Corruption of Achievements Records

Shadowshire · January 2017

Since "Hero of the Daggerfall Covenant" is a prerequisite for buying Daggerfall Overklook (Glenumbra), I decided to check whether my Level 50 CP 585+ Breton Sorcerer met the prerequisites. What I found is that achievements which were previously acknowledged and recorded were now dark, i..e., as if they had never occurred.

In the Quests > General section: Hero of the Daggerfall Covenant lists 5 achievements, 3 of which are quest chains that were lit. Two were not:

.......... > The Stormhaven Adventurer progress bar showed 58 out of 60 quests were completed.

.......... > The Alik'r Desert Adventurer progress bar showed 39 out of 42 quests were completed.

.......... > The Covenant Blue Dye checkbox was filled with the color, which is inconsistent with the above data.

In the Quests > Daggerfall Covenant section: 26 Achievements are listed. Some are solo chains, others are a set of solo chains. Four entries were dark:

.......... > Azura's Ally

.......... > Rude Awakening, which has 3 objectives; one was not lit:

.......... .......... > Resolve the military standoff that threatens the Covenant

.......... .......... > The Wayrest Royal Purple checkbox was filled with the color, which is inconsistent with the missing objective.

.......... > The Alik'r Desert Adventurer progress bar showed 39 out of 42 quests were completed.

.......... > The Stormhaven Adventurer progress bar showed 58 out of 60 quests were completed.
____________________________________________________________________________________

In addition to the activation of the clothing dyes noted above, I have three reasons to believe that the records were corrupted:

(1) When I began my investigation, the first thing which I noticed was that the Map displayed all of the Stormhaven POI objectives, the Wayshrines, and the Tower symbols associated with the quests for Azura's Ally and for Rude Awakening, respectively, in white. They are originally displayed as black and become white after the player's character returns to the quest-giver to report completion of the quest and receives the corresponding award(s). Even the symbol for the World Boss in Gauvadon was in white. My character probably defeated that boss in solo combat (well before the One Tamriel changes).

(2) To further investigate, I re-played the quests for Rude Awakening and for Azura's Ally, respectively. I already knew where the MoBs were, where the bosses were, the route(s) to follow, the actions I would need to take, etc. Also, along the way there are side quests which are available to complete while completing the main quest, but none of the ones previously accepted and completed were available. In sum, short, and fine, I had seen and done it all before. When these two quests were completed, their respective boxes were lit in the Daggerfall Covenant section. Note: I checked whether my Level 50 CP 580+ Imperial Sorcerer had done these quests on Cadwell's Silver, and all the achievements for that area are dark. As far as I know, they were not required to complete Cadwell's Silver.

(3) After completing those quests, my character completed 4 additional quests in Stormhaven. The game client announced that my character had completed the Stormhaven Adventurer achievement after he turned-in the second quest (and the box for it on the Achievements UI was lit).

(4) Then my character went to the Alik'r Desert, where the Salas En map symbol was black (every other symbol around it was white). However, as I played, I recalled doing so previously, especially solving the complex puzzle to free the imprisoned Orc NPC at the end. (I found notes about the puzzle which I had written the first time, but I don't recall whether my other main also completed the Salas En quests.) My character also accepted two other quests associated with Salas En before entering the ruins. After all three had been completed, the game client announced that my character had completed the Alik'r Desert Adventurer achievement.

Then it announced that my character is a Hero of the Daggerfall Covenant.

The question now remains: how long will that record last before the Achievements UI once again shows that they -- if not also other achievements -- were not completed? I have no idea as to when the game system records of those Achievements became corrupted, let alone why. Since you probably can surmise the possible causes, I won't suggest them here.

Please advise: what is the Z.O. development team going to do about this?

susmitds · January 2017

Never had any of my achievements ever go missing. Heck, I got achievements whose conditions I never met.

Shadowshire · January 2017

susmitds wrote: »

Never had any of my achievements ever go missing. Heck, I got achievements whose conditions I never met.

And that indicates corruption of the Achievements records, and/or bugs in the host software, and/or bugs in the game client which we run on our computers. There are many possible ways that the Achievements data can be wrong, or it can be correct but not processed for output correctly. As computer programmers know, "Garbage In, Garbage Out".

Asardes · January 2017

Not all zone quests count towards objective completion. So you may have made everything white, but missed a few misc quests. I completed Cadwell's Gold on 3 characters, and never missed a quest. I used an addon which shows the quests, including the misc ones. I always got the achievement before I finished all the quests in the zone. http://www.esoui.com/downloads/info1022-QuestMap.html

Shadowshire · January 2017

Asardes wrote: »

Not all zone quests count towards objective completion. So you may have made everything white, but missed a few misc quests. I completed Cadwell's Gold on 3 characters, and never missed a quest. I used an addon which shows the quests, including the misc ones. I always got the achievement before I finished all the quests in the zone. http://www.esoui.com/downloads/info1022-QuestMap.html

First, I am not claiming that all zone quests count toward any objective completion. It would not surprise me if a character can complete 65 quests, but only 58 are credited toward the Stormhaven Adventurer achievement. Or the player might complete 45 quests, but only 39 are credited to the Alik'r Desert Adventurer achievement. Granted, if that were in fact the case, then I would say that either the design is flawed or its implementation probably has a bug. A quest is a quest, even if some are "more significant" than others.

Regardless, simply doing enough quests which are all credited to the Stormhaven Adventurer or to the Alik'r Desert Adventurer achievements might not necessarily affect the color of any Map symbol(s).

Doing enough of the quests which are credited does affect whether the armor dyes associated with completing the respective achievements are unlocked. And they were unlocked for my character. Yet, when I recently looked at the corresponding progress bars, the total number of quests accumulated for each of those respective achievements was displayed as less than the number needed for their completion.

That is either evidence of a bug(s) in the software, or of corruption of the data that was originally recorded while I played the game.

Second, my Level 50 CP 585+ Breton Sorcerer did not "miss" any quests that affected either the Azura's Ally or the Rude Awakening achievement. He was not following either Cadwell's Silver or Cadwell's Gold. These Stormhaven quests are in his native Alliance. Before One Tamriel was implemented, they had to be completed before a Daggerfall Covenant character could proceed to Bangkorai, which is the last zone in Covenant territory.

Each of those two achievements is earned simply by completing a series that begins with an initiating quest and continues with other quests, that lead to the final quest, upon conclusion of which the story ends. The corresponding Map symbols would not be white if he did not do that.

So, I have no doubt that he completed each of the two series and received all of the quest rewards, and that is why the Map symbols that are affected by completing each of the two series of quests were and are white. But the square icons in the Achievements UI for those two achievements were dark, not lit as they should have been when I looked at them. After I did those two series of quests again with that character, they were again acknowledged and their icons were and now are lit.

Finally, whether a player uses an add-on to track whether playing a character satisfies the requirements for various Achievements may be useful to the player, but it is otherwise meaningless. The only thing that matters is whether the game client running on the player's computer, and the game host executing in the "megaserver" system, correctly recognize and record the player's actions with respect to whether the player satisfies various and sundry achievements. It also matters whether the data becomes corrupted on the storage media and/or in system memory, and whether it is written and/or read correctly by the hardware as well as the software.

As a former computer programmer and systems analyst, I would know.