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Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

Logged in, watched the tour, feel left out in the cold now.

* Lots of quests/suggestions/activities require stuff I don't have. I somehow expected more easily available things (i.e. run/cycle/workouts without the need for gear)

* English's a foreign language to me. I can talk you to insanity if we're discussion nerd stuff, but reading most of the quests is gibberish without Google Translate. Add more graphics so that I don't have to guess that much.

For now this seems to be heavily focused on native English speakers that like dumbbells/weights and have a good understanding of the science of fitness. That is, not me.

Maybe I kind of expected the WoW style easy gratification at first.. ;-)

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We freely admit that there's a heavy skew toward weightlifting on the site at the moment, but we're focusing on adding more quests/achievements around cardio and other activities quite shortly.

1st) Awesome Idea. I have no idea how many times I got in trouble as a kid for OD'ing on FF3 and 7. Now that I no longer play RPG's but do dig the gym, this is a great paralell.

2) Easy fix: Allow users to set which equipment they have when they first log on. Do it by classes: calisthenics only, bands and dumbbells, home gym, full gym etc etc. This way you can normalize the quests across different classes of equipment and eventually set up for competitions (random battle?!?! lol) between people with different classes of equipment but similar fitness levels according to whatever benchmarks you set.

All in all, looking forward to seeing how this turns out. Good luck!

and it's still weird for weight lift...

i'd love to go to the workout with my cellphone and a pre-typed program for the day, and just fill in the repetitions and weight i actually did.

this way it's just another facebook for gym rats. no added value that updating my facebook didn't give already

I would vehemently disagree with the statement that it's "Facebook for gym rats" or that it doesn't provide value outside of updating your FB profile with your workout logs, but thanks for the opinion.

sorry if i sounded harsh. ok, it has specific badges and plenty of stuff for motivation, and i think that was your main goal. nothing that actually guides or facilitate, which was what i was expecting, maybe.

All of my running friends already post daily to their facebook status how many miles they've run that day.

We're still pretty early on in development. Fitness insights and guidance tools are absolutely planned :)

How about building the achievements around programs that will actually result in real improvement? Or around programs to achieve certain goals?

Everybody always wants cardio. I think because that is what most people do. But that isn't going to make you fit by any useful definition of the word.

We intend to build out functionality to let us offer programs around specific goals. The quest system is a precursor to this, but the idea is to have a fun way of offering structured guidance to the user and move them to specific outcomes.

And believe me, I'm in agreement with you about cardio. It's pretty worthless in many cases :)

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