I was very fond of the Itrials. as a nutball badger, the hardest badge for me EVER to acquire was "avoids the green stuff" as part of the positron trial.
The Trial badges are what finally broke my casual-badge collecting.
Oh, I had pretty much every badge when the Trials first popped up, "casual" seems a little odd even to my ears, I wasn't an obsessive collector but after being around since the game launched and playing quite a lot... it reminds me of that scene in GroundHog Day:
Phil: Well maybe the *real* God uses tricks, you know? Maybe he's not omnipotent. He's just been around so long he knows everything.I never saw myself as being particularly good at badge-hunting, I just had an awesome SG to run with and had been around long enough that picking up a badge now and then added up. When you can't sleep and you're online at 5am, what else is there to do *but* grind those crafting badges? Go pick off a Contaminated in Recluses Victory?
I never cared for the Master badges though. I ran with a great SG that was probably too good for me and was lucky enough to assist on multiple Master runs. Conceptually I abhorred those badges, the notion of a person's badge progress being determined by a different player's skill or simply being lucky enough to run with the right crowd never set well with me. It didn't matter that I came out on the plus side of that equation, I knew it was negatively impacting other badgers who might not be so lucky so it constantly grated.
Then I saw badge runs during Trials being deliberately griefed, or failed over a momentary network hiccup, or Real Life (tm) taking priority at the Wrong Time. When you have 32 people cooperating the odds of any one of those 32 having (being) a problem at any one time goes way up compared to 8-man teams.
Realized I couldn't support badging anymore, just wasn't for me. More to the point, the Trials forced to the surface that badging never really was for me to begin with. Removed all the badge-tracking stuff and just played the game until the doors closed.