Reimagining Achievements - A list of changes for a healthy game

[Altina_Orion]

I say this as someone who’s ranked #53 in achievements on my world and in the top 3000 globally. I’ve done my share of grinds, many of which are longform, obscure, and painful. And even I think the system is broken.

The Problem: Many of FFXIV’s achievements aren’t achievements: they’re chores. We have things like gathering 20,000 Accursed Hoards from Deep Dungeon or 5,000 open world chests in the Occult Crescent. These are 1000+ hour grinds that boil down to “do X activity Y amount of times.” They’re boring, tasteless, and clearly designed just to pad the game. It’s no surprise that a huge portion of players don’t even bother trying to achievement hunt, as these goals are too intimidating and not remotely fun.
What Needs to Change:

1. Reimagine Achievements as Unique Challenges: Let’s move away from raw repetition and instead create achievements that offer unique gameplay experiences. Think “Run a specific dungeon without any party members getting a stack of Vulnerability” or “Complete a dungeon with a full party of healers.”

For Deep Dungeons, there could be achievements for solo-clearing with each job, and a capstone achievement for doing it with all jobs. Yes, that’s a grind, but it’s a meaningful one. Ocean Fishing actually does this well, with goals like “catch X prawns with your party” or “catch all the big fish.” These encourage collaboration and experimentation instead of pure repetition.

2. Retire the Outdated Grinds (Controversial): It’s time to clean house. Achievements like “complete this duty 10 times” are fine. But the ones with absurd numbers should be retired. WoW has a model for this called Feats of Strength which stores legacy achievements that no longer reward points and can’t be earned anymore.
FFXIV could adopt this: achievements with extreme, unhealthy numbers are removed from the game (but preserved on existing accounts), and flagged as “Retired.” They’d be worth 0 achievement points moving forward.

3. Apply This to Seasonal/Holiday Achievements Too: Seasonal event achievements would also be tracked in this way. They’re limited-time by nature, and their removal or preservation should reflect that.

4. Leaderboards and Public Recognition: Let’s give achievement hunters a reason to care. Add official high scores and allow achievement point totals to be shown on Adventurer Plates. Give us a visible marker of progress, something that adds prestige to the pursuit.

Yes, some of these changes would negatively impact me. I’ve earned many longform achievements. But the system, as it stands, is not healthy. I care about this feature enough to want it to be better both for current hunters and for the ones who haven’t even tried achievement hunting yet.

[Jeeqbit]

This is why I only bother with mounts. I tried doing achievements but it's so incredibly boring. Doing levequests 500 times for example, or getting a lot of gil from leves. The minion from Ocean Fishing is enough work without the achievements that come after it.

In comparison, just going as far as the mount is usually still fun for me and gives me decent amount of experience of the content it's from. If they just remodeled all the achievements to line up with the mounts it would be a lot better.

[BigCheez]

I agree that achievements should be more interesting, but as a completionist, I hate the idea of "retired" unobtainable achievements.

That would very much suck for newer people who are getting in to the game later and want to do all the things.

[Jeeqbit]

I agree that achievements should be more interesting, but as a completionist, I hate the idea of "retired" unobtainable achievements.

We already have them: seasonal event achievements.

[Kranel_San]

We already have them: seasonal event achievements.

Notorious monsters achievements an another example of retired achievements that are not seasonal events achievements.

[thedude28]

I agree that achievements should be more interesting, but as a completionist, I hate the idea of "retired" unobtainable achievements.

That would very much suck for newer people who are getting in to the game later and want to do all the things.

What an absurdly stupid take. It's like you didn't think about what OP was asking for.

Sure, your stance is a respectable one, but when you look at the achievements in the game...

1. Most removed achievements aren't related to difficult challenges. Some were circumstantial to 1.0 systems (i.e. 1.0 beast tribe titles). You weren't missing out on much...
2. You were already engaging with most of the systems/achievements anyways. OP was referring to the achievements with extreme requirements and prejudice.
3. The rarest ones only rewards those who have the time (patience is a given in our hobby). That's the only achievement. Nobody is there to clap for you when you've spent over 1k hours in PoTD collecting hordes. They'll only clap when you get the Necromancer title.
4. Not only do they add new achievements to existing tasks, their requirements are DOUBLE the previous achievement (For the Horde VI, added 6.35, forcing you, as a completionist, to collect an additional 10K HORDES!!!!!)

All of this is to say that one look at the Occult Crescent achievements is enough to question you and your achievement hunt. How much time does it take for 100 Forked Tower runs? How much gil/time would it cost you to get 1k bunny chests and 1k chests from pots?

If the 5k leves achievement (or similar unhealthy time sinks) was removed today, would you feel bad for newly minted FFXIV achievement hunters? Would you want them to suffer in the same way you did?

[Shistar]

I think TERA did it best, and it has many of the things you've mentioned. Interesting battle-related achievements ("Kill ABC boss without getting hit by XYZ attack", "Kill ABC boss under 5 minutes -most likely a shorter time in XIV, fights in TERA could stretch out for a long time- or less", "Feed the boss X amount of damage ups through its specific mechanic made to punish you, then kill it despite the added difficulty", etc.)


The only annoying battle achievements in TERA of that nature were the "deal critical damage X amount of times" and eventually being locked out of that dungeon due to leveling. But it could be made to work here in the sense of "hit your positional X amount of times in ABC boss" could be a fun achievement for melees. Similarly, there were achievements for using certain skills X amount of times which were mostly situational, so it could encourage you to change up your playstyle a bit and experiment.


The cool thing TERA had going on was a tangible, visible reward/flex around your job's icon. In the old UI it was a laurel around your job and in the new UI it looked more like futuristic wings. They were tied to the amount of points you had, and there were 5 tiers. They could eventually continue adding tiers in XIV if they felt like it. In TERA, you'd naturally lose points as dungeons got rotated in and out of availability and their points would be stored away from your total until they were re-added into the selection of gearing dungeons. Not my preferred method, but it encourages you to keep getting achievements to maintain your ranking. I don't think XIV really needs it though, since just adding more achievements as they go would naturally push you out of your tier eventually if you never did anything that gives you an achievement.


TERA PC had many reasons to die, but their achievement system was never one of them imho. I think the console version still exists, but I've never played it myself.

[Catwho]

I think TERA did it best, and it has many of the things you've mentioned. Interesting battle-related achievements ("Kill ABC boss without getting hit by XYZ attack", "Kill ABC boss under 5 minutes -most likely a shorter time in XIV, fights in TERA could stretch out for a long time- or less", "Feed the boss X amount of damage ups through its specific mechanic made to punish you, then kill it despite the added difficulty", etc.)

Funny enough, that was how the achievements in FF16 worked. I accidentally got the Titan fight one on the first try because that fight read a lot like Eden 4 Savage to my brain.

[BigCheez]

What an absurdly stupid take. It's like you didn't think about what OP was asking for.

Sure, your stance is a respectable one, but when you look at the achievements in the game...

1. Most removed achievements aren't related to difficult challenges. Some were circumstantial to 1.0 systems (i.e. 1.0 beast tribe titles). You weren't missing out on much...
2. You were already engaging with most of the systems/achievements anyways. OP was referring to the achievements with extreme requirements and prejudice.
3. The rarest ones only rewards those who have the time (patience is a given in our hobby). That's the only achievement. Nobody is there to clap for you when you've spent over 1k hours in PoTD collecting hordes. They'll only clap when you get the Necromancer title.
4. Not only do they add new achievements to existing tasks, their requirements are DOUBLE the previous achievement (For the Horde VI, added 6.35, forcing you, as a completionist, to collect an additional 10K HORDES!!!!!)

All of this is to say that one look at the Occult Crescent achievements is enough to question you and your achievement hunt. How much time does it take for 100 Forked Tower runs? How much gil/time would it cost you to get 1k bunny chests and 1k chests from pots?

If the 5k leves achievement (or similar unhealthy time sinks) was removed today, would you feel bad for newly minted FFXIV achievement hunters? Would you want them to suffer in the same way you did?

As someone who has done a lot of these grinds and knows newer players who are working on them now, yes. Some people like grinding achievements. Asking for them to be removed because it isn't for you is borderline ridiculous.

[Altina_Orion]

As someone who has done a lot of these grinds and knows newer players who are working on them now, yes. Some people like grinding achievements. Asking for them to be removed because it isn't for you is borderline ridiculous.

I'm 9000 hoards into my hoard grind and if they removed the 10k/20k i wouldnt be upset. There are plenty of already unobtainable achievements and WoW has them as well. There aren't a ton that would be retired and if you have earned it, it would be a 0 point badge. Any new player who joins and wants to collect everything is already not going to be able to, so it doesn't matter.