Account Wide Achievements: What's the impact?

Kesstryl · March 2022

Jaraal wrote: »

SerafinaWaterstar wrote: »

It would help get the point of how damn awful AWA is if everyone who has posted an issue here also puts in a bug report in game.

Ignoring the forums is easy for them; perhaps not so easy to ignore bug reports? Surely worth a try - they must at least have to report back on bug reporting numbers?

It's a nice thought, and I totally understand it. But our individual character data is destroyed forever, there's no turning back now. They decided months ago that this was the direction they wanted to go with the game, and no amount of bug reports is going to undo the damage. Besides that, these bugs were reported weeks ago when the PTS dropped, and they chose to ignore them then.... so it stands to reason that they would ignore them now as well.

Also, I would hate to see legitimate concerns that keep people from being able to log in and whatnot buried under a backlog of reports. And we shouldn't punish devs who have no say in the matter and would have to sift through all the reports because of a management decision.

I disagree, this change has broken the way many people play, and they deserve all the bug reports that come out of this as they get. The game world is broken in so many ways. It's an ocean of bugs. For those who like to quest and listen to voice acting, immersion is broken as NPCs react to your achievements and not the state of your individual alts. Certain achievement only quests are not repeatable on alts anymore. I would consider the situation with delves and skyshards broken as well, though I can see them fixing this sooner than fixing a game world that is narratively and immersively broken. They deserve every and all bug reports. Every. Single. One.

Malborn66 · March 2022

AWA has stuffed my measurements of Character progress.

I think that this is the end of ESO for me, ESO+ Subscription and all.

What point in doing things with multiple Characters if you already have all the rewards and points for it.

AWA has destroyed any reason for playing Multiple Characters and by extension ESO with multiples.

Malborn66
PC-EU

Jaraal · March 2022

SerafinaWaterstar wrote: »

The other option is Social Media or streamers (sorry ‘content creators’ 🤨) but they all seem desperate to stay in Zos’ good books that none will dare dissent.

The opinions that matter most are those of the investors. Major shareholders, boards of directors, financial officers, and so forth. If income drops, they will notice. If not, then it's business as usual.

Tommy_The_Gun · March 2022

Tbh. It actually discourages me to play my alts, because I fear that I may get one of those important grindy achievement by accident on one of my silly-named named crafter or banker...

So it is probably doing the opposite what it is supposed to...

In fact I already got an achievement on a "wrong" character yesterday. Not a big deal since it is my 2nd main and achievement itself is not that important. I had no idea that I have the achievement on that character, so it got added as soon as I have logged in lol...

Tracking zone progress is also an issue since skyshards & quests achievements are completed, but the content is not.

If I were to sum it up... well, in the place where I come from there is an old saying that closest I can can translate it to is: "It's one or the other."

Since 99% of achievements are now account bound (or server & platform bound) why do we still have: "earned by" ? All characters have it. This information serves no purpose. So why it still tracks what character got the achievement if all characters got it ? We can not change it. We can not add other characters to this "list".

It is almost as if Devs could not make up their minds...
ZOS, either make achievements truly account wide or not... "Earned by" is just there & acts as a memento. Something that is unnecessary and imho can be more annoying than useful.

Jaraal · March 2022

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

It is almost as if Devs could not make up their minds...
ZOS, either make achievements truly account wide or not... "Earned by" is just there & acts as a memento. Something that is unnecessary and imho can be more annoying than useful.

"Earned by" is not even accurate. If your main is a vampire and feeds 99 times, and then your newbie alt feeds for the first time and gets the Vampire's Feast achievement... did he actually earn it? It would be more accurate if it said "Stolen by."

francesinhalover · March 2022

Vrienda wrote: »

Character individuality is destroyed.

World objectives like delves, dolmens and world bosses are auto completed for all alts if you did them on your main. Meaning no first-time completion exp.

Skyshards are apparently a little messy.

Your titles are now account wide, as is progress towards achievements.

Your character will be referred to as having done X and Y because your main did it.

Certain post-story dialogues like the one for Markarth just don't exist for alts anymore.

Performance is improved, clearly. Just log on and you can totally see how great we're doing now ZOS managed to trim roughly one TB worth of data. /s

Ohhhh thats so cool, i deleted my cache and got really o_o? When the loadings were faster than normal. Game felt more smooth even on grathwood

jcasini222ub17_ESO · March 2022

Just to confirm if this is working as intended- On my lesser ranked PvP characters I can display the grand warlord title but the rank will show as captain, lt, major etc whatever the specific character rank is? (Kinda odd not my cup of tea for a display option) I guess in the same vein, I can display PvP titles on characters that never even joined the conflict?

One thing I did notice on my current my current necro, and this is something I need to recheck, but Orsinium looked all completed even though I haven’t begun the quests there. Big let down if that’s the case.

WhiteCoatSyndrome · March 2022

Edgemoor wrote: »

This will definately cost them, it may even turn out to be a NGE level update (but I doubt it).

Stupid question time! What does NGE mean in this context?

maingray · March 2022

Poor decision, with no choice to opt out. Taken away the desire to level alts.

kringled_1 · March 2022

WhiteCoatSyndrome wrote: »

Edgemoor wrote: »

This will definately cost them, it may even turn out to be a NGE level update (but I doubt it).

Stupid question time! What does NGE mean in this context?

New Game Enhancements I think.
It's a reference to an infamous update to Star Wars Galaxies that was not well received.

redlink1979 · March 2022

Malborn66 wrote: »

(...) What point in doing things with multiple Characters if you already have all the rewards and points for it. (...)

Yup, AWA has just killed the repeatability.

Lumsdenml · March 2022

Personally, I like the changes. When the early DLCs came out, I would choose an alt to do them on, so there were several who got achievements from them. Later, I wanted to get them all on my main, so I went back and did the main storyline and a bit more on my main, but not everything. Now that achievements are combined, I get credit for the things I have already done. For me, anyway, I am more interested in my achievements vs. my character's achievements.

sarahthes · March 2022

xXSilverDragonXx wrote: »

Saieden wrote: »

xXSilverDragonXx wrote: »

WhiteCoatSyndrome wrote: »

I know it’s way, way too late now but is there a reason ZOS didn’t do like they did with level scaling with One Tamriel - that is to say start out with one relatively isolated area, implement it only there until the bugs were worked out and the implementation was solid before gradually phasing it in elsewhere?

Converting EVERY zone back then would have been a massive and time consuming process with lots of manpower. IE MONEY. I don't think achievements being linked to account rather than toon was timeconsuming at all. In fact, the time consuming part would be to make sure things like skyshards remain accurate because it would be idiotic to have them seem like they were collected on new toons, right? Someone with a working brain could comprehend that this should not be 'account wide' right? And of course, to implement that properly would probably take time. And cost money. Thus, they do not take the time because it costs money.

This is what I and many others said from week one pts: The implementation of AWA is a messy hack job, can't possibly be fixed before going live, and will cause irreversible damage to both game itself and player sentiment.

Now that it has gone live, the work (money) to fix it, by which I mean rebuild the entire thing ground up AND compensate players for loss of progress, will be several orders of magnitude greater than pulling it from the start.

Which nearly guarantees they won't fix it. Problem solved. AWA is here to stay, I'm sure of that. Maybe addons can fix sone of the issues like skyshard hunting. But I remember years ago people upset about different things on the PTS, massive threads on those things and nothing got changed.

It's really sad how you can learn to get used to QOL improvements that make the game less enjoyable. Though I usually only play for a few months every few years these days.

Things on the PTS typically start development a year before they go live. This is why once something hits pts it is virtually guaranteed to go live. Hard to undo a year's worth of work in 6 weeks. While feedback on a change is important, I've only ever seen things like skill or ability or item changes get reverted, presumably because those are a lot easier to change given the time constraints.

Shawn_PT · March 2022

To me, "completing" content on alts now feels like a limp, floppy.... limb.

I see a new undiscovered delve. I approach it. *Place discovered!* Cool, now I get to go in, kill a boss, get a little achievement for doing it. However when I walk in, the boss is already marked as killed. There's no point in going there and killing it again. Might as well just check addons to see where the skyshard is, and if there's a quest in there. Grab that and leave. Actually going there and killing the boss is anticlimactic. Feels utterly pointless now.

Public dungeon. Marked as not found. Walk in. Talk to NPC for quest. But alas, every single boss is already marked as "cleared" because it's been done by other character. The only exception is the "group" boss that gives a skill point. So public dungeon experience is walk in, talk to NPC, talk to more NPC, kill one boss. Done. All clear.

Fishing. Every single character of mine now has all the fish on every map caught. I see a fishing node and instead of the wonder of "yay! Let's see if I can get a new one!" all I get is "oh it's been done before. Meh." It's now practically pointless for me to fish.

So yeah. After the initial excitement of finding a new thing to clear, it suddenly feels very limp because I've been lied to. My personal enjoyment of the game has been choked. Thanks zos.

DarcyMardin · March 2022

Before the update, I had Grand Master Crafter only on one character on my original 2014 account. Not being a trials or end game player, I considered that my proudest achievement.

Today, after loading up less than half of my other characters, I now have Grand Master Crafter on 3 of my 4 accounts. How, I don't even know. I do craft on all characters, but I haven't been consciously grinding motifs. It's a mystery.

nickl413 · March 2022

The ONLY good thing about it is you can buy achievement furnishings that were unlocked on a different character, which should have always been possible just like dyes. Other than that, It's a complete mess. Doesn't make any sense at all.

Sylvermynx · March 2022

DarcyMardin wrote: »

Before the update, I had Grand Master Crafter only on one character on my original 2014 account. Not being a trials or end game player, I considered that my proudest achievement.

Today, after loading up less than half of my other characters, I now have Grand Master Crafter on 3 of my 4 accounts. How, I don't even know. I do craft on all characters, but I haven't been consciously grinding motifs. It's a mystery.

It's because if you know all the "base" motifs (the 9 racials) they accrue as 9 x however many alts you've logged into. That's really rather odd I think.

Edgemoor · March 2022

kringled_1 wrote: »

WhiteCoatSyndrome wrote: »

Edgemoor wrote: »

This will definately cost them, it may even turn out to be a NGE level update (but I doubt it).

Stupid question time! What does NGE mean in this context?

New Game Enhancements I think.
It's a reference to an infamous update to Star Wars Galaxies that was not well received.

Exactly what I meant, and judging by the response on this and other threads players are coming to the realisation some of the activities they did are now meaningless. It may take a while for the impact to sink in, but I think it may be fewer players logging on in the end.

For me personally I found going through all the zones and picking up skyshards and doing the public dungeons rewarding. So not being able to track them by character easily is impactful.

Getting the XP from achievements was a great alternative way to level with a feeling of progression.

Given the that it seems the casual players are the majority and also the ones most impacted, this might be pretty bad in the long run.

ajkb78 · March 2022

Console player here, but with a rarely used pc account.

Edgemoor wrote: »

shadyjane62 wrote: »

Edgemoor wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

Getting a small dopamine rush when you accomplish an achievement on an alternate character, especially in a different role, or a class you're not as familiar with.

Being able to track what each character has done in the game, if you play them as individuals.

Immersion of players having a "Thief" title and achievement on a character who has never stolen anything.

There's 91 pages of "feedback" (I put in quotes because feedback usually means two way, which it wasn't), of all the different things players "lose" in this.

It's unbelievable that they would actually implement this in a game that quite heavily relies on those skyshards. I don't see any reason to start a new character unless there is a method to track which skyshards have been acquired.

Spending that amount of time running around the entire map just to discover you've got them is a pointless waster of time and effort.

If they went this route I would have expected them to grant the skyshards to all characters, not just wipe out all progress.

I see the problem with granting all the skyshards is the problem of the skill points. I guess they weren't willing to apply all those unearned skill points to the char, although they were willing to grant the the unearned acheev.

Yeah i agree, but why take away the ability to track which ones you have an which ones you don't? They just made a good portion of their game unplayable.

"Unplayable" - no, not really, just the same as it's always been on console. You can still track them by looking at the zone map. Perhaps if you're playing on pc an add-on might need a bit of fixing but there really isn't a problem.

ajkb78 · March 2022

Ulvich wrote: »

The idea of account wide achievements is turning out to be rejected by almost everyone I speak with. There are numerous postings in these forums that are also rejecting this idea.
Account wide achievements (in my opinion) will take away a character’s identity and uniqueness. Having a fresh level 3 running around with the Dragonslayer title (or others unearned) is simply ridicules. If you wish to make something account wide then perhaps wayshrine discovery, or maybe mount training.

Not really any more ridiculous than my fresh level 3 running around with the worm wizard personality and a trial skin, which he was doing last week.

If you want ridiculous, remember the millions of gold people poured into the Style Master achievement (part of Grand Master Crafter)? Now you can get it with 6 alts and a handful of copies of each of the basic racial motif books, total cost maybe 50k, total time maybe an hour getting the motifs from readers or your guild bank and reading each of them on each alt.

SeaGtGruff · March 2022

xXSilverDragonXx wrote: »

Well, I cannot collect skyshards because they are linked to achievements. And so, toons that don't have ones have maps reading collected. And there's no way I am going to go into all these places to try to guess if it was collected by them or not.

This is a deal breaker for me. Shards are essential. If you cannot track them, then why bother? They are time consuming to get, but they give you those extra skill points. That they didn't even test this enough to avoid this problem is baffling.

The really strange thing is, I'm questing right now on one of my alts, because I got tired of using him for just crafting writs. So I started him on the main quest late last week, and right now he's leisurely questing through Bleakrock Isle. And for the life of me, I can't tell that anything's changed when I'm looking at the map and the zone guide. If it weren't for the obvious changes in his Achievements, I'd be wondering if something failed to update on him yesterday during the conversion, because his map doesn't show anything he hasn't discovered himself, and so far he's having absolutely no trouble at all finding skyshards and then collecting them.

jle30303 · March 2022

The problem isn't account-wide achievements.

The problem is account-wide COMPLETION.

Achievements can be account-wide, but completion - of game features such as delves, WBs, locations, dungeons, skyshards, dolmens and other world events - should be character-specific, just as discovery of such features is.

Quick-n-dirty reversion fix for dolmens, WBs and delves:

(1) Since it is possible for areas to have a character-specific "discovered" and "undiscovered" status, it is trivially possible for them to have a character-specific "completed" and "incomplete" status. Instead of these being two off-on booleans, convert to a single three-state variable in which 0 = "undiscovered", 1 = "discovered but incomplete", 2 = "completed on this character".

(2) As and when any character logs in:
- For each zone, and each feature in the Zone Guide, check whether it's currently "discovered" or not, FIRST. If not discovered, mark the new three-state variable as 0, and the Zone Guide should report it as incomplete. Some things which have been wrongly completed on the Zone Guide will now disappear from it. From here, it can safely go up to 1 (black on the map) or 2 (white on the map) when THIS CHARACTER finds it (1) and completes it (2), and only in the latter instance should it turn white on the map, or be marked in the Zone Guide as complete.
- If a feature IS currently "discovered", then it remains at state 2 - "completed", and is entered as completed in the Zone Guide. This means that some places which haven't yet been completed, will be marked as such (e.g. dolmens and WBs which you ran through on the way to somewhere else), but the majority will revert to incomplete since they haven't even been discovered. Therefore, this is probably the reversion that will do the least harm.

For skyshards:
They're already correct (in their Acquired or Not Acquired status) in the Zone Guide, so revert to the previous behaviour of showing them black on the map if the Zone Guide says Not Acquired, and either white on the map or not on the map at all (depending on filter) if the Zone Guide says Acquired.

SeaGtGruff · March 2022

jle30303 wrote: »

For skyshards:
They're already correct (in their Acquired or Not Acquired status) in the Zone Guide, so revert to the previous behaviour of showing them black on the map if the Zone Guide says Not Acquired, and either white on the map or not on the map at all (depending on filter) if the Zone Guide says Acquired.

But that is how it's working right now.

If you haven't discovered a skyshard yet, it isn't shown on your map.

If you've discovered it but haven't collected it yet, it's shown in black-- even if you're standing right beside it.

It does not turn white-- or disappear from your map, if you've got your map filters set that way-- until you actually collect it.

If you don't believe me, go check it out for yourself.

Edgemoor · March 2022

I think the main issue here might be mitigated by allowing the discovery of a map location to be visible to all characters, not just the character that discovers it. It could even be an option.

xFocused · March 2022

I just want mount upgrades account wide, lol, that's it. If I get one toon to max mount speed/capacity/stamina then please let that apply to all of my toons

Edgemoor · March 2022

xFocused wrote: »

I just want mount upgrades account wide, lol, that's it. If I get one toon to max mount speed/capacity/stamina then please let that apply to all of my toons

Yeah getting used to the slow speed on untrained characters is a real pain. I tend to create new characters before I want to use them so I can level up the mount skills.

xFocused · March 2022

Edgemoor wrote: »

xFocused wrote: »

I just want mount upgrades account wide, lol, that's it. If I get one toon to max mount speed/capacity/stamina then please let that apply to all of my toons

Yeah getting used to the slow speed on untrained characters is a real pain. I tend to create new characters before I want to use them so I can level up the mount skills.

Agreed. Plus the time on being able to upgrade them is insane. Having to wait a full day, lol

ArchangelIsraphel · March 2022

xFocused wrote: »

Edgemoor wrote: »

xFocused wrote: »

I just want mount upgrades account wide, lol, that's it. If I get one toon to max mount speed/capacity/stamina then please let that apply to all of my toons

Yeah getting used to the slow speed on untrained characters is a real pain. I tend to create new characters before I want to use them so I can level up the mount skills.

Agreed. Plus the time on being able to upgrade them is insane. Having to wait a full day, lol

That's part of what really stings about this implementation of AWA. Things that actually would have been USEFUL to have account wide, are not account wide, because cash shop.

NeeScrolls · March 2022

redlink1979 wrote: »

Malborn66 wrote: »

(...) What point in doing things with multiple Characters if you already have all the rewards and points for it. (...)

Yup, AWA has just killed the repeatability.

kringled_1 wrote: »

WhiteCoatSyndrome wrote: »

Edgemoor wrote: »

This will definately cost them, it may even turn out to be a NGE level update (but I doubt it).

Stupid question time! What does NGE mean in this context?

New Game Enhancements I think.
It's a reference to an infamous update to Star Wars Galaxies that was not well received.

Yep , don't remind me... i lived--and part of me died--through that cyber betrayal & utter debacle.

What's so fascinating to me is how similar/parallel things are happening currently with SWTOR (7.0 total combat-styles + ui revamp, essentially de-value'ing ALTs there too) and ESO at the same time. Sometimes i wonder if these 2 games are run by the same 'shadow Dev team' lol (they seem to copy eachother quite a lot over past few years)

Forums at SWTOR are literally saying some of the exact same sentiments (re: ignored PTS feedback) and 'NGE' comparisons.

So far, the ESO 'AWA' hasn't affected me in a negative way because tbh i only really have 2 ALTs here that i've seriously played for significant amount of time. But it does make me wonder....Why are both games doing such similar reductions/consolidations? For SWTOR the rumor is: Easier to port-to-consoles. For ESO though, it feels like an odd move.

Jaraal · March 2022

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

jle30303 wrote: »

For skyshards:
They're already correct (in their Acquired or Not Acquired status) in the Zone Guide, so revert to the previous behaviour of showing them black on the map if the Zone Guide says Not Acquired, and either white on the map or not on the map at all (depending on filter) if the Zone Guide says Acquired.

But that is how it's working right now.

If you haven't discovered a skyshard yet, it isn't shown on your map.

If you've discovered it but haven't collected it yet, it's shown in black-- even if you're standing right beside it.

It does not turn white-- or disappear from your map, if you've got your map filters set that way-- until you actually collect it.

If you don't believe me, go check it out for yourself.

You do have to log in multiple characters for AWA to kick in. Have you done that?