Levelling that moves, a leaderboard worth looking at, and badges that render

Chat levels were priced so that Level 10 took about eight weeks of ordinary talking and the top tier took years, which is not a ladder, it is a wall. The curve is redrawn, so everybody wakes up several levels higher than they went to bed. The leaderboard is a card now instead of a list, and the achievement badges on your rank card actually show their art.

- Levelling is roughly three times faster, and your level goes up the day it ships.
- Nobody is overtaken: the points you already earned are worth more, in the order you already stood in.
- /level top is drawn like your rank card, with your own row lit up.
- Every achievement has its real AQW badge, at the same size as the ones beside it.

**Chat levels**

Run /level rank to see where you land.

The climb is about three times shorter: Level 10 used to cost 3,250 points and now costs 1,120. Level 25 went from 17,500 to 5,800, and Level 75, which is an achievement on the rank card, from 146,250 to 47,400. At the old rate that last one was several years of talking every day.

You keep your place in the queue: What changed is how many levels a point buys, not how many points a message earns. That is deliberate: paying more per message would let somebody who joined this week pass people who earned tens of thousands of points one minute at a time. Everybody moves up together and the order is untouched. If you were on 3,250 points you were Level 10 and you are now Level 18.

Level roles catch up on their own: Any reward role you have now cleared the bar for is granted the next time you level up, and no announcement fires for the jump itself.

Yap points are the same number they always were: A message is still worth one point, once a minute, per server. Nothing about what you have earned was rewritten.

**The leaderboard**

A card, not a list: /level top used to answer with ten lines of text next to a command that draws a rank card. It is drawn now, in the same colours as your card: avatars, level, how far into it each person is, and gold, silver and bronze on the top three.

Your own row is lit: If you are in the top ten, your row is picked out, because that is the thing anybody opens a leaderboard to find.

**Rank card badges**

The achievement strip along the bottom of /level rank.

They all show their art now: The badges are named from the AQW wiki, which spells a lot of them differently from where we first read them, so two thirds of the strip had quietly fallen back to a plain glyph. All of them resolve again.

And they are all the same size: Some badge files carry an invisible border that nothing can see and every measurement can, so those badges were being drawn smaller than their neighbours for no reason anybody could point at.

No more circle around them: Badges used to be cut into a disc, which suited the round ones and sliced the wings, blades and spikes off everything else. They are drawn as they are.

Your level badge matches your level: The Level 5, 10 and 50 achievements now carry the game’s own badge for that number.

Full version: https://ravensaqw.com/updates/2026-08-levels-and-rank-cards