Adding Steam Achievements Ourselves

QuantumPie

The problem
While I'm sure most people don't care, there has been some demand for integrating steam achievements with ESO. For those of us that enjoy decking out our profile and have achievement showcases, it would be awesome to be able to showcase our challenger and trial trifecta achievements for visitors to see. I've seen people argue against it in past threads because 1) achievements are character bound in-game, and having them on steam would be account-wide (on steam's end) 2) There are thousands of achievements in-game, it would take to long to add 3) people can use tools like SAM to unlock everything. But those points can easily be counteracted by:

1. Achievements are character bound in-game b/c they showcase what that character has accomplished. It doesn't make sense to have a PvP alt running around with the Godslayer title that was earned on their PvE alt, or a inventory mule with Grand Master Crafter when they have all skills at 1. Steam achievements however convey what you as a player have done in-game, across all characters, and wouldn't make any difference to their functionality in-game.
2. There are already games with a couple thousand achievements and they automate the process of adding them. Payday 2 is the perfect example of an influence game having thousands. I'm assuming all ZoS has to do on their part is run a script over their achievement database that takes the title, description, and icon and maps that to a Steam achievement. The integration of the unlocking mechanics wouldn't be much either. You'd just need a function to handle the first time a character is logged on after the feature is added and another for when an event is fired for earning an achievement (that event already exists in ESO's addon API)
3. Yes, people can unlock any achievement they want on steam with external tools. In reality, that has no effect in-game and people can pretty easily tell that someone did that since it shows everything being unlocked at the same time. It's nearly impossible to do that and have it look natural.

Moving on to demand, there isn't a lot. I've found around 8 past threads requesting this which I'll link below, and most only get a couple of replies. While the actual time needed to implement this isn't a lot (as mentioned in point 2), why do it if out of the 10s of thousands of users on Steam, only 8 have directly made posts since 2016.

What can we do?

Since ZoS is probably never going to do this themselves, why can't we? ESO's API has the event EVENT_ACHIEVEMENT_AWARDED as seen here, and there are countless other ways to access that information. An addon could easily be made that checks for every earned achievement on a player, and write that to a file. Now the next part is more uncharted territory for me personally, but a separate game (or I guess tool in this case) could be made on steam that has every achievement in ESO on it. That game / tool could then read the file the addon wrote and unlock the corresponding achievements. And boom! You can now showcase those achievements on your profile.

While what I just outlined is entirely possible, there are two main issues: Firstly the game has to be released on steam. From my five minutes of Googling, it seems like that process has changed significantly since I last looked into years back and they had the awful Greenlight system. Secondly, I have no idea about the legality of this and if it breaks any copyrights or ZoS' ToS. But tools like SKSE being on steam and TTC using in-game assets on their website leads me to believe it's possible.


So with my manic rambling aside, what are all of your thoughts? Would you use something like this? Does @ZOS_GinaBruno have any input to share? And on a scale of 1/10, how insane do you think I am to even consider investing the time in doing this?

Past threads:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/524911/im-begging-for-steam-achievements
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/349229/steam-achievements
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/387703/steam-achievements
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/387787/you-guys-said-you-will-add-steam-achievements-when-will-this-happen

https://reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/6fw6mb/teso_achievements_on_steam/
https://reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/afq07e/steam_achievements/

https://steamcommunity.com/app/306130/discussions/0/1694919808742568980/

Sylvermynx

I don't use steam any more, and I don't care about achievements at all personally. But if there's enough interest, and someone "official" works it out, why not?

Taleof2Cities

With as many issues as Steam has, @QuantumPie, I don't think it's a good idea to move forward with additional layers of complexity ... especially if it's something as superficial as platform host achievements.

QuantumPie

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

With as many issues as Steam has, @QuantumPie, I don't think it's a good idea to move forward with additional layers of complexity ... especially if it's something as superficial as platform host achievements.

Which I completely agree with (although I've only been back since March and have never personally experienced these issues, only heard complaints). That's why I outlined that we could technically do it ourselves. I just have no idea of the legality of it or if I / someone is actually crazy enough to invest the time into something as pointless as that. But with everyone stuck at home b/c of quarantine, who knows...

TelvanniWizard

Love the idea!

cuchi

Nowdays most of the achievements are account shared, but I'm sure they will never add Steam achievement at this time for many reasons.

DreamyLu

I'm on Steam ( trouble free since beginning of use), but I'm not interested in achievements. So I'm not against it, but wouldn't care about if it would be implemented. Sorry for that.

Maitsukas

Necro...

Molydeus

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

With as many issues as Steam has, @QuantumPie, I don't think it's a good idea to move forward with additional layers of complexity ... especially if it's something as superficial as platform host achievements.

What issues does Steam have?

ZOS_Icy

Greetings,

As this thread was originally created in June 2020, we decided to close it down. In many cases, it's better to create a new thread on a topic that you want to discuss as opposed to bumping one that is rather old.

Thank you for your understanding.