Can we please slow down on the Achievements?

[Buzzbugs.1236]

I have noticed over the past few years in particular there has been a growing focus on Achievements and attaching rewards to them. I don't mind Achievements existing under the hood, out of sight and out of mind. But please don't make them the main focus point for questing and earning things in PvE!

 

I know a lot of people are probably going to disagree with my feelings on this. I personally just don't think Achievements are a good replacement for proper questing. The Achievement menu leaves a lot to be desired, there is very little information most of the time requiring you to use google to find information on what needs to be done. A traditional quest would come with a Quest Log or a Journal with far more information and a backlog on previous quests completed.

 

I would much rather have far fewer, but quality quests with a story and characters and rewards attached to them, than 1000's of Achievements. The quests themselves would still have Achievements attached to them but they are there for players who are interested in collecting those points. But tie actual rewards such as items and skins to the quests and not the Achievements.

 

Because as of right now they are drawing out the time it takes to complete content and I realize that makes the developers work go further when it pads out play time. I'm not naive about them and what their ultimate purpose is. I just don't think it's very engaging that's all.

Edited May 4, 2021 by Buzzbugs.1236

[Caitybee.3614]

Achievement kind of take the place of Quests in some ways. I don't mind them, I just pick and choose which ones I want to go for if they are particularly difficult. Some give great rewards as well, so they aren't too terrible.

[Buzzbugs.1236]

But unlike a traditional quest they don't have much meat on them. For an example a quest might have characters, a story arc and conclusion and then a reward for completing it. An Achievement is just a string of values attached to already existing content and doesn't bring with it much content of it's own, other than the carrot on the stick reward at the end.

 

 

Edited May 4, 2021 by Buzzbugs.1236

[Danikat.8537]

That's the way it's always been in GW2. I prefer quests as well, but this isn't something that's changed, the game has never had quests outside of the main story, everything else has always been events and achievements. If I remember correctly in the early days they couldn't attach rewards directly to achievements so completing them unlocked the ability to collect it from an NPC instead (and I think some were mailed to you?) but there was never a time when they made side quests that awarded these items instead.

 

Having said that some of the achievements do function like quests, like the ones for the Design-a-Weapon contest weapons; you have to do the steps in order and they tell a story as you go through them. You're not told exactly what to do and where to go, but that's intentional - you're given hints describing the places you have to find and the NPCs dialogue gives you more clues, then the challenge is to find the right location. I did two of them because I like the skins and I'm going to do the 3rd at some point just because I like doing the collections.

 

There's also Repairing/Rebooting/Redeeming IG-6417, Lasting Bonds (the one which awards the olmakhan bag), the griffon and skyscale unlock achievements and I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot.

[ParadoX.3124]

Too much achievements are locked under weapons crafting from the last season, it never ends, its expensive and boring. I hope we'll get different and more interesting ways to earn them in the expansion

[Perisemiotics.4579]

I think you might be referring to all the copy/paste, meaningless achieves from Champions - if you look back at the Jahai Bluffs release achieves, for example, there were still quite a good number of them but they involved "questing" and actually playing the content on the map instead of just sinking materials to buy a recipe to sink even more materials to, finally, get one of 5 different versions of the same skin 😕

Edited May 4, 2021 by Perisemiotics.4579

[leila.7962]

The pace is already super slow IMO. Most of the achievements are pretty easy and fast to complete ... the ones that require more time are usually related to crafting weapons. For people who likes to do achievements, it's been pretty slow .. after you reach over 35k ap it becomes really hard to get more AP's.. it's not like you have a specific time to complete them, and most of them don't really offer anything rather than just achievement points.

[Cuks.8241]

I like achievements/collections in general. I would like a backlog and a summary of the story behind them, some of them actually have nice stories linked to them.

I don't mind that the instructions are vague. It requires some exploring to complete them. I do use wiki from time to time but many can be completed if you take the time to explore and discover. I don't like that I am fully guided through them like it is in many rpgs nowadays. I have completed collections for some Gen2 legendaries without using wiki.

I don't like the ones that are getting overabundant lately - repeat one thing several times. That's just kitten.

[Brimstone.3807]

10 hours ago, Buzzbugs.1236 said:

But unlike a traditional quest they don't have much meat on them. For an example a quest might have characters, a story arc and conclusion and then a reward for completing it. An Achievement is just a string of values attached to already existing content and doesn't bring with it much content of it's own, other than the carrot on the stick reward at the end.

 

 

You're kind of hitting at the core design of GW2 from the get-go. Originally, in beta they didn't even have hearts. Similar concerns to yours were expressed and hearts were added. 

 

I do think we have a lack of interesting dynamic event chains these days which would convey an arc...but I don't think that's what you're looking for either.

 

Gw2 has never really been a "questing" game. Core arcs are left to the base game personal story(dungeons), expacs, and living world.

[Eloc Freidon.5692]

The crafting ones are the only bad form of collections when a hefty money sink is involved. Everything else is fine. They need to go back to Living World form of collections since IBS' second half dropped the ball.

[Zephire.8049]

In-dept achievements are something I also enjoy but there seems to be a reason they moved away from them.

 

Roughly the first have of Gen 2 legendaries had good collection quests and custom dialogue (Chuka and Champawat is amazing) but then they switched to crafting-only for the remaining ones because it took so long to do custom quests, and this is with a 3-4 month gap between each release. Granted we don't know how big the legendary team was and this was during the time period where GW2 was being understaffed for an unannounced project that was cancelled, but one of the cited issues was that it took time to find the right dynamic events to tie to the quest.

 

Messing with that particular code could break an entire chain of events and core Tyria events in general break easily and waiting until the next patch in 1.5 weeks before you can continue on your quest is not fun. Plus for some reason achievements kept being tied to event failures even after Anet said that they would no longer do that.

 

The reason I recapped that isn't because I think in-depth achievements are bad (they aren't) but because it's a surprisingly complicated matter. If they utilize older content and events, they risk breaking an event/event chain for everyone. If they create whole new content, odds of that breaking are smaller but it also takes resources to make all the custom dialogue, coding, and animations for a small part of the game. Achievements that just count how many times you do X require the least effort on their end.

 

And don't forget they need to have something to do between content releases for players to do, so they can't just not add simple achievements. If they were to just not put out achievements, a lot of people would complain and there's already a huge dearth of PvE achievements and (especially AP if you missed LW1) and cutting that back further will alienate dedicated players. If you're a new player you have a ton of options in what you want to do but if you've been playing regularly since release or HoT, there's not a whole lot of variety by this point.

 

This has been far more rambly than I intended but TLDR is it's a complicated matter in terms of balancing both resources and what group of players to focus on. Plus anything involving core content has a not-small potential in breaking that needs to be considered.

 

(But IBS: Champions did drop the ball in terms of achievements with seemingly little-to-no QA testing or consideration for players' time with them.)

[itspomf.9523]

It feels like we went from Hearts, Skill Points, and Vistas as a way of passive storytelling, to ... well, the flavor-text on achievement categories and their hints.

[Doggie.3184]

But I still haven't reached the AP amount to even see the chest for Radiant body piece after getting Hellfire one.

(PS when they gonna finally let us dye the effects for these?)

[leila.7962]

1 minute ago, Doggie.3184 said:

But I still haven't reached the AP amount to even see the chest for Radiant body piece after getting Hellfire one.

(PS when they gonna finally let us dye the effects for these?)

It's supposed to be an uber prestige skin even though its ugly lol... and because it's an old skin i doubt they will ever make it dyeable

[Doggie.3184]

8 minutes ago, leila.7962 said:

It's supposed to be an uber prestige skin even though its ugly lol... and because it's an old skin i doubt they will ever make it dyeable

I like the shape of the Hellfire chest, one of the few coats that fits Sylvari lads and is more robe-like. Unfortunatly the undye-able fire effect ruins it. If I could make it blue fire (matching my Sylvari's glow) I'd like it more. Radiant is just bright AF colored. Yeah; the quality is certainly not worthy of how insanely long it takes to get them as they are now.

 

I do like the AP system though but some things are just very low effort and pet peeves to me, like meaningless collections for items that don't even have flavor-text to justify their existance. Need somekinda lore goin.

 

Edited May 4, 2021 by Doggie.3184