Achievement Change - Lazy Design/Out of touch

[Malakii]

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.

[Malakii]

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.

[Deceptus]

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.

100% agreed and it's one of my bigger gripes.

Thousand point achievements are simply unobtainable by the vast majority of players, and actively discourage people from attempting them.

[Knot_D]

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.

Those achievements mostly are for boomers who played since 2.3 and into PvP, so yes it's not for zoomers who just started playing recently. And yes, I'm that boomer



And also those who did Rival Wings since Astragalos



About the win rate? It's above 50% in my end.

[AzanathEU]

How did you guys even survive gaming before achievements became a thing?

[Raoabolic]

How did you guys even survive gaming before achievements became a thing?

Erm, it's called a gamerscore. The bigger the number, the better you are. Wait, I think that was ilvl. I can't tell anymore. :/

[Malakii]

How did you guys even survive gaming before achievements became a thing?

Searched every corner of a game to make sure we didn't miss anything and used the internet to double-check our progress. Some people like to get everything out of a game. Also, we created our own, pen and paper friend.

[TheMightyMollusk]

How did you guys even survive gaming before achievements became a thing?

Way back in the olden days, we just had high scores that we tried to beat.

Or we'd just see how far we could get before the game got too unfair and just murdered us. Or until we hit a kill screen and the game became literally unplayable.

I saw a kill screen in Pac-Man once. Turns out the game literally can't load a level higher than 255 because of the way the hex codes work, so half the screen gets filled with garbage data.

[Iscah]

I said most people are lucky to average 50%

Pure luck will put everyone around 50% in the long run, if teaming up is randomised and you have equal chance of getting good and bad players in every team.

I think the intent of having achievements for things like "1000 matches" and "1000 wins" is exactly intended to be along the lines of having achievements for 1000 and 2000 matches, but ideally you can get there faster with more skill – but on the other hand, adding more frustration and a longer grind for those with less skill, which is possibly not so good for the game mode overall if it means that bad people have to play more often than good people. It's a balancing act.

(Meanwhile I still want to see the Field Commander set achievements changed to be based on a cumulative total of points after far too many down-to-the-wire losses.)

[Vahlnir]

Way back in the olden days, we just had high scores that we tried to beat.

Or we'd just see how far we could get before the game got too unfair and just murdered us. Or until we hit a kill screen and the game became literally unplayable.

I saw a kill screen in Pac-Man once. Turns out the game literally can't load a level higher than 255 because of the way the hex codes work, so half the screen gets filled with garbage data.

I learn something new every day.