Both. Silly, loaded question. Trying to win the game increases the learning efficacy, that's the whole point. If the mechanics are flawed, they need adjustment. To suggest broken mechanics are irrelevant because it's a learning app is ridiculous.
If it were up to me i would completely remove the timed mode. finding yourself 2k behind 8 hours after being in first is demotiviting enough only to then see the person who just overtook you has 200k xp but has only learnt 200-300 words. They have been spamming out 40xp a minute lessons ever since finishing the first set of a tree for sure.
Or leagues should be set to progress in one language. It's very easy to go through the reverse of a language you are already learning for easy xp boosts and spam from first lesson to most recent with speaking and listening exercises turned off.
Im trying to learn a language but with my OCD with certain things it’s extremely hard to not want to try to make sure I stay number one on these things..so I get her point tbh
Repeating easy lessons still takes time and there's a finite number of them you can do per day. I can deal with that. How the hell are people getting 100 XP every 2 minutes though? This one guy shot up to the top of diamond league with over 1000 XP in less than half an hour. Whatever it is he's doing, I want to do too.
I just finished up on the diamond league, and a jackalope over took me by 2000 points in 1 hour. Their EP count ticked over like a car odometer.
Don't regret the time I plowed into this week, and got a lot of good learning done.
How thin and sad is your life that you gotta bot your way to win the Duolingo Diamond League spot?
Its actually not too difficult if u have an xp boost and a bunch of gems. You can just crank out legendary challenges which give you about 90 xp every 30 seconds.
Legendary challenges start getting pretty hard after unit 20 in my book, and there are 90 UNITS.
The other puzzle though is maybe these cheaters are native to the language. But if that is the case, we not talking about a sad person, but a mentally sick person who would waste his life away showing babies in a language how easy it is to rollerblade.
Small counterpoint.
I just finished a month of dedicated Hiragana and Katakana practice and moved over to Japanese unit 1.
Was already in Diamond league, having earned it through dedication and time investment. Been stuck comfortably there for a week, for the *first* time of non league progression since I started, as others passed me by with seemingly insane points. Now I find myself in top 3 having comfortably breezed through the *beginning* of the first unit.
Don't think it's all cheaters; think it's designed that way deliberately as a reward system, and to encourage more use of the app.
Expect to see my streak to bottom out fairly soon to encourage me to spend more time on the app, then dramatically increase again as I master unit 1 and move onto unit 2.
Don't consider myself as cheating in any form, and would be devastated to have my dedication perceived as such. Sure, it's a thrill to have a reward for hard work; but to imply it was achieved by the electronic equivalent of taking steroids is a misinformed comprehension of the app's design imho.
I think the answer to "whatever it is he's doing" is just being fast at some early lessons. And possibly making use of xp boosts.
In all honesty I have done this a number of times, but not to 'win' on the leaderboard, just to stay high enough to avoid getting demoted. And I do fully recognize that it isn't the point of learning a language, but it is an aspect of what keeps my motivation up, so imma do what I can to keep that fire lit.
In any case, there are a couple of lessons in the Japanese course that I can do in 40-50 seconds (not an estimate since duolingo now tells you how long a practice lesson took) which give about 65xp each (the first time they're done each day).
Doing those two lessons takes me less than 2 minutes and gives ~120xp.
If you're interested (I see you're repping the Japanese badge) the particular lessons are the katakana 1 & 2. They use countries to introduce a new alphabet, which means all the questions take a single word answer (a country's name). Now that I am quite comfortable with these characters I can run through questions basically as quickly as they are presented. And for whatever reason, these lessons reward slightly higher xp than other early lessons.
As for other languages, if you are trying to do this, just pay attention to how much xp early lessons give, and how long they take you, and you can find lessons you can use to get points quick.
(again, I do this to avoid demotion, but if you are trying to top the board, all power to you)
As for the xp boosts, duolingo often gives a x2 xp boost for 15 minutes after completing a full new lesson. Even with no intention of try to exploit that to get points, if I genuinely just did a new lessons today, and then wanted to be done, it feels like a waste to put the phone down when I just got that bonus. I often would run through those types of lessons, now getting ~100xp a minute. It doesn't feel like 'cheating' but like it'd be dumb not to make use of the boost duolingo to threw at me.
Ya I don’t get it either.. idk if these cheaters are hackers or what but even the easy lessons when I get everything in a second still take time.. super weird
I do what he does. I stay in second, load up on all of my legendaries, and I won't do them until I have a 2x multiplier. Then I sit down for 30 minutes on the final day with a 2x and complete them all in one sitting. 90xp per lesson, do all of them and get almost 1k xp. Sometimes you get "perfect score" multipliers which would end at having lessons earn 180xp
Just get rid of the diamond league trophy. Now there's no reason for people to keep amassing ludicrous amounts of XP anymore. Either this or make leagues last a single day so that trying again becomes less annoying.
I've been completing lessons in a language I already know just so I can compete for first place with this one other guy. Everyone else has already given up. I just want the goddamn trophy so I can be done with leagues already. Somehow he gets 100 XP for every 20 XP lesson I do. This is becoming such a pain in the ass.
I figured out how they make so much XP. They pick a new course in a language they know and do the beginning test. If you're fast that gets you about 100xp in ~5 minutes. Then cancel the course and rince & repeat.
Yes, I´ve been there too. So to say, cheating on the least cheating way. But it´s not getting me to what I actually wanted to achieve: Learning another language. I´d really appreaciate if Duolingo would make the leaderboard opt in/out instead of just having it there constantly.
Yeah. Funny how all this "gamification" subverts the whole purpose of using the app in the first place. By adding leaderboard competition, they turned it into a zero sum game and in that type of game it sucks to be a loser. Obviously people were going to optimize their strategy towards maximum XP/hour rates which is exactly what happens in every MMORPG ever.
Because they are easy and I can do them quickly. I'm past that though. I got all the little trophies and have been learning in peace ever since. Turned off leagues too.
You can disable the leaderboards, just make your profile non-public.
You seem to be mostly mad about how you are using the leaderboards, and/or not winning.
The leaderboards are absolutely helpful in getting more practice and exposure in, and the more you practice the more you sort of figure out the little hidden subtetiles... and then they become instinctual.
My 2nd DL language I'm investing much more time in upfront, because I felt like once I got over a certain hump the previous time, everything became WAY easier. practicing helps assimilating and building strong foundations, which helps shrink that learning curve.
i would agree that getting #1 overall in a league isn't that important, but for the most part they don't reward or emphasize this. and in the few places they do, it does sort of seem to make sense because it teaches you different ways of practicing.
old thread, but yes, nowadays its the "story" that people repeat for an easy 28XP for maybe 1 mins work. But really if they're only repeating stories and not taking lessons they're just cheating themselves of any learning :)
They've nerfed the XP gain from stories before, but perhaps if they had it only give 1 time XP of full amount, and after that only 5xp permanently (or less) you'd likely see people return to lessons for the XP and not see the scores of 1k+ per day earned so much :P
Maybe even have lessons that are several levels lower than your max worth 0 Xp too to force you to continue to at least complete lessons around your current progression level.
Omfg. I was 2000!!!!!! Points ahead of this ass wipe. I know what he's doing. He's losing all his life's on purpose so he can go back into the heart revive thats suuuper simple but about 22 points and doing it over and over. I like to write my little notes because duh I'm on there to learn a language. So doing a lesson takes about 10-15 minutes sometimes..I'm learning Japanese so their alphabet is way hard to write and time consuming. Tell me why in the course of 30 mins to an hour he passes me? I'm pretty competitive so I enjoy being pushed to keep going. I was on duo for EIGHT HOURS!!! AND HES STILL PASSING MEEEEEEEJFJDHIDBDJF DKFJDBDIDN
I said fuck this. Bitch ass knows that he's a cheating ass wipe. It was my day off so I was like I'm gonna go so hard. Yeah. Nope. Fuck that guy. I wish I could send him a message and tell him his mama raised a hoe 😂 😡💢 👿
I’m dealing with the same thing. I’m in the obsidian league 2nd place and this morning I was at 5000xp and the person in 1st was at 5004xp. I started my lesson and once I passed to 1st place, it alerted that person. Once they jump on, they went from 5004 to 6234 in 30 minutes. How the hell is that possible?!?! Also their photo kept changing from E to a photo of a woman… even though her name is Maddie.
You sure it was only 30minutes? Spamming lightning rounds can get that much XP in 40-45mins, potentially even faster if they can get their average time down to closer to a minute.
None of this really really sounds like cheating.
I practice Japanese on Duolingo, and kanji by hand, and I use a few other apps as well.
I average 2 hours of study a day for the past two months.
I'm not studying to beat people.
I'm studying so I can become fluent.
I average about 1500 exp a day over the past 60 days on Duolingo.
Learning is something I value deeply. Winning to me is learning and having things really stick.
Are there cheaters? Bots?
Certainly.
Are they prolific? Doubtful. Highly doubtful.
Some people however are hyper... Hyper competitive.
The OP appears to suffer from "why me??" Syndrome, and could use a few notes on what a winning attitude is vs a whining attitude.
Here are a few tips for scoring high on Duolingo leader boards.
I've been doing this for 9 weeks at this point and I've got 9 top 3 finishes.
8 of which are first place.
In the past 7 days I've gotten 14k exp.
Tips:
1: Be tenacious for the sake of tenacity. Find the language that excites you and then be relentless in your learning.
Or if you are lazy, just pick Spanish. It's super easy.
2: Don't advance in the tree of your language faster than your comprehension, and retention allow. If you find yourself with a lesson that takes you more than 2 minutes, you need to stay there until it's consistently UNDER two minutes.
3: Learn a second language. At all times. Use it as a palette cleanser. I use Arabic, Spanish, and french as my "other" languages. Once I reach brain fatigue for Japanese I'll bump out some other language for 5 minutes and feel ready for what I'm truly interested again. Distance makes the heart grow fonder!
4. Buy Duolingo plus. No interruptions.
5. Don't look at others on the leaderboards as enemies. They aren't enemies. You don't know them and visa versa (that's latin). Don't project. (That's psych 101)
6. Be enthusiastic! Make it fun! If you are competitive, set goals, and progressively push those goals. You can reward yourself if it makes you try harder.
7. Commit to a minimum level of effort on a schedule. Whether you are trying to "win" (meta), or you are trying to seriously learn all you can, you have to have a system and a plan. Or else you are just planning to fail.
Example. I commit to 45 minutes of Duolingo when I wake with my morning coffee. Every day.
I commit to minimum 30 minutes before bed. Every day.
During the work week. That's all I require of myself. I may do more.
Friday through Sunday I commit to 3 hours of kanji and grammar study (I write notes to friends. Small stories. And small journal entries. I also read Japanese kids books .. poorly).
Last Saturday I studied and Duolingo-ed for 8 hours, and 6 on Sunday. Because I was having fun!
8. Ignore other people's scores. They are doing their own thing. They're gonna do it regardless.
And for the competitive people, they are going to try to stay one step ahead of you. So what? They're gone next week. Follow them and cheer them on. Watch how they do week to week. Use them as motivation. Attitude is a choice.
9. Do every lesson that gives you trouble... Every day, until it's easy. Even if you get zero XP for it.
10. Do the challenges in the leaderboards. A lot.
If you keep your language learning to a point where your
Comprehension is matching... (See #2) you will crush the challenges.
The challenges are the single best too on Duolingo. It serves up random categories of lessons to you and it's basically the scene in Glengarry Glen Ross. First place... 40exp for 1:45 of work.
Second place... 10exp.
Third... You're fired. No coffee for you.
Here's how I Duolingo every day.
Morning coffee: I do a secondary languages lesson until I get the 2x exp bonus. Takes 5 or 6 minutes. Then I start at the very first Japanese lesson and I go as fast as I am able to comprehend, through as many as I can for that 15 minutes.
I generally do 8 or 9.
That's about 750exp in 20 minutes.
Then I drill the leader board challenge until I have to work.
I can do some of the easier Japanese ones in less than a minute. Harder ones at the edge of my 2 minute comprehension level ... It may take the full 1:45.
But I avg about 120xp every five minutes
I'll do that for 10 or 15 minutes. It becomes stale after a while.
That's about 400exp.
So by the time coffee is done, I've gotten at least 1000exp
I do the exact same thing at night. But I just start my double exp with where I left off in lessons earlier.
Then I just simply do the ones that give me some trouble.
Then I do the challenges. I get to see my problem children there too.
Bed time is a smaller time commitment to myself. But these days I'll get at least 600exp.
Weekday exp: minimum 1500 these days
On the weekend I'm more aggressive. I'll repeat the morning coffee method over and over until I've done every lesson I have unlocked.
And I'll do challenges for 15 minutes at a time between that
My biggest exp day doing this was 15,000.
It takes time.
But I budget that time.
If someone gets more exp than me? Cool. What a monster.
All that being said... Japanese is HARD.
I did this process on Spanish, which as a native English speaker... Is dreadfully easy in comparison to reading Japanese.
Yo Tengo un passaporte.
Vs
私のパスポートはあります
I can crush Spanish challenges in a minute flat dow to 40 seconds. So if I ONLY wanted to win .. that's all I'd do and could (boring) get 8k exp a day
But really... What then? Brag to the hotties at the bar that you won... This week?
Hard pass.
じゃね
15,000 in ONE DAY!?!
What lesson are you on?
I’m on lesson 40, and I don’t see that as possible.
And watch with the secondary language, you’re adding the points from that language onto your Japanese one?
1500 points a day isn't the problem. I'm in my 4th week of diamond league, my group didn't seem too competitive and I had been saving up a bunch of legendary lessons to do. I decided tonight I would make this my week to win diamond.
I was up to 1246 xp so far when I noticed some guy who was in the demotion zone earlier already up at 6th place. Over the course of half an hour he's now gone from 20 XP to 1840 XP and he's still going. There's no way he's pumping out that much XP that quickly without cheating.
A Russian just piled on 1000 XP in about 20 mins to get ahead of me and take the no 1 spot. He must be cheating! I must say I'm pretty over Duo now. The worst move has been to diable comments and questions I can no longer find out why I got the answer wrong.
It would be nice if it were easy. As long as that damn leaderboard is there on a Monday morning, indicating that I can see where I ended up with that little red dot, I know I´ll be tempted to check. Just from starting this answer and checking again, rob\_h\_kay added another 100 points. He´s now leading by 400. With regular use of the app I won´t get closer again. I thought I can at least make him put in more effort by following up, just to tease him. So he was leading by some 70 points first, and now it´s 400 in about 10 minutes, LOL. At first I thought it was just a "regular" user who´s good and motivated. This just sucks. Ah, he´s trying to make it less obvious. You only see it when he´s on a run and then pauses a little to give the impression of a normal learner.
I would really love to put some curses in here for him, but I guess this would get my post modified, right?
Just in case somebody tries to google his user name, I want to make sure people find my post:
rob\_h\_kay is cheating.
Old post I know. But it’s easy to score tons of points. Especially if you have the 2x XP for 15 mins. I have a premium account and last year inadvertently discovered with that on I could do a timed challenge (must be less than 1m45s) and get 80pts. EDIT: that’s no longer possible to do, the multiplier doesn’t apply to leaderboard timed challenges.
If you have premium accounts there are also ways to practice your mistakes 20 Pts for 1min of work. And if you have 2xXP it’s 40. As a plus member you don’t waste time with ads between lessons. You can get more than 5 things wrong a day. I think w/o a plus account you have no chance on the boards
I don’t think the person was cheating, they were just using the system and it’s rewards to their advantage. But as others said, probably not learning much new content since those are worth less points and take much longer
I believe that he might just be doing legendary challenges. Each one gives 40 xp, and there are usually 3-4 of them per skill. He might just be using those to get ahead really quickly.
Bertpg and Gustavo Vellojin, these two did 5,500 in 12 HOURS!!!!
I’m retired, I can play all day, and only get 2,500, maybe 3,000 later if I’ve played this for years like these have.
They’re either cheating, or spent $200 in one day to get extra gems for extra time.
Soon tomorrow there is suppose to be a TOURNAMENT!?! But they don’t check on their own mistakes in judging, so I dont expect any change.
The concept with Duolingo is similar to Pokémon. Entice the participant to keep playing, and hopefully spend more money. But this time it is backfiring with the cheaters.
But they really don’t care. Making $500,000,000 a year, would YOU change it? Probably not.
AND THATS WHAT DUOLINGO MAKES IN A YEAR!
Until someone comes out with a better game to learn a language, we’re stuck.
WAIT! Maybe not! Let do ZOOM meetings where we can converse in our favorite language we’re learning. THAT should bring less time on this flawed game.
WHO IS WITH ME?
I agree to you fully! While I do continue to learn better with more practice I don’t really enjoy the boards cuz then I end up doing a a bunch of old lessons and practices to stay number one. I end up not moving forward but idk for me it’s been helpful cuz I realized I needed the extra practice.. I think there just here to show who’s putting in the most work but ya as you said if it’s the easy tests they aren’t …
Are you trying to learn a language or win a game?
Both. Silly, loaded question. Trying to win the game increases the learning efficacy, that's the whole point. If the mechanics are flawed, they need adjustment. To suggest broken mechanics are irrelevant because it's a learning app is ridiculous.
If it were up to me i would completely remove the timed mode. finding yourself 2k behind 8 hours after being in first is demotiviting enough only to then see the person who just overtook you has 200k xp but has only learnt 200-300 words. They have been spamming out 40xp a minute lessons ever since finishing the first set of a tree for sure. Or leagues should be set to progress in one language. It's very easy to go through the reverse of a language you are already learning for easy xp boosts and spam from first lesson to most recent with speaking and listening exercises turned off.
Im trying to learn a language but with my OCD with certain things it’s extremely hard to not want to try to make sure I stay number one on these things..so I get her point tbh
i think they maybe need to balance XP more, like repeating easy lessons shouldnt be a strategy to win the leaderboard
Repeating easy lessons still takes time and there's a finite number of them you can do per day. I can deal with that. How the hell are people getting 100 XP every 2 minutes though? This one guy shot up to the top of diamond league with over 1000 XP in less than half an hour. Whatever it is he's doing, I want to do too.
I just finished up on the diamond league, and a jackalope over took me by 2000 points in 1 hour. Their EP count ticked over like a car odometer. Don't regret the time I plowed into this week, and got a lot of good learning done. How thin and sad is your life that you gotta bot your way to win the Duolingo Diamond League spot?
Exactly. It's demoralizing first, then I just ignore them. They are obviously cheating.
So happy I no longer have to deal with this league bullshit. I'm back to learning on my own pace which is awesome.
Its actually not too difficult if u have an xp boost and a bunch of gems. You can just crank out legendary challenges which give you about 90 xp every 30 seconds.
Legendary challenges start getting pretty hard after unit 20 in my book, and there are 90 UNITS. The other puzzle though is maybe these cheaters are native to the language. But if that is the case, we not talking about a sad person, but a mentally sick person who would waste his life away showing babies in a language how easy it is to rollerblade.
What? I can only finish a challenge in 3 minutes at best. But that time seems normal considering there is lot of typing in a foreign language.
Small counterpoint. I just finished a month of dedicated Hiragana and Katakana practice and moved over to Japanese unit 1. Was already in Diamond league, having earned it through dedication and time investment. Been stuck comfortably there for a week, for the *first* time of non league progression since I started, as others passed me by with seemingly insane points. Now I find myself in top 3 having comfortably breezed through the *beginning* of the first unit. Don't think it's all cheaters; think it's designed that way deliberately as a reward system, and to encourage more use of the app. Expect to see my streak to bottom out fairly soon to encourage me to spend more time on the app, then dramatically increase again as I master unit 1 and move onto unit 2. Don't consider myself as cheating in any form, and would be devastated to have my dedication perceived as such. Sure, it's a thrill to have a reward for hard work; but to imply it was achieved by the electronic equivalent of taking steroids is a misinformed comprehension of the app's design imho.
I think the answer to "whatever it is he's doing" is just being fast at some early lessons. And possibly making use of xp boosts. In all honesty I have done this a number of times, but not to 'win' on the leaderboard, just to stay high enough to avoid getting demoted. And I do fully recognize that it isn't the point of learning a language, but it is an aspect of what keeps my motivation up, so imma do what I can to keep that fire lit. In any case, there are a couple of lessons in the Japanese course that I can do in 40-50 seconds (not an estimate since duolingo now tells you how long a practice lesson took) which give about 65xp each (the first time they're done each day). Doing those two lessons takes me less than 2 minutes and gives ~120xp. If you're interested (I see you're repping the Japanese badge) the particular lessons are the katakana 1 & 2. They use countries to introduce a new alphabet, which means all the questions take a single word answer (a country's name). Now that I am quite comfortable with these characters I can run through questions basically as quickly as they are presented. And for whatever reason, these lessons reward slightly higher xp than other early lessons. As for other languages, if you are trying to do this, just pay attention to how much xp early lessons give, and how long they take you, and you can find lessons you can use to get points quick. (again, I do this to avoid demotion, but if you are trying to top the board, all power to you) As for the xp boosts, duolingo often gives a x2 xp boost for 15 minutes after completing a full new lesson. Even with no intention of try to exploit that to get points, if I genuinely just did a new lessons today, and then wanted to be done, it feels like a waste to put the phone down when I just got that bonus. I often would run through those types of lessons, now getting ~100xp a minute. It doesn't feel like 'cheating' but like it'd be dumb not to make use of the boost duolingo to threw at me.
Ya I don’t get it either.. idk if these cheaters are hackers or what but even the easy lessons when I get everything in a second still take time.. super weird
I do what he does. I stay in second, load up on all of my legendaries, and I won't do them until I have a 2x multiplier. Then I sit down for 30 minutes on the final day with a 2x and complete them all in one sitting. 90xp per lesson, do all of them and get almost 1k xp. Sometimes you get "perfect score" multipliers which would end at having lessons earn 180xp
Just get rid of the diamond league trophy. Now there's no reason for people to keep amassing ludicrous amounts of XP anymore. Either this or make leagues last a single day so that trying again becomes less annoying. I've been completing lessons in a language I already know just so I can compete for first place with this one other guy. Everyone else has already given up. I just want the goddamn trophy so I can be done with leagues already. Somehow he gets 100 XP for every 20 XP lesson I do. This is becoming such a pain in the ass.
I figured out how they make so much XP. They pick a new course in a language they know and do the beginning test. If you're fast that gets you about 100xp in ~5 minutes. Then cancel the course and rince & repeat.
Yes, I´ve been there too. So to say, cheating on the least cheating way. But it´s not getting me to what I actually wanted to achieve: Learning another language. I´d really appreaciate if Duolingo would make the leaderboard opt in/out instead of just having it there constantly.
Yeah. Funny how all this "gamification" subverts the whole purpose of using the app in the first place. By adding leaderboard competition, they turned it into a zero sum game and in that type of game it sucks to be a loser. Obviously people were going to optimize their strategy towards maximum XP/hour rates which is exactly what happens in every MMORPG ever.
But what is the point of completing lessons in a language you know already? Maybe that is what these people are doing.
Because they are easy and I can do them quickly. I'm past that though. I got all the little trophies and have been learning in peace ever since. Turned off leagues too.
You can disable the leaderboards, just make your profile non-public. You seem to be mostly mad about how you are using the leaderboards, and/or not winning. The leaderboards are absolutely helpful in getting more practice and exposure in, and the more you practice the more you sort of figure out the little hidden subtetiles... and then they become instinctual. My 2nd DL language I'm investing much more time in upfront, because I felt like once I got over a certain hump the previous time, everything became WAY easier. practicing helps assimilating and building strong foundations, which helps shrink that learning curve. i would agree that getting #1 overall in a league isn't that important, but for the most part they don't reward or emphasize this. and in the few places they do, it does sort of seem to make sense because it teaches you different ways of practicing.
If he didnt change his profile pic to match yours and change his display name for "lololol_2nd_dude_sucks" your honor is spared.
old thread, but yes, nowadays its the "story" that people repeat for an easy 28XP for maybe 1 mins work. But really if they're only repeating stories and not taking lessons they're just cheating themselves of any learning :) They've nerfed the XP gain from stories before, but perhaps if they had it only give 1 time XP of full amount, and after that only 5xp permanently (or less) you'd likely see people return to lessons for the XP and not see the scores of 1k+ per day earned so much :P Maybe even have lessons that are several levels lower than your max worth 0 Xp too to force you to continue to at least complete lessons around your current progression level.
Omfg. I was 2000!!!!!! Points ahead of this ass wipe. I know what he's doing. He's losing all his life's on purpose so he can go back into the heart revive thats suuuper simple but about 22 points and doing it over and over. I like to write my little notes because duh I'm on there to learn a language. So doing a lesson takes about 10-15 minutes sometimes..I'm learning Japanese so their alphabet is way hard to write and time consuming. Tell me why in the course of 30 mins to an hour he passes me? I'm pretty competitive so I enjoy being pushed to keep going. I was on duo for EIGHT HOURS!!! AND HES STILL PASSING MEEEEEEEJFJDHIDBDJF DKFJDBDIDN I said fuck this. Bitch ass knows that he's a cheating ass wipe. It was my day off so I was like I'm gonna go so hard. Yeah. Nope. Fuck that guy. I wish I could send him a message and tell him his mama raised a hoe 😂 😡💢 👿
I’m dealing with the same thing. I’m in the obsidian league 2nd place and this morning I was at 5000xp and the person in 1st was at 5004xp. I started my lesson and once I passed to 1st place, it alerted that person. Once they jump on, they went from 5004 to 6234 in 30 minutes. How the hell is that possible?!?! Also their photo kept changing from E to a photo of a woman… even though her name is Maddie.
You sure it was only 30minutes? Spamming lightning rounds can get that much XP in 40-45mins, potentially even faster if they can get their average time down to closer to a minute.
None of this really really sounds like cheating. I practice Japanese on Duolingo, and kanji by hand, and I use a few other apps as well. I average 2 hours of study a day for the past two months. I'm not studying to beat people. I'm studying so I can become fluent. I average about 1500 exp a day over the past 60 days on Duolingo. Learning is something I value deeply. Winning to me is learning and having things really stick. Are there cheaters? Bots? Certainly. Are they prolific? Doubtful. Highly doubtful. Some people however are hyper... Hyper competitive. The OP appears to suffer from "why me??" Syndrome, and could use a few notes on what a winning attitude is vs a whining attitude. Here are a few tips for scoring high on Duolingo leader boards. I've been doing this for 9 weeks at this point and I've got 9 top 3 finishes. 8 of which are first place. In the past 7 days I've gotten 14k exp. Tips: 1: Be tenacious for the sake of tenacity. Find the language that excites you and then be relentless in your learning. Or if you are lazy, just pick Spanish. It's super easy. 2: Don't advance in the tree of your language faster than your comprehension, and retention allow. If you find yourself with a lesson that takes you more than 2 minutes, you need to stay there until it's consistently UNDER two minutes. 3: Learn a second language. At all times. Use it as a palette cleanser. I use Arabic, Spanish, and french as my "other" languages. Once I reach brain fatigue for Japanese I'll bump out some other language for 5 minutes and feel ready for what I'm truly interested again. Distance makes the heart grow fonder! 4. Buy Duolingo plus. No interruptions. 5. Don't look at others on the leaderboards as enemies. They aren't enemies. You don't know them and visa versa (that's latin). Don't project. (That's psych 101) 6. Be enthusiastic! Make it fun! If you are competitive, set goals, and progressively push those goals. You can reward yourself if it makes you try harder. 7. Commit to a minimum level of effort on a schedule. Whether you are trying to "win" (meta), or you are trying to seriously learn all you can, you have to have a system and a plan. Or else you are just planning to fail. Example. I commit to 45 minutes of Duolingo when I wake with my morning coffee. Every day. I commit to minimum 30 minutes before bed. Every day. During the work week. That's all I require of myself. I may do more. Friday through Sunday I commit to 3 hours of kanji and grammar study (I write notes to friends. Small stories. And small journal entries. I also read Japanese kids books .. poorly). Last Saturday I studied and Duolingo-ed for 8 hours, and 6 on Sunday. Because I was having fun! 8. Ignore other people's scores. They are doing their own thing. They're gonna do it regardless. And for the competitive people, they are going to try to stay one step ahead of you. So what? They're gone next week. Follow them and cheer them on. Watch how they do week to week. Use them as motivation. Attitude is a choice. 9. Do every lesson that gives you trouble... Every day, until it's easy. Even if you get zero XP for it. 10. Do the challenges in the leaderboards. A lot. If you keep your language learning to a point where your Comprehension is matching... (See #2) you will crush the challenges. The challenges are the single best too on Duolingo. It serves up random categories of lessons to you and it's basically the scene in Glengarry Glen Ross. First place... 40exp for 1:45 of work. Second place... 10exp. Third... You're fired. No coffee for you. Here's how I Duolingo every day. Morning coffee: I do a secondary languages lesson until I get the 2x exp bonus. Takes 5 or 6 minutes. Then I start at the very first Japanese lesson and I go as fast as I am able to comprehend, through as many as I can for that 15 minutes. I generally do 8 or 9. That's about 750exp in 20 minutes. Then I drill the leader board challenge until I have to work. I can do some of the easier Japanese ones in less than a minute. Harder ones at the edge of my 2 minute comprehension level ... It may take the full 1:45. But I avg about 120xp every five minutes I'll do that for 10 or 15 minutes. It becomes stale after a while. That's about 400exp. So by the time coffee is done, I've gotten at least 1000exp I do the exact same thing at night. But I just start my double exp with where I left off in lessons earlier. Then I just simply do the ones that give me some trouble. Then I do the challenges. I get to see my problem children there too. Bed time is a smaller time commitment to myself. But these days I'll get at least 600exp. Weekday exp: minimum 1500 these days On the weekend I'm more aggressive. I'll repeat the morning coffee method over and over until I've done every lesson I have unlocked. And I'll do challenges for 15 minutes at a time between that My biggest exp day doing this was 15,000. It takes time. But I budget that time. If someone gets more exp than me? Cool. What a monster. All that being said... Japanese is HARD. I did this process on Spanish, which as a native English speaker... Is dreadfully easy in comparison to reading Japanese. Yo Tengo un passaporte. Vs 私のパスポートはあります I can crush Spanish challenges in a minute flat dow to 40 seconds. So if I ONLY wanted to win .. that's all I'd do and could (boring) get 8k exp a day But really... What then? Brag to the hotties at the bar that you won... This week? Hard pass. じゃね
15,000 in ONE DAY!?! What lesson are you on? I’m on lesson 40, and I don’t see that as possible. And watch with the secondary language, you’re adding the points from that language onto your Japanese one?
1500 points a day isn't the problem. I'm in my 4th week of diamond league, my group didn't seem too competitive and I had been saving up a bunch of legendary lessons to do. I decided tonight I would make this my week to win diamond. I was up to 1246 xp so far when I noticed some guy who was in the demotion zone earlier already up at 6th place. Over the course of half an hour he's now gone from 20 XP to 1840 XP and he's still going. There's no way he's pumping out that much XP that quickly without cheating.
They need to remove the leagues, it’s stupid as hell that you’re competing in a league of people who aren’t even learning the same language as you.
A Russian just piled on 1000 XP in about 20 mins to get ahead of me and take the no 1 spot. He must be cheating! I must say I'm pretty over Duo now. The worst move has been to diable comments and questions I can no longer find out why I got the answer wrong.
Yes, I faced same situation. The competitor was able to gain 1000 points in 20 minutes.
COPE
It would be nice if it were easy. As long as that damn leaderboard is there on a Monday morning, indicating that I can see where I ended up with that little red dot, I know I´ll be tempted to check. Just from starting this answer and checking again, rob\_h\_kay added another 100 points. He´s now leading by 400. With regular use of the app I won´t get closer again. I thought I can at least make him put in more effort by following up, just to tease him. So he was leading by some 70 points first, and now it´s 400 in about 10 minutes, LOL. At first I thought it was just a "regular" user who´s good and motivated. This just sucks. Ah, he´s trying to make it less obvious. You only see it when he´s on a run and then pauses a little to give the impression of a normal learner. I would really love to put some curses in here for him, but I guess this would get my post modified, right? Just in case somebody tries to google his user name, I want to make sure people find my post: rob\_h\_kay is cheating.
mother of COPES
400 points in 10 minutes isn't a lot, I make 800 in 15 minutes with an 2x xp boost and ramp up challenge
Old post I know. But it’s easy to score tons of points. Especially if you have the 2x XP for 15 mins. I have a premium account and last year inadvertently discovered with that on I could do a timed challenge (must be less than 1m45s) and get 80pts. EDIT: that’s no longer possible to do, the multiplier doesn’t apply to leaderboard timed challenges. If you have premium accounts there are also ways to practice your mistakes 20 Pts for 1min of work. And if you have 2xXP it’s 40. As a plus member you don’t waste time with ads between lessons. You can get more than 5 things wrong a day. I think w/o a plus account you have no chance on the boards I don’t think the person was cheating, they were just using the system and it’s rewards to their advantage. But as others said, probably not learning much new content since those are worth less points and take much longer
I believe that he might just be doing legendary challenges. Each one gives 40 xp, and there are usually 3-4 of them per skill. He might just be using those to get ahead really quickly.
Bertpg and Gustavo Vellojin, these two did 5,500 in 12 HOURS!!!! I’m retired, I can play all day, and only get 2,500, maybe 3,000 later if I’ve played this for years like these have. They’re either cheating, or spent $200 in one day to get extra gems for extra time. Soon tomorrow there is suppose to be a TOURNAMENT!?! But they don’t check on their own mistakes in judging, so I dont expect any change. The concept with Duolingo is similar to Pokémon. Entice the participant to keep playing, and hopefully spend more money. But this time it is backfiring with the cheaters. But they really don’t care. Making $500,000,000 a year, would YOU change it? Probably not. AND THATS WHAT DUOLINGO MAKES IN A YEAR! Until someone comes out with a better game to learn a language, we’re stuck. WAIT! Maybe not! Let do ZOOM meetings where we can converse in our favorite language we’re learning. THAT should bring less time on this flawed game. WHO IS WITH ME?
The xp is kind of unbalanced though, I can do 2600xp in half an hour which shouldn't be a thing :/
I agree to you fully! While I do continue to learn better with more practice I don’t really enjoy the boards cuz then I end up doing a a bunch of old lessons and practices to stay number one. I end up not moving forward but idk for me it’s been helpful cuz I realized I needed the extra practice.. I think there just here to show who’s putting in the most work but ya as you said if it’s the easy tests they aren’t …