Achievement Change - Lazy Design/Out of touch

I know probably most people may not care about this topic and may bypass this thread. I am aware that we are a niche part of the community and most people just see these things as something that you get from time to time when playing but don't specifically try to complete them. There are some of us that use achievements as goals to get the most out of the game, we are paying for and actively pursue them.

For the last few expansions, I have felt that SE is pretty out of touch with the game/achievements. Recently with this new patch, they added a new deep dungeon and created a new achievement For the Hoard VI, this achievement requires you to discover 20,000 pieces of the Accursed Hoard. Before the introduction of this achievement, the prior one was For the Hoard V which requires you to discover 10,000 pieces of the Accursed Hoard. The completion rate of this achievement on https://lalachievements.com/rarity/title/global/ is roughly 0.047% or roughly 84 people. According to https://ffxivcollect.com/achievements/types/1 there are only 52 people. Even if we assume that these are two completely different groups, which they are not and mostly overlap, we get a total of 136 people that have completed these achievements. So it is beyond me why they think they should double it from 10,000 to 20,000.

I would bet that 90% of the population has less than 1,000 accursed hoard progress. This just seems lazy, non-logical, and just created as a huge time sink because they don't understand what this actually entails. Imo this is not the type of achievement I want. A long monotonous grind where you set up a save file to have concealment and intuition. Enter the dungeon, pop intuition, and if there is a hoard, conceal to it. Congratz 1/20000; if not exit. Repeat x20000. Ofc you don't have to do it this way but this is by far the most efficient way to do it.

Honestly, I would like them to remove it before anyone gets it, but at the very least start making better achievements and stop just multiplying prior achievements by 2 to get the next. Put some thought into it, and consider the percentage of players who have obtained the prior achievement before adding the next. I wish I could ask how much time they think a single achievement should take if you only grinded that one thing every day.

Continued on Post 2, TLDR on bottom of post 2. Sorry I know it is long.

Other examples of things that I think they need to reconsider for the future are.

PVP:

They like to make achievements that say participate and triumph. They put 5,000 on participation and they use that say exact number for triumphs. Most players are lucky to have a 50% win ratio in pvp. So in reality basically you will need 10,000 participations to maybe win 5,000 games. I just can't tell if SE just doesn't think about it or just says yes this is fine. I think if you are going to do 5,000 participation achievements you should do at least half that in triumphs for the achievements. This type of model applies to every game mode including rival wings which they dont have a queue for and it basically only community ran. I think the community does a great job but still... 1000 participation and 1000 wins for a mode that isn't even in the roulette.

Also, there is no title associated with the 1,000 frontline achievements for each gc. They should consider reworking the achievement reward structure as the 20 achievement points associated with it isn't worth much with how actual achievement points are handled atm. Tbh all final achievements should have some reward attached to them especially if they are lifetime achievements.

Hunts:

2,000 A ranks 1000 S ranks per expansion for the last two expansions. At least they didn't match these both at 2,000 as they do in PVP but in no way is this equivalent. You are talking about every 4 hours respawn to 48-72+ hours respawn. Yes if you do these at the start of the expansion with multiple instances it is not as bad as it is later, but I doubt that is what SE intended. With data center swapping now as well, you can complete this easier but again I doubt this is what SE intended. I just feel like this is another lazy achievement where they put no thought into it and just said sure that is fine.

Leves: The 5,000 leves in each category (battle, local, field) is a bit excessive, then adding on 1500 additional leve quests for the GC that are battle-related but do not count towards your battle leves will take 7.5 years to complete if you start them now with no progress on them. I understand this is a lifetime achievement, but i would argue that maybe this is too much. I think they could easily fix this if they allowed you to regenerate more leves naturally or through an item. Also, have gc leves count toward battle leves.

TLDR: SE seems to put no thought into how they create their achievements with random x times a large number to create the next. As someone who does try to complete achievements, I just wish they would put a little bit more thought into it and take into consideration the number of people that complete said achievements and average win rates when associated with a triumph achievement. Additionally, wish they would make certain achievements equivalent in time expectation and they would state what SE thinks is an appropriate time expectation if one would grind non-stop to complete an achievement they release. In no way am I asking SE to remove any other achievement other than that just For The Hoard V which no one has received yet. As I would not want to take away something from someone that has already earned it.

Furthermore, Much more important than the removal of the prior mentioned achievement is that I just wish they would put more consideration into future achievements that they make in patches/expansions to come. I don't think this would take anything away from the development cycle as it really just adjustments of numbers and for achievement insight, they could poll their players.

Yes, the achievements in this game are stupid and not fun to pursue. I tried it. Doing 500 battle leves that ask you to one shot enemies for 5 minutes is not fun. Neither is getting 10,000 pieces of the accursed hoard. I am content with the hunt achievements asking for 2,000 s ranks, but even that gets out of hand with a 5,000 and 10,000 achievement.

Mount collecting is more fun to me.

I think that this is their way of "future proofing" various achievements. The downside is that most of them won't be obtainable for years, if anyone bothers with them at all. I get why they do it, but I do think that they need to chill on the requirements a bit. WoW isn't perfect, but they do achievements right, in my opinion. Some require a significant investment of time, like the 12 month holiday achievement which rewards a mount, or the recently added Warden outfit for completing the Trading Post monthly objectives for 12 months, but most everything else can be done sooner rather than later if you have the right conditions (full raid/dungeon party/etc), or if you work at them every day for a couple of months. Nothing quite as insane as we have here either way. Like a lot of things, a good balance is usually the best approach. The devs have always struggled to find a balance in various aspects of this game.

I think some of the game's achieve mints are just pointlessly cruel, and I love pursuing most of them, but yeah they don't really respect the player's time do they. I'm glad there isn't a mount or glam tied to them, but 20,000 hoard pieces, come on. That's easily, like, 4,000 hours of work. And the leve ones are timegated in addition to being kind of annoying. I think someone said it takes 4 years minimum to complete some of them?

Some of them are definitely super badly designed(a bunch of the gatherer ones for example...unless you leveled your gatherers SOLELY in those areas by gathering just from the level range nodes).

Some kind of make a little sense, but still could probably have been done better and not just "Oh, you did that type of activity X times, now double the amount of times you need to do it".

The majority of those seem to me like they are SE's way of giving content longevity...rather than it be rewarding content.

Many of these upper-end achievements are meant to effectively be lifetime equivalent, that is really all there is to it.

I don't particularly care what the numerical value is, but Achievement Points in and of themselves have served very little purpose, bar to be SEs way of funnelling veteran rewards into it. Achievement points in general are in dire need of a proper reward structure.

Heck, give me a Bahamut mount for 150 tokens.

There's so little to do with achievement points that I tend to forget about them unless I'm doing one for a specific reward. I'm long past the point of thinking I need to have every achievement anyway, so it doesn't really bother me.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

Many of these upper-end achievements are meant to effectively be lifetime equivalent, that is really all there is to it.

I don't particularly care what the numerical value is, but Achievement Points in and of themselves have served very little purpose, bar to be SEs way of funnelling veteran rewards into it. Achievement points in general are in dire need of a proper reward structure.

Heck, give me a Bahamut mount for 150 tokens.

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While I would argue that I would consider the 10,000 hoard achievement a lifetime achievement. Which is why I didn't make a post on it and didn't include several achievements that take a long time like 10,000 dungeons. Personally, I don't mind lifetime achievements but when lifetime achievements get another lifetime achievement on top it just seems excessive and just makes me ask why? For what reason? Most people just interact with deep dungeon to level spamming certain sets of floors and don't even do accursed hoard. At least with 10,000 dungeons, you have several reasons other than just leveling to interact with them, and are part of the natural gameplay loop. The accursed horde pool may be large but 90% of it is garbage so in no way is it rewarding and you are not going to get the good stuff doing the optimal farm for that achievement. If you don't do the optimal route is going to take you much longer especially if you are wanting to get good loot. I mean I personally have 10,000 dungeons so I am done with that, so why not 20,000 now? I mean I don't want that but that is the same logic they are showing here and my criticism of it.

Though I do completely agree the achievement points in general are in dire need of a proper reward structure. Jonathas has little to no purpose and seemed like a really good idea that they never worked on after release.

I've been getting achievements for months now and I've been having more fun with the game and I set objectives and I like that. But man, some achievements do need a new look. I agree with the ones you said. I made a post months ago about the Hunt mounts achievements and how they're way easier to get while there are instances, so newer players later don't have that advantage. But that's just one of many. The thing is, achievements do need a new look because the players who are trying to get most of them are the ones who play more the game or at least keep the content alive and are doing most of the stuff in the game. That's why I feel achievement points should get an use too. Someone said a Bahamut mount and it doesn't sound bad. How about Legacy mounts? Players who work for achievements have done more that players who were in 1.0 and are not in the game anymore. Include achievements that give mounts or rewards for getting 15k, 20k and 25k points, and also stop multiplying achievement numbers. What's next? 20k dungeons, 20k HQ crafts with each class? Surely there are more interesting ways to introduce new achievements and rewards.