Because I'm off this week, and bored, here's my thoughts on the badges and badge hunting:
1. The game developers should officially track the badge hunting stats instead of letting some third party website do it. This lends legitimacy to the whole process of badge hunting and makes it completely unambiguous who holds the OFFICIAL badge hunting titles in the various categories that might exist.
2. What is and is not considered officially to be a badge should be chosen carefully by the devs. All official badges that are tracked by the badge hunting software would be called "Badges" and would have some sort of descriptor that identifies them as "Badges" which all non-badges do not have.
3 Not all items that act like badges count officially as Badges, per se. For example, you might have some type of "collectable badge-eque object" that you give out for a specific event to those in attendance. I would call that a "Pin" or something, and NOT lump it in with the officially-tracked Badges that the badge hunting hobby counts.
4. Veteran Reward stuff that can only be earned for time spent subscribed or whatever should be marked by non-badge objects only.
5. Any Accolades that carry with them buffs or prestige powers should also not be badges in and of themselves, though they might require the earning of any number of badges to unlock the Accolade. This way badge hunters looking to get some hard-to-get badge might be able to entice friends to help them get that badge via teaming up. For example, I might want the Zookeeper badge, but I can't defeat that many Rikti Monkeys all by myself that quickly, so I recruit some friends who mostly only care about getting the Vanguard Medallion (which is not a badge now, but still gives a prestige power with long recharge time). They help me get the one badge I would have trouble getting myself, I help them get their prestige powers, it's a win-win for all of us.
6. There should still be plenty of Badges that take a SH1TL0AD of time spent grinding for to actually get. I'm not trying to make it easy, but I am trying to make it FAIR, and those are different goals.
7. Choice of alignment ought not make one's badge-hunting outlook significantly easier or harder overall. I'm referring to the Isolator badge type stuff here, mostly. I'm sure some badges will be easier or harder to get based on powers, etc, and I'm all for that, but I would try to make the same badge open to everyone in the same way, not give heroes a whole map full of Contaminated and then close that map off to other alignments, Or if you are going to do that, make a different badge that works the same way in the favor of the villains. That way all alignments have to grind for their version of "the hard-to-get one".
Edit:
8. It would be cool if there were badges that are inherently easy for one class to get while being much harder, but not impossible for the others to get. CoX had this type of stuff, it was like badges for amount of damage resisted, or amount of buff/healing applied to others, etc. It would be cool if each class had it's own "easy to get" badge in that sense.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
When it comes to dividing badges into categories the main distinction the Devs of CoT need to take into account is whether a badge is an "account-based" badge or a "character-based" badge.
Account based badges would be things like the Anniversary badges or other "one time only" badges like the Kickstarter badge. These badges are geared more towards things that the player had to handle or deal with in the real world instead of things that would directly affect individual in-game characters.
Character based badges would be the vast majority of the rest of the badges in the game such as Exploration or Defeat badges. These mainly deal with anything the individual character had to be directly involved with and usually (strictly) have nothing to do with "real life" dates or things related to the real world.
When looking to see which badges a character/player has earned the account-based badges would be common to any character you're playing. If you have 29 of them those same 29 would show up no matter which character you're playing because they are not technically linked to any single character - if anything they are linked only to you, the player. A character's character-based badges would naturally only show up on the specific character you're playing at the moment.
This means that one-time-only badges will no longer be "trapped" on characters you want to delete or re-roll. As account-based badges they will always be linked to you regardless of character. As far as which badges would then be "official" you could then declare that only character based badges matter. This means that a player who starts the game 5 years after someone else would have the same chance to earn all of the "official" badges because the ones they missed based on real life would not matter.
As to your specific point about how "hard" should hard-to-get badges be I have no problem if there are a few that might take as much as 3-6 months of regular daily play to get. CoH had a few badges like this, but its real problem was that it had a badge or two (like Empath) that would have literally taken 20+ years of regular daily play to get. Basically they were horribly broken and eventually got serious redefinitions to fix them. Hopefully CoT will not start out with any obvious mistakes like that.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]