Duolingo has been quite open about the fact that they experiment on their users in order to find what works better and worse. Some users are given one type of lessons or features, others another. After a while the people at Duolingo look at the results and see if one of the approaches works better than the other. All new features have been tested on numerous users first, and some features that have been tested were then quietly discarded. This is an ongoing process.
But I have never seen them test anything this strange before. You see, after completing the daily quota of exercises to maintain a continuous “streak”, we are rewarded with gems or “lingots”. These can be used to purchase various in-game luxuries like outfits for the mascot, or special hidden lessons, or a day off without resetting the “streak”. I haven’t found them particularly useful, so I have a truckload of them by now. But lately I have noticed something weird.
I am a “plus subscriber”, meaning I pay a sum each month for some very limited privileges. Mostly it is simply that I want to support them financially, but the price is ridiculously high compared to entertainment services that have thousands of movies or millions of songs for roughly the same subscription price or less. So yeah, it is pretty much charity. But one thing we get “rewarded” with is more of those mostly worthless lingots. After finishing the day’s quota, I am presented with 3 chests, of which I can open two. (One for my streak and one as a plus subscriber.) The number of lingots in a chest can vary from 1 to 5, but generally so that each day varies from 1 to 3 or from 2 to 5. For quite a while, it seemed to be random how many I got. Not anymore. I always get at least one with the lowest number.
For instance if one day the chests contain 3, 1 and 3 lingots, I get 1 and 3. If it is 2 – 5- 5, I get 2 and 5. It does not matter which chest I click on: Left and right, left and middle or middle and right. Any combination gives the same result.
This was not always so. I did not notice when it started, but it’s been that way for over a full month now at least. Every Singe Day. And I have no idea what the purpose is, except if it is an attempt to make sure I leave the day’s session with a sour aftertaste. There is no economic reason to limit them: I am not sure if you can buy them for real money, but you sure can’t sell them, and they have very limited use and accumulate quickly through normal use. There seems to be no imaginable purpose to code this new limitation except to tell the people who pay the ridiculously overpriced subscription “We just want to remind you that we really, really don’t appreciate your support, and we choose to remind you of this at the best possible time to make you remember it for the rest of the day.”
I assume they are going to sift through their statistic to see how many of us cancel our subscription and how many quit Duolingo altogether, compared to a control group that doesn’t have this bizarre little insult added to their code. Because, science!