That is so true Sek. Back when I started crunching I did not think that it mattered what I was crunching, only that I was crunching. I definitely would have "managed" my crunching differently had the current levels existed back then. Who knows what I would have done differently. As you correctly point out, it was some time before we were able to see our time per project. I only got 3 days of crunching completed on Genome Comparison before it ended and none on HDC. Being an ex-gridder who was there when the doors were found locked, I did not want to run the UD agent again (it felt dirty). Thus I am a little "miffed" when some tout the levels that were awarded posthumously.

Cheers

That's your line: "But it is annoying to see how close I was to the next level.", but as fortune had it, you've got all 16 :D

tluehr, I was not referring to you in the above snippet. You are 100% right.
[rant] There have been some postings in these forums about having "all" the badges and such as if they had always existed. Those who have them definitely earned them and I don't want to take away from that. But how could one have managed their crunching to obtain a badge when they didn’t exist. Even now it is hard to collect these badges, such as on this project. Some have reported getting hundreds of DDDT2 WUs and are already at the gold level, while some are still trying to download their first job. Some will say "not to worry, it is early in the project", which is true, but that does not ease the disappointment of those that wish to join the competition but are forced to sit on the sidelines. In the case of the completed projects; didn’t know that the competition existed. [rant/]
The badges are fun though and I wouldn't want it to end.

Cheers

Sure, but all of us may have different opinions and personal reasons regarding the crunch-worthiness of the various projects. This means that it is important to leave to the members the choice to target their crunching efforts on a specific project or on all or part of the projects as they seem fit.



My point of view here is that the absolute pursuit of a badge will have no effect in that grand scheme of the grid. Simply because of the variety of systems available all members are at different stages, and all crunch different mixes of projects, and so on the whole all is flattened and there is no risk that at a given moment all members at the same time do crunch for one project to get one specific badge. As the number of members increase this risk decreases.

Hmmm, I was crunching at UD then here, then the badges came along... I was motivated to tweak machine/settings etc... but now I'm buying 64 bit versions of software, extra RAM, even overclocking a bit... Would I do it if the science didn't matter (SETI for instance)? Prob not. but Badges spark the competitive bug in me.