I don't recommend achievement hunting considering MMOs give crummy rewards for sometimes absolute epic wastes of time
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I don't recommend achievement hunting considering MMOs give crummy rewards for sometimes absolute epic wastes of time
The Violet Proto-Drake was a reskin, but a reskin of a mount model that was otherwise only obtainable either as a rare world drop, a very low drop from a specific heroic boss, completing a meta-achievement for Heroic dungeons or from completing meta achievements in raiding. It also used to give 310% flying over other flying mounts of only 280%. The only other 310% flying for years was if you had unlocked certain raid mounts. It was a pretty big deal for years that "casual" players could get access to what was seen as an epic mount or otherwise unachievable mount speed increase. I knew a lot of people that happily worked towards getting their Violet-Proto Drakes.
They did eventually remove the 310% flying from the Violet-Proto Drake and other mounts and just made it a normal purchasable mount speed upgrade.
WoW's (and other MMOs) achievement system is leagues above FFXIV. There's just no comparison. There's interesting achievements that encourage exploration, quest completionism, beating bosses in unusual ways that often require doing mechanics "wrong" or flawlessly, hidden quest lines, etc. FFXIV has some good achievements like the Bozja duels, sightseeing, various ocean fishing achievements and reasonable but grindy completionism like the Bozja field notes. But the vast majority are either "Congrats, you beat this Main Story Quest which we've designed to be beaten by anyone with a pulse" or "congrats, you did this meaningless activity 5,000 times!" Achievements in FFXIV are either so easy to obtain that they're pointless, or they encourage/require unhealthy amounts of time invested into banal activates, like killing thousands of A and S ranks per expansion for a mount.
Just because other games in the genre are notorious for having bad achievement systems, doesn't mean FFXIV couldn't be better.
FF14 achievements aren't worth it at all for me. Too many of them are extremely grindy with no reward or simple participation achievements. There are way too many titles as rewards. There are very few worthwhile breakpoint achievements, like a mount at 50 mounts, 75 mounts, 100 mounts and so on. You also can't display them in any notable way and while I know "showing off" is looked down on in ff14, it's also a part of online gameplay to be able to share accomplishments. The minion and mount tabs are terrible too. All this combined makes it feel like achievements in this game aren't meant to be collected. It's designed so you can't get them all. They just added them in because they had to, but don't really want to make a big deal of it or make you want to do it.
I agree WoW did it better. I even liked that they displayed achievements in guild chat because spam aside, it was nice to "grats!" fellow guild members or receive a "grats" and it would provide a small form of interaction. Achievements for beating raid or dungeon bosses in unique ways added replayability and fun challenges and there were a lot of breakpoint achievements that made it worth collecting all the various things in the game. They were also designed so that you could get most of them over time. And they were visible, even on the forums and while no one really cared about achievements that much and you'd be ridiculed if you were toxic over it, it was just a nice perk to have that high score.
I'd love if ff14 revamped the achievement system and added incentive to collect them. It would provide a ridiculous amount of gametime at very little development cost.