Zone Guide & Map Completion with Account Wide Achievements

ElvenOverlord

Longbow9 wrote: »

For the gamer who considers the questing a vital part of the game, having the quest related achievements pre assigned to an alt GREATLY diminishes the value of a DLC or Expansion. Where, before, I could count on multiple enjoyable runs through the story line, I now get one shot. Everything after that is anticlimactic.

It's hard for me to believe that the same developers that devised the achievements system in the first place could suddenly become so tone deaf and boneheaded regarding how they treat questing and achievements. They have to know that they are killing the game for a large number of their player base.

Having spent years in the corporate world, this has all the trappings of a decision made by the empty suits upstairs that have no understanding of the game but love to roll around in the cash it throws off.

Maybe a dent in the revenue stream brought on by half the player base being disenfranchised will get their attention. Let us hope so because this is the only thing they understand.

I agree. What I hate is how stubborn they were with it. Despite the majority of their playerbase saying "we don't want this" they pushed through with it anyway. They had no plan to change it regardless of whether the feedback was negative or not. These changes were shoved down our throat. There are quests and lines of dialogue that I'll never be able to see again on any other alt. My character has achieves and titles I purposely didn't go for cause it doesn't fit the theme/backstory of my character. All of that is now for nothing. Even the people who wanted account wide achieves don't like the way this was implemented.

FlopsyPrince

Elsonso wrote: »

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KMarble wrote: »

peacenote wrote: »

... Perhaps they would have listened if they didn't have so many "I'm so happy about this" comments they could point to from people who didn't realize the other ramifications tied to AwA, but here we are.

I doubt it. They did what they set out to do no matter the consequences.

Like many, I lost the joy I had playing the game, and tbh it has more to do with how the devs handled the issues brought up by the thread on PTS than with AwA itself.

I agree. Having been a software developer for going on 1000 years, this just feels like an executive decision, backed up by some player request data. Well, maybe only 900 years. I lose count.

Anyway, we'll never know unless some dev does a "tell all" at some point down the road. I just wish they had been more upfront and open about this from the start. People immediately noticed how it was announced during the live stream, and that just ended up being the harbinger for what was to come.

It looks like player desires were only claimed. The "database savings" seem to be the driving aspect, from what I have read. Though they didn't remove the need for individual data in the database, so I wonder how much it would have really helped.

I wonder how nasty their database use really is....

FlopsyPrince

jle30303 wrote: »

One more thing I have noticed:

World bosses, if not required for something like an antiquity lead, are now UTTERLY DEAD since AWA. The difference between "people only need to do them once per account" and "people need to do them once per character" is absolutely huge.

Why would you need more than 1 lead when you can make things like Ring of the Pale order from your stickerbook?

Pay whatever currency that costs!

At least that seems like a "reasonable" thought some likely had.

Jarl_Ironheart

I am very anti account wide achievements due to the fact that I want each character I make to feel like they are doing something for the first time. Each character I make is a unique person. It really bugs the completionist in me too when I want to make sure I clear everything with one character and I can't accurately track it due to another alt already having done said achievement. I really wish this was optional at the very least. It really crushes the fun of making alts.

ArchangelIsraphel

FlopsyPrince wrote: »

jle30303 wrote: »

One more thing I have noticed:

World bosses, if not required for something like an antiquity lead, are now UTTERLY DEAD since AWA. The difference between "people only need to do them once per account" and "people need to do them once per character" is absolutely huge.

Why would you need more than 1 lead when you can make things like Ring of the Pale order from your stickerbook?

Pay whatever currency that costs!

At least that seems like a "reasonable" thought some likely had.

Because maybe they find it fun to actually....play the game and use the antiquities system to create such things?

TaSheen

ArchangelIsraphel wrote: »

FlopsyPrince wrote: »

jle30303 wrote: »

One more thing I have noticed:

World bosses, if not required for something like an antiquity lead, are now UTTERLY DEAD since AWA. The difference between "people only need to do them once per account" and "people need to do them once per character" is absolutely huge.

Why would you need more than 1 lead when you can make things like Ring of the Pale order from your stickerbook?

Pay whatever currency that costs!

At least that seems like a "reasonable" thought some likely had.

Because maybe they find it fun to actually....play the game and use the antiquities system to create such things?

That's me! I'd far rather dig stuff up as many times as I want to, because it's one of the most fun things in game outside of questing for me.

Tandor

FlopsyPrince wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

.

KMarble wrote: »

peacenote wrote: »

... Perhaps they would have listened if they didn't have so many "I'm so happy about this" comments they could point to from people who didn't realize the other ramifications tied to AwA, but here we are.

I doubt it. They did what they set out to do no matter the consequences.

Like many, I lost the joy I had playing the game, and tbh it has more to do with how the devs handled the issues brought up by the thread on PTS than with AwA itself.

I agree. Having been a software developer for going on 1000 years, this just feels like an executive decision, backed up by some player request data. Well, maybe only 900 years. I lose count.

Anyway, we'll never know unless some dev does a "tell all" at some point down the road. I just wish they had been more upfront and open about this from the start. People immediately noticed how it was announced during the live stream, and that just ended up being the harbinger for what was to come.

It looks like player desires were only claimed. The "database savings" seem to be the driving aspect, from what I have read. Though they didn't remove the need for individual data in the database, so I wonder how much it would have really helped.

I wonder how nasty their database use really is....

The initial announcement only referred to it being a popular change. Only when they realised how unpopular it was did they make claims about database issues. As for the resulting performance improvements, no-one has seen any yet.

Thrasher91604

Well it certainly buggered the undaunted initiation quest on more than one character. The starter dungeon is not added to your map, so you can’t just port to it.

HyekAr

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hey everyone,
......

• Zone Quests, Wayshrines, Points of Interest, Crafting Stations, Mundus Stones, Public Dungeons, Skyshards and Shalidor's Library Books are still character-specific in the Zone Guide.
• Delves, Striking Locales, World Events and World Bosses use the Achievement to track progress in the Zone Guide but you will still need to discover these on individual characters on the Map.

....

All cool!! Great job!! I would like to just say. Could you change and move the World Boss to the character-spec coz it is challanging point.

Also would be cool adding extra challange, WB solo killing
Thanks

jle30303

World bosses, Delves and World Events (assuming this is Dolmens, Abyssal Geysers, Harrowstorms and Volcanic Vents) SHOULD always have been character-specific, not account-wide, regardless of whether there is an account-wide achievement for beating it.

Account-wide *achievement* but character-specific *completion* is what the majority wanted - not merely character-specific finding (which makes something go straight from "not found" to "completed", when it should become "found but incomplete" until the specific character has completed it.

That's the point made by most of this thread and 90 pages in the PTS.

virtus753

My map is showing that I’ve discovered and killed all the world bosses in a zone, but when I ride to a world boss I see my compass marker for it is still blacked out with a white edge as if I hadn’t killed it yet. I go kill that world boss twice (again, since this is the character I used to clear the zone initially in 2019) and the compass marker stays black throughout. It’s still black now.

It used to be white, before these changes.

Is this the new normal? Is this a known bug? It’s been four months. Should I toss it in the we-know-but-it-isn’t-ever-getting-fixed pile?

Elsonso

Interesting patch notes for Update 35 related to AwA...


Reworked the repair states of Orsinium to be driven off quest completions in Wrothgar instead of achievement progress. The key quests are For King and Glory, Blood Price, The Hand of Morkul, Blood and Faith, and Blood on a King's Hands.

Onomog

From the patch notes:

Achievements
You can now repeat the Adoring Admirer encounters on additional characters.
Note: Due to the manner in which this was rescripted, you have the option to redo it on the original character that
completed the Most Admired achievement if you so desire.

This is a very welcome change. Thank you. I look forward to more changes like this.

EozZoe1989

iam on and off .. ill always have content lol ..

peacenote

Elsonso wrote: »

Interesting patch notes for Update 35 related to AwA...


Reworked the repair states of Orsinium to be driven off quest completions in Wrothgar instead of achievement progress. The key quests are For King and Glory, Blood Price, The Hand of Morkul, Blood and Faith, and Blood on a King's Hands.

This is a really nice update because it spells out that they are aware of what's causing some of these problems.

Now if only we could hear about maps, delves, and whatnot, and be given a way to separately repeat and track dungeon and trial meaningful tasks, like speed mode...

Crown_of_Antlers

peacenote wrote: »

Now if only we could hear about maps, delves, and whatnot, and be given a way to separately repeat and track dungeon and trial meaningful tasks, like speed mode...

Agreed. It's very frustrating to have a character, fresh out of character creation, who appears to have all of those done before they take so much as a single step through the game world.

Kesstryl

I've been out of town on a month long vacation. I'll quickly chime in that fixing more of the broken quests from AwA is most welcome, and excellent news.

I agree that fixing delve and dungeon auto completion on the map should be considered as an additional fix so they don't show as completed unless the associated quest is also completed. It's too confusing and demotivating as is. Since the quests are already per char, the map should reflect the quest state per char.

WB auto completion is also demotivating, but there is no associated quests for them so the only way to fix them is to make additional per char DB entries which I'm not sure ZOS is willing to do.

jle30303

There are plenty of delves that don't have an associated quest though. Completing a delve has always been "kill the boss", and separate from any quest it has, if there *is* a quest. World Bosses also generally have no quest (unless it's a zone daily quest).

World events such as Dolmens, Harrowstorms, Abyssal Geysers and Volcanic Vents don't have even a set regular boss, but people still seem to like the idea of finishing those "individually" rather than on an account-wide basis.

Elsonso

jle30303 wrote: »

There are plenty of delves that don't have an associated quest though. Completing a delve has always been "kill the boss", and separate from any quest it has, if there *is* a quest. World Bosses also generally have no quest (unless it's a zone daily quest).

Hmm. Which delves do not have an associated quest? I am drawing a blank, at the moment, as all of the ones that I can recall have had one. Ancient base game ones, maybe?

jle30303 wrote: »

World events such as Dolmens, Harrowstorms, Abyssal Geysers and Volcanic Vents don't have even a set regular boss, but people still seem to like the idea of finishing those "individually" rather than on an account-wide basis.

I know I do. I don't care if it gets ticked off some account-wide list, but replayability suggests that each character should also be able to check that box independently of the account. Oh. Forgot.

SilverBride

Elsonso wrote: »

jle30303 wrote: »

There are plenty of delves that don't have an associated quest though. Completing a delve has always been "kill the boss", and separate from any quest it has, if there *is* a quest. World Bosses also generally have no quest (unless it's a zone daily quest).

Hmm. Which delves do not have an associated quest? I am drawing a blank, at the moment, as all of the ones that I can recall have had one. Ancient base game ones, maybe?

I also have found quests for every delve, including all the base game ones. Usually the quest giver is standing outside near the entrance or a short way down the road. But sometimes the quest giver is inside the delve, or there is an item inside that triggers the quest. These can be easy to miss if you don't explore the entire delve.

Zorrin

Elsonso wrote: »

Hmm. Which delves do not have an associated quest? I am drawing a blank, at the moment, as all of the ones that I can recall have had one. Ancient base game ones, maybe?

I just ran Entila's Folly in Auridon and it does not have an associated quest. Then I got curious and clicked through a bunch of the delves listed here https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Delves. It turns out there's actually quite a few base game delves with no related quests, more than I would have figured considering I've done them all several times lol.

peacenote

@ZOS_Kevin Did this get unstickied by accident? As far as I know, we have received no additional announcements or fixes for what's being discussed in this thread.

If anything, this topic is more important than ever because, while there are people like me who care about both things, a lot of the folks who DIDN'T care about the combat changes would still care about this!

Dr_Con

after playing through the changes, I don't mind that individual delve bosses are shared achievements. Having needed to do the group dungeon boss on many characters, I go through to the individual bosses that I never got a chance to kill sometimes to see that I still haven't killed them due to their infrequency of spawning and my lack of interest - case in point being in Hall of the Dead where there are many draugr bosses so close to eachother and players can run through and mistake them for normal trash mobs. Don't get me wrong, while the dungeon itself isn't stellar it is something I'd expect out of Skyrim so I think the map devs hit the nail on the head, but it's an example of a zone I have little interest in getting an achievement for killing the bosses on each character.

barney2525

Alina_Scarbridge wrote: »

Literally everything on the map should be individual character based.

Agreed.

They caved in to the demands of those who dont care about developing a character and just run to get the best stuff as fast as possible. Zos was badgered enuff that they gave in and changed things. Now, every character I have, who has never crafted an item, is a Master Crafter. Does that make sense?

peacenote

No answer from Kevin so I'll try @ZOS_GinaBruno : Did this get unstickied by accident? As far as I know, we have received no additional announcements or fixes for what's being discussed in this thread.

I would also like to point out (credit is not mine in any way) that one small thing broken from AwA is on the table to fixed in the new PTS patch notes. See last entry in this topic, which I'm following. So... yay!

If the plan is to work on this in very small incremental changes, could we get confirmation? Is there a list somewhere on the dev to-do list that includes the map issues, the loss of the QoL boss spawning, the mixed up zone guide, and maybe a per-character log of dungeon and trial achievements? Technically we still don't even have acknowledgement that all these things were collateral damage vs. working as intended, so it seems like since this was stickied, it should stay stickied until we receive a statement. It seems a waste of everyone's time for us to submit bug reports every time we have an issue where we could just get a statement on how aware ZOS is of these items and whether they don't want to address them (intended) vs. they hope to deal with it sometime in the future (collateral damage).

peacenote

Hi folks! I spent a lot of time wandering around Tamriel with many alts for the first time in a LONG time because of the Explorer's event. This was because I decided to use the double drops as a way to clear out my surveys.

I loved it and hated it at the same time.

Why did I love it? Well, it made me nostalgic because I had an actual reason why it made sense to go around Tamriel with characters other than my main. I could get double xp for unlocking areas I haven't been, and potentially double drops for my surveys... and oh was it gorgeous. So many beautiful lands and I got to run through them and see all the differences. If the event is intended to truly help you get out and explore and realize all of the content that's out there.. it worked! I really enjoyed taking different characters around, getting to know them again, and chasing all of those red x's on my map. For me, there truly is no greater fun than making an alt and re-exploring Tamriel and unlocking it all over again.

But then I realized... I was literally wrecking the map for myself. Because of the double drops, my focus was gathering. Doing surveys, getting wayshrines for later, and grabbing nodes. But if I wandered too close to a world boss... bam! It's suddenly "done" on my alt just because I wasn't watching where I was going.

And then suddenly I hated it because the whole event became a reminder for me that there's very little reason for me to use these other characters, now. I can't track my world boss progress. I can't track my delve progress. I can't challenge myself to beat speed mode, hard mode, etc. in dungeons with the different classes and characters. Chances are high that, besides writs, probably I won't use those characters again until next Explorer's event. Maybe. While I like the quests they aren't enough to incentivize me to work through multiple characters. Often I skip quests and JUST do "everything else" when leveling someone.

ZOS, can we please get an update on this? I don't care if my achievements no longer track every time I kill 1,000 mudcrabs per character, or even every time I conquer a world boss on each character. The achievements are fine to mostly track what I've done for the first time ever. But it's so much less meaningful to replay content knowing that I can't re-experience the game and determine what my character has and hasn't beaten because of how much of that content was only track-able through achievements. We now have Stickerbook, the Amory which saves builds per character, the Companion system which tracks reputation per character.... obviously you can add different databases to track per-character data; it's just the achievement database in particular that got too big. Can't we get a database for dungeon and trial challenges, and map progress?

Spiritrush

I cannot add much here, feels like this myriad of AWA issues have largely fallen on deaf ears. I still believe the manner in which AWA was implemented has had a significant, net negative impact on player experience. This was simply a poor business decision, reducing the enjoyment and long-term playability of the game for so many. We clearly and loudly warned of these issues at the time, and I still cannot fathom why whomever was in charge approved the implementation without taking what appeared to be obvious concerns for any gameplay experience designer.

This may seem like 'water under the bridge' and an effort not worth pursuing, but I would not underestimate the value of reversing the negative effects of AWA implementation as you look at overhauling the rewards system. AWA use (account wide visibility, and other AWA perks such as title use on ALTs with a different color) while retaining individual ALT progression was clearly the way to go. The data can be parsed (pre-AWA backup + current AWA) for a comprehensive and meaningful fix (even if imperfect) - it would be worth it in the long run. @ZOS_MattFiror, this definitely needs to be fixed for the benefit of enjoyable gameplay experience and the long-term viability of player retention and content replayability, worth considering.

WalkingBomb

The "complete but showing as incomplete" bug seems to have reintroduced itself with Necrom for me, this time even enhanced with zone guide saying I haven't done those things I have already done. The quests themselves did not reappear luckily, so it seems no progress has been lost but there may be an issue with the map reading quest data. In pic related you can see how some quests in the middle of a chain are straight up missing.






Would love to hear if it's just me or others too. If it's just me I'll contact support I suppose.
No addons were harmed used for this screenshot.

Vampryss

this is really frustrating for new characters. I would like this reversed please. It feels broken

Tyrant_Tim

Love AWA, thanks. After a decade of gameplay people are finally completing all of their achievements.