PTS Update 33 - Feedback Thread for Account Wide Achievements

Dark_Lord_Kuro

silvereyes wrote: »

Dark_Lord_Kuro wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

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.

Easy to test for zos tough
Make a na character copy before the end of pts
If my hypotesis hold true, it should solve itself out since character woulnt unlock then relock acheivement

@SnowP already said that this was from a clean EU character copy, never used on PTS before PTS v7.3.3. They hadn't logged in to the EU characters until PTS v7.3.3, despite the fact that the character copy was there last week. They should have had no account-wide achievements yet to conflict with.

I suppose it's possible that a DBA mangled the PTS data, even with accounts that hadn't logged in to PTS yet, but I think it more likely that they just missed something.

At any rate, ZOS can query the db directly and see the code to trace down the exact cause. No need to rely on PTS at all, and they shouldn't wait until next week to investigate anyways.

Misunderstood his answer as he saying the eu character copy was yesterday my bad

karthrag_inak

They rolled back multi-player mounts at last minute. Surely they might do that here, yes?

matterandstuff

Vaoh wrote: »

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.

The problem is that achievements in ESO don't work like, say, Steam achievements, they're how ESO tracks most progression period. The lack of fixes to the underlying architecture along with this is leading to quite a few broken quests (which cannot be easily fixed once done, as the museum hotfix mess showed) and content either unreplayable or autocompleting for new characters.

karthrag_inak

So, on khajiit's 18 characters, he has finished Caldwell's Gold only on 4. Will this one still be able to complete Caldwell's gold on his other 14 characters? Or at least the 13 that are Khajiit? (poor fishy-cat argonian is used to being left out in the cold, unfortunately)

tmbrinks

Very few people are against an account-wide overview that combines the progress of your characters and unlocks the appropriate achievements/cosmetics/furnishings/titles on your account. I can probably count them on one hand from all 55 pages of this thread.

Many of are greatly concerned about losing the individuality of our characters.

It's possible to accommodate both groups. I don't give a flying hoot if you want to wear your Godslayer title on your level 3 writ mule. I won't and I can accept that I could do that, I simply won't equip it. I have only used my GS mount on my 2 characters that have earned the achievement, and AFAIK, I've done the same with skins I've earned.

I just want to be able to track what each of my characters are doing in the game separately, as I have for the last 8 years.

So many are treating this as a Win/Lose (in order for the AWA group to "win" the rest of us have to "lose") there is such a thing as a win/win.

KMarble

Araneae6537 wrote: »

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?

In theory, yes. I don't know if there is a way to test that from our side, though.

Araneae6537 wrote: »

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.

It would have to be an add-on that has to be deployed before the update drops, stores information outside the game and stops collecting data before the update.

This will only solve part of the problem because any activity that counts towards any achievement - independent of character - will go into the "player vessel". The game will no longer differentiate between characters. All points will be added together, at which point, the hypothetical add-on won't be able to do anything - at best - or will merge everything together.

Araneae6537 wrote: »

But even that wouldn’t solve the problem of their identity in the game, 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 then they could 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.

I don't understand it either, and I'm very, very sorry for all the stress that this is causing so many people.

tomofhyrule

TPishek wrote: »

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:

1. New quests to be made for these, since they don't exist already.
2. 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.

Cherry picked example - the Coral Heart does have a quest, and that line is already tied to the quest.

Let's consider Melina Cassel in the Reach. She doesn't have a quest, it's only dialogue. Her interactions are tracked solely by the achievement... which is how people found out it was broken since character A can talk to her once and then she talks to character B like she's already seen them before. Her trigger needs to be changed to something character-specific, yet she has no quest.
See also the Adoring Admirer in Blackwood, Choixith in Summerset/Murkmire, etc.

Let's consider Delve completion. Currently the map markers turn white upon killing the boss once. Most of the delve bosses are not necessarily related to the delve quest (and not all delves have a quest). If the trigger to mark the delve as complete was the quest, that might work for the ones that do have quests, but what about the delves that don't? However, the hidden quest journal would at least give a way to retroactively mark delves correctly for people who have done them 5+ years ago. Still, how would the non-quest delves be handled?
See also WBs and Dolmens, which also don't have specific quests for a specific one.

So you see, it's not all something that's cut and dry. Removing the achievements without having a place to put these things that are only tracked and only trackable by achievements will lead to a loss of data, as we saw in the change from week 3 to week 4 of PTS.

And if we want to be pedantic, you are also proving my point: the triggers should be moved away from achievements and to quests or other trackers before the achievement data is deleted. So therefore AwA should be delayed while these connections are changed, and then the achievements can be merged without borking everything the way it did.

silvereyes

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.

Some back-of-the-envelope math...

There are 1959 achievements in the game (no, I didn't count, I asked the game to)

/script local t = 0 for cI = 1, GetNumAchievementCategories() do local _, nSC = GetAchievementCategoryInfo(cI) for sI = 1, nSC do local _, sCNA = GetAchievementSubCategoryInfo(cI, sI) t = t + sCNA end end d(t)

Each achievement id is a 64 bit integer (8 bytes). So is each achievement's progress indicator number counter. Character ids are likewise large numbers, so let's assume another 64 bit integer.

That leads to a maximum grand total achievements storage space per player of ... drumroll please:

1959 x (8 + 8 + 8) x 18 
= 846,288 bytes
= 826.45 KB

826.45 KB

For reference, that's about the same size as two marketing images on the website:


I solved your performance problems, ZOS! Make 20 marketing images 10% smaller, and you're done!

Edit: fixed number of bytes per int 64.

tomofhyrule

Dark_Lord_Kuro wrote: »

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

Again, the game is currently set up where a lot of exploration is tracked by achievements. Most quests are tracked in a hidden quest journal, so questing is still possible and 99% of them work fine still. But there are some things that are evidently tracked by achievements - the two queens issue in Elsweyr evidently plays off of the achievement instead of the quest journal. That again seems like an easy fix if they reset the trigger for Khamira appearing to 'completed Elsweyr quests' rather than 'got Elsweyr complete achievement.' Ditto for the (SPOILER CHARACTER) issue after Markarth, is that their appearance could be tied to the end of the questline instead of the achievement. It'd probably just need a new journal 'entry' to mark off that you talked to then and they can despawn.

However, for the things that are only tracked by achievement, that needs to be connected to something else before the achievement is merged. That's how we're getting the Melina Cassel/Adoring Fan issue. They have no tracker outside of achievements, so either the achievement needs to be kept character-specific at launch or there needs to be a fix put in first.

It's those issues - smaller in scope so you can still play the game, but really hurts those people who are into the exploration/character development - that people are mad about. TES series games are known best for their exploration and storytelling, so having them chopped up by AwA is making a lot of us feel like it's a betrayal of the series.

NB: For anyone on PTS here's another thing to test. Some locations are sharded (Bleakrock before/after the Covenant attack, Starved Plain outside Davon's Watch before/after the quest to calm the spirits). I'd assume they track on quest journal and not achievements? Can someone confirm?

Dark_Lord_Kuro wrote: »

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)

A server rollback is essentially a nuke. That means that the entire thing would be reset to the way it was when it was patched, so all progress after that would be deleted.

They definitely backup the servers before patching, so the rollback would be easy enough to do. But what that means is that after the patch, it'd erase all progress on the servers from the time it was rolled back.

If the patch came out on the 14th and opened at noon (let's say), and then at noon on the 15th they needed to roll back because of a massive bug, that would mean the server was opened for 24 hours where millions of players may have been farming the new dungeons, pushing for emperor, running with their prog groups, etc. That 24 hours, and everything the players did on them, would just be deleted if the server rolled back. That's why it's an absolute last resort, since no matter what, you will be taking progress away from players... and if too many people lose too much, they'll 100% leave.

Bugs always make it from PTS to live. We'd hope that that's a minimal number of bugs and that they can be squashed in an incremental, but if AwA rolls out and then a bug like the museums is found, they'll only be able to fix it the same way they did on PTS - which was to void the achievement for everyone (and that made some characters get stuck in a half-completed state where they can't tick off the last item because it's tracked by quest). The PTS has the luxury of being able to say that it's a test server and another copy can be made. But the live server can't just have another copy rolled over. Nobody would care if they made emp on PTS, but imagine someone getting Emperor and then waking up the next morning to find out that the last 24h didn't happen so they don't get the credit? Oof...

karthrag_inak

silvereyes wrote: »

Some back-of-the-envelope math...

There are 1959 achievements in the game (no, I didn't count, I asked the game to)

/script local t = 0 for cI = 1, GetNumAchievementCategories() do local _, nSC = GetAchievementCategoryInfo(cI) for sI = 1, nSC do local _, sCNA = GetAchievementSubCategoryInfo(cI, sI) t = t + sCNA end end d(t)

Each achievement id is a 64 bit integer (4 bytes). So is each achievement's progress indicator number counter. Character ids are likewise large numbers, so let's assume another 64 bit integer.

Khajiit is very sorry to correct you, but 64 bits is 8 bytes. Does not change your point much, but accuracy matters!

silvereyes

karthrag_inak wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

Some back-of-the-envelope math...

There are 1959 achievements in the game (no, I didn't count, I asked the game to)

/script local t = 0 for cI = 1, GetNumAchievementCategories() do local _, nSC = GetAchievementCategoryInfo(cI) for sI = 1, nSC do local _, sCNA = GetAchievementSubCategoryInfo(cI, sI) t = t + sCNA end end d(t)

Each achievement id is a 64 bit integer (4 bytes). So is each achievement's progress indicator number counter. Character ids are likewise large numbers, so let's assume another 64 bit integer.

Khajiit is very sorry to correct you, but 64 bits is 8 bytes. Does not change your point much, but accuracy matters!

Yup, you are right. For some reason, I was thinking myself in circles about that fact trying to account for 64 bit operating systems. Should have stuck with my original numbers.

ectoplasmicninja

I don't work in software so I may be incredibly naive here, but there must be a way to allow titles to be account-wide and merge some achievements like the monster trophy ones or the separate hardmode/no death/speedruns of yore without having to reinvent the wheel and break/complicate progress on alts. Wouldn't that be the best of both worlds? Things that make sense are merged, a bunch of folks get achievements that they previously had only completed parts of on different characters, those who want to be a level 3 Godslayer can do so, and tracking isn't entirely eliminated for people who care about knowing what each alt has done.

I guess it comes down to asking what is ZOS' actual goal here. Cutting down on data storage? Then I can see why they want to make as many things as possible account-wide. Making players who want account-wide titles happy? That could (probably) easily be done without interfering in everything else. As someone who has done Rivenspire/Western Skyrim/Markarth several times for the "of House Ravenwatch" title, I am both happy this will not be mandatory for me to use the title on another alt and distraught that no more of my characters will ever be able to experience the epilogue dialogue with Verandis. That is just not cool. There are a lot of valid concerns in this thread and I'd be very interested to see some comprehensive explanations of the devs' reasoning in this upcoming Q&A.

Is there an ETA on that at all, by the way?

PeacefulAnarchy

tomofhyrule wrote: »

NB: For anyone on PTS here's another thing to test. Some locations are sharded (Bleakrock before/after the Covenant attack, Starved Plain outside Davon's Watch before/after the quest to calm the spirits). I'd assume they track on quest journal and not achievements? Can someone confirm?

Bleakrock is properly separated. It's the only one I can check on EU.

Razakel13

Even if this goes live with fixes for museum quests and map completion it will still obliterate my desire to play on alts, and I would just unsub and uninstall. Having this looming on the horizon has already torpedoed my desire to play - I was halfway through the Summerset storyline but I just can't motivate myself to continue.

Plenty of people have suggested alternate implementations that please both the AWA and character-specific achievement crowds. Can't believe ZOS has stayed so quiet this long. Could really use that Q&A right about now.

tomofhyrule

ectoplasmicninja wrote: »

I don't work in software so I may be incredibly naive here, but there must be a way to allow titles to be account-wide and merge some achievements like the monster trophy ones

Funny you mention that - ZOS did do exactly that.

The "Maelstrom Arena Conqueror" achievement is one of the few that is character-specific, and that's for completing vMA. That means your alts will not have that achievement unlocked. However, with account-wide titles, you can still give one of those alts 'Stormproof,' so the titles being awarded is divorced from the achievement list.

A hybrid view, where titles are unlocked like any cosmetic (if you don't want to see your Lv 3 with Godslayer, just don't assign it to them), where the grindiest of the grindy achievements (Monster Trophies, Fencing gold, Jee-Lar's ridiculousness) still tallied account-wide, but the simple Questing and Exploration category achievements were still per character (and again, with an account overview so you can see the points and collected achievements over the whole account) is what most people are asking for. I don't play WoW, but based on their article that's how they changed their system and it would solve most people's problems here. That also would mean that achievement furnishers could sell based on the account-wide list so you don't have to swap characters to buy a certain thing, but your character can still go explore the map for themselves.

If ZOS redid their achievements that way, we wouldn't have 50 pages worth of panicked feedback on it. Most people would be excited to be able to have their progress recorded account-wide without losing the exploration and storytelling that makes ESO a TES series game. We know there are two major types of players in ESO and we shouldn't have a system that forces players to play a certain character because of achievements. But we also shouldn't have a system that removes anything, especially not something that removes exploration from The Elder Scrolls.

I would hope that someone at ZOS is very quickly seeing how the current implementation could go very badly very quickly and is using the next two weeks to excise AwA from U33 to put an improved version that we'll all be excited about in a later patch. I can totally wait for another update or two to tally my Monster Trophies, and I'll be very happy when I can give my dungeon titles to my RP characters who fit them best. But right now, all I can see is that my alts' stories and exploration are coming to an end, so it feels like the walls are closing in.

Please ZOS, if this goes live as it is now, there's no going back. Save AwA for the next patch, and then make it a dual system where those who want to see only the account view see that, and those who want to see the character view can still have that. Everybody wins in that case.

Jaraal

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.

Perhaps they are still taking bids from independent contractors to draft a Q&A that will portray them in the most favorable light?

Regardless, I find it curious that they would prefer that the players debate speculation and misinformation rather than providing facts. However, given the dysfunctional communication we have grown to expect from them over the years, is anyone really surprised by the silence?

Zezin

silvereyes wrote: »

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.

Some back-of-the-envelope math...

There are 1959 achievements in the game (no, I didn't count, I asked the game to)

/script local t = 0 for cI = 1, GetNumAchievementCategories() do local _, nSC = GetAchievementCategoryInfo(cI) for sI = 1, nSC do local _, sCNA = GetAchievementSubCategoryInfo(cI, sI) t = t + sCNA end end d(t)

Each achievement id is a 64 bit integer (8 bytes). So is each achievement's progress indicator number counter. Character ids are likewise large numbers, so let's assume another 64 bit integer.

That leads to a maximum grand total achievements storage space per player of ... drumroll please:

1959 x (8 + 8 + 8) x 18 
= 846,288 bytes
= 826.45 KB

826.45 KB

For reference, that's about the same size as two marketing images on the website:


I solved your performance problems, ZOS! Make 20 marketing images 10% smaller, and you're done!

Edit: fixed number of bytes per int 64.

Multiplied by 20 million players... And that's not accounting alts just one character per account.

Zezin

I believe that is around 15 terabytes?

Edit: got the name wrong I think? Not so sure about the names of file sizes.

silvereyes

Zezin wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

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.

Some back-of-the-envelope math...

There are 1959 achievements in the game (no, I didn't count, I asked the game to)

/script local t = 0 for cI = 1, GetNumAchievementCategories() do local _, nSC = GetAchievementCategoryInfo(cI) for sI = 1, nSC do local _, sCNA = GetAchievementSubCategoryInfo(cI, sI) t = t + sCNA end end d(t)

Each achievement id is a 64 bit integer (8 bytes). So is each achievement's progress indicator number counter. Character ids are likewise large numbers, so let's assume another 64 bit integer.

That leads to a maximum grand total achievements storage space per player of ... drumroll please:

1959 x (8 + 8 + 8) x 18 
= 846,288 bytes
= 826.45 KB

826.45 KB

For reference, that's about the same size as two marketing images on the website:


I solved your performance problems, ZOS! Make 20 marketing images 10% smaller, and you're done!

Edit: fixed number of bytes per int 64.

Multiplied by 20 million players... And that's not accounting alts just one character per account.

I'll bite. You want to pretend all 20 million players who ever bought the game are actively tracking progress on all achievements on their maxed-out 18 alts (yes, I did multiply by 18 in my math)? That's 15.4 TB. Add in full redundancy and backups, and you are looking at about $1.9k / month for storage on an AWS MongoDB server. That's $0.000095 / month per player, on average, for a highly-available, fast, queryable achievements data set. The db server instance is the expensive part of that proposition, not the storage, and that scales with player count, not data row size.

Besides, ZOS is already addressing storage concerns with cold storage. Do you really think they are going to upend game design to eke out an extra few fractions of a penny per player per month? There are better ways, and they are already doing them.

Zezin

If the average ESO player had 2 characters (I do believe

silvereyes wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

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.

Some back-of-the-envelope math...

There are 1959 achievements in the game (no, I didn't count, I asked the game to)

/script local t = 0 for cI = 1, GetNumAchievementCategories() do local _, nSC = GetAchievementCategoryInfo(cI) for sI = 1, nSC do local _, sCNA = GetAchievementSubCategoryInfo(cI, sI) t = t + sCNA end end d(t)

Each achievement id is a 64 bit integer (8 bytes). So is each achievement's progress indicator number counter. Character ids are likewise large numbers, so let's assume another 64 bit integer.

That leads to a maximum grand total achievements storage space per player of ... drumroll please:

1959 x (8 + 8 + 8) x 18 
= 846,288 bytes
= 826.45 KB

826.45 KB

For reference, that's about the same size as two marketing images on the website:


I solved your performance problems, ZOS! Make 20 marketing images 10% smaller, and you're done!

Edit: fixed number of bytes per int 64.

Multiplied by 20 million players... And that's not accounting alts just one character per account.

I'll bite. You want to pretend all 20 million players who ever bought the game are actively tracking progress on all achievements on their maxed-out 18 alts (yes, I did multiply by 18 in my math)? That's 15.4 TB. Add in full redundancy and backups, and you are looking at about $1.9k / month for storage on an AWS MongoDB server. That's $0.000095 / month per player, on average, for a highly-available, fast, queryable achievements data set. The db server instance is the expensive part of that proposition, not the storage, and that scales with player count, not data row size.

Besides, ZOS is already addressing storage concerns with cold storage. Do you really think they are going to upend game design to eke out an extra few fractions of a penny per player per month? There are better ways, and they are already doing them.

I won't pretend I know how this stuff works because honestly I don't.

peacenote

Despite the fact that it seems as if the writing is on the wall here, given the latest patch notes for PTS... I keep returning to this thread, and to the forums, more regularly than I ever have before, advocating for broader perspectives, because I truly believe that AwA in its current state will have long-lasting, negative ramifications for this game. And I like this game. I have poured WAY too much time and WAY too much $$ into it to stand by and watch what I honestly believe is a huge mistake for ESO without trying to do something.

If it was just something that I personally disliked, I would have moved on long ago. But this is a VERY destructive change that will change ESO in an extremely negative way for many players and there will be no going back once it hits live. No re-balancing, no tweaks... not for the primary objections and concerns that are being raised. Not only that... it WOULDN'T have to be this way! I have never seen so many "I made a forum account just to comment on this" or "I thought I wanted this...but not this way" posts in all of my time on the ESO forums, and I've been here since the beginning. Just imagining all of the players who don't follow the forums or social media and will potentially be blind-sided saddens me to no end. And, AwA could be a win for almost all players if only a few small tweaks were made. I do NOT want to take AwA away from the people that want them. I want to see it adjusted so that it alienates less of the current player base. That is all.

In addition, I am becoming increasingly upset with the lack of response (what feels like disrespect, really) to everyone's well-thought-out comments and suggestions. That fact that we've been told that a response is coming has almost made it even worse. A Q&A after the fact isn't good enough, ZOS. We want a discussion while there would still be time to adjust course, or at the very least have a few weeks of time absorbing direct, clear statements as to why the many concerns are not considered enough to change course. Is it performance? Is it a future direction of the game? Creative vision? What?!?

At first I was just concerned that a complex problem was being over-simplified. Now it feels like we are not at all being heard on the forums, or blatantly ignored.

So... for anyone else who is concerned... I have a question. Are we communicating in the wrong place? I have seen major ideas be reversed in this game. Does anyone know what truly "got the message through" to ZOS? I have been posting on the forums, patiently waiting and believing that this feedback is truly getting up to appropriate people... but given the amount of feedback provided compared to the overwhelming silence, made even more odd by the fact that we've gotten more detailed explanations for a single line of a balance change in patch notes, I'm starting to think that we need to go about this a different way. Some ideas:

1. DPS is King: I have noticed that healing and tanking changes tend to never gain widespread support for adjustment or reversal, but if something messes with DPS, there's an uproar. Are those folks posting in other places that are more effective? YouTube, certain Discords, Twitch, Twitter, etc.? What platforms might bring this more to the attention of the broader player base, and/or ZOS and the devs?
2. Class Representatives: Aren't these folks supposed to be advocating for us regular players? Should we maybe be putting in @ mentions to them, instead of repeatedly pinging the ZOS names we know? This goes BEYOND class but touches every aspect of the game, and should concern them as it could result in less balancing and prioritization of the classes. It's been theorized multiple times that AwA will cause balance to be abandoned because now no one can now complain that it's "too hard" to get something on a certain class. Just use a different character, and you're all set! It's potentially a huge step back from the push to make sure all classes can do each role effectively. And different classes and how they play are part of what makes ESO, ESO. Anyone familiar with the class reps and want to ping them?
3. Players Well Known in the Community: Similar to my idea above, I'm wondering if non-class-reps, known for PvP or content creation or being an expert at certain changes... do they realize what's actually at stake here? Anyone willing to be a voice for making this feature better? We're at 60 pages of feedback here - and that's just one thread. It may be we just need the right spokesperson.
4. Microsoft: Well, I've seen conspiracy theories that guess that Microsoft is pushing for this change. However, they also are buying Blizzard, the folks that bring us World of Warcraft. I would argue that WoW is an example of AwA done right. Likely MS doesn't care about the specific implementation... but there may be more pressure on ZOS to "prove" themselves to Microsoft or deliver on time, lest certain folks or budget or whatever be cut, now that they're part of a bigger portfolio. Well, maybe we shouldn't let ZOS fend for themselves. Perhaps we should help them (as I do believe they try to listen to us and implement what we'd like) by going on the social media for Microsoft, Xbox, etc., highlighting how this is a mistake and pointing out that WoW's version is what we want to see in ESO.

Hopefully, alternate communication avenues are OK to bring up here. Something is off. All companies want their products to succeed and ZOS typically listens to us more than most. I believe the change that's coming is going to reduce re-playability for many, negatively impact Crown Store income, and cause a loss of subscribers and none of that seems in ZOS's best interest. I think the implementation misses the mark in a way that will have irreversible ramifications for a portion of the community. I think the issues aren't getting to the right eyes and ears. Is there anything we can do before it's too late?

silvereyes

Zezin wrote: »

If the average ESO player had 2 characters (I do believe

silvereyes wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

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.

Some back-of-the-envelope math...

There are 1959 achievements in the game (no, I didn't count, I asked the game to)

/script local t = 0 for cI = 1, GetNumAchievementCategories() do local _, nSC = GetAchievementCategoryInfo(cI) for sI = 1, nSC do local _, sCNA = GetAchievementSubCategoryInfo(cI, sI) t = t + sCNA end end d(t)

Each achievement id is a 64 bit integer (8 bytes). So is each achievement's progress indicator number counter. Character ids are likewise large numbers, so let's assume another 64 bit integer.

That leads to a maximum grand total achievements storage space per player of ... drumroll please:

1959 x (8 + 8 + 8) x 18 
= 846,288 bytes
= 826.45 KB

826.45 KB

For reference, that's about the same size as two marketing images on the website:


I solved your performance problems, ZOS! Make 20 marketing images 10% smaller, and you're done!

Edit: fixed number of bytes per int 64.

Multiplied by 20 million players... And that's not accounting alts just one character per account.

I'll bite. You want to pretend all 20 million players who ever bought the game are actively tracking progress on all achievements on their maxed-out 18 alts (yes, I did multiply by 18 in my math)? That's 15.4 TB. Add in full redundancy and backups, and you are looking at about $1.9k / month for storage on an AWS MongoDB server. That's $0.000095 / month per player, on average, for a highly-available, fast, queryable achievements data set. The db server instance is the expensive part of that proposition, not the storage, and that scales with player count, not data row size.

Besides, ZOS is already addressing storage concerns with cold storage. Do you really think they are going to upend game design to eke out an extra few fractions of a penny per player per month? There are better ways, and they are already doing them.

I won't pretend I know how this stuff works because honestly I don't.

Fair enough. I didn't mean to make it sound like I do either, because honestly, I have no idea what ZOS' architecture is. This is all still just back-of-the-envelope stuff.

The main point is, while 2k achievements x 18 seems like a big number to humans, it's a rounding error to storage concerns.

And I highly doubt that achievements play a big factor in other performance concerns, like CPU cycles or network latency either. The game is doing a lot of CPU calculations and handling a lot of state variables for every mob and character stat multiple times per second, synced up amongst up to dozens of players at a time. That main gameplay loop is where the performance costs hit hard. Keeping track of a few dozen achievements related to battle is the most expensive thing achievements will ever do. Making those combat achievement counters have a player id instead of a character id on them isn't going to do squat for performance. It's got to do a check and increment a counter either way, and it doesn't matter how many logged-off alts there are.

The vast majority of achievements mostly only fire when you kill specific bosses, advance specific quests, interact with objects, or complete specific groups of other achievements. Those happen such a small percentage of the time, they can basically be rounded to zero in terms of performance impact.

Saieden

silvereyes wrote: »

Zezin wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

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.

Some back-of-the-envelope math...

There are 1959 achievements in the game (no, I didn't count, I asked the game to)

/script local t = 0 for cI = 1, GetNumAchievementCategories() do local _, nSC = GetAchievementCategoryInfo(cI) for sI = 1, nSC do local _, sCNA = GetAchievementSubCategoryInfo(cI, sI) t = t + sCNA end end d(t)

Each achievement id is a 64 bit integer (8 bytes). So is each achievement's progress indicator number counter. Character ids are likewise large numbers, so let's assume another 64 bit integer.

That leads to a maximum grand total achievements storage space per player of ... drumroll please:

1959 x (8 + 8 + 8) x 18 
= 846,288 bytes
= 826.45 KB

826.45 KB

For reference, that's about the same size as two marketing images on the website:


I solved your performance problems, ZOS! Make 20 marketing images 10% smaller, and you're done!

Edit: fixed number of bytes per int 64.

Multiplied by 20 million players... And that's not accounting alts just one character per account.

I'll bite. You want to pretend all 20 million players who ever bought the game are actively tracking progress on all achievements on their maxed-out 18 alts (yes, I did multiply by 18 in my math)? That's 15.4 TB. Add in full redundancy and backups, and you are looking at about $1.9k / month for storage on an AWS MongoDB server. That's $0.000095 / month per player, on average, for a highly-available, fast, queryable achievements data set. The db server instance is the expensive part of that proposition, not the storage, and that scales with player count, not data row size.

Besides, ZOS is already addressing storage concerns with cold storage. Do you really think they are going to upend game design to eke out an extra few fractions of a penny per player per month? There are better ways, and they are already doing them.

The performance argument is hard copium. I've already made the point a few times that real time logging for guild traders and combat exists on the servers, and that in a few minutes on average, either of those alone generate more data than achievements could ever could.

nightstrike

Kesstryl wrote: »

Dear ZOS,

Elder Scrolls has always been an RPG first and foremost. The single player games were not just games to beat, they provided a world you could immerse into, where you could suspend your disbelief and actually feel like a person in that world trying to save it from whatever danger threatened Nirn. ESO had a rocky beginning, but over time, ZOS, you got it right, and it really felt like an Elder Scrolls game. The best part about it was, I wasn't limited to just one character doing the story, I could create multiple characters and they all didn't have to do the same story. I have one character only, my woodelf Kesstryl, who completed Coldharbor and is the one I consider The Vestige. My other characters are heroes in other parts of the world. My Nord Reynild is the hero of Western Skyrim and Markath. My Argonian Speaks-With-Trees is the hero of Morrowind. My Altmer Malatunir, an Ayleid descendant, is the hero of Blackwood and the Deadlands. He also saved the souls of argonians and righted the wrongs of his ancestors in the Murkmire story. My Khajiit Maila is a master thief. My Breton Luceya is a lawful good healer hired by adventurers to keep them safe through evil places (basically my dungeon and trials healer). My Dunmer Varla helped Sotha Sil to save Clockwork City.

Each character played through different content because that was their story. When I replay content, sometimes I'll apply the costume of the first character and pretend it's that character going through it again. I know that's weird, but in my mind each of these stories belongs to one character, and any others repeating them are sort of "dreaming" the story of that character. My characters are not extensions of me the player, they're people living in different places in Tamriel rising to the occasion. I don't want to be reminded that they are just tools I'm using to play a game. I want them to remain individual people in Tamriel with their own histories and stories, and their own achievements and tracking. I don't want to lose this. I don't want to look at a map in a place Reynild has never been to and see it already explored because Kesstryl was already there. I don't want my healer Luceya to have NPCs respond to her as if she's a master thief because Maila put that achievement on my account. I don't want to lose my second chance at talking with Count Ravenwatch at the end of the Markath story for his final thoughts and be welcomed into House Ravenwatch on a character playing through the story again because Reynild was the first to have spoken to him and gotten the achievement. I don't want NPCs in Western Skyrim to respond to Varla, who's never been there, as if she is the one who saved them and not Reynild. I don't want Reynild to be thanked for stopping the Planemeld when it was Kesstryl who did that. Do you see what this mess is doing to my characters? Do you see how it's ruining the game for me? How long, ZOS, do you think people like me will be able to stand this kind of ruin before we simply walk away and don't log in again?

Fine, ZOS, you want to make ESO like every other MMO out there. How about copying what World of Warcraft did, the most successful MMO ever, which was to implement Account Wide Achievements in addition to Character achievements so both existed simultaneously? Why not that? Keep NPCs and quests tied to the character data so the account data doesn't break immersion for my individual characters? Let me track my individual character achievements, and even get the ding message when that character accomplishes something for the first time, just like WoW has. You want to be like other games, but you are ruining what makes an Elder Scrolls game unique, which is that it's built on a solid RPG foundation. RPGs don't merge characters into an amalgamation and have the world treat all alts as if they all did the same thing. It would cease being an RPG and simply be a game to beat once, and then move on to something else. You want people to just beat ESO once and then move on because they achieved it all? Is this a game to beat or an RPG? Is this beautiful and immersive world simply there to be a background to score pushing and beating the system? It's not there to create characters that are part of it and that have stories in it as they work along side some of the best NPCs you ever created that are wonderfully voice acted? You want players to think of their characters as simple tools that you really only need one of because individually they don't exist, only the player exists and that's all that matters? You have no idea how bad this is. Please listen to us and put off the Account Wide Achievement update until you can fix this properly. Otherwise, you could easily save money by firing all the voice actors and writers and just get rid of quests and just make more dungeons and trials and PvP and call it a day. Change the name from Elder Scrolls to something else while you're at it, it will lose its soul as an Elder Scrolls game. Gutting characters is the first step towards that.

@ZOS_Kevin please make sure the developers read this message. It is completely on point.

Fennwitty

peacenote wrote: »

So... for anyone else who is concerned... I have a question. Are we communicating in the wrong place? I have seen major ideas be reversed in this game. Does anyone know what truly "got the message through" to ZOS? ...
... Is there anything we can do before it's too late?

Only thing I've seen have any impact or ability to elicit a response are YouTube or Twitch videos going viral.

SilverBride

nightstrike wrote: »

Kesstryl wrote: »

Dear ZOS,

Elder Scrolls has always been an RPG first and foremost. The single player games were not just games to beat, they provided a world you could immerse into, where you could suspend your disbelief and actually feel like a person in that world trying to save it from whatever danger threatened Nirn. ESO had a rocky beginning, but over time, ZOS, you got it right, and it really felt like an Elder Scrolls game. The best part about it was, I wasn't limited to just one character doing the story, I could create multiple characters and they all didn't have to do the same story. I have one character only, my woodelf Kesstryl, who completed Coldharbor and is the one I consider The Vestige. My other characters are heroes in other parts of the world. My Nord Reynild is the hero of Western Skyrim and Markath. My Argonian Speaks-With-Trees is the hero of Morrowind. My Altmer Malatunir, an Ayleid descendant, is the hero of Blackwood and the Deadlands. He also saved the souls of argonians and righted the wrongs of his ancestors in the Murkmire story. My Khajiit Maila is a master thief. My Breton Luceya is a lawful good healer hired by adventurers to keep them safe through evil places (basically my dungeon and trials healer). My Dunmer Varla helped Sotha Sil to save Clockwork City.

Each character played through different content because that was their story. When I replay content, sometimes I'll apply the costume of the first character and pretend it's that character going through it again. I know that's weird, but in my mind each of these stories belongs to one character, and any others repeating them are sort of "dreaming" the story of that character. My characters are not extensions of me the player, they're people living in different places in Tamriel rising to the occasion. I don't want to be reminded that they are just tools I'm using to play a game. I want them to remain individual people in Tamriel with their own histories and stories, and their own achievements and tracking. I don't want to lose this. I don't want to look at a map in a place Reynild has never been to and see it already explored because Kesstryl was already there. I don't want my healer Luceya to have NPCs respond to her as if she's a master thief because Maila put that achievement on my account. I don't want to lose my second chance at talking with Count Ravenwatch at the end of the Markath story for his final thoughts and be welcomed into House Ravenwatch on a character playing through the story again because Reynild was the first to have spoken to him and gotten the achievement. I don't want NPCs in Western Skyrim to respond to Varla, who's never been there, as if she is the one who saved them and not Reynild. I don't want Reynild to be thanked for stopping the Planemeld when it was Kesstryl who did that. Do you see what this mess is doing to my characters? Do you see how it's ruining the game for me? How long, ZOS, do you think people like me will be able to stand this kind of ruin before we simply walk away and don't log in again?

Fine, ZOS, you want to make ESO like every other MMO out there. How about copying what World of Warcraft did, the most successful MMO ever, which was to implement Account Wide Achievements in addition to Character achievements so both existed simultaneously? Why not that? Keep NPCs and quests tied to the character data so the account data doesn't break immersion for my individual characters? Let me track my individual character achievements, and even get the ding message when that character accomplishes something for the first time, just like WoW has. You want to be like other games, but you are ruining what makes an Elder Scrolls game unique, which is that it's built on a solid RPG foundation. RPGs don't merge characters into an amalgamation and have the world treat all alts as if they all did the same thing. It would cease being an RPG and simply be a game to beat once, and then move on to something else. You want people to just beat ESO once and then move on because they achieved it all? Is this a game to beat or an RPG? Is this beautiful and immersive world simply there to be a background to score pushing and beating the system? It's not there to create characters that are part of it and that have stories in it as they work along side some of the best NPCs you ever created that are wonderfully voice acted? You want players to think of their characters as simple tools that you really only need one of because individually they don't exist, only the player exists and that's all that matters? You have no idea how bad this is. Please listen to us and put off the Account Wide Achievement update until you can fix this properly. Otherwise, you could easily save money by firing all the voice actors and writers and just get rid of quests and just make more dungeons and trials and PvP and call it a day. Change the name from Elder Scrolls to something else while you're at it, it will lose its soul as an Elder Scrolls game. Gutting characters is the first step towards that.

@ZOS_Kevin please make sure the developers read this message. It is completely on point.

I agree.

Ishtarknows

KMarble wrote: »

AWA showcases, IMO, that ZOS prefer to cater to a type of player whose only interest is "end game" no matter how they get there (but, if possible, with the least amount of no effort.

I disagree. Obviously it depends on what your own endgame looks like, but I'd say endgame players want to achieve titles on more than one character and the kudos comes from having more than one Godslayer/ Planesbreaker/ Gryphonheart/ Former Emperor/ 5* General/ Grand Master Crafter/ Master Thief/ Bane of the Gold Coast/ Tamriel Hero etc
Rather than the extremely casual view of "I've done it once so I don't need to do it again". It's the casual people this change caters to.

The people I've spoken to about this are generally neutral or positive when they hear about it first, but when they hear how it's being implemented are generally baffled and unhappy.
Some things should be kept character specific, like titles. Some classes and roles are just easier to complete content on while some are significantly harder and personally, I'm sad any new characters I make won't be able to earn their own arena and trial titles while they're still sub50.
Initially I hoped we'd get a new, additional feature, kind of like the Xbox game achievements where major achievements are collated and give an account overview rather than this ridiculous venture to appease the casuals.

StorybookTerror

Maybe @ZOS_MattFiror would like to chime in on this AWA change, that is now up to 60 pages of feedback? I certainly think it would be helpful, given how concerned a large portion of the community here is.

Kelinmiriel

StorybookTerror wrote: »

Maybe @ZOS_MattFiror would like to chime in on this AWA change, that is now up to 60 pages of feedback? I certainly think it would be helpful, given how concerned a large portion of the community here is.

Please?

We love this game! We love our characters, the stories. The Zone Guide was a wonderful addition a few years ago, and it's not working right on the PTS now with AWA.

AWA is fine as an addition, just not replacing what we have now. Global titles are fine - those who don't want to use them on characters who haven't earned them don't have to (if we can still tell which characters haven't.)

The deadline is too close now. Please don't force this change on us, when it can't be reversed, and so many of us don't want to lose the individuality of our characters - the progress we've made over all the years we've played.

Oliviander

Chaquinho89 wrote: »

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!

I can see that many players think that way.
And therefore I am absolutely not againsta AWA.
But obviously you are not a Role Player.

It is really ok for me that ESO atttracts Non Role Players too !

But ESO was sold to us as a MMO Role Playing Game.
And it was a Role Playing Game for 8 Years
And therefore I am absolutely against ripping us of
our Characters history.
Because this ends ESOs being a Role Playing Game.

For real Roleplayers this will feel exactly the same
as playing soccer without a ball !!

And so I guess many will decide to cease playing.