Crazy Idea: Storyline Achievements

Would it be possible to make it so that once you've played through an entire storyline one time on any character it becomes unlocked account wide for the purposes of replaying for achievements and joining friends to aid them in their storyline?

I suggest this because I'm finding it very annoying that everything I want to do in storylines at this point I either have to play on one of my characters I've already played through before or redo the entire story before I can do anything. Examples of this: Can't join friends for Hearts and Minds without playing through the entire HoT storyline, Can't even work on season 2 achievements as they don't unlock until you've played through on your current character. Maybe I just want to play whatever character I want and don't want to have to do every single story over and over again just to go back and redo the things I actually want to redo? This becomes more and more obnoxious the more storyline you add to the game.

Yeah, well, it's kinda like time-gated crafts... Sometimes arena net can't put out enough content to make players want to stay and play, so they add barriers to force you to do it... Problem is, frustrated players tend to quit... Something Arena Net seems to have forgotten.

@ReaverKane.7598 said:Yeah, well, it's kinda like time-gated crafts... Sometimes arena net can't put out enough content to make players want to stay and play, so they add barriers to force you to do it... Problem is, frustrated players tend to quit... Something Arena Net seems to have forgotten.

This doesn't feel like something they thought through, as evidenced by the fact that it doesn't work this way in more recent story episodes. For instance, I think it's only LS2 that forces you to play through the story before you can go back and do achievements. And I believe you can usually join other players to help with their storyline, but the very first part of the HoT storyline you can't join at all and the very last step you can only reach it if you've done up to that point on your current character. After that it seems like you don't see these types of issues anymore?

I think it would just be a lot more convenient for players if you only had to play through the story once to unlock achievements and join friends on any of your characters, whether that particular character has completed the storyline or not.

@AliamRationem.5172 said:

@ReaverKane.7598 said:Yeah, well, it's kinda like time-gated crafts... Sometimes arena net can't put out enough content to make players want to stay and play, so they add barriers to force you to do it... Problem is, frustrated players tend to quit... Something Arena Net seems to have forgotten.

Right, the wonkyness of season 2 makes some sense, as it was coming off the design of season 1. Season 1 had the achievements locked until you did a playthrough, as season 2 currently does. For season 1 it made more sense at the time, because the content was temporary, you had a rush of people to do it immediately, and it wasn't always designed to be solo. If everyone could do the achievements on the first run, most people would be all done before the slower people, and wouldn't have motivation to run it anymore for those who still needed to do it. And since it was only around for 2 weeks, it was good to spread the completions over that 2 week period instead off all at once. Season 2 started to change the formula, but in this case I think they just kept the current mechanism in place. After seeing season 2 in action they realised it wasn't serving a purpose any more (content is no longer temporary) and removed it so now you can do achievements on the first run.

@AliamRationem.5172 said:Would it be possible to make it so that once you've played through an entire storyline one time on any character it becomes unlocked account wide for the purposes of replaying for achievements and joining friends to aid them in their storyline?

It’s like this for everything but LS2.

I suggest this because I'm finding it very annoying that everything I want to do in storylines at this point I either have to play on one of my characters I've already played through before or redo the entire story before I can do anything. Examples of this: Can't join friends for Hearts and Minds without playing through the entire HoT storyline, Can't even work on season 2 achievements as they don't unlock until you've played through on your current character. Maybe I just want to play whatever character I want and don't want to have to do every single story over and over again just to go back and redo the things I actually want to redo? This becomes more and more obnoxious the more storyline you add to the game.

You can join Hearts of Mind without needing to have the story active so you most certainly can join it without being on that story step.

Yes, LS2 story mastery achievements require you to complete the story on that character first. Fortunately everything after that doesn’t require you to do the story multiple times unless you fail the achievement or it actually requires you to play multiple times due to achievements that conflict with each other. That said, you cannot start a specific instance out of order on a character that hasn’t done the story but you can certainly join someone else’s.

If it was automatically unlocked account wide, you would no longer get rewards for each story step on each character individually. I don't know if that would be a desireable state.

@Ashantara.8731 said:If it was automatically unlocked account wide, you would no longer get rewards for each story step on each character individually. I don't know if that would be a desireable state.

Achievements aren't the same as completion rewards.