Efiwe has updated its lives system so that the wait for a refill now depends on how much a learner has done in their current session. Learners who run out of lives after solving a significant number of challenges wait less than the standard three hours, with the reduction scaling up to a one hour wait for the deepest sessions. The release also fixes an issue where lives purchased on one device could fail to appear on another.
Efiwe today announced Adaptive Refill, a change to how the platform’s lives system handles the wait after a learner runs out. The feature is live across all courses on the platform. Every Efiwe learner starts with 200 lives. A wrong answer costs 10, and when lives run out, learners have until now waited a flat three hours for them to refill automatically, or bought more to continue immediately. That three hour wall applied equally to someone who had solved four challenges and someone who had solved forty.
Adaptive Refill changes that. The platform now counts how many challenges a learner has solved correctly in their current sitting, and shortens the refill wait accordingly. Solve eight or more before running out and the wait drops to two hours. Fifteen or more brings it to ninety minutes. Twenty five or more brings it to a single hour. Learners who run out early in a session keep the full three hours. The counter resets after thirty minutes of inactivity, so the reduction reflects genuine sustained effort rather than activity spread across a whole day. Only correct answers count toward it.
“The three hour wait was designed to encourage careful, thoughtful coding, and it does that well,” said Chidi Nwaogu, Co-founder and CTO of Efiwe. “But it was hitting the wrong people hardest. Someone twenty five challenges into an evening, who is clearly working and clearly learning, would hit the wall and lose their whole session. Someone who quit after three challenges got the same treatment. Those are not the same learner, and the system should not treat them identically.” He added, “There is still a wall. We kept a one hour floor deliberately, because the lives system exists for a reason. What changed is that effort now shortens it.”
When the reduced wait applies, the game over screen tells learners why, naming how many challenges they solved in that session and what the wait was shortened to. The intention is that the reduction reads as something earned rather than as an unexplained change.
Learners on Efiwe Pro, and members of organisations on Group Pro or Group Pro Plus, are unaffected by this change, as those plans already exempt them from the lives system entirely. Wrong answers do not cost them lives and the game over screen never appears to them.
This release also resolves an issue affecting learners who use Efiwe on more than one device, which is common on shared phones in the classroom and household settings Efiwe is built for. Previously, a learner who ran out of lives while signed in on two devices, then bought more lives on one of them, could find the purchase failing to take effect. The second device held its own saved copy of the old out of lives state. When the learner signed back in on that device, the outdated copy was sent back to Efiwe’s servers and overwrote the lives they had just paid for, returning both devices to the game over screen.
Devices that are signed out remotely now clear their saved copy immediately and refresh, so there is no outdated information left to send back. All progress and lives are freshly retrieved from Efiwe’s servers the next time the learner signs in. Purchased lives now hold across every device a learner uses.
Both updates are available immediately at efiwe.com.
or