One of the hidden risks in any long-running reputation system is path dependence. The players who were around in the messy experimental years often end up with outsized scorecards compared to those who arrive later, even if the newcomers are doing harder, more meaningful work. @Yield Guild Games is now old enough that this problem is real: the first seasons of quests and badges looked very different from today’s onchain guild ecosystem. If YGG wants its reputation layer to stay fair over a decade, it has to start treating reputation as a timeline with eras, not a single flat scoreboard where every badge counts forever in the same way.
Right now, YGG’s stack is already richer than a simple “XP counter.” Players and guilds accumulate soulbound badges across questing programs, seasonal campaigns and onchain guild activity. Early systems like the Guild Advancement Program and Reputation & Progression turned seasonal quests and SBT badges into XP, while the newer Guild Protocol and onchain guild framework treat those badges as the backbone of identity and trust. Over multiple seasons, hundreds of different badges have been issued for play, testing, community roles and special events, all anchored to wallets as non-transferable proof of action.
The problem is that those early badges were experiments. Some were granted for fairly shallow tasks, or for activities that made sense in the “first wave” of play-to-earn but look less relevant in today’s mentorship- and contribution-driven model. Others came from short-lived programs or partner campaigns that no longer exist. Yet in many scoring models, those legacy badges still contribute to reputation just like more modern, high-signal achievements such as leading an onchain guild, running events, or mentoring new players. Over time, early experimental badges risk becoming an inherited advantage that newer cohorts can never realistically catch up with.
Splitting reputation into eras is a way to acknowledge that the design of the system itself evolves. Instead of pretending that a badge earned in a 2021 campaign and a badge earned in a 2026 onchain guild season are identical signals, #YGGPlay can say: these come from different design epochs, with different goals, rules and exploitation risks. The score can still draw from the entire history, but it does so with context: “what did this badge mean in its own era, and how should that era sit alongside the others?” That mindset reframes reputation as a narrative arc rather than a static high-score table.
A practical first step is to define clear era boundaries tied to protocol milestones. One obvious split is the pre-GAP questing era, when badges were simpler and more ad hoc. A second is the GAP and RAP era, when seasons, XP and reputation locks became formalized. A third is the emerging Guild Protocol era, where onchain guilds, subDAO structures and deeper contribution metrics come into play. There may soon be a fourth era centered on onchain publishing and more integrated game pipelines. Each era reflects a different underlying “theory of merit,” so it makes sense to segment reputation along these lines instead of flattening everything into one pool.
Once eras are defined, scores inside each era can be normalized internally before being combined. Instead of raw badge counts, you compute an era-relative rank: how far above or below the median is this player within that era’s population? That transforms “I farmed 40 easy badges in Era 1” into “I was in the top X% of Era 1 contributors,” which is then comparable to “top Y% in Era 3” even though the badge designs are completely different. Normalization also protects against badge inflation: if an era had hundreds of noisy badges, the system still cares about where you stood relative to your peers, not how many icons you collected.
The next design lever is cross-era weighting. A simple approach is to give each era a cap on how much it can contribute to a global score. For example, early experimental years might be capped at a certain share of total reputation, with more mature eras gradually taking a larger slice as design stabilizes. Another approach is to apply a gentle recency curve: earlier eras never drop to zero, but their contribution slowly tapers unless it is reinforced by continued activity in later periods. That way, early pioneers keep a meaningful head start, but it does not become an insurmountable wall for someone who joins three years later and consistently delivers.
Eras also give a better language for describing career arcs. In a flat system, a wallet with many old badges and little recent activity might rank similarly to someone who has been steadily contributing across multiple seasons. In an era-aware system, you can distinguish “Era 1 champion who faded,” “Era 3 late bloomer,” or “cross-era pillar who shows up in every design generation.” That nuance matters when guilds and partners are choosing leaders, moderators or long-horizon collaborators. A single global score hides those patterns; an era-split profile reveals them.
A separate question is what to do with truly experimental or low-signal badges. Rather than deleting or hiding them, a more respectful approach is to compress them into meta-badges: one emblem that says “participated in the early experiment phase,” another that indicates “beta tester in legacy partner campaigns,” and so on. The underlying SBTs stay onchain as historical artifacts, but their effect on the active reputation score is routed through a small number of higher-level categories with tightly controlled weights. The RAP idea of forging multiple achievements into distilled experience already points in this direction; era-based meta-badges are a natural extension.
This is also where decay and contextualization beat hard resets. Players understandably resist the idea that their early achievements might be “taken away.” Splitting by eras allows @Yield Guild Games to say: nothing is removed, but we now interpret it in the context of the era’s design and maturity. Early badges become part of a “founder” chapter of someone’s story: still visible, still respected, but no longer the main determinant of what they can access today. That framing is psychologically important; it turns rebalancing from a punishment into a natural outcome of a living system.
From a fairness perspective, era-splitting addresses the structural disadvantage of new entrants. If all badges ever minted contribute equally, there is a real risk that older cohorts compound their lead indefinitely, especially if early programs had generous rewards. Studies of online communities show that when newcomers feel permanently behind a small founding elite, participation and innovation suffer. By carving reputation into eras and moderating the weight of early experimental stages, YGG can keep its early contributors honored without turning them into an untouchable aristocracy.
Technically, eras are straightforward to encode. Every badge and SBT already has a mint timestamp, issuer and program metadata. Era flags can be added at the contract or indexer layer, mapping ranges of timestamps and program IDs to named epochs. Reputation engines then read raw badge data, group by era, apply per-era scoring rules and output both era-specific scores and global aggregates. Nothing about the underlying onchain guarantees changes; what changes is the way scoring logic interprets the same raw history.
The more interesting part is governance. Deciding where one era ends and another begins is not a purely technical choice; it encodes value judgments about what “maturity” looks like. YGG can treat era definitions and cross-era weights as governed parameters, with proposals that include both data (for example, evidence that a new questing or guild framework is stable) and social input from guild leaders and players. The Guild Protocol concept already positions reputation as a shared public good; era management would become one of the key levers the community tunes over time.
There is also room for experimentation at the edges. For example, YGG could pilot “limited-lifetime” badges in future eras whose scoring weight is explicitly tied to the era in which they were earned, or create special era transition quests that reward players who help test new systems and then sunset those badges into purely historical status later. These patterns help make the rules of the game explicit: players know from the start which achievements are meant to be permanent pillars and which are temporary experiments.
In the long run, splitting $YGG reputation into eras is less about nerfing early adopters and more about future-proofing the ecosystem. Web3 gaming will change massively over the next decade; so will the kinds of contributions that matter. A reputation layer that refuses to acknowledge its own history will slowly drift out of sync with reality. An era-aware system, by contrast, treats change as part of the design: each generation of badges lives in its own chapter, with its own logic, and the overall story of a player’s career emerges from how those chapters stack together.
If YGG gets this right, a player’s profile in ten years will read like a well-structured CV rather than a chaotic wall of icons. “Early experimenter in the first quest seasons. Core contributor in the onchain guild era. Long-term mentor and organizer in the publishing era.” Early badges will still be there, but they will sit in their proper place as the beginning of the story, not as a permanent shortcut to the ending. And that, ultimately, is what a healthy reputation system should offer: not just a memory of what people did, but a fair and evolving way to understand who they have become.
@Yield Guild Games #YGGPlay $YGG
