Black Hole Badges

If you are new to Khan Academy Herculean is going to be near impossible!

Yeah, that's true. On my profile I have a progress bar set up to track how close I am to having mastered every math skill on KA. I'm at about 75%. So I thought, "Hey, Herculean's not too bad." Then I remembered that the math skills only account for about one third of the skills on KA. I have a friend who claims to have earned the Herculean badge at one point, and he helpfully informed me that the computer programming classes are also required to earn Herculean. That puts me at about 20-30% to Herculean. I got a bit of ways to go. Also, in case anyone hasn't heard yet, UPDATE: New Black Hole Badge: Maelstrom. Achieve a Level of 100 (become proficient in 4950 skills, which I believe is about 70-80% of the total KA skills).

Don't you think it's a little weird that the staff tried to conceal the original Black Hole Badges, but the new "Maelstrom" achievement's right there IN YOUR FACE? Just reach Level 100, or master 5050 skills. 

Hmmm. Good point. They may have thought it was obvious, if you have badges for 5, 10, 15, 25, 50, and 75, and reaching 100 is possible, then where is the badge for 100? All of a sudden there's a new Black Hole Badge. Yeah, I can see how it would be obvious, at least to existing KA members, if not some new ones as well. It's also a requirement for two more Black Hole Badges. Maelstrom: Become proficient in 4950 skills. You can't master a skill unless you are already proficient in it. Atlas: Master 5000 skills. You'll likely get Atlas not too long after Maelstrom. Artemis: Master 7500 skills. Currently Unobtainable. If they ever reach this stage, they may make another Black Hole Badge for Level 125. But that would mean proficiency in 7750 skills. KA has several hundred more skills to implement before it will be possible.

Supersonic Seven what level are you at? Have you gotten Tempest yet?

Unfortunately I'm not quite that active. I'm at level 53 right now. I come back every once in a while though to submit new projects/programs and keep the streak going. I'm about 20% to Tesla which does help to motivate me a bit but since KA removed a lot of the Energy Point farming badges, there's not a lot of ways to quickly improve that. I'm trying though. 20% to Tesla, 30% to Atlas, 25% to Herculean, 20% to Artemis, and 30% to Maelstrom. My five goals. Still some ways to go though.

What is the herculean achievement ?
I am new to KA so I think the achievement was removed before I joined because of which it is not visible to me.

The Herculean is a Black Hole Badge. This particular Black Hole Badge is more than just hidden; it doesn't even show up in the first place. It can still be attained by completing the tasks necessary however, that is, attaining proficiency in every KA skill to date.

when you said that Artemis is impossible, do you mean only through student courses or educator courses as well.

Both, both are impossible by now, the site doesn't have 7,500 skills available to master yet.

New Badge Ideas:

Mathematician Badge Line: Complete x math skills, final one called Lebniz

Computer Programmer Badge Line, complete x computer programming challenges, final one called Claude Shannon

New avatar ideas: blood orange juice squid: unlocked by getting a certain number of energy points on halloween/ surrounding days and on days with a blood moon

graph paper avatars: variants for blobby, stelly, sneak peak, purple pi, leafers, piceratops, primosaur, duskpin, aqualine, and starky, unlocked by getting certain mathematician badges and getting certain energy point amounts from math things

Cyborg avatars: variants for hopper, winston, oh noes, leafers, piceratops, primosaur, duskpin, aqualine, and starky, unlocking similar to that of graph paper avatars, but you need computer programmer badges and energy points obtained from computer programming

That sounds cool and interesting! As someone gifted in mathematics and computer programming myself, I would find it really neat if these badges were actually on the site. We've been needing a few more repeatable badges that drop Energy Points recently lol.

Mathematician Badge Line: Used to be called challenge patches as well, was retired :(

Computer Programmer Badge Line: Called challenge patches.

New avatars: YES PLEASE!!! I've finished all the avatars and most of the badges, and have completely run out of motivation to keep going... Tesla's way too far away to tempt me.

Agreed we need new avatars. Also backgrounds was cool back in the day, was removed. Bring those back too. Also bring back missions and all retired badges.

Wait what are missions? And yes, I agree.

Bringing back the old mastery challenges would be nice too... they were easy badge/energy point earners.

Black hole badge idea

Box office: submit an animation made on khan academy to a amateur short film competition… and win

New black hole badge idea: Apollo: collect every sun badge (not the retired ones), and master 5000 skills, gives same energy point amount as Artemis, and also gives solar avatar variants (golden, glowing). new bonus reward for artemis: lunar avatar variants (silver, glowing)

Energy Point Leaderboard | Khan Academy Wiki | Fandom

This has the leaderboard and all the badges and how in the world does area 51 have so many energy points

What is going

Hi Aaryan Bhattar, apparently, this user is a Hacker, if you want to measure someone's progress on the platform, the most reliable statistics are levels and the amount of black hole Badges, energy points and badges quantity are quite broken, cause in the past people used to farm badges and energy points repeating exercises, also, retired badges could give them a lot of energy points, these are retired so the numbers don't inflate even more.

Yechidoth Taw Immodicus I actually happen to know the user Area 51 in real life, he said to get as many energy points as he did he didn't actually hack in points, he instead used a whole bunch of exploits in old KA, such as longer videos giving thousands of energy points, whereas now they only give a maximum of 850. He also left very short videos auto-looping in the background of his browser for months on end, likely a reason why videos now only give 100 points when rewatching. Furthermore he grinded out thousands of now-retired badges like 299792458 m/s which give energy points per completion for hours on end almost every day. He also completed all available courses at the time up to a few years ago. He said he would have gone further but ran into several caps, such as video watch cap mast 32K or so due to a 16-bit integer limit, or Energy Point rollover just beyond 1 billion due to a 32-bit integer limit. Even though KA may have upgraded its systems now, back when he was active there were a lot more exploits and code instability that he took advantage of.

That's really interesting Supersonic Seven, I don't doubt you, when I said hacking I had in mind what you said, like the badge strategy and old mechanics, today It's much harder to gain energy points, so it can be misleading, for example, an old user can have 20 Million energy points, but by the standards today that would be much less, like, I don't know, 5 Million in practice, many users today who have less energy points in fact used Khan Academy more than old users.

These exploits from the old code that the user done, for me shows and proves how curious and nerd they are.

ohhhh, i get it Yechidoth Taw Immodicus

But isnt that cheating?

I made my own question and comment to increase discussion about this topic

Black Hole badges – Khan Academy Help Center

I would say so, like it's a trick, not an organic way to obtain you know? but he is right when he said this isn't hacking.

It's not cheating if you're taking advantage of what the developers gave you. Unless the hack you're using wasn't even supposed to be remotely possible, like for example if you could spam-click the profile button for energy points or something.

Wingfeather

Whatever word you use for it, playing videos in the background without watching them to get the points is not using the system as intended.  Most such hacks waste resources in some way.  Even those that don't waste resources, result in giving one person the same award for little effort that someone else earned by doing what was expected.  I'm not sure why some people see that as okay or even good (at least until they're the one who did what was expected and sees others with the same award for using hacks).

I'm sure Area 51 didn't see it as "hacking", more like "using a feature to get obscene amounts of Energy Points". When I talked to him he made it sound like he just wanted to push the KA stats to their limits, rather than "I'm gonna see if I can break KA by hacking". You might call it hacking, but it certainly wasn't malicious or anything of the sort.

I agree with Supersonic Seven

Using a feature to gain energy points isn't doing anyone harm. If anything it proves to be a source of awe, not discouragement. I speak from experience since I am quite new to KA and these giants actually motivated me to do better. Also, farming energy points doesn't go against the true purpose of KA as just watching the videos or doing the quizzes provide some form of learning, no matter how small.

Exactly, for example, I'm trying something similar with the level system, I just want to know how many levels there are, and if Atlas is already possible to obtain, I'm Level 110 right now, so if there's a max level, it has to be 111 or higher, I think that the actual max level is something around 120~130, I would say 124~