Important: Daily Lab Limit

[Yugali]

Hey there Arcade Players,

We hope the new lab limit is helping you reach your learning and earning goals in the Arcade! However, we also believe it's important for you to understand the reasoning behind this rule.

Why this change? Because you deserve to progress toward your cloud skills goals as efficiently and flexibly as possible.

Why the Limit at All?

The Arcade needs to remain a fair and accessible platform for everyone. This limit helps us manage platform resources responsibly. For example, some users relaunch labs multiple times or use workarounds to access specific content repeatedly, which can negatively impact the platform experience for other players.

However, if managed correctly, this limit can be more than enough for anyone to achieve all the milestones in the program and more.

✅ Point #1: We have just started the new season of the arcade. "Speed" has NEVER led to learning, whether it’s learning cloud or anything else. You still have a LOT, LITERALLY A LOT OF TIME to reach your milestones, so DO NOT worry at all.

✅ Point #2: We also understand that learning can be overwhelming sometimes. To ensure you have the right balance between learning and everything else, this limit can be helpful.

✅ Point #3: We understand that not everyone can successfully complete the labs in a single attempt and may need time for learning. For such cases, we recommend that users first go through the lab instructions and understand them before starting. That has always been the correct way of learning.

Learning for all: Thank you for your dedication and patience as we work to make the Arcade learning experience better for everyone. We’re introducing this new lab limit in an effort to find the right balance: you should have plenty of room to grow your skills, but we want to keep the platform running smoothly for all. 

Here’s to reaching your next big milestone in the Arcade.

See you in The Cloud!

[codwahetro]

are the swags are same for both arcade facilitator  and normal arcade games?

[Abhishek213]

There are no swags for facilitator program.

[Medam_Kowsik]

If it is true, Im glad I didnt register for facilitator program, 
And I am new , can you please help me understand how to get credits for me?

[Riya1111]

we people are waiting for swags reliving and we got lab limiting 🙂 

@Yugali 

[darshansharma_]

It was never about learning because if it was, number of labs to complete in a week/month would have been a lot less and ordered from easy to hard. 

It was always about SPEED and SWAGS.

[kc3]

It is quite hard to come up with an alternative metric measuring learning. Completed labs/skill badges is almost the only possibility if you exclude learning paths or certifications. And I am pretty sure that the arcade, and perhaps also the people working on it, are evaluated with that same metric. 

[lina4lina]

My challenge is that sometimes labs aren't working so I have to retry and that uses one of my tries.  I was doing a BigQuery lab where it said data would be loaded, it wasn't.  I stopped lab and restarted and then data was loaded.  But I used 2 of my lab allotments to finish 1 lab.  Sometimes for challenge labs, it can take 2-3 tries to get it right.  

Also, I have no clue when I can do my next lab as it isn't clear when my lab limit is reset so I have to just try randomly?  This definitely isn't conducive to learning.  And as others have said, some days I can do 1 lab/day, some 0 but weekends, I can do more.

[kc3]

Your lab limit does not reset per se. The check looks for the 10th-last lab which has to be 24h ago. If you do your labs today at 1pm, 2pm, ... 10pm, then tomorrow you can only start your first after 1pm and your 2nd after 2pm. It is a rolling window check, always looking at the 10 last labs.

[Lekesh]

Ma'am is there any way i can enroll under any facilitator? is there any benifit of enrolling under facilitator? can participate in google arcade from today to get swags without enrolling under any facilitator?

[Abhishek213]

Forms closed already you can try next year as of now play as gen players

[Lekesh]

can't i earn arcade points without facilitator by getting skill badges and completing labs?

[Abhishek213]

Yes you can

[yashgoyal365]

Yes you can earn Arcade points without enrolling in Facilitator Program. For more info you can read below attached post as well.
Milestone System - Arcade and Arcade Facilitator 

[100]

I don't understand that community team @Yugali  @kothalkar what they want, they want that we can complete each an every lab for each badge or we left some badge so we can't reach our milestone because after 15 Labs in one day fair enough for transparency but now 10 Labs this is not good for students as well as professional. Please consider my post to the Team Members  because One badge consists 13 to 14 labs, how we can complete  this in new time frame.

If anyone not in facilitators programme they can't reach ultimate milestone.

[PDas]

Yes, you are absolutely right bro, this not a transparency this is called vulnerable rule  no one can can meet this criteria. 

If I complete my 10 Labs today at 11 pm, I can't touch my google cloud account for 24H, it means my second days will totally lapsed and I am waiting for 3rd days it's really funny rule @Yugali 

Thank you Arcade Team. 

[Gouri94]

Appreciate you @100 , this a so called ruled it never ever increased participants speed as well as proficiency on Arcade because it is  a vast program. 

[kalam2002]

Hello, i reached to champions milestone without participating in the facilitator program

[hanisntsolo]

There would come a point when daily limit would be only 5 labs. Marks my comment here!

They are eliminating maximum people from the program.

I understand the lab limits and stuff but I got discouraged 🫤 using simple math does not add up to the limit I was trying to reach so dropped out of arcade!

[janusz_szpilews]

Let me join the rant. I work full-time, so practically I can only do labs on weekends. Just did some labs on Friday evening as a warm-up and today I was greeted with a "wait 24 hours" message. It looks that everything contributes to the lab counter, not only subscriptions but all Arcade games including Trivia quizzes. If some people (or bots) are doing labs in an evil way you should target them directly. And please exclude Arcade games from the limit.

[kc3]

I wonder what effects actually are at play here. An unexpected scale of people participating in the arcade, a huge amount of people abusing, or AI demands on resources now taking more and more of the cake? It would be quite interesting to hear about some of the details. 

[janusz_szpilews]

The explanation in the initial post is somewhat cryptic. There was always a limit on accessing the same lab using the subscription. While I agree that collecting 80 skills badges in a week should be impossible, I think the current restrictions are too broad.

[Rushina1]

makes sense...limit the skill badges then and not the monthly trivia and level games!

[hanisntsolo]

++

[Rushina1]

I agree and as someone commented here, it shd be 12 midnight to reset counter! this 24 hours from the time of the last lab completed it just pits!

[kc3]

The trouble with "midnight" is that it is time-zone dependent. And if you set it to "local time-zone of the participant", you open the door to manipulations and people hopping virtually from one time-zone to the next. 

This quota seems to address demand surge. So potentially you could introduce something like demand surge pricing to help people that only have time on weekends. Example based on the current quota of 10 labs: Give everyone a 70 lab credit for the whole week, with 10 labs a day at regular rate, and charge them higher if they use more than 10 labs a day. That could create a bit more flexibility for participants like janusz_szpilews.

But anyway, I wonder if the lab quota will go away after September, once the facilitator period ends?

[Abhishek213]

Yes it will end with facilitator event

[Thumbs]

hmm, makes sense. time-zone could be UTC, the way we place code 🙂 does away with the time-zone issue

[hanisntsolo]

Ever heard of GMT?

[hanisntsolo]

Brother sign the petition on homepage

[jishanahmed]

I was okay with the previous limit, but now you have reduced it to 10 (altough looking at the scoreboards, some have worked a way around it), it means that if I retry a couple of Labs, it takes 2 or 3 days to complete one of the Milestone parts, return it back to the original amount of 15 !!!!!

[Abhijeetsri]

Extend the date of facilitator program then.

[Abhishek213]

Event won't be extended we have asked them already.

[Abhijeetsri]

Then they should reduce the number of labs inside a skill badge .

[Nandhagopan]

@Yugali I didn't received the arcade swags yet. What will I do ?

[SateeshAkula]

@Yugali It is understandable that many users are participating in completing challenges and lab resources are increasing day to day. This might have impacted your infra to allocate the resources daily.

But as we signed-up, the terms and conditions of the arcade program didn't include anything about any changes to the challenge in the middle like these. Moreover, users may have agreed to reduced quote changes for equal opportunity. In addition to that, users haven't provided any professional commitment to login at a particular time of a day to finish the challenge.

If a user logged in at 10 AM, exhausted the daily limit in an hour on a certain day just because he got some private time. It doesn't mean he had to wait for 24 hours i.e [11 AM of next day] to launch a lab. This questions the fairness of your decision and commitments in allowing the participants to clear the challenge. If at all an individual choose to make next login after 8 PM, this new rule is taking away the participants time.

Participants have their own professional commitments, and their daily routine which may vary each day. Arcade challenges are cleared in their own private time. Quote limits reset shouldn't be based on log-in to log-in activities. If you are not intentionally making these changes to prevent participants from clearing challenges, I request the team to roll-back to older terms.

Older Terms:

1. Daily lab limit quote was 15 to an user 

2. Each day these lab quotes reset at 12 midnight.

New Terms:

1. Reduced to 10 labs per user account

2. Daily quote resets based on user's last lab usage, irrespective of day change.

I hope this post will reach the right time. Kindly respect the privacy and quality of life of every individual. New terms are not helping participants, this questions the intentions & fairness of this program. Participants aren't professionally employed by google or qwiklabs. If you wish to provide less rewards to participants, please be more creative.

Thank you

[darshansharma_]

@Yugali Yes, changing the lab limit in between an ongoing session is unfair to those who have yet to complete a lot of labs. Some people have already got 60+ arcade points.  If you really want to make a change with respect to learning, consider only those people who perform lab all the months till December, filter out those who have rigged the system by having 60+ arcade points achieved in the very 2nd month of a new session, or those who use multiple accounts (10-20) and get swags delivered to the same address. 

[Abhishek213]

Many surprizes are yet to come.

[hanisntsolo]

Its a rolling window there are limited swag stocks, simply they wanna minimize the number of people reaching the ultimate milestone.

[Abhishek213]

Still people are increasing so limit isn't helping much

[Killwish]

Not received my swags till now.