Today we are announcing updates to the honor point system. The honor system will continue to work as you know it, but the points earned for certain activities have been changed to better reward code warriors who create and complete harder kata on the site. These updates are meant to encourage more code warriors to attempt harder kata, which will help kata get out of beta faster. As harder kata move out of beta faster, the more likely that kata authors (sensei) will focus on creating more challenging kata.
In general, you now earn more honor for many of the activities on the site. Some activities have seen a small bump in the honor that you receive for doing them, while others have received a 5–10x increase to better represent their importance. A good example is creating and completing kata. Previously you only received 10 honor for completing a purple belt kata. Now you receive 128 honor!
Up to now the points for how you earn honor for had not been well documented but we now have a spreadsheet available which both details what points used to be as well as their updated values. You will notice that there is a dramatic shift mostly towards content which is ranked as more challenging.
A few new ways of earning honor has also been introduced. This includes awarding honor for voting on how satisfying a kata is, as well as for voting on what you think a beta kata’s rank should be once it is approved. Both of these activities now have honor attached to them in order to better promote getting beta kata approved faster.
The honor for translations has been completely reworked. Originally, you would receive honor for translations based off of how many of them have been approved. This has changed so that they are now rank based. The more difficult a kata is, the more honor you will receive for translating it into a new language. You get 2x what you would normally get for completing a kata.
Now that more honor is being awarded for activities, we also needed to adjust the targets that earn you new privileges. You can check out the privileges table in the Airtable above to see how things have changed.
Note that if you have been previously granted a privilege, you will keep that privilege even if you no longer have earned enough honor based off of the new scale.
Just to be clear, the kyu ranking system has not changed. Your kyu level will stay the same, only honor is being affected with this update.
Most code warriors will notice an increase in their honor at some point starting today. We need to recalculate the honor for every warrior in the system so there may be a delay before you see your honor increase. Most likely once the honor has changed across the board, some of you will have moved honor board positions as well — those who have focused their efforts more on creating or completing harder kata will likely move up a few positions.
We are also announcing some additions to the global leaderboard. There are now two new leaderboards which track a subset of the total honor each code warrior earns.
The completed kata leaderboard tracks top users based solely off of the kata that you complete. Solution up votes are not counted.
This leaderboard tracks top users based off of their contributions. This includes creating kata and translations. Kata up votes (very satisfied rating) are counted as well.
You can view the new leaderboards here. As with the honor updates, the leaderboards will be changing through today as each new user account gets updated.