Achievements, The other time sink.

[Griss]

Achievements, every body knows about them. Some people love and hunt them down. Some people don't care and some out right hate them. They can drive you crazy or act as a way for the games developer to give you gentle nudges towards potential play styles or how they envision players interacting with the games content. Sometimes they have tangible rewards Sometimes they don't. but they act as a sticker or badges of honor posted to a board that say hey look what i did!

Now with that preamble out of the way, on to the meat of this post. I was wondering if the development team had any plans to expand the lodestone history to eventually include skill/luck based or class based entries? Or at least if we will see "meta" entries like player has attuned to all aether nodes and gates in a given area? I would also like to take this opportunity to see if the community had any thoughts on if they did this. or what the reaction were to be if they went as far as to add in tangible in game rewards for completing certain achievements or a number of them?

Now i realize that the rank and file that posts on these boards can not answer the part targeted towards the developers. But feel free to weigh in on the second part after all that's why i put it there.

Now before some ask what i am blathering on about let me explain. Currently the history entries or "Achievements" are all what i call Baby's first steps style, reach an aether, do a quest, hit x rank, kill this monster, kill x amount of monsters. basically things you would do normally in the course of playing. Class based would be a extension of the current entries but would be focused on the mechanics of individual classes. Say as a "Marauder" stay in steadfast stance for x amount of time. as a "thaumaturge" successfully enfeeble monsters x amount of times, things like that.

Skill/luck based would cover things that you have to put a little finesse into achieving or things that happen by pure happenstance. Incapacitate x number of body parts on monsters, Stop a monster from using a weapon skill by stunning, sleeping, or fracturing it before the skill is done "readying". interrupt a spell by silencing the caster. Survive a dot effect with one hp remaining, defeat a mob at the exact time it ko's you. have a dot defeat a monster after you have been ko'ed. Complete a synth with one durability remaining etc.

Now i don't know exactly what kind of metrics the game records about our play. or how difficult it would be for the game to flag these as they occur. I just think it would be neat if a badge were to pop up on our histories for them. and if we could see something more pronounced for achieving them then a line in the chat log. I also realise that there are far more important things that require the attention of the development team. Just thought i would get the ball rolling on this particular conversation.

I'm sorry that this post has gone a bit long so i will cut it short here.

[REDace0]

I didn't read everything, but I would love to see some things on our history like: "All DoW R10+" or "reached all nodes in South Thanalan".

[Arcell]

I'm all for achievements and all that in-game. Hell I love games that give you something for completing them, gives you that much more of a reason to do so.

There are only a few types of achievements I'm against and those are things that only some people can get like server firsts and things of that nature. As a completionist it would kill me to have achievements listed that no one can get anymore.

[Griss]

That's actually something i wanted to bring up in my original post arcell, but it was already getting on the long side. So i decided to cut it and hope some one mentioned it. lol

Personally i am kind of split on world/server first type achievements. one one hand its the biggest Look what i did sticker you can get, on the other hand like you said its only a limited number who can get them. But if you think about it, we potentially have a set of those now on our history lists. In that Physical level might be getting scraped. if that happens and they don't remove those entries. no one past the point where they are scrapped will ever get them.

hate to bring up that other massively popular game, but they handle things like these pretty decently by removing things you can no longer achieve via any means from the normal list and moving them to a separate list. you would never be sitting at 99/100 achievements and never be able to complete every thing.