters in this scenario with the karma pts heavily skewed in favor of reviews especially as you add more reviews.

I did away with the old karma for trying a beer from "X" number of breweries - just seemed redundant given the states/countries. (Yea, I know its not exactly the same). However, I replaced it with karma for trying "X" number of breweries from your home state - that way it encourages people to try local breweries.

All karma related to "hads" and "visits" would be tied to ratings alone (not reviews).

Added categories for volunteering/working BA sponsored events and for serving as a moderator - those likely need to be tweaked as I don't know all that much about how that works.

For trading I kept the kama for trades but with the caveat that you have to maintain a floor of 95% positive or above to get the karma. People who trade more often may have further thoughts on that.

I didn't really give much thought to the levels and their names - people should chime in with thoughts on that.

Anyway, just throwing this out there to get the conversation focused more on what the new system should look like rather than if the karma should exist anymore.

 

For the most part I really agree with what you posted - though you probably need to adjust the points for styles since there are only 104 styles currently defined on BA and that has not changed in quite a long time.

I have mixed feelings on removing the from X number of breweries and replacing it with the ones for your home state...

1. I certainly support local breweries but as someone that has lived in a couple of different states while being on BA, how does Beer Karma address when people switch states? Do they lose the points accumulated from the previous state? Or they have to get to the next milestone in the new state before they can continue to accumulate?
2. What about those people that live right at the border of two states (or more)? I lived in Hoboken, NJ for a while (less than 1 mile to midtown Manhattan) and probably did more of my sampling of beers in NY than NJ, should I miss out on acquiring that kind of Beer Karma? Should it be based on geolocation and a radius? Eventually that will have an issue if people move within the same state.
3. Some states have laws which make it hard to operate a brewery and therefore do not have access to a high number of breweries where other states (CA, NY, MI, NC, PA, etc.) have a ton of breweries, allowing those people to attain more Beer Karma than others just because of the state of residence.
4. Only applicable for US residents, other folks get it by country I guess? Lots of countries with few breweries.
5. I like the idea of encouraging people to try new breweries as well as local breweries. Personally I had a challenge with a couple of BAs (and longtime friends) to hit 1000 different breweries and it required a lot of work to find new breweries when shopping locally and traveling.