PTS Update 33 - Feedback Thread for Account Wide Achievements

SilverBride

When are we going to see the Q&A?

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Kevin

KMarble

Jaraal wrote: »

On the other hand, the fact that none of these quest bugs has been fixed in the weeks since the bomb was dropped on us may indicate that they are not actually going to implement AWA during this update. Are there still overlapping characters in Rimmen? Because that would be one of the first things they would address.

You have no idea how much I hope you're right. They did fix one bug related to AWA though. The bug, and the promptness fixing it are very, very telling.

The bug was that players could not buy zone skyshard on characters. The game was telling them that they already had the achievement (all skyshards in a zone) when they player was logged on brand new characters, even though they had the achievement on one or more other characters.

IMO, that bug showcases how little thought was put into this version of AWA, and the fast fixing implies that they do want to move forward with it.

silvereyes

tomofhyrule wrote: »

I'm betting the main goal is to get console achievements to pop by basically re-popping every achievement.

The timing of the trophies being fixed is suspicious, but as you said, getting the trophy to pop on the console platform could just as easily happen with character-based achievements. "Account-wide" achievements aren't even the same scope as platform level trophies. They aren't truly account-wide the way platform trophies and Crowns and Chapters are. They are server (NA / EU) specific.

At best, I think the subject of fixing the trophy achievements may have spurred a discussion about account-wide achievements - or vice versa - but I don't think one was necessary for the other. It may have been a, "hey, while we are making people log in on every character to check achievements anyways, why don't we also look at this other feature request in the backlog."

newtinmpls

peacenote wrote: »

Getting that "you did this!" pop up is part of the fun for many and it will not be possible to get that pop-up again for any achievements that are account-wide.

I just experienced it this morning... I went to Imperial City because one of my friends was working on the Midyear Mayhem dailies and invited me to join; I got a pop up that said something like "Imperial City Recruit." I thought, "oh, wow, that's cool, I guess I never took this character into Imperial City before!" Literally all I had to do was enter and kill one player, it required almost zero effort, but it was fun to get the acknowledgement. I was grouped and it happened so fast that I don't think I even contributed to the kill at all. After the update there will be so many of those little moments that can be experienced only once.

I once heard a dev talking about some things in programming that change the game experience

One of them was about traveling in the world. A common complaint among players is "I'm not going fast enough", and one very effective solution on the part of the programmers was to NOT change the speed of travel, but add more "things" that the character passed. That turned out to be a very effective solution.

I hear a lot of people missing those "little steps" and things - me included.

I think that removing the individual recognition and acknowledgement for the character is akin to making the world more bland and boring - in a sense - and is the last thing I think that the devs should do.

tomofhyrule

Jaraal wrote: »

KMarble wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

nightstrike wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

_Zathras_ wrote: »

Literally, anything reassuring would be awesome right about now. Even, "Hey folks, as mentioned we are still working on a detailed Q&A for you who are invested in this direct discussion, as well as the greater ESO community. We're hoping to get that to you very early next week. The devil is in the details! Until then, here are a few things we want to let you know about the upcoming AWA changes that will hopefully set minds at ease from both sides of this debate.."

The silence makes them appear indecisive. And it's entirely possible that they still don't know what they are going to do about this situation. It's easy to imagine that there are varied opinions amongst the ZOS employees, and the fact that this is going to hurt sales makes it more imperative than some simple class/set/weapon balance issue.

I dunno, to me, the silence is just par for the course. ZOS doesn't really have a habit of communicating their thoughts. They shove things through without listening or responding to feedback with every major PTS change, so I don't see this being much different.

How often is there something other than silence? 3, maybe 4 times in the history of the entire game?

But they actually went out of their way with the AWA feedback to tell us they were reading it and "considering" it. They never use those kind of words on things they are 100% determined to push through. And they bought themselves time by stating that they were preparing a Q&A for us at some indefinite point in the future, rather than addressing our concerns outright.

So there's still hope that they will make the right decision and cancel, or at least postpone the implementation as it currently is.

The optimist in me hopes you're right, but the realist in me tells me you're not. So far all we had from ZOS were empty words. I suspect we only got some kind of response from them because 1. the subject of communication has been brought up time and time again, and 2. Kevin was probably hired to keep things under control while not actually giving us any info.

On the other hand, the fact that none of these quest bugs has been fixed in the weeks since the bomb was dropped on us may indicate that they are not actually going to implement AWA during this update. Are there still overlapping characters in Rimmen? Because that would be one of the first things they would address.

As evidenced by the length of this thread, this topic probably ended up a lot more controversial than anyone at ZOS probably thought it'd be. However, I don't know if this means they're going to do anything. I'm still hoping that we'll get some input soon.

I'm pessimistic though. Heck, I've even been meh about trying to play this event on alts because why bother getting them Pelinal boxes when I could just keep getting AP on my main and he already has the achievement?

I know there was a change they made to light/heavy attacks that died on PTS, but iirc they said that was more of a test than anything else. I also remember they did delay the two-person mounts after PTS found that they'd ban people just for riding. Otherwise, I don't remember too many things that end up on PTS not making it live, even if they are unpopular. And that sometimes includes major bugs that get reported on PTS and then aren't fixed until an incremental patch two-to-four weeks after it goes live.

Now I'd hope they do it like the two-person mounts. I remember they were showing that off when they announced it (around the time Greymoor was coming out!) and they even had a whole segment of the ESO live dedicated to it (not just an off-hand comment like "oh btw, AwA is coming"). And then it broke the game and banned people, so they had to table it for over a year. And now it's finally fixed and returning. I'd hope they see the feedback for AwA and decide to table it for the next patch so they could make a hybrid/two-tab system like most people are asking for (the article from WoW going AwA posted by @peacenote above also makes amazing points about why both AwA and character-specific are good, and it looks like that was also about 8 years into its lifetime), but the lack of any real responses here is making me nervous that what we've seen is what we'll get.
...At least I know not to do any Elsweyr story quests until the live team gets bug reports about the merged queens so it can be fixed sometime in April.

silvereyes

peacenote wrote: »

If we're copying other games... let's do that. That's what I want. And what an excellent write-up they provided about it, too: Bringing Achievements to the Account Level.

I'd like to quote this specific piece of the article: "However, and this is important, you will still see the achievement toast (the pop-up notification) if a second or subsequent character completes the achievement. We think it’s still important to recognize milestones like reaching level 80, maxing out a profession, or killing a raid boss for the first time. It's fun to have everyone congratulate you when you get the toast. Nonetheless, this will just be a new character of yours completing the achievement that you’ve already earned on your account. You won’t double up on points.

Another nugget of wisdom from that article:
"This is the kind of system that will evolve over time, and we don’t think this has to be the way achievements work forever. As beta players start experimenting with it and offering feedback, I am certain that we will end up making even more changes."

They had a closed beta program, where they gathered feedback from real players and were willing to make adjustments based on that feedback. I haven't heard of any betas in ESO since the Morrowind closed beta - which was just a glorified PTS with an NDA - but maybe ESO should start such a program? It might lead to better results than the current PTS feedback loop, which leaves developers too stressed for time to make significant adjustments.

Jaraal

tomofhyrule wrote: »

I'm pessimistic though. Heck, I've even been meh about trying to play this event on alts because why bother getting them Pelinal boxes when I could just keep getting AP on my main and he already has the achievement?

That's a good point. I noticed while playing a new (to pvp) character yesterday that they kept getting the cool Pelinal's achievement popups, and it made me smile.... but also made me sad that ZOS intends to kill this part of the game.

It just won't be the same.

CombatCoati

tomofhyrule wrote: »

You know, I just thought of something.

I know we all have a bunch of conspiracy theories about why they're doing this now (as opposed to at any other time), and the fact that they didn't try to sell this as 'it'll improve performance' (which they do if anything does have a chance to improve performance slightly) makes me think it's not that. I'm betting the main goal is to get console achievements to pop by basically re-popping every achievement.

But that's beside the point.

At the heart of it, I'd want to think about the mechanics of this transfer. If the goal is to get achievements to pop account-wide, and as it's implemented now is that logging onto a character gives a '523 achievements unlocked' popup, that must mean there's an empty database for the account achievements that is being populated, and a filled one for characters that is being copied over.

So... why can't we just keep that character database after the copy? And then the character-specific things that are attached to achievements (like skill points for the group events or MA, zone completion icons, or rune translations) could be tracked on that character list so you could do away with the character icon and you'd get true account-wide achievements. And for those people who don't like to see an empty list, make it so the character view (and its related popups) only are visible when you toggle something like Gameplay > Show Character Achievements and then switch to a second tab on the Achievements page.

That would give several benefits:

• Grindy achievements would still tally account-wide. You'd be able to see individual character contributions on the character side, but once you have 10 characters collectively doing 15 Jee-Lar dailies each, the achievement pops. You can still play one of those characters for another 135 days to see their progress and get that one to pop specifically, but the achievement's already earned over the account.
• Account-wide achievements would show all points, including the ones that are currently set up as character-specific. There would be no need to make character-specific achievements since there is a place to track things like that.
• Benefits of account-wide achievements (account-wide titles, anything available at furnishing vendors) will still track from the account side like on PTS so will still work.
• Character Achievements are still intact, are still viewable, and will still pop, but only for players who enable it. Players who want to see only one single list of achievements and only pop them when the first character does them will still have that.
• Zones will not be auto completed and minor non-quests like museums will still be available on alts. Any zone completion things like the issue with the two queens in Elsweyr could also stay character-side so the stories aren't broken.

This style seems to be doing what most people here want. It keeps the character history, but it hides it for anyone who is intimidated by the blanks to be filled. It keeps account tallies, but still lets you explore zones with characters. The only con here is that it is now two databases of achievements so it could bloat character data a bit - it could be reduced a bit by removing the "Earned by:" on the account view (since if you were interested, you could just go look at the characters themselves) or by putting one of the lists into storage in a high-profile area like PvP or trials (and then recopy the new achievements to the other list after leaving the zone).

I couldn't agree more, as your proposal matches my own suggestion I made some pages ago, where in addition I suggested to name per character achievements differently (my suggestion would be 'milestones') to avoid confusion, and make the per character achievements not linkable to chat to avoid the problem that players are rejected by groups if they do not have an achievement for a trail or the like.

As for the additionally storage space - well, the global achievements database would hold the same amount of data as each character database (maybe slightly less, as imho not each and every minor character achievement would require a global one), so we are talking about one character slot more or less here. Sure, it adds up over all the players, and the data of inactive accounts has to be kept if someone comes back after a a three year or so hiatus, but hard disk space is not exactly that expensive, so I think that would be kind of a lame excuse.

AlnilamE

Zezin wrote: »

alberichtano wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

Ugh_Tech wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

Ugh_Tech wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

Ugh_Tech wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

I think this change will be a good for the health of the game overall, while having players replay content might be good for an engagement metric it can also lead to a burn out.

Sorry, but I really just don't get it. Who or what forces anyone to replay any content if he/she doesn't want to?
And what part of this 'change' saves anyone from that 'forced' replay?

Seriously, I just don't see it. Since all achievements related to skill points seem to be excluded, what's the difference between starting a new char with and without AwA, except some titles which are (my personal opinion) completely meaningless for progressing in the game?
I really don't know so please explain to me what I am missing.

EDIT: I'd understand if we'd be talking about 'mount'-abilities, maybe motif-knowledge or skillpoints, but as far as I understood it, none of these things are affected by AwA.

Achievements represent the overall completion of the game, it might not make sense for people who don't care about completionism bit it does to me.

Same here, but that's exactly why I want to keep achievements tracked on character-level.
I'm not against AwA in general, but the current implementation kills the way players currently can track what parts of the game have been completed by each of their characters.
We're basically aiming for the same goal ('completition overlook'), just on another level of detail. These don't have to exclude each other, but in the current implementation they do, and in my opinion ZOS should develop a solution that satifies both groups of players instead of wiping the detail-data in which one of the groups has invested energy and time over years to satisfy the other group.

I feel like this is mostly due to a poor implementation when the game was launched, achievements should track player progress while character progress should be tracked with a journal/log, instead we have this weird achievement system. When I think about it it feels more like they're fixing it and bringing it in line with other games, the only problem is that it's getting rid of the character tracking.

That's the bad thing which caused this thread!
Since there are Addons on PC that provide some kind of account-wide overview, I don't think it should be too hard to provide AwA while preserving character-based progress as well.
The current implementation might be 'unusual' compared to other games, but 'adjusting' it to other games is not a fix when data is wiped that represents large effords that players put in.

I get it, I do honestly and I've said so before , I'm in favor of there being separate character tracking but lots of people are confusing achievements with that.

The game itself has tied achievements and character tracking together for 8 years. This isn't a matter of confusion. It's how the game is designed.

If the developers want to redefine ESO achievements to be the account-wide, single-use badges that other games have, step number one needs to be developing new tracking features. Anything less constitutes removing an essential feature for a lot of people.

For an RPG, character tracking isn't expendable.

This:

Zezin wrote: »

Ugh_Tech wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

Ugh_Tech wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

I think this change will be a good for the health of the game overall, while having players replay content might be good for an engagement metric it can also lead to a burn out.

Sorry, but I really just don't get it. Who or what forces anyone to replay any content if he/she doesn't want to?
And what part of this 'change' saves anyone from that 'forced' replay?

Seriously, I just don't see it. Since all achievements related to skill points seem to be excluded, what's the difference between starting a new char with and without AwA, except some titles which are (my personal opinion) completely meaningless for progressing in the game?
I really don't know so please explain to me what I am missing.

EDIT: I'd understand if we'd be talking about 'mount'-abilities, maybe motif-knowledge or skillpoints, but as far as I understood it, none of these things are affected by AwA.

Achievements represent the overall completion of the game, it might not make sense for people who don't care about completionism bit it does to me.

Same here, but that's exactly why I want to keep achievements tracked on character-level.
I'm not against AwA in general, but the current implementation kills the way players currently can track what parts of the game have been completed by each of their characters.
We're basically aiming for the same goal ('completition overlook'), just on another level of detail. These don't have to exclude each other, but in the current implementation they do, and in my opinion ZOS should develop a solution that satifies both groups of players instead of wiping the detail-data in which one of the groups has invested energy and time over years to satisfy the other group.

I feel like this is mostly due to a poor implementation when the game was launched, achievements should track player progress while character progress should be tracked with a journal/log, instead we have this weird achievement system. When I think about it it feels more like they're fixing it and bringing it in line with other games, the only problem is that it's getting rid of the character tracking.

Not even sure why it is so important to "bring it in line with other games"? Fepp other games! What is the point of having a hundred different games if they are all trying to be the same game anyways? Isn't the very point of having hundreds of games exactly that they are all different, for better or worse? This conformity-mania is troubling, to say the least.

There's a reason some systems get copied, some times they're just better, also I'd hardly say a shooter or a rts game are the same as ESO, achievements are minor compared to the rest of the gameplay for the game.

Sometimes. But sometimes they don't fit into the game. Personally, if they don't preserve individual achievements in some way, I'll go play something else. I am losing my enthusiasm for ESO for the first time in 8 years the longer we don't get some sort of feedback from the devs about what's a bug and what isn't here.

Csleia

typical response in this thread from someone who likes the change:
"this is great i dont have to play on alts anymore or do anything twice"

typical response from people who dont like the change:
"this is horrible, i wont have a reason to play on alts anymore, or replay any content whatsoever"

Tandor

Csleia wrote: »

typical response in this thread from someone who likes the change:
"this is great i dont have to play on alts anymore or do anything twice"

typical response from people who dont like the change:
"this is horrible, i wont have a reason to play on alts anymore, or replay any content whatsoever"

Yup, which is why it would be crazy to push through a system that doesn't cater for both sets of players, let alone one that is in a form that even a lot of those who like the principle behind the change don't like the way it is being implemented.

CombatCoati

Csleia wrote: »

typical response in this thread from someone who likes the change:
"this is great i dont have to play on alts anymore or do anything twice"

typical response from people who dont like the change:
"this is horrible, i wont have a reason to play on alts anymore, or replay any content whatsoever"

I think you got both of your citements wrong - it's more like

"this is great, now I can play on any alt without having to worry that their achievement progress does not add to my account / my main"

against

"this is horrible, now I can't track anymore what my alts have done and what not"

Putting it that way, you can see that those are not excluding each other, but could exist together, making not every one happy, but way more people than what we see now - both on live as well as the PTS it seems.

tomofhyrule

Csleia wrote: »

typical response in this thread from someone who likes the change:
"this is great i dont have to play on alts anymore or do anything twice"

typical response from people who dont like the change:
"this is horrible, i wont have a reason to play on alts anymore, or replay any content whatsoever"

I don't want to keep going back to the WoW article on implementing AwA (8 years after release...) since I don't think anything should be implemented based on 'well, that's how these other people do it,' and the fact that ESO is my only MMO so I can't even talk about WoW from experience, but...

emphasis mine

"Overall, we never want you to play Character A instead of Character B because of achievement concerns. If Character A had the Violet Proto-Drake, then you might not play Character B. If Character A was only one [part] away from the [net achievement], then you may not play Character B. If Character A had completed most of the raid achievements from [another net achievement], you may not want to bring Character B for one fight and miss out on the achievement. Having alts is cool and working on achievements is cool, but we don’t want the two systems to work against each other.

This goal is paramount and drives everything else. If we allowed you to earn extra achievement points from completing an achievement on two different characters, then you might only want to play the character with the most points and you’d feel like you had to grind through all the achievements with every alt, thus defeating the purpose of having account-level achievements."

and

"This means you only earn the points once. If you have earned an achievement on one character, you can see it on all your characters. However, and this is important, you will still see the achievement toast (the pop-up notification) if a second or subsequent character completes the achievement. We think it’s still important to recognize milestones like reaching level 80, maxing out a profession, or killing a raid boss for the first time. It's fun to have everyone congratulate you when you get the toast. Nonetheless, this will just be a new character of yours completing the achievement that you’ve already earned on your account. You won’t double up on points."

The system they describe is a hybrid - you can get achievement points over the whole account so you don't have to focus your time on a single character. But you aren't barred from getting achievements on a second character since the first already got them. This way both groups get what they want.

And as a sidenote - the WoW system isn't talking about using achievements as character trackers, which is the problem most people here are having. But yes, as some people have noted, popping an achieve on an alt does give a little fun, in addition to allowing you to have some way to follow their history.

ESO players do fall into two groups: the 'I am the player and these are my tools' people, and the 'I am the overseer and these characters have their individual lives' people. That's why some people like AwA as the PTS implements it ("oh boy, I can now use the best tool for the job!") and some don't ("don't delete my character's exploration! He hasn't been here yet!"). The current live version only helps the latter type of player, the PTS version the former. As it is now, it feels like ZOS is pitting these two groups against each other, when they don't have to be. If we had a hybrid system like the ones that half of the people in this thread have described, then both groups would mostly get what they need with little to no inconvenience.

heaven13

Crown_of_Antlers wrote: »

majulook wrote: »

So still nothing from ZOS as to fixing any of the bugs that have been found with this?
Is this game is pretty much over for a lot of players or will they just suck it up and keep playing?

It will be over for my husband and myself. I suppose on the day before this goes live we'll log in and say goodbye to our characters. Like many others who have contributed to this thread, we've put a lot into them and enjoyed the different adventures they've had. We'll miss them, but we would rather never log in on them again than have their achievements all mashed together into one.

I’ve already left. I logged in once, for a couple seconds, since the first PTS patch. I logged into EU to delete all my characters there. NA characters still exist but I won’t play any of them because I’m not letting this implementation of AwA touch any of my characters. ESO+ has been canceled.

I was talking with my partner about how long I’ve been playing and breaks I’ve taken. I wanted to check on when a character had been started and then gotten one specific achievement. With how AwA is implemented, I will no longer be able to see any of this. For any character.

Elsonso

heaven13 wrote: »

I’ve already left. I logged in once, for a couple seconds, since the first PTS patch. I logged into EU to delete all my characters there. NA characters still exist but I won’t play any of them because I’m not letting this implementation of AwA touch any of my characters. ESO+ has been canceled.

I was talking with my partner about how long I’ve been playing and breaks I’ve taken. I wanted to check on when a character had been started and then gotten one specific achievement. With how AwA is implemented, I will no longer be able to see any of this. For any character.

Too soon to burn bridges. Set the charges and ready the orbital nukes, sure, but too soon to press the button. ZOS still has some time to abort landing and go around. Not much time, and I don't expect that they will, but they do have to be given the chance.

Zezin

[

tomofhyrule wrote: »

Csleia wrote: »

typical response in this thread from someone who likes the change:
"this is great i dont have to play on alts anymore or do anything twice"

typical response from people who dont like the change:
"this is horrible, i wont have a reason to play on alts anymore, or replay any content whatsoever"

I don't want to keep going back to the WoW article on implementing AwA (8 years after release...) since I don't think anything should be implemented based on 'well, that's how these other people do it,' and the fact that ESO is my only MMO so I can't even talk about WoW from experience, but...

emphasis mine

"Overall, we never want you to play Character A instead of Character B because of achievement concerns. If Character A had the Violet Proto-Drake, then you might not play Character B. If Character A was only one [part] away from the [net achievement], then you may not play Character B. If Character A had completed most of the raid achievements from [another net achievement], you may not want to bring Character B for one fight and miss out on the achievement. Having alts is cool and working on achievements is cool, but we don’t want the two systems to work against each other.

This goal is paramount and drives everything else. If we allowed you to earn extra achievement points from completing an achievement on two different characters, then you might only want to play the character with the most points and you’d feel like you had to grind through all the achievements with every alt, thus defeating the purpose of having account-level achievements."

and

"This means you only earn the points once. If you have earned an achievement on one character, you can see it on all your characters. However, and this is important, you will still see the achievement toast (the pop-up notification) if a second or subsequent character completes the achievement. We think it’s still important to recognize milestones like reaching level 80, maxing out a profession, or killing a raid boss for the first time. It's fun to have everyone congratulate you when you get the toast. Nonetheless, this will just be a new character of yours completing the achievement that you’ve already earned on your account. You won’t double up on points."

The system they describe is a hybrid - you can get achievement points over the whole account so you don't have to focus your time on a single character. But you aren't barred from getting achievements on a second character since the first already got them. This way both groups get what they want.

And as a sidenote - the WoW system isn't talking about using achievements as character trackers, which is the problem most people here are having. But yes, as some people have noted, popping an achieve on an alt does give a little fun, in addition to allowing you to have some way to follow their history.

ESO players do fall into two groups: the 'I am the player and these are my tools' people, and the 'I am the overseer and these characters have their individual lives' people. That's why some people like AwA as the PTS implements it ("oh boy, I can now use the best tool for the job!") and some don't ("don't delete my character's exploration! He hasn't been here yet!"). The current live version only helps the latter type of player, the PTS version the former. As it is now, it feels like ZOS is pitting these two groups against each other, when they don't have to be. If we had a hybrid system like the ones that half of the people in this thread have described, then both groups would mostly get what they need with little to no inconvenience.

This is a really good assessment, agree 100%.

wenchmore420b14_ESO

Elsonso wrote: »

heaven13 wrote: »

I’ve already left. I logged in once, for a couple seconds, since the first PTS patch. I logged into EU to delete all my characters there. NA characters still exist but I won’t play any of them because I’m not letting this implementation of AwA touch any of my characters. ESO+ has been canceled.

I was talking with my partner about how long I’ve been playing and breaks I’ve taken. I wanted to check on when a character had been started and then gotten one specific achievement. With how AwA is implemented, I will no longer be able to see any of this. For any character.

Too soon to burn bridges. Set the charges and ready the orbital nukes, sure, but too soon to press the button. ZOS still has some time to abort landing and go around. Not much time, and I don't expect that they will, but they do have to be given the chance.

True.
After 4 months in closed beta and almost 12K hrs since launch, I have adapted a "wait and see" attitude toward changes.
Yes, ZoS has listened to feedback before. In beta and early launch, they did listen to players.
(As I mentioned in an earlier post, they had a roundtable of GM's they discussed things with and got the feel of the player base, but that sadly went away).
And I have always weathered the changes, whether I liked them or not, and learned to live with them.
But what is currently being shown us on PTS is defiantly a game changer for me.
Just my 2 drakes...
To sad for huzzahs today.......

spacefracking

Just show a separate account

CombatCoati wrote: »

Csleia wrote: »

typical response in this thread from someone who likes the change:
"this is great i dont have to play on alts anymore or do anything twice"

typical response from people who dont like the change:
"this is horrible, i wont have a reason to play on alts anymore, or replay any content whatsoever"

I think you got both of your citements wrong - it's more like

"this is great, now I can play on any alt without having to worry that their achievement progress does not add to my account / my main"

against

"this is horrible, now I can't track anymore what my alts have done and what not"

Putting it that way, you can see that those are not excluding each other, but could exist together, making not every one happy, but way more people than what we see now - both on live as well as the PTS it seems.

The baffling part is that there are addons that implement a hybrid awa system with per character achievement. The feature already exists, code written and tested, yet they're implementing a slapdash version of it. Bizarre.

silvereyes

They're heeeeeerrrrre!

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/598717/pts-patch-notes-v7-3-3/p1

wolfie1.0.

alberichtano wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

Ugh_Tech wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

Ugh_Tech wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

Ugh_Tech wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

I think this change will be a good for the health of the game overall, while having players replay content might be good for an engagement metric it can also lead to a burn out.

Sorry, but I really just don't get it. Who or what forces anyone to replay any content if he/she doesn't want to?
And what part of this 'change' saves anyone from that 'forced' replay?

Seriously, I just don't see it. Since all achievements related to skill points seem to be excluded, what's the difference between starting a new char with and without AwA, except some titles which are (my personal opinion) completely meaningless for progressing in the game?
I really don't know so please explain to me what I am missing.

EDIT: I'd understand if we'd be talking about 'mount'-abilities, maybe motif-knowledge or skillpoints, but as far as I understood it, none of these things are affected by AwA.

Achievements represent the overall completion of the game, it might not make sense for people who don't care about completionism bit it does to me.

Same here, but that's exactly why I want to keep achievements tracked on character-level.
I'm not against AwA in general, but the current implementation kills the way players currently can track what parts of the game have been completed by each of their characters.
We're basically aiming for the same goal ('completition overlook'), just on another level of detail. These don't have to exclude each other, but in the current implementation they do, and in my opinion ZOS should develop a solution that satifies both groups of players instead of wiping the detail-data in which one of the groups has invested energy and time over years to satisfy the other group.

I feel like this is mostly due to a poor implementation when the game was launched, achievements should track player progress while character progress should be tracked with a journal/log, instead we have this weird achievement system. When I think about it it feels more like they're fixing it and bringing it in line with other games, the only problem is that it's getting rid of the character tracking.

That's the bad thing which caused this thread!
Since there are Addons on PC that provide some kind of account-wide overview, I don't think it should be too hard to provide AwA while preserving character-based progress as well.
The current implementation might be 'unusual' compared to other games, but 'adjusting' it to other games is not a fix when data is wiped that represents large effords that players put in.

I get it, I do honestly and I've said so before , I'm in favor of there being separate character tracking but lots of people are confusing achievements with that.

The game itself has tied achievements and character tracking together for 8 years. This isn't a matter of confusion. It's how the game is designed.

If the developers want to redefine ESO achievements to be the account-wide, single-use badges that other games have, step number one needs to be developing new tracking features. Anything less constitutes removing an essential feature for a lot of people.

For an RPG, character tracking isn't expendable.

This:

Zezin wrote: »

Ugh_Tech wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

Ugh_Tech wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

I think this change will be a good for the health of the game overall, while having players replay content might be good for an engagement metric it can also lead to a burn out.

Sorry, but I really just don't get it. Who or what forces anyone to replay any content if he/she doesn't want to?
And what part of this 'change' saves anyone from that 'forced' replay?

Seriously, I just don't see it. Since all achievements related to skill points seem to be excluded, what's the difference between starting a new char with and without AwA, except some titles which are (my personal opinion) completely meaningless for progressing in the game?
I really don't know so please explain to me what I am missing.

EDIT: I'd understand if we'd be talking about 'mount'-abilities, maybe motif-knowledge or skillpoints, but as far as I understood it, none of these things are affected by AwA.

Achievements represent the overall completion of the game, it might not make sense for people who don't care about completionism bit it does to me.

Same here, but that's exactly why I want to keep achievements tracked on character-level.
I'm not against AwA in general, but the current implementation kills the way players currently can track what parts of the game have been completed by each of their characters.
We're basically aiming for the same goal ('completition overlook'), just on another level of detail. These don't have to exclude each other, but in the current implementation they do, and in my opinion ZOS should develop a solution that satifies both groups of players instead of wiping the detail-data in which one of the groups has invested energy and time over years to satisfy the other group.

I feel like this is mostly due to a poor implementation when the game was launched, achievements should track player progress while character progress should be tracked with a journal/log, instead we have this weird achievement system. When I think about it it feels more like they're fixing it and bringing it in line with other games, the only problem is that it's getting rid of the character tracking.

Not even sure why it is so important to "bring it in line with other games"? Fepp other games! What is the point of having a hundred different games if they are all trying to be the same game anyways? Isn't the very point of having hundreds of games exactly that they are all different, for better or worse? This conformity-mania is troubling, to say the least.

My gut is telling me that really all of this is a Microsoft/Xbox mandate that is coming from higher up the change from ZOS. It would explain sooo much as to why this feels rushed. This is speculation of course, but its the only factor that i can think that has changed recently to cause such a pivot after so long without and hint of it coming.

Csleia

no guys the biggest issue is the deletion of replayability

this awa system literally deletes all duplicate achievements because it only keeps data from the first character that you got an achievement on

fix: make it say "achieved by: " for every character that got it, and then you can have awa without deleting and preventing replayability of achievements

with awa as it is now, if you have 10 godslayers it will delete 9 of them permanently, if you dont know what that is then you are not qualified at all to judge whether you like this system or not

wenchmore420b14_ESO

Well, they did listen a little.
Museum Achievements got fixed on PTS.
Lets hope they listen to our other concerns... Hope, hope, hope!

Museum Achievements
In order to allow characters to participate in finding each museum’s objects and obtain the reward for doing so, we’re making all museum Achievements character-based rather than account-wide. We are continuing to explore a better solution to this problem but wanted to ensure you can at least continue earning these rewards on all characters in the meantime.

Caroloces

ESO players do fall into two groups: the 'I am the player and these are my tools' people, and the 'I am the overseer and these characters have their individual lives' people. That's why some people like AwA as the PTS implements it ("oh boy, I can now use the best tool for the job!") and some don't ("don't delete my character's exploration! He hasn't been here yet!"). The current live version only helps the latter type of player, the PTS version the former. As it is now, it feels like ZOS is pitting these two groups against each other, when they don't have to be. If we had a hybrid system like the ones that half of the people in this thread have described, then both groups would mostly get what they need with little to no inconvenience.

Up to a point, I think that's a fairly good analysis of the situation, but I think I would disagree with "The current live version only helps the latter type of player" (meaning those in favor of retaining character wide achievements). A player has the option to dedicate one character in the account to collect all the achievements available in the game, almost as if achievements were account wide. He/she could create alts, and simply ignore the Achievement system altogether for those alts. Of course, you would then have the player (if driven by a need to complete achievements) concentrating on just the one character, but that would be their choice.

I think a more accurate analysis of the situation would be to consider two different mindsets in play: One would be the "completionist" mindset in which the player views the game as a fixed challenge with markers (achievements) that would lead to a satisfying conclusion; the other mindset would be one in which the player views the game as a living saga with no fixed conclusion, the achievements being guideposts in the journey of one, or more, characters.

One thing I believe you're definitely on the money is the unfortunate fact that ZOS is pitting these two groups against one another to the detriment of the game as a whole. Personally, I am a die-hard Elder Scrolls fan who has subbed and played the game since its inception. This is a persistent world with a history (and future!) rooted in a vast and dynamic lore. If I create a dark elf necromancer (which I just recently did!), I want that character to grow into its own reality, whether it be an acolyte of the Fighter's Guild or an Undaunted seeking to conquer every dungeon! Character achievements help shape this toon into an individual who strikes out on his own, apart from what my other characters might be dedicated to.

I don't begrudge the players who have the completionist mindset (to each his own), but I do believe that it relegates ESO to a game of fixed boundaries and a finite and limited vision, just like most games out there: You complete it, and then you move on. So many games, so little time! as my younger brother likes to tell me!

silvereyes

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Museum Achievements
In order to allow characters to participate in finding each museum’s objects and obtain the reward for doing so, we’re making all museum Achievements character-based rather than account-wide. We are continuing to explore a better solution to this problem but wanted to ensure you can at least continue earning these rewards on all characters in the meantime.

Well, that's good to know they are at least workshopping other solutions and willing to put stopgap measures in place in the meantime. There's still a ton more bugs on the list, though, so it'd be great to get some clarity on those. A week is a really long time to wait for the next communication.

Csleia

spacefracking wrote: »

Just show a separate account

CombatCoati wrote: »

Csleia wrote: »

typical response in this thread from someone who likes the change:
"this is great i dont have to play on alts anymore or do anything twice"

typical response from people who dont like the change:
"this is horrible, i wont have a reason to play on alts anymore, or replay any content whatsoever"

I think you got both of your citements wrong - it's more like

"this is great, now I can play on any alt without having to worry that their achievement progress does not add to my account / my main"

against

"this is horrible, now I can't track anymore what my alts have done and what not"

Putting it that way, you can see that those are not excluding each other, but could exist together, making not every one happy, but way more people than what we see now - both on live as well as the PTS it seems.

The baffling part is that there are addons that implement a hybrid awa system with per character achievement. The feature already exists, code written and tested, yet they're implementing a slapdash version of it. Bizarre.

exactly, 171,819 downloads of pithka's achievements tracker

again, the issue is not just "tracking achievements", its how awa is going to delete all duplicate achievements on alt characters

Zezin

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

Well, they did listen a little.
Museum Achievements got fixed on PTS.
Lets hope they listen to our other concerns... Hope, hope, hope!

Museum Achievements
In order to allow characters to participate in finding each museum’s objects and obtain the reward for doing so, we’re making all museum Achievements character-based rather than account-wide. We are continuing to explore a better solution to this problem but wanted to ensure you can at least continue earning these rewards on all characters in the meantime.

Can't say I'm happy with the way they did it though, it's good you're able to do it multiple times but those are some achievements I have very little interest in chasing on multiple characters.

wolfie1.0.

Wolfpaw wrote: »

nightstrike wrote: »

jad11mumbler wrote: »

I don't believe ZoS will change anything based on our fedback.
Its apparently what the casual , newer playerbase wants and They must come first.

I honestly wonder where they get their ideas from in the first place. Somebody had to sit down and think that this was a good idea, and then actively ignore 51 pages of complaints about it. How does that process actually work? I mean, at my job, I sit in design meetings, and we talk about customer needs and resource planning. Something like this would be a red flag that says "stop doing that". I can't really fathom how decision processes like this work where you implement a hated feature and force it to roll out for some unknown reason. Maybe someone high up the chain plays the game with only their main character and wants it this way?

It just seems so poorly thought out, so poorly designed, so rushed to deploy, so ignorant of customer needs.... How do you as a developer come to work every day and create such bad product and feel good about your job? I don't get it.

51 pages for & against AWA, and plenty of the posts from both sides are the same players boosting page count by sharing their opinion over and over. This thread hardly reflects all the players in ESO, a drop in the bucket compared to the millions of players.

Years of forum requests for AWA, email survey (not sure if AWA was in it, new races was if I remember right), twitch streams, social media, etc...AWA was not pulled from the air with out reason. Population won't collapse, the exaggerations/hyperbole could be toned down considering some frustrations.

No need to set the tone this is all viewed in a negative perspective?

& to also add, from a learned PvP player (mostly), this is not our game, those characters are not ours, and we don't pull 50+ hours/week at ZOS working on this. A little perspective towards the people at ZOS that have spent a lot of time working on this, & probably proud of their hard work.

May be best to find alternative ways/system for players that don't want AWA to hold individual value of their characters.

Just curious, but there have been WAAYYY more complaints about the state of PVP for similar time frames... Where exactly is the improvement there? Do point to the recent post by Matt either. ZOS has been promising performance improvements for years, and they have yet to deliver.

As to who owns the game? yes you are correct ZOS does. it is there game, we just license it, by paying for it. Many games have failed to take off, or have shut down, just by making a few decisions that upset their core player base. A game like ESO needs a core set of dedicated players to enable the casual players that play in bursts to exist. They need subs and crown purchases to keep the lights on. Upset too many people that pay those bills and they will go elsewhere.

Also i keep hearing about surveys and such. When was the last time you received a survey? its been years for me, and i have many accounts with ESO. As far as whether players will accept it or hate it will depend on how the non forum users react to it.

We simply don't know how the bulk of the player base is going to react. Its been stated often enough that a minority of players frequent these forums, Fewer contribute, Even fewer download and test the PTS (per ZOS which is why they test certain things on live) and fewer than that engage in both the PTS and forums.

Only time will tell, all i can do is be vocal and attempt to engage.

Zezin

Caroloces wrote: »

ESO players do fall into two groups: the 'I am the player and these are my tools' people, and the 'I am the overseer and these characters have their individual lives' people. That's why some people like AwA as the PTS implements it ("oh boy, I can now use the best tool for the job!") and some don't ("don't delete my character's exploration! He hasn't been here yet!"). The current live version only helps the latter type of player, the PTS version the former. As it is now, it feels like ZOS is pitting these two groups against each other, when they don't have to be. If we had a hybrid system like the ones that half of the people in this thread have described, then both groups would mostly get what they need with little to no inconvenience.

Up to a point, I think that's a fairly good analysis of the situation, but I think I would disagree with "The current live version only helps the latter type of player" (meaning those in favor of retaining character wide achievements). A player has the option to dedicate one character in the account to collect all the achievements available in the game, almost as if achievements were account wide. He/she could create alts, and simply ignore the Achievement system altogether for those alts. Of course, you would then have the player (if driven by a need to complete achievements) concentrating on just the one character, but that would be their choice.

I think a more accurate analysis of the situation would be to consider two different mindsets in play: One would be the "completionist" mindset in which the player views the game as a fixed challenge with markers (achievements) that would lead to a satisfying conclusion: the other mindset would be one in which the player views the game as a living saga with no fixed conclusion, the achievements being guideposts in the journey of one, or more, characters.

One thing I believe you're definitely on the money is the unfortunate fact that ZOS is pitting these two groups against one another to the detriment of the game as a whole. Personally, I am a die-hard Elder Scrolls fan who has subbed and played the game since its inception. This is a persistent world with a history (and future!) rooted in a vast and dynamic lore. If I create a dark elf necromancer (which I just recently did!), I want that character to grow into its own reality, whether it be an acolyte of the Fighter's Guild or an Undaunted seeking to conquer every dungeon! Character achievements help shape this toon into an individual who strikes out on his own, apart from what my other characters might be dedicated to.

I don't begrudge the players who have the completionist mindset (to each his own), but I do believe that it relegates ESO to a game of fixed boundaries and a finite and limited vision, just like most games out there: You complete it, and then you move on. So many games, so little time! as my younger brother likes to tell me!

No the assessment was good, I WANT to use multiple characters depending on the situation and or how I want to play at a specific time saying one group can just use one character is pointless you could also say that there would be nothing wrong with AwA because the people against it can just have a single character and avoid that problem.

tomofhyrule

Here's a question to test for our EU friends now that they've done this:

Do you have a museum achievement where one character got it and another didn't? If you've logged into PTS last week, that achievement should have popped for your account, even on the character that didn't get it. If you first log on this week, character B should still have the achievement locked.

So what if you take your account that logged in last week and noticed that B got it account-wide, and now log on this week. Does 'B' still have it?

I don't think they recopied the server, so progress should have been consistent across both weeks. But if B had it last week (because of account) and not this week and they can now go find the parts, that suggests that the character progress is still stored, even if we can't see it.
...which means at least for PC friends, someone may be able to get an addon to see that progress again.

Aethereal'Golden

I greatly enjoy this new system, thank you.
However, I hate the book system - stylebooks to be specific. All my characters can't read all of them, so that section will be unfulfilled forever.
Can all characters be able to learn stylebooks (as texts written) - while only one (who activated the book) will be able to actually craft the motif?