Everyone likes having shiny badges in their profile because you get to have your favourite formats right next to your name. But right now the system very heavily favours people that submit to lots of XBHs, rather than people who are proficient in the format, simply because it's too difficult to get badges from competing in majors.

There's a billion different refactors of the badge system you could propose, but I don't think any of that is necessary. I think the simplest thing that would keep both the major/XBH camps happy is to give 2 points per major entry scoring over 20, instead of 1.

Here's why I think this is a good idea:

• Achieving a score of 20 is more difficult in majors, and they occur less often, so it makes sense for the reward to be greater
• Attaining badges in rare formats that only appear in majors (e.g. NTRQ) would be more feasible
• Getting badges from XBHs would still be much faster than via majors, so people's previous grinding would not be trivialised
• Acts as a kind of "length of service" reward
• The badge system would remain simple to understand
• No need to rebalance the system, which means nobody loses any progress
• Everyone can get excited about the new badges they'd unlock!

I guess the one big criticism would be "well just enter more XBHs lol", which is true - grinding XBHs is much quicker if you just want badges. However I don't think that means that any other method of gaining badges should be so prohibitively difficult! There's room to have two different strategies - long-term with majors, or short-term with XHBs.

The only criticism I have is that it would make my goal to reach badgeless ascension even more difficult. :P

as i understand, the primary purpose of badges was to keep trolls from hosting ohb, so it makes sense that it should favor ohb entries

It can still favour OHBs without being incredibly one-sided though

from my humble experience, what i have seen (even totally ignoring my own entries, obviously, so i'm not suspicious saying this) is that entries with lower scores are not that bad and those with higher scores are not that good - so, no wonder at all that reflects a lot in the badge progressions as well (sorry if i'm saying some taboo here...)