Please make delves and world bosses character specific

JoeCapricorn

Ever since AWA hit the community with the grace of a bag of bricks made of gelatinized poutine, one of the biggest gripes was the loss of character specific completion of certain parts of the world map. There was always that satisfaction of having completed a delve for the first time on a new character. This facet of replayability was taken for granted and now that it was ripped away it is impossible to ignore the anhedonia it spurs forth.

There are two consequences of the implementation that have bothered me that only came to light when High Isle itself was released. With a larger zone comes a larger set of interactive world locations, and there are a few things that have me missing the old way.

The first is I have no apparent desire to complete a delve on any more characters aside from my main. I might kill the main boss if they are in the way, and that is it. Before I made it a point to kill the main boss for the completion, and that was part of the fun of taking a new character through the zones. Since I level many of my new characters this way, this was a prime part of fresh XP. This incentive is gone, for no real reason. It would not affect performance to regain the per-character completion of delves, world bosses and world events, and there is no monetary gain from taking those things away. Arguably, there is a degree of monetary loss. Less replayability, even with something such as these, means less of a desire for players to come back for a new zone. I remember when so many people crowded dragons and Harrowstorms straight through the third week after release. Just a few days after High Isle, I found myself standing at a Volcanic Vent waiting for people to show up. I said in zone that the "Volcanic Vent with the name Volcanic Vent" was up. That helped a great deal, saying the name of the Volcanic Vent I was at. But even after providing directions, "Turn left at the blue tree and then hang a right after the other blue tree", no one really showed up for the first five minutes. This is kinda weird... honestly.

The second is I am also avoiding completion of certain world bosses and world events so I can get the credit for that on a certain character. This is just an OCD thing. I don't think this can be fixed even with regaining per-character completions for each map thing. If it is tied to achievements and those remain account wide, it may not be as simple to program those back. It would be nice if we could change which character completed which achievement. As long as such a change was free.

I would be happy with each character being able to gain the completion and XP bonus for world bosses, delves and world events. It even seems relatively straight forward to code that in, as there are other map-specific things that are still character specific. I think it even can come down to a single Boolean variable: isCompleted = 1. You can't tell me that server performance is going to suffer from a single boolean value. I would also be shocked if the one for per-character discovering locations on the world map isn't named "isDiscovered". Graduating with a degree in computer science 11 years ago only to pursue an entirely unrelated career involving actual bugs sure comes in handy!

AzuraFan

Without knowing the code, it's hard to say what would be easy vs. difficult. It all depends on how tracking achievements was designed. If the tracking is somehow linked to the map (the fact that when we went to AwA, the map was affected seems to suggest that it is), then it might be difficult to untangle them now.

I'm with you. I've pretty much mothballed my alts because there isn't much point playing through zone storylines, fishing, doing WBs, delves, etc. when there's no easy way to keep track of who's done what. I like ticking boxes and doing achievements, so that's one of the primary things that keeps me playing (I don't PvP, do vet stuff or trials, rarely do dungeons). The way they implemented AwA pretty much killed alts for me. I'm playing a new one through Vvardenfell right now just because I haven't done that storyline for years, but it's not the same when everything's already completed.

I'd love it if maps were fresh for every character, but I'm afraid that ship has probably sailed.

(and yeah, it means fewer players at group overland events. I've noticed it too. Guild events that used to draw a lot of guildies for WBs and such hardly draw anyone now)

JoeCapricorn

AzuraFan wrote: »

Guild events that used to draw a lot of guildies for WBs and such hardly draw anyone now)

Part of that is because they killed large groups fOr PeRfOrMaNcE rEaSoNs

12 player limited groups suck.

AzuraFan

JoeCapricorn wrote: »

AzuraFan wrote: »

Guild events that used to draw a lot of guildies for WBs and such hardly draw anyone now)

Part of that is because they killed large groups fOr PeRfOrMaNcE rEaSoNs

12 player limited groups suck.

Possibly, but the guilds I run with just run multiple groups. The interest only drastically decreased when AwA was introduced.

Treeshka

I think the account wide achievement is irreversible.

JoeCapricorn

There's no doubt about that. But restoring character specific completions of world bosses, delves and world events wouldn't mean rolling back anything.

There may be a few ways to do it.

The first one is to smartly apply some logic to in order to set the flags per character. If per-character completion was already kept track of, this shouldn't even be necessary, and it would just revert to how things were before pretty easily. If not, new characters, new content, and characters that have not discovered the map location, would show those things as incomplete by those characters. For instance, Faun Falls is not discovered by my magicka nightblade, he would then discover it, but it would still be incomplete. If a character of mine had discovered it, and there wasn't a pre-existing track of whether they completed the world boss (but my main did complete it previously), it might show as completed for that character, as it may not be possible to apply a logical condition where if this character did not discover the place, there is no way to have completed the place. Essentially, things would remain completed even if that character didn't do it, but all new characters and all new content zones would be back to normal.

The second is a bit more disruptive (and would be a sort of roll-back)... Per-character completions would essentially be reset, except for those that are mentioned as having completed the achievement. So, my main completed Faun Falls, but my first character to do it was Sorlia, she would get the completion, while it would appear incomplete on Faun Falls on my main Fen-Wander. I would just have to complete it again to get the XP. The consequence of doing this though is it would affect all world-bosses, delves and world events retroactively.

Those are the two ways that I could think of. The absolute easiest way is if there was already some kind of variable that kept track of what each character did.

As for how the world location appears on the map - it may have to be tweaked. The icon may instead be based on each character's completion flag, rather than the achievement. Seems simple enough.

spartaxoxo

They did AWA for performance reasons, so I doubt they bring back a large portion of the achievements as character specific. The boss completion of a delve isn't even something that effects individual character's interaction with the world like quest completions.

If they were to partially revert some of the AWA decisions, I can't imagine the low impact on character stuff like delves and world bosses would be included.

JoeCapricorn

It still would be nice to have the initial XP bonus for each character, to give an incentive to complete those places on new characters. Rolling back AWA is impossible, but adding some character specific exploration progression isn't.