PTS Update 33 - Feedback Thread for Account Wide Achievements

kringled_1 · February 2022

TPishek wrote: »

kringled_1 wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

kringled_1 wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

Sheezabeast wrote: »

In all objectivity, will the amount of people buying the new Breton chapter plus the people buying the shiny new statue, outweigh the revenue loss of people canceling their subs?

People who care about achievements at all are an extremely tiny minority.

With 1700+ responses and 58 pages in 3 weeks, I beg to differ.

I don't think you realize just how few people actually participate on a forum compared to the number of people who play the game and just do quests.

Having been a participant of forums since closed beta in 2013, I have found that the consensus on forums is a good demographics of the community as a whole and reflects most wants, doesn't want, likes, dislikes, etc.
Only one other thread I can remember has caused this kind of feedback, and ZoS's silence on the matter only deepens it.

Wait till it goes live and watch zone chat of the people who don't follow forums and log in to all their alts history gone.

And I would guess 95% of people won't even notice that their achievements are merged because it doesn't affect questing.

This implementation affects questing deeply if you're playing on a second character.

How? You still have the ability to do quests on multiple characters, your character still can do whatever lines it wants.

NPCs talking to you as if you've already done their quest when you're just starting. Epilog quest lines shut out because the game thinks you're already done. The two queens in Rimmen.
They developed this game for years with achievements and major quest completion mapped 1:1. Some of the issues are resolvable in time as they change things to point at the hidden quest tracking log. Some things were never tracked as a quest, only as an achievement so they break in this implementation.

I expect to see bugs on an active development test server, it means almost nothing.

Bugs on the PTS (or even live) wouldn't be a problem if the underlying data to fix them were being retained, but it looks like it's not.

SilverBride · February 2022

TPishek wrote: »

And I would guess 95% of people won't even notice that their achievements are merged because it doesn't affect questing.

There is a lot more to playing overland than just quests. There are dolmens, delves, world bosses, public dungeons, skyshards and other things to discover and complete. AWA takes away our ability to track these making it impossible to fully enjoy the complete world on all of our characters.

iyx · February 2022

I've mention this before in a thread. On the current state of AWA worst part after losing replayability is that it potentially creates disparity between new and old players, if they do questing in the same group. If things like NPC reactions, exploration and quest availability are tied to achievements, then players who have these achievements can find themselves in a deliberately losing position and deprived of content and immersion, consistency of the world in front of those who have a fresh start.

I have an old accounts with a pile of achievements in WoW and SWTOR, but nothing prevented me from going through content with a novice friend, absolutely NOTHING from the zones, quests or events was changed or missed just because that I already had relevant achievements on some other characthers.
I understand that most ESO players perceive questing as a solo activity, leaving group playthrough for dungeons and pvp, but at least someone enjoys exploration, story, adventures together (sadly no mainquest for party of vestiges). It's an MMORPG after all. It was my dream for ages, to wander Tamriel in a company with some friends. Personally, it's a great pleasure for me to have characters in group be equal, no matter how much progress each player has on account - the same amount of champion points, the same level of gear, the same progress in the world and story, all can be freely adjusted. But now I'm reading that such progress will be influenced by things that have nothing to do with this preferred playstyle.
I don't understand at all how things like this would work in a group. Has anyone thinking about this? Will Tamriel divides into a world for a fresh players, and a world for an experienced achiv-hunters? ESO already somewhat unfriendly and inconsistent for novices with all that prologue advertisements and different starting zones. So now it becomes unimmersive for long-time players too?

I just hope for at least some answers and fixes before everyone has to figure out how to deal with such changes on live.

TPishek · February 2022

tomofhyrule wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

kringled_1 wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

kringled_1 wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

Sheezabeast wrote: »

In all objectivity, will the amount of people buying the new Breton chapter plus the people buying the shiny new statue, outweigh the revenue loss of people canceling their subs?

People who care about achievements at all are an extremely tiny minority.

With 1700+ responses and 58 pages in 3 weeks, I beg to differ.

I don't think you realize just how few people actually participate on a forum compared to the number of people who play the game and just do quests.

Having been a participant of forums since closed beta in 2013, I have found that the consensus on forums is a good demographics of the community as a whole and reflects most wants, doesn't want, likes, dislikes, etc.
Only one other thread I can remember has caused this kind of feedback, and ZoS's silence on the matter only deepens it.

Wait till it goes live and watch zone chat of the people who don't follow forums and log in to all their alts history gone.

And I would guess 95% of people won't even notice that their achievements are merged because it doesn't affect questing.

This implementation affects questing deeply if you're playing on a second character.

How? You still have the ability to do quests on multiple characters, your character still can do whatever lines it wants.

NPCs talking to you as if you've already done their quest when you're just starting. Epilog quest lines shut out because the game thinks you're already done. The two queens in Rimmen.
They developed this game for years with achievements and major quest completion mapped 1:1. Some of the issues are resolvable in time as they change things to point at the hidden quest tracking log. Some things were never tracked as a quest, only as an achievement so they break in this implementation.

I expect to see bugs on an active development test server, it means almost nothing.

...isn't the point of the test server to catch and fix those bugs before they go live?!?

They've fixed one. Out of the many that have been reported. And even they admitted they were still looking for a more elegant solution.

So... shouldn't this be delayed until said elegant solution had been found, and tested to make sure there are no issues?!

Yes and no, because most of the bugs where characters are showing up or saying stuff when they aren't supposed to be aren't really dependent on anything and can be "fixed" by tying those lines to quests instead of achievements. They're oversights that can be retroactively fixed if need be. I assume the stuff like museums where they had to revert they would need to recode how they are handled entirely. They have said they are redoing the base code for the game, so it can be assumed those would eventually be moved back to account wide as well. It's not really a matter of if they should at this point , it's "this is happening, help us find oversights to make it smoother."

TPishek · February 2022

SilverBride wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

And I would guess 95% of people won't even notice that their achievements are merged because it doesn't affect questing.

There is a lot more to playing overland than just quests. There are dolmens, delves, world bosses, public dungeons, skyshards and other things to discover and complete. AWA takes away our ability to track these making it impossible to fully enjoy the complete world on all of our characters.

That's not really an issue with achievements, we have a zone tracker that tells you what you need to do and where to go to do whatever it is to do. At worst I would feel that there isn't the small amount of instant gratification that comes from "HERO OF BLEAKROCK" or "KHENARTHI'S ROOST SKYSHARD HUNTER" popping up when you do things, which I think they could probably add back in without it doing anything.

Araneae6537 · February 2022

tomofhyrule wrote: »

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.

But why delete all of your alts? Do you think your account data could get messed up even if you don’t log in with them?

I would rather let most of my characters sit in carbonite than delete them. But which to play and if indeed it should be only one… I don’t have a single main but rather have different characters for different aspects of the game because that is how I enjoy playing it. So I don’t know what I will do… Definitely not log on at all at first, then maybe only one character (but which?) to preserve data until hopefully some generous ingenious person creates an add-on to prevent identity entanglement…

Maybe I’ll take a break from ESO altogether and finally read “War and Peace”…

kringled_1 · February 2022

TPishek wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

And I would guess 95% of people won't even notice that their achievements are merged because it doesn't affect questing.

There is a lot more to playing overland than just quests. There are dolmens, delves, world bosses, public dungeons, skyshards and other things to discover and complete. AWA takes away our ability to track these making it impossible to fully enjoy the complete world on all of our characters.

That's not really an issue with achievements, we have a zone tracker that tells you what you need to do and where to go to do whatever it is to do. At worst I would feel that there isn't the small amount of instant gratification that comes from "HERO OF BLEAKROCK" or "KHENARTHI'S ROOST SKYSHARD HUNTER" popping up when you do things, which I think they could probably add back in without it doing anything.

The zone tracking is based on achievements though, and as of yet there isn't a substitute data source for delves/WB/striking locations.

tomofhyrule · February 2022

TPishek wrote: »

tomofhyrule wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

kringled_1 wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

kringled_1 wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

Sheezabeast wrote: »

In all objectivity, will the amount of people buying the new Breton chapter plus the people buying the shiny new statue, outweigh the revenue loss of people canceling their subs?

People who care about achievements at all are an extremely tiny minority.

With 1700+ responses and 58 pages in 3 weeks, I beg to differ.

I don't think you realize just how few people actually participate on a forum compared to the number of people who play the game and just do quests.

Having been a participant of forums since closed beta in 2013, I have found that the consensus on forums is a good demographics of the community as a whole and reflects most wants, doesn't want, likes, dislikes, etc.
Only one other thread I can remember has caused this kind of feedback, and ZoS's silence on the matter only deepens it.

Wait till it goes live and watch zone chat of the people who don't follow forums and log in to all their alts history gone.

And I would guess 95% of people won't even notice that their achievements are merged because it doesn't affect questing.

This implementation affects questing deeply if you're playing on a second character.

How? You still have the ability to do quests on multiple characters, your character still can do whatever lines it wants.

NPCs talking to you as if you've already done their quest when you're just starting. Epilog quest lines shut out because the game thinks you're already done. The two queens in Rimmen.
They developed this game for years with achievements and major quest completion mapped 1:1. Some of the issues are resolvable in time as they change things to point at the hidden quest tracking log. Some things were never tracked as a quest, only as an achievement so they break in this implementation.

I expect to see bugs on an active development test server, it means almost nothing.

...isn't the point of the test server to catch and fix those bugs before they go live?!?

They've fixed one. Out of the many that have been reported. And even they admitted they were still looking for a more elegant solution.

So... shouldn't this be delayed until said elegant solution had been found, and tested to make sure there are no issues?!

Yes and no.

Ok, I'll bite.

because most of the bugs where characters are showing up or saying stuff when they aren't supposed to be aren't really dependent on anything and can be "fixed" by tying those lines to quests instead of achievements.

Which would require a few things:

New quests to be made for these, since they don't exist already.
How would characters be granted credit? Since the 'fix' from the PTS only proved that all character-specific data is gone. That would mean all characters would either be granted a completed quest (so the problem stands that alts who haven't done it would et credit) or an unfinished quest (forcing characters who have completed it to redo it)

They're oversights that can be retroactively fixed if need be.

As we saw on PTS, the 'fix' simply deleted the achievement data for all characters, and now there are several characters with a bugged achievement - they have the Petraloop in the museum, but it's not checked off. They can't re-get it, so they're now permanently locked out of it.

They didn't copy over a hidden character data. Because it's gone. If AwA as is goes live, there is no backup data to copy over anymore.

I assume the stuff like museums where they had to revert they would need to recode how they are handled entirely.

Yes, which should happen before AwA is released. If you're going to build a house, you don't build the house and then decide 'eh, I'll fix the foundation when I get to it.' If the problem is that museums (and quests, and XP, and a number of other things people have mentioned) is tied to achievements, that needs to be severed first. Only then can they deal with making achievements account-wide, since then they're not connected to anything.

They have said they are redoing the base code for the game, so it can be assumed those would eventually be moved back to account wide as well.

The coding as it is showing on PTS is that the character-specific data that was tied to achievements is being removed. They have no place to store that. That means it's irreversible. And again, it's a hypothetical you're suggesting. There will be no more data to copy over.

To use another weird analogy, if you're moving from one house to another, you need to find somewhere to put all the boxes with your stuff while you move. You can't just throw away all of your furniture and wait until you get to the new place and expect you can get it back. Similarly, if the server rearchitecture is going to mess with achievements, they need to keep data as complete as possible, not compact it in a lossy way until the new code is written.

It's not really a matter of if they should at this point , it's "this is happening, help us find oversights to make it smoother."

Which is why people are scared. Because if this goes live and they 'fix' bugs the same way, it will be destructive.

Zezin · February 2022

People need to stop treating bugs as if they were an intended feature, bugs will happen and it's the developers job to squish them. Bugs shouldn't be a basis to criticize AwA, I can understand people worried about progress tracking/loss but bugs are bugs, report them and wait for fixes, it's not the first time we had a release filled with bugs, the community will play around them until they get fixed. Point being, this is the feedback thread for the system, for bugs use this one https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/596978/pts-update-33-bug-reports-for-account-wide-achievements/p1

TPishek · February 2022

tomofhyrule wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

tomofhyrule wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

kringled_1 wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

kringled_1 wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

Sheezabeast wrote: »

In all objectivity, will the amount of people buying the new Breton chapter plus the people buying the shiny new statue, outweigh the revenue loss of people canceling their subs?

People who care about achievements at all are an extremely tiny minority.

With 1700+ responses and 58 pages in 3 weeks, I beg to differ.

I don't think you realize just how few people actually participate on a forum compared to the number of people who play the game and just do quests.

Having been a participant of forums since closed beta in 2013, I have found that the consensus on forums is a good demographics of the community as a whole and reflects most wants, doesn't want, likes, dislikes, etc.
Only one other thread I can remember has caused this kind of feedback, and ZoS's silence on the matter only deepens it.

Wait till it goes live and watch zone chat of the people who don't follow forums and log in to all their alts history gone.

And I would guess 95% of people won't even notice that their achievements are merged because it doesn't affect questing.

This implementation affects questing deeply if you're playing on a second character.

How? You still have the ability to do quests on multiple characters, your character still can do whatever lines it wants.

NPCs talking to you as if you've already done their quest when you're just starting. Epilog quest lines shut out because the game thinks you're already done. The two queens in Rimmen.
They developed this game for years with achievements and major quest completion mapped 1:1. Some of the issues are resolvable in time as they change things to point at the hidden quest tracking log. Some things were never tracked as a quest, only as an achievement so they break in this implementation.

I expect to see bugs on an active development test server, it means almost nothing.

...isn't the point of the test server to catch and fix those bugs before they go live?!?

They've fixed one. Out of the many that have been reported. And even they admitted they were still looking for a more elegant solution.

So... shouldn't this be delayed until said elegant solution had been found, and tested to make sure there are no issues?!

Yes and no.

Ok, I'll bite.

because most of the bugs where characters are showing up or saying stuff when they aren't supposed to be aren't really dependent on anything and can be "fixed" by tying those lines to quests instead of achievements.

Which would require a few things:
New quests to be made for these, since they don't exist already.

How would characters be granted credit? Since the 'fix' from the PTS only proved that all character-specific data is gone. That would mean all characters would either be granted a completed quest (so the problem stands that alts who haven't done it would et credit) or an unfinished quest (forcing characters who have completed it to redo it)

They're oversights that can be retroactively fixed if need be.

As we saw on PTS, the 'fix' simply deleted the achievement data for all characters, and now there are several characters with a bugged achievement - they have the Petraloop in the museum, but it's not checked off. They can't re-get it, so they're now permanently locked out of it.

They didn't copy over a hidden character data. Because it's gone. If AwA as is goes live, there is no backup data to copy over anymore.

I assume the stuff like museums where they had to revert they would need to recode how they are handled entirely.

Yes, which should happen before AwA is released. If you're going to build a house, you don't build the house and then decide 'eh, I'll fix the foundation when I get to it.' If the problem is that museums (and quests, and XP, and a number of other things people have mentioned) is tied to achievements, that needs to be severed first. Only then can they deal with making achievements account-wide, since then they're not connected to anything.

They have said they are redoing the base code for the game, so it can be assumed those would eventually be moved back to account wide as well.

The coding as it is showing on PTS is that the character-specific data that was tied to achievements is being removed. They have no place to store that. That means it's irreversible. And again, it's a hypothetical you're suggesting. There will be no more data to copy over.

To use another weird analogy, if you're moving from one house to another, you need to find somewhere to put all the boxes with your stuff while you move. You can't just throw away all of your furniture and wait until you get to the new place and expect you can get it back. Similarly, if the server rearchitecture is going to mess with achievements, they need to keep data as complete as possible, not compact it in a lossy way until the new code is written.

It's not really a matter of if they should at this point , it's "this is happening, help us find oversights to make it smoother."

Which is why people are scared. Because if this goes live and they 'fix' bugs the same way, it will be destructive.

Okay, I'll use a specific example to illustrate it.

You do The Coral Heart quest and Tythis the banker praises you for saving the heart. That line would be tied to completing the Coral Heart achievement currently, so characters that haven't done it yet might also hear it from him. You change the flag on the line from being connected to the achievement to the coral heart questline, so that characters that did the quest would continue to hear it, and characters who hadn't would stop. They would have to do this for every single flavor line in the game probably, but it isn't impossible to fix, the game still tracks what quests individual characters complete.

TPishek · February 2022

kringled_1 wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

And I would guess 95% of people won't even notice that their achievements are merged because it doesn't affect questing.

There is a lot more to playing overland than just quests. There are dolmens, delves, world bosses, public dungeons, skyshards and other things to discover and complete. AWA takes away our ability to track these making it impossible to fully enjoy the complete world on all of our characters.

That's not really an issue with achievements, we have a zone tracker that tells you what you need to do and where to go to do whatever it is to do. At worst I would feel that there isn't the small amount of instant gratification that comes from "HERO OF BLEAKROCK" or "KHENARTHI'S ROOST SKYSHARD HUNTER" popping up when you do things, which I think they could probably add back in without it doing anything.

The zone tracking is based on achievements though, and as of yet there isn't a substitute data source for delves/WB/striking locations.

I just did a delve on the PTS and that does seem to be a pretty big flaw, yes. Not necessarily game breaking, but potentially a strike against being able to keep track of what you are doing.

silvereyes · February 2022

TPishek wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

And I would guess 95% of people won't even notice that their achievements are merged because it doesn't affect questing.

There is a lot more to playing overland than just quests. There are dolmens, delves, world bosses, public dungeons, skyshards and other things to discover and complete. AWA takes away our ability to track these making it impossible to fully enjoy the complete world on all of our characters.

That's not really an issue with achievements, we have a zone tracker that tells you what you need to do and where to go to do whatever it is to do. At worst I would feel that there isn't the small amount of instant gratification that comes from "HERO OF BLEAKROCK" or "KHENARTHI'S ROOST SKYSHARD HUNTER" popping up when you do things, which I think they could probably add back in without it doing anything.

All this has been discussed before with some dismissing the bugs, others saying they are literally gamebreaking, etc. etc. There's no use rehashing old arguments at this point.

The truth is, none of us know how this is going to play out, but for those of us who have been on PTS since day 1 and testing the crap out of this stuff, we've been pretty discouraged by the lack of quality we see. Now that even the bug fixes are introducing bugs, I think it's time they take a step back and reassess if they can even pull this off.

SilverBride · February 2022

TPishek wrote: »

kringled_1 wrote: »

The zone tracking is based on achievements though, and as of yet there isn't a substitute data source for delves/WB/striking locations.

I just did a delve on the PTS and that does seem to be a pretty big flaw, yes. Not necessarily game breaking, but potentially a strike against being able to keep track of what you are doing.

It is game breaking for a lot of us. I play through every quest and complete every map objective in every zone on all my characters, but now my newest will be robbed of this. This is how I play the game, and this is what I enjoy.

[Edited for clarity]

KMarble · February 2022

Araneae6537 wrote: »

But why delete all of your alts? Do you think it could get messed up even if you don’t log in with them?

I would rather let most of my characters sit in carbonite than delete them. But which to play and id indeed that should be only one… I don’t have a single main but rather have different characters for different aspects of the game because that is how I enjoy playing it. So I don’t know what I will do… Definitely not log on at all at first, then maybe only one character (but which?) to preserve data until hopefully some generous ingenious person creates an add-on to prevent identity entanglement…

Or maybe I’ll take a break from ESO altogether and finally read “War and Peace”…

I won't delete my characters, and like you, I will only play one. I can't help you decide which one of yours to play, sorry (and yeah, I know it was rhetoric).

In regards to the portion of your post I highlighted, there is no way for anyone to create such an add-on because no add-on can retrieve what isn't there.

I'm trying to come up with a good analogy, but this is the best I could do. Right now on live each character has a database that holds their achievements. They're like vessels that contain a liquid. Each character has their own vessel.
With AWA those vessels will be gone and exchanged with one "player vessel". All the liquid that was in separate vessels will be poured into the player one once you log into each character. Not only that, but moving forward there will only one vessel where all the liquid will be stored.

The liquid has no markings to differentiate their origin (which character got it), it's the same substance in all the vessels. Once it's poured into the "player vessel" there is no way to say what came from whom.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

To the posters of this thread in general, there is a saying in my country that is very apt to the situation that is arising here: "the worse blind is the one who refuses to see".

TPishek · February 2022

SilverBride wrote: »

There is absolutely no reason that they can't track individual achievements separately from account wide. WoW does it so why can't ZoS?]

TPishek wrote: »

Performance is probably the main reason why. They have so much data they need to track per character that is mostly redundant, they could conceivably cut it down to somewhere between 1/2 to 1/18 by making things account based.

I'm going to unfortunately have to be very blunt. You individually are no reason to prevent them from making the game sustainable for the long term. Half the stuff in it barely runs as it is; PvP is a mess, trial and dungeon instances break constantly, there is a huge strain on the server, etc. The amount of data per account is likely insane, and cutting it down is probably the only way to keep the game from being too bloated and stressed for a longer period of time and growth. Having individual character achievements defeats the entire purpose of making things account-wide. People are joining the game at a much faster rate than the tiny minority of people that are leaving, they do not have the time or resources to worry about that, [snip]

[Minor edit for bait.]

Jaraal · February 2022

RoseTheSnowElf wrote: »

I have seen this topic talked about 1 time in chat. However, they were discussing Alliance War Rank titles. And they thought it would be cool that those would be account-wide. (It's my understanding that those are still character specific. Right?)

Nope. Currently on test your level 2 crafting mule can wear the Emperor, Former Emperor, Grand Overlord titles. And Battleground titles like Bloodletter, Grand Champion, The Merciless, etc.

SilverBride · February 2022

TPishek wrote: »

You individually are no reason to prevent them from making the game sustainable for the long term. Half the stuff in it barely runs as it is; PvP is a mess, trial and dungeon instances break constantly, there is a huge strain on the server, etc. The amount of data per account is likely insane, and cutting it down is probably the only way to keep the game from being too bloated and stressed for a longer period of time and growth. Having individual character achievements defeats the entire purpose of making things account-wide. People are joining the game at a much faster rate than the tiny minority of people that are leaving, they do not have the time or resources to worry about that, [snip]

[Minor edit for bait.]

This game has been sustainable for 8 years as it is. The biggest performance problems have been in Cyrodiil and they located the problem and are working on fixing it.

They have not stated that this is being done to reduce data and improve performance so I am not sure that is the reason. That is why we need the Q&A.

[Edited for clarity]

Chaquinho89 · February 2022

I'm so looking forward to this!!
I have hard modes done in some characters, but speed runs and no-deaths done in others, meaning I can't get the whole stupid achievements to unlock titles and collectibles in my account, if this account-wide update merges them all and I get what I have already earned then I'm freaking excited about it!
I don't have time to play this game for 12 hours a day looking for "end-game" groups, so kudos to ZOS for doing it!

wenchmore420b14_ESO · February 2022

TPishek wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

There is absolutely no reason that they can't track individual achievements separately from account wide. WoW does it so why can't ZoS?]

TPishek wrote: »

Performance is probably the main reason why. They have so much data they need to track per character that is mostly redundant, they could conceivably cut it down to somewhere between 1/2 to 1/18 by making things account based.

I'm going to unfortunately have to be very blunt. You individually are no reason to prevent them from making the game sustainable for the long term. Half the stuff in it barely runs as it is; PvP is a mess, trial and dungeon instances break constantly, there is a huge strain on the server, etc. The amount of data per account is likely insane, and cutting it down is probably the only way to keep the game from being too bloated and stressed for a longer period of time and growth. Having individual character achievements defeats the entire purpose of making things account-wide. People are joining the game at a much faster rate than the tiny minority of people that are leaving, they do not have the time or resources to worry about that, [snip]

[Minor edit for bait.]

If this was the case, and ZoS is doing this for performance reasons, they would be shouting it from the roof tops. To be able to say they were fixing performance would be a feather in their hat. But they aren't. They aren't saying anything.
They promoted "Performance Fix" with something as small as "We are removing fireflies and deer from Cyrodiil so it runs better". It didn't.
So, no they are not doing this for performance or they would brag about it.

And, until we hear a response from Jess, Gina or Kevin, we will keep tagging and asking might we see answers to our queries.
My 2 drakes...
Huzzah!

CombatCoati · February 2022

TPishek wrote: »

I just did a delve on the PTS and that does seem to be a pretty big flaw, yes. Not necessarily game breaking, but potentially a strike against being able to keep track of what you are doing.

And this is not only true for delves, but also for dolmens or world bosses. And that behaviour of having all those "auto-complete" on discovery will be noticed by players, regardless if they care for achievements or not.

You are right that checks against achievements that involve completing quests might be fixed by changing the checks against quest completion instead of an achievement.

But there are things that are only tracked in the achievements, nowhere else, so there is nothing else to check against, and thus there is no easy fix for those.
As for the museum quests, that obviously use the same way of tracking as delves or the like, the only fix was to roll back the change to AWAs which as a bonus deleted all progress on all characters in those quests.

Now imagine that deleting all exploration progress on all characters is the only way to take back the change if this hits life as is and people start to complain in droves about it (which can or cannot happen of course, though personally I do not think that a majority will like it and that there in fact will be an uproar), and you might understand why some of us are worried.

TPishek · February 2022

CombatCoati wrote: »

As for the museum quests, that obviously use the same way of tracking as delves or the like, the only fix was to roll back the change to AWAs which as a bonus deleted all progress on all characters in those quests.

Now imagine that deleting all exploration progress on all characters is the only way to take back the change if this hits life as is and people start to complain in droves about it (which can or cannot happen of course, though personally I do not think that a majority will like it and that there in fact will be an uproar), and you might understand why some of us are worried.

No, I do not understand why you are worried about rollbacks on a test server, because that is what the test server is for. I don't think them quick and dirty reverting something for a test environment is indicative of what they may or may not do on the live server. In fact I am more comforted by the fact that they rolled back that specific aspect and nothing else because it tells me that they don't find much else to be permanently broken by merging data.

_Zathras_ · February 2022

Tandor wrote: »

You're spot on, of course. I hope by then even sites like MOP will have picked up on this story.

Maybe someone will slip the story under a couple of doors via Twitter

Wolfpaw · February 2022

I had hoped the AWA went further. Account-wide everything like map completion, rank, achievements, story, etc...everything, so I can pick up and play where I left off on a different toon.

wolfie1.0. · February 2022

Sheezabeast wrote: »

In all objectivity, will the amount of people buying the new Breton chapter plus the people buying the shiny new statue, outweigh the revenue loss of people canceling their subs?

I wasn't going to buy the new chapter at all on any of my 30 accounts. Normally I would upgrade 6 or 7 and get the rest over time. A friend convinced me to get it on at least 1 but I am waiting to see if this goes live. If it doesn't then I will still buy and I may buy 5 or 6 because zos made a good decision. If it does go live then I will cancel all 8 of the yearly subs I have. I will also stop my crown purchases that I have made. I was using proceeds from some disposable income that I had to buy them. It's no small amount from an individual perspective, but probably a drop in the bucket for zos. Regardles, I will likely still play eso for a while mostly because almost all of my subs are good through December 2022. So going to be a drain on ZOS's resources until then. I won't quit playing altogether until my friends do.

In the end ZOS probably is doing me a favor.

silvereyes · February 2022

Deleted

Araneae6537 · February 2022

KMarble wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

But why delete all of your alts? Do you think it could get messed up even if you don’t log in with them?

I would rather let most of my characters sit in carbonite than delete them. But which to play and id indeed that should be only one… I don’t have a single main but rather have different characters for different aspects of the game because that is how I enjoy playing it. So I don’t know what I will do… Definitely not log on at all at first, then maybe only one character (but which?) to preserve data until hopefully some generous ingenious person creates an add-on to prevent identity entanglement…

Or maybe I’ll take a break from ESO altogether and finally read “War and Peace”…

I won't delete my characters, and like you, I will only play one. I can't help you decide which one of yours to play, sorry (and yeah, I know it was rhetoric).

In regards to the portion of your post I highlighted, there is no way for anyone to create such an add-on because no add-on can retrieve what isn't there.

I'm trying to come up with a good analogy, but this is the best I could do. Right now on live each character has a database that holds their achievements. They're like vessels that contain a liquid. Each character has their own vessel.
With AWA those vessels will be gone and exchanged with one "player vessel". All the liquid that was in separate vessels will be poured into the player one once you log into each character. Not only that, but moving forward there will only one vessel where all the liquid will be stored.

The liquid has no markings to differentiate their origin (which character got it), it's the same substance in all the vessels. Once it's poured into the "player vessel" there is no way to say what came from whom.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

To the posters of this thread in general, there is a saying in my country that is very apt to the situation that is arising here: "the worse blind is the one who refuses to see".

I see your point. I had been thinking if I don’t log on at all or with only one character then the data is still there, right? I was thinking maybe an add-on could catch that data when I did log in and record it and keep track from there and so enable me to keep track of what I’ve done on each character since ZOS can’t be arsed to do so apparently.

But even that wouldn’t solve the problem of each of my character’s identity in the game, other characters talking to them as if they’ve done things they haven’t, it’s all so so stupid to not first fix how character progression is tracked and only then merge achievements — or delete them altogether for all I care!

Edit: This is not okay, not okay at all. I cannot renew my ESO+ until I see something different. Only 9 days left now.

Araneae6537 · February 2022

I really don’t think most players know what this AWA is going to look like and naïvely assume it will exist alongside character tracking for zones and quests just like in any other game with accountwide achievements. I try to tell them what has been reported on the PTS and I think people can’t believe ZOS would break the game so badly. I would very much like to not believe it myself but with not even a word regarding intending functioning, known issues, nothing, nada, I am feeling much more pessimistic now than they are.

wolfie1.0. · February 2022

TPishek wrote: »

Ugh_Tech wrote: »

TPishek wrote: »

Sheezabeast wrote: »

In all objectivity, will the amount of people buying the new Breton chapter plus the people buying the shiny new statue, outweigh the revenue loss of people canceling their subs?

People who care about achievements at all are an extremely tiny minority.

If you're right, then why should ZOS do anything about this whole AwA-thing? Why put efford in programming, testing and bug-fixing for a 'tiny minority' while the 'huge majority' doesn't care?

Performance is probably the main reason why. They have so much data they need to track per character that is mostly redundant, they could conceivably cut it down to somewhere between 1/2 to 1/18 by making things account based.

I call BS on it being a performance improvement. Not when recipe, furnishings, motifs, research, skyshards and other such items are still character tracked. Then there's the redundant provisioning mats, the useless cp mats. The really redundant petty repair kits. The pointless crown items they give us for login rewards. The many now or future to be redundant gear sets. Not to include all of the really pointless trash stuff you get while killing things in the world. And still they are going to add a TCG

There are a LOT of items the could have removed to free up database space. All of which require tracking.

If this was done for the sake of preformance then they chose the wrong target or had some really really bad code.

If the off chance that you are correct then we had better see some significant performance increases and I had better not get booted ever again.

Vaoh · February 2022

A question to those on PTS.

Are account wide achievements affecting more than just merging achievement progress for all of your characters?

I was under the impression that account wide achievements would not have any effect on quest progression, since the achievements themselves are moreso just trackers for the things you’ve already accomplished.

Sounds like they should wait until High Isle for this to go Live. Also a lot more players would be happy if you were able to see each of the characters who earned an achievement including the dates earned. This would avoid losing character history.

Dark_Lord_Kuro · February 2022

tomofhyrule wrote: »

Dark_Lord_Kuro wrote: »

SnowP wrote: »

Dark_Lord_Kuro wrote: »

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

Sorry to smash your hopes but if the code of v7.3.3 would hit the live server - that is exactly what will happen.
I testest in week one of PTS and today. On week one I had the NA charackter copy and today is the first time I used the EU character copy. So there was no unlocking and relocking at all.

Wasnt the eu character copy last week?
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/598203/pts-patch-notes-v7-3-2#latest

At the very least it should be easy to test it out for zos with another na copy before the end of pts

...if ZOS copies the NA servers again, which they haven't done in the past two years.

It's been 2 weeks NA, the rest EU since Elsweyr. There won't be another copy unless they break with normal cadence and specifically try to recopy since they know of a few bugs, and tbh I'm not hopeful for that (even though I'd love NA to get more than just the first two unpolished weeks on PTS every patch)

Either way though, the way this was 'fixed' seems like a preview of how it will go if a problem is found on live. Yes, the issues with the museums being reset and locking PTS characters from those achievements permanently will not occur when the patch rolls out live. That problem will only affect characters that get fixed after the patch rollout.

However, we know there are other unaddressed issues. So if it rolls out on live in its current state, they'll have to do that fix again... and at that point, they can't use the excuse "oh, we'll just recopy the servers" after the servers are already live. That means a server rollback, and that will mean people lose progress.

We know you're excited to see this, and we can see that minor storytelling bugs like the above are a non-issue to you. But this is still a TES game and many TES fans are here for the storytelling and exploration, so this is a major part of the game that is being unfxiably bugged if this rolls out as-is. I haven't seen anyone in the last 20 pages or so using "I think my achievements should be character-based only because I had to suffer so you should too!" as an argument, and even many people who are excited about AwA are in favor of a dual system (like in other MMOs, including WoW) because of how destructive and buggy this version is on PTS.

Again (and I notice you still haven't responded to the many people who have asked you this), how would you fix this? Would you be comfortable rolling this out on live knowing that there's a high chance another bug like this will come up, and then will need a fix? How would you fix this on live if you don't have the luxury of a copy to do without ruining hours (days!) of peoples' progress? Do you think the playerbase would survive if the official answer was "Well, nobody cares about story here, so we're essentially going to just remove Melina Cassel and her achievement from the game since it's bugged now."?

Did not know about the way character copy worked on pts so i assumed na would get another turn

Since i tought that the new issue was linked to the unlock then relock to me it seemed as a good solution for the problem, since then other posted that it wasnt the cause of the problem so i then agree the solution was not as good as it could be

Lets be honnest when was the last time all issue where solved on pts? Sure in a perfect world it would happen all the time but we arent in that world

It may be down to how i explained myself but im also in this game for questing, lore and exploration, i just dont use acheivement for tracking that. In fact i may never have gotten this game if it wasnt a tes title

A few time i have posted that i think a opt in/out scenario would be the best scenario as it truly give bothe side what the want

Regarding the solution i propose if everithing goes bad, im no programer so i woulnt know

And a question for those of you more familliar with that kinfd of stuff. How does a roll back actually work? Do zos happen to just have copy of the server backed up so like reloading a previous save in a single player or more like a rewind button on a tv remote? Because if its the first one it could mean a copy of character specific acheivement before u33 is somewher at zos(but even then i do not know if its would be usable to restore live acheivement in case of a problem)