Monthly Challenge Hub

Hello, and welcome to what I hope will be a long-running custom on these forums! Some members and I have participated in a server where every month, there was a theme, and getting a shiny that fit that theme would award you with a special role color. There weren't repeating themes, meaning that every new month brought a brand new role to collect. This was a brilliant system, but there were a couple of issues with this: first, the way that member roles work on Discord is that a higher-priority one will override the rest, full stop. This meant that, no matter how much you liked a month's color, if you participated in the next month's theme, you would no longer be represented by that color. This unintentionally disincentivized hunting if you liked your current color better than what the new month had to offer.

The second issue was that these roles were only available for the month, and then you could never get them again. This could be a powerful motivator, but given that shiny hunting is incredibly dependent on RNG, it also induced collector's anxiety. (At least for me. That could very well be a skill issue on my part :p) It was personally stressful for me to see that there were prize roles I could never complete because I hadn't been present while they existed, or I had but had been too busy or unlucky to snag the color.

That brought me to the system I'd like to use on these forums: badges. These are little decorations that appear on your profile, as well as in a pop-up on your mini-profile. We will have a theme every month - maybe sometimes not linked to a month, we'll see - and the prize badge will only be obtainable during that month. However, they will not be locked by year - in March 2024, you will be able to go for both the badge from March 2023 and the new one introduced with that rotation of the event. We will still be doing new themes every time we come back to a month! But none will be lost to time. I hope that this brings out the best parts of the system I was used to, while mitigating the parts I found unfortunate.

So, this is the main thread for this event! Each month will have its own discussion thread, but if you have suggestions for the next month's theme, badge, or just want to talk about the concept of the challenge, here is the place.

This will be outlined in every thread hereafter, but as long as a shiny is legitimate, you can get a badge for finding it. "Legitimate" in this case refers to anything (full odds, methods, RNG manip; main series, spinoff, fangame, etc.) as long as it is not hacked in and is not obtained using a speed-up function. It may be contentious to allow RNG manipulation, but here's the way I see it. Not many of our users are going to prefer RNG manip. If that is their preferred way to get shinies, I'd like them to be able to participate. If it isn't their preferred route, and they take the time to learn it anyway to get the badge, I think they've earned it.