PTS Update 33 - Feedback Thread for Account Wide Achievements

Saieden

CrystalExarch wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

Having our characters' history and progress trashed is not a minor inconvenience for a huge portion of the playerbase. It will completely destroy the only way I play.

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Kevin

Where are our answers? Are you going to do the right thing now that you know how devastating this is for many of us and fix it so we can track our characters progress individually?

We need some answers NOW.

I'm afraid, no answers until it will be already too late for a reaction. This is when their Q&A will come out, I presume, to say a few words justifying the decision they took for the community against a big part of the community.

At this point I want to remind ZOS [and some of you] that while Final Fantasy XIV, for example, actively discourages creation of alts, it doesn't fail to acknowledge the uniqueness of a newly-created character as all of its achievements are character-bound. Why ZOS can't keep working on the same principle is beyond my imagination.

As for me, although I'm a new player with just 4 months of playing ESO, I'm not going to keep feeding someone that bites my hand. My ESO+ expired today. I shall not renew it or play my characters before I receive a clear explanation as to why a ROLE-PLAYING game gets rid of one of its fundamental concepts: ability to replay the story through the eyes of another character.

Last week I re-run through the Blackwood main quest with my second character, who is already a Dark Brotherhood member as my main wasn't at the time of playing it; and so I experienced the different dialogue between a DB and a non-DB member. Now, what will happen when AwA goes live? Does anyone know? I certainly don't.

I'll continue watching this thread, and any news regarding AwA, but honestly I don't hold my breath.

Wishing best of luck to all sad and angry fellow players out there.

My sub expires at the end of march, so I had the luxury of being able to cancel my sub and give the benefit of the doubt at the start of PTS. At this point, it looks unlikely I'll resub in the foreseeable future. I will say that it is not only because of this change and it's implications themselves, though they did give me pause to reflect on what I actually do in game with my and the nature of the content. Suffice to say, I came to the conclusion that under the surface, despite there being new content every 3 months, there is very little innovation at all, even across the entire game's history. Templating is massively overused, and the only for me to re-experience the content I enjoy is make a new class which is then gated behind mind-numbing running grinds. On top of that, while the lore is deep and all that, the actual delivery of story content is reduced to rehashed face-to-face animations (and faces, for that matter), plain text (books and notes), and sometimes an unskippable in game cutscene that is disconnected from the character entirely. It's sad because the actual core combat mechanics, when they work, feel absolutely amazing, and I really do enjoy visceral feel of it and the mechanical challenge. It's just that the game forces me to do so much other (to me) boring stuff before I can do the stuff I actually enjoy and, am challenged by, "the way I want".

RaddlemanNumber7

I think 7.3.3 shows the devs just didn't think this whole thing through. They should withdraw AwA for now, and have another go in a few months time when they have finalised a satisfactory design. After consulting properly with their customers, of course.

Jaraal

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

The part that i find hypocritical from ZOS is that they stated that there wasn't supposed to be any NEW or significant new systems introduced in 2022. Liars...

Yeah I can't even imagine a bigger, more impactful system change than changing one of the most basic functions that has been in place for the eight years the game has been around. Maybe if they went to turn based combat, that would be bigger.... but I digress.

You are correct that their words ring hollow at the most basic level. I'm so tired of being disappointed by false promises of performance improvements and the cutting away of long standing parts of the game for unclear reasons (Bosmer lore trashed for spurious PvP passives nobody wanted, Argonian lore altered but not the quests and dialogue about poison resistance, large groups being done away with because they "liked the behavior changes", skill progressions being swapped around despite player outrage (Vigor for Rapids swap), cheapening of the main story by bringing sacrificed heroes back to sell new content, etc, etc...)

I really love this game and have played it exclusively for many years. But the way they treat the player base and historically ignore feedback from the PTS, combined with the continuing lack of communication has got me looking into other games. And I would hesitate to consider any new offerings from this particular team for the same reasons. You get the feeling that they know people love the Elder Scrolls franchise so much that they can basically change whatever, whenever, and the people will just keep coming back. Well, I think this change in one of the core functions of the game will be the true test of people's loyalty. And it's ironic that the group of players this AWA change benefits most are the casual one and done folks who want to beat the game as fast as possible and aren't interested in replaying content on other characters. It's the people who love the game most and are excited to play it over and over again with different characters who are the ones most hurt by this change.

Ugh_Tech

When I look at what ZOS is not doing (communicating with the community), I prepare for the worst, which means the only way to keep character-based progress tracked would be putting each character in a separate account (and basically do a complete restart with no achievements on any character).

Really ZOS, in that case I'd say you owe us
- 20$ per character (except the first one) or a free copy of the base game
- all chapters/DLCs we paid for (again, for each but one character)
- free transfer of chars to new accounts to keep their achievements
- a large discount on ESO+ (100% for all but the first account)

Maybe that's a wording that's understood by the management.

SnowP

Here are some Tests on the PTS v7.3.3 using a clean Char not used on the PTS before:

Wrothgar
Achievement is char dependent, but when starting the quest and displaying Agra Crun, it is not marked in the achievement.


Kari`s List Thieves Guild
Achievement is char dependent, but as you can see below charater wide benefits are still removed - you get no advancement in the skill line when earning the achievement.
pre:

post:


It seems to me that the buggy code of v7.3.0 was only a little tweaked instead of using the working code that we have on live right now. That is a very bad decision in my oppinion.

Mephit

SnowP wrote: »

Here are some Tests on the PTS v7.3.3 using a clean Char not used on the PTS before:

Wrothgar
Achievement is char dependent, but when starting the quest and displaying Agra Crun, it is not marked in the achievement.


Kari`s List Thieves Guild
Achievement is char dependent, but as you can see below charater wide benefits are still removed - you get no advancement in the skill line when earning the achievement.
pre:

post:


It seems to me that the buggy code of v7.3.0 was only a little tweaked instead of using the working code that we have on live right now. That is a very bad decision in my oppinion.

I've never coded a game like this, but I have coded (mostly an architect these days) for large financial companies for over 30 years.

They are fixing forward.

The more detailed designers / coders know they have messed up, and know they should step backwards, but they won't be allowed to.

It is a "copy and paste bodge job", and they naively thought they could get away with it. Someone probably thought they were being "smart".

But the weirdest thing is they still don't understand the implications this has on the base game, and they clearly didn't test it.

It's mind boggling.

So, they are slapping band-aids on bad code that arose due to a bad design, and they will keep doing it.

The promised Q&A was intended as a distraction / delaying tactic.

I cancelled my ESO+ when this was first announced (expires later today), cos I could no longer invest in a company that was using my money to make their product worse.

CombatCoati

Jaraal wrote: »

I don’t need to see the Q&A at this point. I already got the answer in the patch notes, that they fixed one of potentially hundreds of bugged quests. That tells me that this mess is a done deal.

As for me, they even didn't really fix that. They did not fix their vision of account wide museum quest achievements by keeping those and still be able to complete those quests on alts as well. They only rolled back the change, which, at least for me, shows that there is no easy real fix for what we see on the PTS and consider as bugs, like museum quests or map completion.

There seems to be no hidden database in the back, where the achievements and the game itself get their data from. The achievements database in fact is the tracking database. So for every account wide achievement, in game checks will be against the account wide progress. You want to check against per character progress, as in the museum quests? No account wide achievement for those, sorry for that.

What baffles me is that you do not have to look far to find a real fix for all the problems - have two layers of tracking, one per account and one per character, and adjust ingame checks accordingly as you desire. Instead we get a "We are continuing to explore a better solution to this problem".

I can only see advantages with a dual tracking system. Not only for players, but also from a developers point of view. With such a solid base, there are so many things to build on.

The hole presentation - adjustable at any time. Will the player see only account wide progress and not per character? Both on different tabs? Maybe even selectable which one to show by default, or even being able to turn off one or the other view if a player desires so?

Take titles as another example - those will be account wide. Now imagine that does not get the positive feedback as expected (personally I do not think so, this is just an example), and you as a dev want to change it back to be per character. Easy thing, just change the in game check to be against the account wide database to be against the per character database. Sounds so easy that you could even make this selectable in the options, which I would call a real qol feature.

Unfortunately, for reasons unkown to us it pretty much seems ZOS does not want or can not go the way of a dual tracking system (which, as I have learned, WOW uses, so there is a not too small reference that this can be done). I do not want to speculate on the reasons here, but I want to say that I think that this is an incredibly bad way to go, as it makes the whole thing irreversible.

Just imagine we in fact see the mass exodus of players predicted by some. What then? Will ZOS say, "err, OK, we see this was a mistake. You can come back, it's all per character again, with the added benefit that you are able to do everything again that you have done during the last 8 years, because unfortunately your old data is lost"? That will not only not get any players back, it would drive away even more that have stayed.
If it was my call, I wouldn't dare to take such a risky step without a safety net. And yet, ZOS seems to be about to do exactly that.

Elsonso

CrystalExarch wrote: »

I'm afraid, no answers until it will be already too late for a reaction. This is when their Q&A will come out, I presume, to say a few words justifying the decision they took for the community against a big part of the community.

The justification is obvious. It cleans up a design that never should have been in the game. Account level milestones (to avoid the use of "achievements") should be account wide, not tied to the character. The lesson was out there, but ESO was released this way, for whatever reason.

This was a lesson to learn from Blizzard. As much as I hate using WoW as a reference for this game, this is one time ZOS should have followed rather than trying to forge their own path. Blizzard did everything that ZOS appears to want to do, just better.

I agree that it should be done, but not the way that it is being done. I doubt that the Q&A will address these shortfalls.

_Zathras_

CrystalExarch wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

Having our characters' history and progress trashed is not a minor inconvenience for a huge portion of the playerbase. It will completely destroy the only way I play.

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Kevin

Where are our answers? Are you going to do the right thing now that you know how devastating this is for many of us and fix it so we can track our characters progress individually?

We need some answers NOW.

I'm afraid, no answers until it will be already too late for a reaction. This is when their Q&A will come out, I presume, to say a few words justifying the decision they took for the community against a big part of the community.

At this point I want to remind ZOS [and some of you] that while Final Fantasy XIV, for example, actively discourages creation of alts, it doesn't fail to acknowledge the uniqueness of a newly-created character as all of its achievements are character-bound. Why ZOS can't keep working on the same principle is beyond my imagination.

As for me, although I'm a new player with just 4 months of playing ESO, I'm not going to keep feeding someone that bites my hand. My ESO+ expired today.

Mine expired 3 days ago. I don't give participation rewards for corporate silence either. Yoshi and I now have a financial arrangement at least until the fall.

Honestly, given this Promise to Improve less than a month ago, all of this could have been managed better. It was the perfect opportunity for a community-positive engagement to re-build trust and goodwill.

To Gina: it's not too late to engage. People here are frustrated at the lack of communication, but you're still an awesome person. A few nice words will go a long way.

Zezin

_Zathras_ wrote: »

CrystalExarch wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

Having our characters' history and progress trashed is not a minor inconvenience for a huge portion of the playerbase. It will completely destroy the only way I play.

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Kevin

Where are our answers? Are you going to do the right thing now that you know how devastating this is for many of us and fix it so we can track our characters progress individually?

We need some answers NOW.

I'm afraid, no answers until it will be already too late for a reaction. This is when their Q&A will come out, I presume, to say a few words justifying the decision they took for the community against a big part of the community.

At this point I want to remind ZOS [and some of you] that while Final Fantasy XIV, for example, actively discourages creation of alts, it doesn't fail to acknowledge the uniqueness of a newly-created character as all of its achievements are character-bound. Why ZOS can't keep working on the same principle is beyond my imagination.

As for me, although I'm a new player with just 4 months of playing ESO, I'm not going to keep feeding someone that bites my hand. My ESO+ expired today.

Mine expired 3 days ago. I don't give participation rewards for corporate silence either. Yoshi and I now have a financial arrangement at least until the fall.

Honestly, given this Promise to Improve less than a month ago, all of this could have been managed better. It was the perfect opportunity for a community-positive engagement to re-build trust and goodwill.

To Gina: it's not too late to engage. People here are frustrated at the lack of communication, but you're still an awesome person. A few nice words will go a long way.

Well there you go, no AwA there. Game's good for RP too. There's some questionable decisions on the design of the game but it's overall pretty nice. I would never switch to it from ESO though, I love ESO's combat and the voice acted quests.

Kesstryl

I just cancelled my sub and have two weeks left on it. That's two weeks to see if they will somehow either fix this mess, or push it back until they fix it. Their actions will determine if I resub or not. I was planning to pre-order High Isle, but I'll wait on that now too. I don't care about getting a stupid fawn pet or elk mount when the individuality of my characters is being gutted. I have no reason to play until that is preserved. I might delete a character and make a power leveled avatar who has done no other achievements to check in on my guild and preserve the history of my actual characters by never touching them again. My husband has wanted to try another MMORPG with me, one that does preserve individual character data (Final Fantasy XIV,) and I think we will do the trial for that one and possibly find a new game to actively play and spend money on. As for Elder Scrolls, I'll replay the single player games to visit Tamriel, and remember when the ancestors of my characters were once part of that world. Maybe I'll mod in my Vestige as a companion in one of them since vestiges are immortal. I just can't right now with this game.

teslacoil68k

I've been playing the game since beta, almost daily since Morrowind, sank way too much money into cosmetics and crown crates, yet this is the first time I'm posting on these forums.

Most points have been made in previous posts already better than I could, but I feel I need to reiterate just how important this is.

For the game in general:
- Story quests are plainly broken, with all choices and world edits looking at character achievements showing in a completed state. See the two Elsweyr queens problem for a prime example.
- Little things in the world such as Choixth and the Adoring Admirer, even if some of them are character specific, it's too easy to break those. Museum quests were allegedly fixed, but there's just too many unintended consequences like this to just fix slapdash.
- Story quests, skyshards, delves, dolmens, exploration, even something as small as Maiq will be both more difficult to track and less satisfying to complete. I already heavily feel the lack of a completed quest journal as it is, this change takes away even the bits that existed.
- Still having the date and tag which character completed the quest just makes it worse, because it can permanently mess up the journal just by logging in on a character. If doing AwA, then go all the way.
- Fewer players willing to do difficult achievements (vet dungeons, trials, etc) when dungeon queues are already long, because players experienced enough to help will already have the achievement and no motivation to do it on an alt.
- The dedicated player population likely becoming less active or dropping out in general, making the game emptier, either because their carefully curated characters lost their personality (roleplayers/rpgers) or because challenging content has less motivation to repeat (pveers).
- Implementing account wide achievements as just a summary on top of existing and preserved per character achievements would probably be easier and way less buggy, in addition to satisfying most groups. No apparent logical reason to press on with the current implementation other than sunk cost.

For me personally:
- I will never be able to log into my original characters again, because not having all the achievements with the name and date of my current main (Morrowind era) would be completely unacceptable for my OCD.
- I'll basically have to abandon all other characters I wanted to level with their own classes and personalities if any of them happened to have trigger an achievement before my main.
- I'll likely never feel motivated to explore zones or go through the story again on a different character, because all the choices tied to achievements are broken, and tracking what I've done was difficult enough without a completed quest journal as it is.
- I'll probably have a harder time finding groups for dungeon achievements because most players who care about those have them and won't have much motivation to run them again.

Please don't do this.

SerafinaWaterstar

I’m just depressed about the whole thing - it is a ****storm coming of their own making.

Ill-conceived in concept, thoughtlessly hashed together without any understanding of the game & how it works, poorly introduced and now not listening to any feedback. This is a textbook example of how not to do things.

And most players are unaware of how this will affect them, because, as is usual, nothing of consequence has been said about this change.

The lack of communication is, quite frankly, unacceptable.

I really would prefer to carry on playing the game, as mostly I enjoy it & have met some lovely people, but its hard when the developers themselves seem to be actively thwarting this.

Elsonso

_Zathras_ wrote: »

Mine expired 3 days ago. I don't give participation rewards for corporate silence either. Yoshi and I now have a financial arrangement at least until the fall.

Yup. All ZOS had to do was communicate intentions, plans, and how this is intended to work. Three weeks ago.

I have never understood what it is with ZOS and communication. Eight years in and they are still struggling with it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

CrystalExarch

Elsonso wrote: »

CrystalExarch wrote: »

I'm afraid, no answers until it will be already too late for a reaction. This is when their Q&A will come out, I presume, to say a few words justifying the decision they took for the community against a big part of the community.

The justification is obvious. It cleans up a design that never should have been in the game. Account level milestones (to avoid the use of "achievements") should be account wide, not tied to the character.

This is your opinion, an opinion I don't share.

ValarMorghulis1896

I still wonder why ZOS doesn't make it selectable (...but I think I know the answer...)

Dark_Lord_Kuro

SnowP wrote: »

Here are some Tests on the PTS v7.3.3 using a clean Char not used on the PTS before:

Wrothgar
Achievement is char dependent, but when starting the quest and displaying Agra Crun, it is not marked in the achievement.


Kari`s List Thieves Guild
Achievement is char dependent, but as you can see below charater wide benefits are still removed - you get no advancement in the skill line when earning the achievement.
pre:

post:


It seems to me that the buggy code of v7.3.0 was only a little tweaked instead of using the working code that we have on live right now. That is a very bad decision in my oppinion.

Could be a result of unlocking then relocking the acheivement, if so it wont happen on live

proprio.meb16_ESO

It took them months (and three consecutive patches stating they did) to fix wrothgar museum pieces quest when it got bugged some months ago, it's no surprise things are (yet) at this point... sometimes it seems as some older developer left and a newcomer has got in charge of something he never saw before.

I just hope they'll decide to posticipate awa, but i fear it will not happen, with all imagined consequences.

arteen_eso

Account-wide achievements are neat to look at, but from what I gather they don't really help the player in any meaningful way.

Motif knowledge? Still per-character. Alchemy knowledge? Still per-character. Skyshard collection? Still per-character. Just like per-character horse upgrades.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but progression on cumulative achievements such finish X dailies in a zone is still per-character. You couldn't unlock the "Murkmire Prepper" title by doing 75 dailies on one character and 75 on another. Those values don't add to each other.

Other than being able to unlock combination achievements like the Beast personality by accomplishing the hard mode on one character, speed run on another character, and no-death on another, which is a useful but niche situation, there's not much actual player benefit. All cosmetics earned from achievements, aside from titles, are already account-wide.

I want AWA, but not with the downsides of the current implementation.

Elsonso

CrystalExarch wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

CrystalExarch wrote: »

I'm afraid, no answers until it will be already too late for a reaction. This is when their Q&A will come out, I presume, to say a few words justifying the decision they took for the community against a big part of the community.

The justification is obvious. It cleans up a design that never should have been in the game. Account level milestones (to avoid the use of "achievements") should be account wide, not tied to the character.

This is your opinion, an opinion I don't share.

Maybe not, which surprises me, but it is what it is. I would suggest that if they had done it right from the start, you would be happier now than you will be after Update 33.

Tandor

Elsonso wrote: »

CrystalExarch wrote: »

I'm afraid, no answers until it will be already too late for a reaction. This is when their Q&A will come out, I presume, to say a few words justifying the decision they took for the community against a big part of the community.

The justification is obvious. It cleans up a design that never should have been in the game. Account level milestones (to avoid the use of "achievements") should be account wide, not tied to the character. The lesson was out there, but ESO was released this way, for whatever reason.

This was a lesson to learn from Blizzard. As much as I hate using WoW as a reference for this game, this is one time ZOS should have followed rather than trying to forge their own path. Blizzard did everything that ZOS appears to want to do, just better.

I agree that it should be done, but not the way that it is being done. I doubt that the Q&A will address these shortfalls.

It depends how you mean that. I can agree that if there was ever going to be an account-wide system then it should have been in the game from the start. However, given the particular hybrid MMO/RPG nature of ESO, its TES heritage, and its target market (especially, but not exclusively - other than at the start of course, on PC) then I can't agree that this is something that should have been in the game at all.

CrystalExarch

Elsonso wrote: »

CrystalExarch wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

CrystalExarch wrote: »

I'm afraid, no answers until it will be already too late for a reaction. This is when their Q&A will come out, I presume, to say a few words justifying the decision they took for the community against a big part of the community.

The justification is obvious. It cleans up a design that never should have been in the game. Account level milestones (to avoid the use of "achievements") should be account wide, not tied to the character.

This is your opinion, an opinion I don't share.

I would suggest that if they had done it right from the start, you would be happier now than you will be after Update 33.

I have been playing TES for 20+ years and if ZOS had implemented what you consider to be the "right" design from the start I wouldn't have bought ESO in a first place. So, no, I wouldn't be happier at all. As for the time after update 33 I am not even sure I care to bear witness of such a butchered version.

tomofhyrule

This is really starting to scare me. I already know I’m going to delete all of my alts but one and reset them to just after the tutorial so they don’t affect my main in any way. What I’m scared of is the day of/day after patch.

I remember the Armory release: there was a bug where it didn’t reset your CP when you changed builds, making it so you could have both sets of CP stars and therefore underflowed your CP to 65k. It was reported on PTS, but not fixed before release. Ended up getting my main bugged and I was too scared to play him since I was afraid to get banned.
How did they fix it? Global CP reset for everyone, whether you used the Armory or not. And there was a lot of complaining from people who didn’t get hit with the bug.

I remember the patch before that, where there was a bug with housing chests. If you deleted a low-level character, it also wiped the entire contents of your storage chests. Ended up getting hit by that one too, and I had to drop my prog groups for the next two weeks to wait for my gear to come back or to spend mats/transmutes to quick remake everything. They eventually fixed that one manually by looking at all affected accounts and restoring the contents of our chests, but it took two weeks.

So I’m nervous about this patch. We’ve found the bugs that are still unaddressed, but there’s just silence now. ZOS doesn’t exactly have a track record of smooth patch-day releases (and I’m unlucky enough to keep getting hit by them), so if there is something that goes wrong… how will they fix it? As we see on PTS, there’s no ‘recopy’ they can do. And now, this isn’t ‘oh, it only affected a few accounts,’ it’ll be affecting every account and every character on those accounts. That’s months of manually fixing it all… or a total server rollback.

I get that “it’s bad PR!” to delay a feature. But they’ve done it before (remember two-person mounts were supposed to release with Greymoor), and unlike the other features that got delayed after entire feature presentations, AwA didn’t really get more than a passing mention in the ESO live. They could still pull it to polish it for later.

…and if it goes live and then requires a server rollback of a few days to fix? How bad would that PR be?

Susinok1

Well add my voice to the AGAINST account wide dungeon achievements.

I like getting my dungeon trifectas on multiple toons. I'm close to end game and this will make the end game much smaller. Also getting an achievement on a DPS does not mean you can tank or heal that particular dungeon without a lot of practice. So it doesn't even really relate.

I wonder how this affects style page farming? If I have a hard mode on my healer, will my DPS have a better drop chance?

ectoplasmicninja

I'm perfectly happy with account-wide achievements, because I'm only in them for the titles, dyes (mostly the dyes), etc., so being able to use any title on any character is only a plus for me. If I find a particular title immersion-breaking because my character is a baby who hasn't done anything noteworthy yet, I just won't use it. Hell, I look forward to finally being able to delete my level 30 Master Angler and still have the title.

But I'm not the only player here. There are people who chase achievements per character (some folks have 18 Master Anglers and Flawless Conquerors or the like, which is very impressive even if I would never personally do this) so this would be a bad move for them. And the side effects that have been seen on PTS of being locked out of being able to repeat certain quests and never experience certain dialogue again are also totally unacceptable for me as a quester. That needs to be fixed.

Not sure any solution can be arrived at that would please everyone or even a majority, but perhaps if the issues with quest NPCs being layered on top of each other, reacting weirdly to alts, and refusing to give certain achievement-related dialogue more than once could be fixed, that could be combined with some sort of toggle for players who vehemently don't want account-wide achievements and most people would at least be not upset.

Arunei

arteen_eso wrote: »

Account-wide achievements are neat to look at, but from what I gather they don't really help the player in any meaningful way.

Motif knowledge? Still per-character. Alchemy knowledge? Still per-character. Skyshard collection? Still per-character. Just like per-character horse upgrades.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but progression on cumulative achievements such finish X dailies in a zone is still per-character. You couldn't unlock the "Murkmire Prepper" title by doing 75 dailies on one character and 75 on another. Those values don't add to each other.

Other than being able to unlock combination achievements like the Beast personality by accomplishing the hard mode on one character, speed run on another character, and no-death on another, which is a useful but niche situation, there's not much actual player benefit. All cosmetics earned from achievements, aside from titles, are already account-wide.

I want AWA, but not with the downsides of the current implementation.

I'm not sure about the dailies, but from what I've seen and heard, progress towards other cumulative things like the Monster Trophies and Black Market Mogul will be account-wide rather than character-specific.

Elsonso

Tandor wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

CrystalExarch wrote: »

I'm afraid, no answers until it will be already too late for a reaction. This is when their Q&A will come out, I presume, to say a few words justifying the decision they took for the community against a big part of the community.

The justification is obvious. It cleans up a design that never should have been in the game. Account level milestones (to avoid the use of "achievements") should be account wide, not tied to the character. The lesson was out there, but ESO was released this way, for whatever reason.

This was a lesson to learn from Blizzard. As much as I hate using WoW as a reference for this game, this is one time ZOS should have followed rather than trying to forge their own path. Blizzard did everything that ZOS appears to want to do, just better.

I agree that it should be done, but not the way that it is being done. I doubt that the Q&A will address these shortfalls.

It depends how you mean that. I can agree that if there was ever going to be an account-wide system then it should have been in the game from the start. However, given the particular hybrid MMO/RPG nature of ESO, its TES heritage, and its target market (especially, but not exclusively - other than at the start of course, on PC) then I can't agree that this is something that should have been in the game at all.

I want the MMO achievements to be MMO achievements, and the "TES" achievements to be character-based. This mistake was that ZOS just tossed everything together and started stirring. This is just me wishing that the original ZOS dev team had as much of a TES background as they had an MMO background.

That begs the question about what is an MMO achievement, and what is a TES achievement. In an MMOTES game, this is a dangerous line, but I think they could have done better at launch, and in Update 33, to retain elements of both without going overboard in one direction.

Edit: Want to add... even if ZOS lacked the vision to get it right, Blizzard offered a perspective that they could have copied that would be better than what ZOS did at launch, and what ZOS is doing today.

Edit 2: this is also my final comment on this subject, so

silvereyes

Elsonso wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

CrystalExarch wrote: »

I'm afraid, no answers until it will be already too late for a reaction. This is when their Q&A will come out, I presume, to say a few words justifying the decision they took for the community against a big part of the community.

The justification is obvious. It cleans up a design that never should have been in the game. Account level milestones (to avoid the use of "achievements") should be account wide, not tied to the character. The lesson was out there, but ESO was released this way, for whatever reason.

This was a lesson to learn from Blizzard. As much as I hate using WoW as a reference for this game, this is one time ZOS should have followed rather than trying to forge their own path. Blizzard did everything that ZOS appears to want to do, just better.

I agree that it should be done, but not the way that it is being done. I doubt that the Q&A will address these shortfalls.

It depends how you mean that. I can agree that if there was ever going to be an account-wide system then it should have been in the game from the start. However, given the particular hybrid MMO/RPG nature of ESO, its TES heritage, and its target market (especially, but not exclusively - other than at the start of course, on PC) then I can't agree that this is something that should have been in the game at all.

I want the MMO achievements to be MMO achievements, and the "TES" achievements to be character-based. This mistake was that ZOS just tossed everything together and started stirring. This is just me wishing that the original ZOS dev team had as much of a TES background as they had an MMO background.

That begs the question about what is an MMO achievement, and what is a TES achievement. In an MMOTES game, this is a dangerous line, but I think they could have done better at launch, and in Update 33, to retain elements of both without going overboard in one direction.

Edit: Want to add... even if ZOS lacked the vision to get it right, Blizzard offered a perspective that they could have copied that would be better than what ZOS did at launch, and what ZOS is doing today.

I'm curious where you would draw the line. I tried separating achievements into separate account-wide and character-specific bins in this list, but there were disagreements almost immediately.

Still, I agree that such a separation even today would change a lot of the current conversation from, "OMG they killed ESO," to, "gods, I'm annoyed they didn't make X achievement character-specific/account-wide."

silvereyes

Dark_Lord_Kuro wrote: »

SnowP wrote: »

Here are some Tests on the PTS v7.3.3 using a clean Char not used on the PTS before:

Wrothgar
Achievement is char dependent, but when starting the quest and displaying Agra Crun, it is not marked in the achievement.


Kari`s List Thieves Guild
Achievement is char dependent, but as you can see below charater wide benefits are still removed - you get no advancement in the skill line when earning the achievement.
pre:

post:


It seems to me that the buggy code of v7.3.0 was only a little tweaked instead of using the working code that we have on live right now. That is a very bad decision in my oppinion.

Could be a result of unlocking then relocking the acheivement, if so it wont happen on live

Or, it could just as easily be indicative of a deeper problem, like not reverting all the code / data tables that need reverting, and that could easily get propagated to the live server. I wouldn't dismiss the symptoms out of hand, if I were ZOS. It's always worth looking a little deeper for root causes.

Ugh_Tech

Nonsense here, post can be deleted.