Can anyone explain to me how Account Wide Acheivements is a beneficial feature?

renne · March 2022

Tomboski wrote: »

1. I can't freely tp to any location that I've already conquered/completed.
2. I can't help anyone who needs a tp to a location that I've already conquered/completed.
3. [snip] else do you want from me?

If you've already done it on that toon you can absolutely do it.

Theros wrote: »

Kisakee wrote: »

Theros wrote: »

AwA I love it!!!

Like someone say: "every character can be my main" How cares create alts to have diferent role-play!! Just put all-in-one

Thank you Developers! You make the game Great again!

I don' know what you understand by roleplay but for me it's not having different achievements on different toons.
My characters are fleshed out in having their own style, sentiment, attitude and playstyle, i love all of them in their special roles. That's what i call roleplay.

Roleplay? well....
-I'm a Great Silencer in any alt now! (But only my assasin trully is)

-Now i can try help others in for exemple Faing Lair Challenger (Only my main DD did it) but now, i link my achivment with pride and tell everyone i'm a very very good tank! Because i did this alot in Tank! If we die... not my fault! I'm a exelent tank.

-And when i create a new char. I just love when boss's, delves and etc are completed! (if i ask, i will ask to have all completed) All of this are Roleplay and i trully love it

And in trials? OMG!!! I will never understand why people can't complete them! I link achivments in my healer but people keep die inside trials... i dont understand!

My favourite thing about utterly baseless this argument is how everyone pushing it as an argument against AwA doesn't seem to realise that people could already do this. I could quite literally, before AwA, respec my DK dps into a tank, link my SotN or DD achievements and say "I've done these on my tank." AwA doesn't change any of that.

If THIS is why you're against AwA, why aren't these people complaining about being able to completely respec toons, too?

[edited to remove quote]

wenchmore420b14_ESO · March 2022

renne wrote: »

Tomboski wrote: »

1. I can't freely tp to any location that I've already conquered/completed.
2. I can't help anyone who needs a tp to a location that I've already conquered/completed.
3. [snip] else do you want from me?

If you've already done it on that toon you can absolutely do it.

Theros wrote: »

Kisakee wrote: »

Theros wrote: »

AwA I love it!!!

Like someone say: "every character can be my main" How cares create alts to have diferent role-play!! Just put all-in-one

Thank you Developers! You make the game Great again!

I don' know what you understand by roleplay but for me it's not having different achievements on different toons.
My characters are fleshed out in having their own style, sentiment, attitude and playstyle, i love all of them in their special roles. That's what i call roleplay.

Roleplay? well....
-I'm a Great Silencer in any alt now! (But only my assasin trully is)

-Now i can try help others in for exemple Faing Lair Challenger (Only my main DD did it) but now, i link my achivment with pride and tell everyone i'm a very very good tank! Because i did this alot in Tank! If we die... not my fault! I'm a exelent tank.

-And when i create a new char. I just love when boss's, delves and etc are completed! (if i ask, i will ask to have all completed) All of this are Roleplay and i trully love it

And in trials? OMG!!! I will never understand why people can't complete them! I link achivments in my healer but people keep die inside trials... i dont understand!

My favourite thing about utterly baseless this argument is how everyone pushing it as an argument against AwA doesn't seem to realise that people could already do this. I could quite literally, before AwA, respec my DK dps into a tank, link my SotN or DD achievements and say "I've done these on my tank." AwA doesn't change any of that.

If THIS is why you're against AwA, why aren't these people complaining about being able to completely respec toons, too?

The difference is you could CHOOSE to change that about your character, what ZoS did was FORCED change on our characters.
Who has played D&D? So I roll a new character but I ask the DM for all the spells and perks of my LV25 character? Makes no sense, huh?
I have a new character for ESO I made a few months ago. They have a birthdate, I can tell you their parents name and how many siblings they have. Their hobbies and interests and life goals. They are individual.
Do you know what a "story arch" is? How a character, whether in a movie, a book or a video game grows and changes in a personal growth level?
This is why this is NOT a baseless argument and I'm sorry you don't have the imagination to understand how we can play our characters as individuals with their OWN story to tell, not a conglobation of all our alts.
Go ask any performer at a Renaissance Faire what it means to "be in character" and maybe you can understand what our characters mean to us.
Huzzah!

[edited to remove quote]

Saieden · March 2022

sarahthes wrote: »

Saieden wrote: »

Arunei wrote: »

Saieden wrote: »

tonyblack wrote: »

It’s great for players who like to play multiple characters especially in competitive content. I no longer need to stress what class I should bring to trial or dungeon groups and miss out on titles or other rewards for other characters.

Until you realize that now even social guilds that do organized vet trials for beginners and intermediates are pretty much forced to ask players to provide logs of their respective roles. Instead of a simple screenshot to show that they are ready to progress into harder content because achievements mean. This will be a huge barrier to entry for many, and will only feed the false perceptions that "all players who do vet trials and look at logs are toxic gate-keeping metagamers."

God knows what it will be like for console.

Uh...I hope you aren't saying people running trials for beginners are asking the beginners for their logs, because that doesn't make sense. If you're a beginner the whole point of "beginner" raids is to learn how to do them, not be expected to already know enough to provide logs. If they're trying to move on to harder content then maybe just...take them them through the harder content and see how they do? Live results will tell you more than a single static image that might have been the result of good luck or something.

This honestly seems better, imo. It might take more time to "test" someone's progress but it seems to me it should be worth that extra effort to ensure people are learning properly, instead of just wanting to shoot them through stuff as fast as humanly possible.

Not absolute beginner, obviously, I mean players that have completed vet craglorn trials/HMs to join DLC vet trials would typically post an achievement (along with parse or owned gear sets) to get a rank to join for their role. No (successful) training guilds will accept a tank into vKA if they've cleared it on dps, but never any tanked a vet trial before, this is the issue now with AWA. Before, the amount work and effort it would take to apply as a "fake-role" (i.e cleared as DPS and applying for healer rank) was enough of a deterrent to stop 99.99% of would-be's. Now, you just log in and every toon has all the clears without necessarily setting a foot into actual content, so guilds that required achievements previously for mid-tier difficulty are basically forced to ask for logs.

The problem with "just see how they do" is that 11 other people are involved and have to set time aside IRL to be there, and if people's time is wasted because the healer has never had to interrupt flameshapers before, they will just leave the guild. So raid leads put a system in place to stop this from happening as far as is reasonable. No one is being pushed through as fast as possible, except by the player themselves (by signing up and grinding as much as they can through their own determination), it's simply a way to efficiently handle hundreds of potential applicants, otherwise no one would get anywhere.

I don't understand the bolded part. Every guild and discord I'm in that has separate ranking systems for supports vs DDs already required logs... (PC NA).

Also, my magden is the toon I got all my healer HM clears on but I'm currently specced for damage. Same with my magplar/templar healer and my magcro/necro healer.

On PC at least logs are the determinative factor, and on console for more serious groups I believe supports are required to provide POV videos when applying to groups (as close as they can get to logs).

I guess EU is/was probably a bit more relaxed, perhaps on NA raid leaders have just been burnt by overconfidence a few too many times. It's also worth emphasising I'm referring to mainly to social guilds that are catering to players that are relatively inexperienced in veteran content. I was also in a raid guild whose training sign ups started at 75K for dps and essential trial sets for supports.

Oreyn_Bearclaw · March 2022

tmbrinks wrote: »

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

This is not rocket science. As the player, I can see my total progress, AKA what percent of the game I have completed, for my account. Personally, I love it. It allows me to not feel obligated to chase hard to get achievements on specific characters. I have never played a game where achievements were tied to the character or a specific playthrough. They are always tied to the account, and most games take multiple playthroughs to get all achievements. ESO was an anomaly that has thankfully been corrected.

AWA was absolutely increasing my playtime until ESO stared attempting to melt every CPU in sight.

But I feel like that could have been accomplished for you, without taking away how so many of us, who have commented on this, like to play this game... and that is what hurts That and the silence.

@tmbrinks

I don't disagree. I think the implementation was less than stellar. If it were me, I would have left individual character achievement pages alone, and added a separate account wide page without titles attached to it. I probably said some version of that on these forums 100 times over the past 8 years. That way people that use it more as a guide for alts arent upset, and it keeps the end game community engage (i.e. chasing trifectas on alts).

I am 100% not surprised that ZOS used a sledgehammer when a scalpel was called for. They have been doing it since forever.

That said, they didnt do what I described, and I dont see them reversing it, so I am not sure we need 50 threads on the same subject. Even if they could reverse, I would rather it be the way it is now than the old system if those were my two options. I think its overall much better despite the flaws.

I think ESO is also a little unusual as it heavily relied on achievements to be guideposts for completion, a role traditionally done in most games by a more robust journal/quest log. Perhaps that is something they could look into as a good compromise in the future. The quest log in this game is about as minimal as it can be.

renne · March 2022

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

renne wrote: »

Tomboski wrote: »

1. I can't freely tp to any location that I've already conquered/completed.
2. I can't help anyone who needs a tp to a location that I've already conquered/completed.
3. WTF else do you want from me?

If you've already done it on that toon you can absolutely do it.

Theros wrote: »

Kisakee wrote: »

Theros wrote: »

AwA I love it!!!

Like someone say: "every character can be my main" How cares create alts to have diferent role-play!! Just put all-in-one

Thank you Developers! You make the game Great again!

I don' know what you understand by roleplay but for me it's not having different achievements on different toons.
My characters are fleshed out in having their own style, sentiment, attitude and playstyle, i love all of them in their special roles. That's what i call roleplay.

Roleplay? well....
-I'm a Great Silencer in any alt now! (But only my assasin trully is)

-Now i can try help others in for exemple Faing Lair Challenger (Only my main DD did it) but now, i link my achivment with pride and tell everyone i'm a very very good tank! Because i did this alot in Tank! If we die... not my fault! I'm a exelent tank.

-And when i create a new char. I just love when boss's, delves and etc are completed! (if i ask, i will ask to have all completed) All of this are Roleplay and i trully love it

And in trials? OMG!!! I will never understand why people can't complete them! I link achivments in my healer but people keep die inside trials... i dont understand!

My favourite thing about utterly baseless this argument is how everyone pushing it as an argument against AwA doesn't seem to realise that people could already do this. I could quite literally, before AwA, respec my DK dps into a tank, link my SotN or DD achievements and say "I've done these on my tank." AwA doesn't change any of that.

If THIS is why you're against AwA, why aren't these people complaining about being able to completely respec toons, too?

The difference is you could CHOOSE to change that about your character, what ZoS did was FORCED change on our characters.
Who has played D&D? So I roll a new character but I ask the DM for all the spells and perks of my LV25 character? Makes no sense, huh?
I have a new character for ESO I made a few months ago. They have a birthdate, I can tell you their parents name and how many siblings they have. Their hobbies and interests and life goals. They are individual.
Do you know what a "story arch" is? How a character, whether in a movie, a book or a video game grows and changes in a personal growth level?
This is why this is NOT a baseless argument and I'm sorry you don't have the imagination to understand how we can play our characters as individuals with their OWN story to tell, not a conglobation of all our alts.
Go ask any performer at a Renaissance Faire what it means to "be in character" and maybe you can understand what our characters mean to us.
Huzzah!

Folks are claiming AwA is bad because people can claim to have done a complete on a role they haven't completed it on. But with respeccing they could already do that. Which means people are also CHOOSING to falsely represent a complete on a different role.

Everything you said after "The difference is you could CHOOSE to change that about your character, what ZoS did was FORCED change on our characters." has zero relation to the issue I am talking about people blaming AwA for. I'm sorry you have your issue, but it's not relevant to this particular discussion about people falsely representing their content completions.

moleculardrugs · March 2022

I don’t get why they just can’t have 2 systems? One AWA and one not. It’s not hard to add a new line of text

Tannus15 · March 2022

moleculardrugs wrote: »

I don’t get why they just can’t have 2 systems? One AWA and one not. It’s not hard to add a new line of text

while this would be ideal for the players, it's literally the worst solution from a dev perspective. this doubles the potential issues.

lots of people have wanted AwA for a long time, personally i'm really happy about it and i'm confident that over time the dialogue issues will be sorted.

[snip]

[Edit for Bait.]

renne · March 2022

moleculardrugs wrote: »

I don’t get why they just can’t have 2 systems? One AWA and one not. It’s not hard to add a new line of text

The FAQ sticky explains why.

karekiz · March 2022

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

Who has played D&D? So I roll a new character but I ask the DM for all the spells and perks of my LV25 character? Makes no sense, huh?

Well if its truly DND than it would be entirely up to the DM to associate whats the most fun for the campaign. Fun > Rulebook imo. Its why GOOD DM's will edge a battle one way or the other and not blindly follow 100%. A group having fun is greater than a group that gets stomped over and over or never having any fear of death. Comparing DND which is a highly customized experience is just not really fair as this can't be a customized experience.

As for your point on gaming what you have described is simply New Game Plus modes. Is it 100% logical that my favorite game Dead Space Issac Clark starts with mass upgrades and entirely new suits? No. Not really. Storyline wise it does not make sense. Is it fun? Hell yes.

kargen27 · March 2022

It is so people can pretend to have played the game on all their characters instead of actually playing the game on all their characters.

Jaraal · March 2022

moleculardrugs wrote: »

I don’t get why they just can’t have 2 systems? One AWA and one not. It’s not hard to add a new line of text

They said the main reason for AWA was to free up data space on the server. Adding a new system would go against their goals.

moleculardrugs · March 2022

renne wrote: »

moleculardrugs wrote: »

I don’t get why they just can’t have 2 systems? One AWA and one not. It’s not hard to add a new line of text

The FAQ sticky explains why.

Oh, don’t know where it is

moleculardrugs · March 2022

Jaraal wrote: »

moleculardrugs wrote: »

I don’t get why they just can’t have 2 systems? One AWA and one not. It’s not hard to add a new line of text

They said the main reason for AWA was to free up data space on the server. Adding a new system would go against their goals.

Oh I see, saving data and making things more efficient. That’s cool! But from some of the comments I’ve read, people lost 8 years of work on some characters due to this change, and it feels unfair for them.

I don’t really have an opinion because I started playing fairly recently and wish I could have done some more achievements for the undaunted skill line.

Jaraal · March 2022

Saieden wrote: »

mekops_ESO wrote: »

I honestly would have just settled for account-wide titles and a section of UI that lets me reference other characters achievements and link them in chat. Thats all anyone really wanted to do anyways. All of the other stuff we would have wanted with "account-wide" achievements became an exception anyways.

But you see, storing that extra 512KB per account is going to break the database, so we NEED it!

/s

My guess is that the craft bag is probably the biggest resource hog. I know I personally have over 50,000 items in mine. But, since it’s a money maker, and probably the main reason people pay for ESO+, I don’t envision them nerfing it any time soon.

Mythgard1967 · March 2022

Jaraal wrote: »

Saieden wrote: »

mekops_ESO wrote: »

I honestly would have just settled for account-wide titles and a section of UI that lets me reference other characters achievements and link them in chat. Thats all anyone really wanted to do anyways. All of the other stuff we would have wanted with "account-wide" achievements became an exception anyways.

But you see, storing that extra 512KB per account is going to break the database, so we NEED it!

/s

My guess is that the craft bag is probably the biggest resource hog. I know I personally have over 50,000 items in mine. But, since it’s a money maker, and probably the main reason people pay for ESO+, I don’t envision them nerfing it any time soon.

That is not how this works. There isn't a data record made for every single item in a stack. ....and the craft bag is already account based

SilverBride · March 2022

It could have been good if it was implemented along side individual character achievements, instead of replacing them.

And it could have been good if it didn't completely remove the ability to track individual character progress through the zone map for the multitude of players who play their characters as individuals.

It could have worked for most everyone if it had tracked both account and individual achievements the same way other games do, but instead only one playstyle benefits.

Jaraal · March 2022

Mythgard1967 wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Saieden wrote: »

mekops_ESO wrote: »

I honestly would have just settled for account-wide titles and a section of UI that lets me reference other characters achievements and link them in chat. Thats all anyone really wanted to do anyways. All of the other stuff we would have wanted with "account-wide" achievements became an exception anyways.

But you see, storing that extra 512KB per account is going to break the database, so we NEED it!

/s

My guess is that the craft bag is probably the biggest resource hog. I know I personally have over 50,000 items in mine. But, since it’s a money maker, and probably the main reason people pay for ESO+, I don’t envision them nerfing it any time soon.

That is not how this works. There isn't a data record made for every single item in a stack. ....and the craft bag is already account based

I don’t have any stacks in my craft bag. And who said the craft bag was character based?

If I have 10,000 Ta runes in my bag, why does ZOS only allow me to pull out 200 at a time, rather than 10,000, if they don’t have a data footprint?

peacenote · March 2022

Ragnarok0130 wrote: »

peacenote wrote: »

tonyblack wrote: »

It’s great for players who like to play multiple characters especially in competitive content. I no longer need to stress what class I should bring to trial or dungeon groups and miss out on titles or other rewards for other characters. It’s also nice to do dailies and hero of x zone achievements while playing on any class of my choosing. And map is clearly indicates now what i have already done and what I’m still missing.

What tp to specific location have to do with AWA? You can still do it same as before by clicking on wayshrine and paying small sum of gold.

For people like me, who specifically made characters to enjoy more difficult content in end game on different classes, multiple times, it's a nightmare because I no longer can tell which characters have done the achievements in each dungeon and trial. It is the absolute worst part of this feature.
.

I don't get this and hope you can further elaborate on your position so I can understand your thinking. How is not having a specific toon pop an achievement "nightmarish" when the specific toon that you created to run difficult content is still able to run that content? Do you stop using that toon on the content as soon as the achievement pops up for it?

Personally I make toons of different classes to run content so I have variety of different experiences to extend my enjoyment of the game. For me healing as a templar and warden are different animals giving me different experiences when I run that content so having an achievement pop as a reward like a skinner box doesn't factor into my enjoyment. That's the reason that I love AWA; I can more fully experience the game without worrying about ensuring that I do every single grindy minute thing on every toon. So basically I can have fun instead of go to work when I play ESO.

@Ragnarok0130 Oh sure. The quick answer is -- the primary reason for wanting the achievement wasn't a "reward" (although personally I enjoy the acknowledgments)-- it was to have a checklist! No, of course I don't stop using the toon, but once the achievement popped I moved on to the next challenge. If the challenge is checked off across the account, I suddenly have a lot less to work towards. I'm a goal driven person.

Here's the longer explanation:

I am in a dungeon team where, on one character, I am strategically working through earning on every dungeon speed mode, hard mode, no death. It's fun for me, to "get them all." This particular character is a templar healer. This happens to be my "main." This team is almost done - we only have a few of the newer dungeons left!

I wanted to do this again, on a necro tank. To challenge myself as I have less experience tanking. And I've been planning and looking forward to doing this for almost a year now - way before u33 came out. But now, if I want a checklist to track my progress for my tank specifically across dungeons, let alone whether I've done the dungeon at all, I must track it separately, whereas before the game did it for me. As I am learning how to be a better tank, working my way through all of the mechanics on all dungeons such that I'm good enough to earn these challenges with a group is enjoyable to me. Plus, it makes it so that later I can better explain the tank perspective to pugs, should it be requested. Can I randomly just run dungeons? I mean, sure. But would I learn more if I tried every challenge in each dungeon, one by one? I think so. And who was I hurting by wanting to challenge myself in this way?

I also have a "second main" which is my sorc DPS. I do pledges with her all the time, sometimes through the queue and sometimes with friends. Before U33 I could tell which dungeons she had done hard mode, speed run, no death but now they are all "checked off." So before if I only had time to run one pledge, I'd pick the one I hadn't done yet, as a way to add a little bit of extra fun to the choice --"oooh, I might get my speed mode checked off!" But now I can't tell whether I've completed this content as a DPS, because my main, the templar healer, has gone through all almost of it.

If a friend wants to run something, needs gear, needs a skill point, or whatever, I'll help out no matter what. But I enjoyed my own little mini-game of choosing an alt that hadn't completed the dungeon as the one to come and help. It didn't bother me if they hadn't all done everything, but now they all look like they have done everything.

And I've been playing this way for eight years. Not because I had to, or was forced to, or begrudgingly. I did so with enjoyment and it's what kept me here, in ESO, instead of moving on to other games. I always had new little goals for myself. "Today, I'll try to get speed mode on my nightblade." "Today, I'll take my stamsorc to Cloudrest for the first time; that will be fun!" It's just not the same to rely on my memory. Let's face it, it's not perfect. I might vaguely remember tanking Cloudrest but it might not come to me, right away, whether it was in normal or vet, whether it was my DK tank or my necro tank. It might come to me later, halfway through the trial, which just annoys me even more that before I was able to check my achievements and know and now I lost an opportunity to bring my other tank through the trial and test her better.

Before AwA, folks who didn't want to earn the achievements on all their characters... just didn't have to. Plus, anyone on PC could install a mod and look at the account-view if that was their preference. But now, the forcing of achievements being viewed as "completed" on all characters REMOVED THE OPTION for those of us who liked going through all the achievements on each toon. No more built in check-lists, little personal mini-games, and little goals we set for ourselves. I really liked working my way through the challenges on different classes, in different roles, and now... I have to resort to spreadsheets?!? Plus pay attention to whether no one died and how fast each run was? If you didn't want to "grind" all the achievements, before u33 you could still bring a templar or warden as you pleased and enjoy the experience and just not worry about achievements. There was no rule that they had to be done, and characters missed out on nothing functional (except titles, which should have been addressed long ago) if folks brought an "alt" to a run. Characters didn't run faster with more achievements. They didn't get more magicka or stam recovery. They didn't get better drops (say, gold instead of purple or blue). Achievement points aren't even currency. Because most rewards were already account-wide, literally all they did is mark when something had been completed, and now we can only do this one time, instead of once per character.

That said, Ragnarok, please know I appreciate your perspective and how you truly seemed interested in why I feel the way I do. I would have liked to see an AwA implementation that made players like you happy and players like me happy. A separate dungeon/trial journal, a toggle, both views, a % of achievement completion across account progress bar... I believe it could have been done. But even if you don't play the way I do, I hope you can understand how frustrating it is to have to resort to spreadsheets to track something I've been happily doing in the game since its launch. I want to take my necro tank, and go through the dungeons one by one, and check off all the achievements... and I don't want to have to create a new account, and make a new necro tank, without any of my eight years of collectibles and Crown Store purchases just to have that experience.

peacenote · March 2022

Saieden wrote: »

peacenote wrote: »

Danikat wrote: »

Theros wrote: »

Kisakee wrote: »

Theros wrote: »

AwA I love it!!!

Like someone say: "every character can be my main" How cares create alts to have diferent role-play!! Just put all-in-one

Thank you Developers! You make the game Great again!

I don' know what you understand by roleplay but for me it's not having different achievements on different toons.
My characters are fleshed out in having their own style, sentiment, attitude and playstyle, i love all of them in their special roles. That's what i call roleplay.

Roleplay? well....
-I'm a Great Silencer in any alt now! (But only my assasin trully is)

-Now i can try help others in for exemple Faing Lair Challenger (Only my main DD did it) but now, i link my achivment with pride and tell everyone i'm a very very good tank! Because i did this alot in Tank! If we die... not my fault! I'm a exelent tank.

-And when i create a new char. I just love when boss's, delves and etc are completed! (if i ask, i will ask to have all completed) All of this are Roleplay and i trully love it

And in trials? OMG!!! I will never understand why people can't complete them! I link achivments in my healer but people keep die inside trials... i dont understand!

If you're lying to your group about what you're capable of then the problem is that you're lying to your group, not the specific steps you take to do that.

Yep, and any group worth is salt will be able to tell right away.

By then it's too late, the person has already wasted 11 other people's time.

I think you've had different experiences than I have had.

I feel like trial teams are loosely formed based on these categories:

Pugs
Guild or friend based one-off or casual runs
Organized teams looking for a fill
Organized teams where one has a recurring spot

-For pugs, I have never been asked to show any achievements, ever. Time can be wasted with people who drop, aren't good, etc., but that comes with the territory of being a pug. Barrier of entry needs to be low or groups would never fully fill.

-For guild or friend based runs, it's usually done with a sense of community and people aren't typically asked for qualifications. And often they know each other already.

-For teams that had a last minute cancellation, they usually hit up people they know and then try their luck with a random person. At that point, again, typically achievement linking is not requested. If someone is obviously not equipped to handle the run, they'll be kicked. Time wasted is minimal as you can tell in the first boss.

-For organized teams that plan to prog and run at a regular time, there are ALL kinds of requirements. Screenshots of builds, logs, achievements, and test runs. If someone uses achievements on a re-specced character, somehow faked all of the other requirements, and can't actually play their toon, it will again be obvious in the first boss. Time wasted is minimal compared to the weeks of raiding the team plans to spend together.

I'm not thrilled with the current version of AwA but I don't think achievements for gatekeeping have much value or cause a lot of saved time with making trial groups. I haven't seen a lot of groups form solely based on achievements. As someone who heals on multiple characters, I do feel that generally if you've done it once, that should be enough to get you into consideration for a team if you're willing to put in the time. People can take breaks from the game and come back and the meta will have majorly changed and their achievements mean nothing. But again, it may be I am missing a way trial groups are formed with your specific guilds or on your server. In my experience achievements, titles, and cp didn't at all guarantee player quality, even before u33.

For AwA or AwT(itles), it does seem like one of the "dividing" lines was... did you enjoy these for yourself, to track your characters, or did you use them to provide "proof" of what you've done to an external audience? This nuance (and the creative "intention" for the game) wasn't explored, discussed, or acknowledged at all by ZOS before or after AwA came out. It's frustrating. We don't even know if ZOS thought this was toxic behavior, or if they even knew that some people were using titles and achievements for this purpose, and whether they wanted to disrupt this practice or if it was an unintended consequence and they accidentally impacted some end game raid leaders.

renne · March 2022

moleculardrugs wrote: »

renne wrote: »

moleculardrugs wrote: »

I don’t get why they just can’t have 2 systems? One AWA and one not. It’s not hard to add a new line of text

The FAQ sticky explains why.

Oh, don’t know where it is

Stickied to the top of this forum section that you would have had to come to in order to get to this thread. I get there are a LOT of stickies at the moment but it's there.

Mythgard1967 · March 2022

Jaraal wrote: »

Mythgard1967 wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Saieden wrote: »

mekops_ESO wrote: »

I honestly would have just settled for account-wide titles and a section of UI that lets me reference other characters achievements and link them in chat. Thats all anyone really wanted to do anyways. All of the other stuff we would have wanted with "account-wide" achievements became an exception anyways.

But you see, storing that extra 512KB per account is going to break the database, so we NEED it!

/s

My guess is that the craft bag is probably the biggest resource hog. I know I personally have over 50,000 items in mine. But, since it’s a money maker, and probably the main reason people pay for ESO+, I don’t envision them nerfing it any time soon.

That is not how this works. There isn't a data record made for every single item in a stack. ....and the craft bag is already account based

I don’t have any stacks in my craft bag. And who said the craft bag was character based?

If I have 10,000 Ta runes in my bag, why does ZOS only allow me to pull out 200 at a time, rather than 10,000, if they don’t have a data footprint?

And your 10k runes??? that's not 10k items taking up space in a database. Craft bag footprint doesn't have to be the same as INVENTORY foot print. That is an assumption you are making. There could be an entirely different design there.

Saieden · March 2022

renne wrote: »

moleculardrugs wrote: »

I don’t get why they just can’t have 2 systems? One AWA and one not. It’s not hard to add a new line of text

The FAQ sticky explains why.

[snip] In fact, the idea was brought up weeks before the "QnA" and it was almost universally agreed that if there was any tangible performance benefit to AWA, ZoS would have been shoving it in our faces from the day it was announced.

[edited for bashing]

Mushroomancer · March 2022

To me the main benefit is that I'm not forced to play one character in trials "because then my alts won't get the title", and no, I have never given the tiniest crap about reclearing trials with alts to get titles on them; I feel like that's a very artificial and forced way to squeeze replayability out of content which is mostly bereft of it, aside from changing role entirely.
It's a pity this change came at a time in which I am severely burnt out on ESO, so my playtime hasn't increased much.

Could this have been implemented in a better, more elegant way? Absolutely. Overall though, I think this is a good change, once it gets smoothed over, if it ever does. Probably would have been better if ZOS hadn't nuked a lot of character-specific data in the process, but hey, it's for performance, and everytime they have claimed to better performance it has worked, right? Yes, I'm being sarcastic, if that wasn't obvious enough.

Here is the thing I don't get about RPers who complain about AwA, and this is a genuine question, don't want to throw any shade at anyone or be facetious. How can you rationalize hundreds of fellow "chosen ones" running around, a lot of them with ridiculous, immersion-shattering outfits and names, but you cannot fathom not equipping a title which is an optional cosmetic line of text? Also, if immersion and authenticity is your main concern, how is having pop-ups of quite arbitrary milestones being reached not immersion breaking? Imagine having a loud pop-up showing up out of thin air when you got a new job IRL, so authentic.

Now, I can understand people using achievements as a sort of spreadsheet to track what each character may have accomplished (and yes, the little flavour dialogue NPCs spit out as you walk past them being influenced by this is pretty silly), but is losing your spreadsheet genuinely enough to completely kill any RP potential (which to me is very small, I will admit) this game has?

renne · March 2022

Saieden wrote: »

renne wrote: »

moleculardrugs wrote: »

I don’t get why they just can’t have 2 systems? One AWA and one not. It’s not hard to add a new line of text

The FAQ sticky explains why.

[snip] In fact, the idea was brought up weeks before the "QnA" and it was almost universally agreed that if there was any tangible performance benefit to AWA, ZoS would have been shoving it in our faces from the day it was announced.

There is a sticky explaining why ZOS has made this choice. Sorry, it literally doesn't matter if it IS absolute garbage or if you've made a million posts explaining why you think it's wrong, these are the reasons ZOS has given.

[edited to remove quote]

peacenote · March 2022

Mushroomancer wrote: »

To me the main benefit is that I'm not forced to play one character in trials "because then my alts won't get the title", and no, I have never given the tiniest crap about reclearing trials with alts to get titles on them; I feel like that's a very artificial and forced way to squeeze replayability out of content which is mostly bereft of it, aside from changing role entirely.
It's a pity this change came at a time in which I am severely burnt out on ESO, so my playtime hasn't increased much.

Could this have been implemented in a better, more elegant way? Absolutely. Overall though, I think this is a good change, once it gets smoothed over, if it ever does. Probably would have been better if ZOS hadn't nuked a lot of character-specific data in the process, but hey, it's for performance, and everytime they have claimed to better performance it has worked, right? Yes, I'm being sarcastic, if that wasn't obvious enough.

Here is the thing I don't get about RPers who complain about AwA, and this is a genuine question, don't want to throw any shade at anyone or be facetious. How can you rationalize hundreds of fellow "chosen ones" running around, a lot of them with ridiculous, immersion-shattering outfits and names, but you cannot fathom not equipping a title which is an optional cosmetic line of text? Also, if immersion and authenticity is your main concern, how is having pop-ups of quite arbitrary milestones being reached not immersion breaking? Imagine having a loud pop-up showing up out of thin air when you got a new job IRL, so authentic.

Now, I can understand people using achievements as a sort of spreadsheet to track what each character may have accomplished (and yes, the little flavour dialogue NPCs spit out as you walk past them being influenced by this is pretty silly), but is losing your spreadsheet genuinely enough to completely kill any RP potential (which to me is very small, I will admit) this game has?

The people you are describing aren't me (I'm fine with account wide titles), but I think part of it is again just keeping track. For years in all MMOs I used to make my characters earn their own money. For example I didn't expand bag space for a character until that specific one had enough gold. I don't do that anymore (got lazy, haha) but if you WANTED each character to work towards a title, now you can't know if they did as they are all in the drop down and the achievement is checked off. Probably for a lot of people they would have been fine if account specific data had been retained or there was an indicator, player facing only, that showed whether a toon had earned the title yet or not, so they could choose to wait to equip it until they did.

But now the checklist (achievements) and the mechanism (the title being absent) to choose to wait to equip the title is gone. You can't go by earned by as that is the first toon but not necessarily the only toon that has done it.

I think the writing was on the wall for a LONG time that rewards are tied to account, not character, such that AwT should have not been a surprising change, but it's too bad that people who want to keep track / earn titles again don't have the option. I know before U33 if I got an achievement on a new character I would take a screenshot with the earned reward, even if another toon had already unlocked it, but now it is pretty challenging to know when you've done something a second time. No pop up, no separate date logged, no indicator that the title is new in the drop down. Before the data was erased, I could know when a character earned its own skin by achievement and achievement date even though the reward was character wide.

Again, characters sharing rewards doesn't bother me. Just pointing out that, in one update, ALL the tools available for people that didn't do this were wiped out.

Kesstryl · March 2022

Mushroomancer wrote: »

Here is the thing I don't get about RPers who complain about AwA, and this is a genuine question, don't want to throw any shade at anyone or be facetious. How can you rationalize hundreds of fellow "chosen ones" running around, a lot of them with ridiculous, immersion-shattering outfits and names, but you cannot fathom not equipping a title which is an optional cosmetic line of text? Also, if immersion and authenticity is your main concern, how is having pop-ups of quite arbitrary milestones being reached not immersion breaking? Imagine having a loud pop-up showing up out of thin air when you got a new job IRL, so authentic.

Now, I can understand people using achievements as a sort of spreadsheet to track what each character may have accomplished (and yes, the little flavour dialogue NPCs spit out as you walk past them being influenced by this is pretty silly), but is losing your spreadsheet genuinely enough to completely kill any RP potential (which to me is very small, I will admit) this game has?

I can answer the bolded point for my own characters. A lot of the stuff that happens in my stories is off screen, but this is where my head cannon is with all of my vestiges. I have one character, the first one I played in beta and made at the beginning (recreated after the Warden class came out which fit her nature theme way better), my Woodelf Kesstryl. She is the one who is technically The Vestige, the one who shot Molag Bal in the knee with an arrow (pun intended). My other characters were rescued by her from Coldharbor. I pretended my other characters were dreaming about what Kesstryl did when they did the main quest, they actually didn't do it. likewise, she dreamed of their adventures also, they all kind of became a family through being connected like this and dreaming about each other when IRL I took them to repeat quests. All my vestiges were connected like this because their souls were together in one of Molag Bal's planemeld contraptions to power it. When Kesstryl went through Coldharbor, she rescued my other characters from Molag Bal's prisons. When she got her soul back from Meridia and the other souls were released, they all still shared a connection from being together.

Fast forward, they all went to their own countries and began to become heroes in their own lands. Kesstryl went to the Aldmeri Dominion, worked for Razum Dar, and basically he became her best friend. She ended up in Summerset, married a half elf (another character of mine), and lived out her days as an archer in the Queen's army. My Breton Luceya went to Glenumbra, my Nord Thorundir worked for the High King in Eastmarch and the Rift, and my Dark Elf Varla lived in Deeshan. When later chapters came out, I didn't do the Main Quest on my newer characters, but they were all rescued by Kesstryl also. Reynild went to Western Skyrim and eventually became accepted into House Ravenwatch even though she's not a vampire, Gabrien was a Necromancer working for the wrong side who takes pity on the Khajiit in Elsweyr and ends up fighting for them, ect etc you get my point by now.

In my TES universe out of the metaverse created in the head cannon of each player, my Nirn needed many heroes, and many vestiges were able to retain their full selves and not become shriven, at least not yet (without Kesstryl they probably would have eventually). Heck, originally it was going to be cannon to have many vestiges in the early development of ESO, they were going to be called The Numinous, google it. While this might make Kesstryl the most important character out of my cast, she is by no means my Main. I don't really have a Main Character, they are all my Main Characters. I love them all.

As for achievements, I didn't care about them for myself, I used them to keep track of what my characters accomplished. I cared about them as what my characters did, not about what I the player did. I wanted to keep that AND have AwA for other players so they could play the way they wanted like some other MMOs have, and many who wanted AwA also expected that. I didn't fathom that something would be taken away from me to give something to someone else. Whatever, I can still RP without that, but it did hurt to lose my individual character achievements. Titles, I was fine with the old system, but I was OK with letting people do what they wanted with them. As long as my play style was preserved, go ahead and put Godslayer on your level 3 alt.

For me immersion has nothing to do with pop-ups. For me immersion is the game behaving towards my alts as if they are individuals and not just an avatar of me. There are a few documented NPC interactions that are breaking immersion right now because of AwA, and we are not sure how many more there are because there wasn't enough time to test THE ENTIRE GAME in the PTS cycle. This is unacceptable to me, and this does ruin game play for me. There are a handful of quests that are locked out to me forever on alts because they are flagged by achievements only. I only wish there was more outcry about this than anything else as this directly impacts story, questing, and immersion. While the majority of quests and NPCs are acting as they should, people like me play with the game sound on, listen to the voice acting, and pay attention to the details, so you can see how this impacts our play style. No my ability to run dungeons and trials is not impacted, but my ability to immerse into the stories on my alts is impacted. I also don't like having parts of the map autocomplete for alts, but that's another topic already covered in another thread.

Saieden · March 2022

renne wrote: »

Saieden wrote: »

renne wrote: »

moleculardrugs wrote: »

I don’t get why they just can’t have 2 systems? One AWA and one not. It’s not hard to add a new line of text

The FAQ sticky explains why.

[snip] In fact, the idea was brought up weeks before the "QnA" and it was almost universally agreed that if there was any tangible performance benefit to AWA, ZoS would have been shoving it in our faces from the day it was announced.

There is a sticky explaining why ZOS has made this choice. Sorry, it literally doesn't matter if it IS absolute garbage or if you've made a million posts explaining why you think it's wrong, these are the reasons ZOS has given.

You've missed the point entirely. The reasons they have given are easily refuted by the most basic logic, and even if they are true, it only proves that they are incapable of developing robust and scalable data solutions, and are willing to sacrifice the player's experience instead of improving the quality of their product and/or staff. It's like a restaurant deciding to sell half burgers or steaks for the same price as the full one because they can't fit enough of them on the grill at once, instead of upgrading their kitchen to properly serve tables at capacity. And then telling customers that it's better because now they don't have to chew as much.

But sure, they gave an "explanation", so it's fine.

[edited to remove quote]

Nemezijus · March 2022

Saieden wrote: »

renne wrote: »

Saieden wrote: »

renne wrote: »

moleculardrugs wrote: »

I don’t get why they just can’t have 2 systems? One AWA and one not. It’s not hard to add a new line of text

The FAQ sticky explains why.

[snip] In fact, the idea was brought up weeks before the "QnA" and it was almost universally agreed that if there was any tangible performance benefit to AWA, ZoS would have been shoving it in our faces from the day it was announced.

There is a sticky explaining why ZOS has made this choice. Sorry, it literally doesn't matter if it IS absolute garbage or if you've made a million posts explaining why you think it's wrong, these are the reasons ZOS has given.

You've missed the point entirely. The reasons they have given are easily refuted by the most basic logic, and even if they are true, it only proves that they are incapable of developing robust and scalable data solutions, and are willing to sacrifice the player's experience instead of improving the quality of their product and/or staff. It's like a restaurant deciding to sell half burgers or steaks for the same price as the full one because they can't fit enough of them on the grill at once, instead of upgrading their kitchen to properly serve tables at capacity. And then telling customers that it's better because now they don't have to chew as much.

But sure, they gave an "explanation", so it's fine.

If the rumors are true that we can't get furnishing slot increase due to older gen console architecture limitations, its a possibility for similar reasons of AwA and database reduction. If the base game code (which is quite old I guess) is too robust to allow integration of more scalable solutions then they have to start making compromises.
Also, to my best knowledge, ESO gets the most new content (maps, dungeons, achievements) updates per year out of all big-scale MMOs so I can imagine that the amount of data in the database grows quite fast.

[edited to remove quote]

Saieden · March 2022

Nemezijus wrote: »

Saieden wrote: »

renne wrote: »

Saieden wrote: »

renne wrote: »

moleculardrugs wrote: »

I don’t get why they just can’t have 2 systems? One AWA and one not. It’s not hard to add a new line of text

The FAQ sticky explains why.

[snip] In fact, the idea was brought up weeks before the "QnA" and it was almost universally agreed that if there was any tangible performance benefit to AWA, ZoS would have been shoving it in our faces from the day it was announced.

There is a sticky explaining why ZOS has made this choice. Sorry, it literally doesn't matter if it IS absolute garbage or if you've made a million posts explaining why you think it's wrong, these are the reasons ZOS has given.

You've missed the point entirely. The reasons they have given are easily refuted by the most basic logic, and even if they are true, it only proves that they are incapable of developing robust and scalable data solutions, and are willing to sacrifice the player's experience instead of improving the quality of their product and/or staff. It's like a restaurant deciding to sell half burgers or steaks for the same price as the full one because they can't fit enough of them on the grill at once, instead of upgrading their kitchen to properly serve tables at capacity. And then telling customers that it's better because now they don't have to chew as much.

But sure, they gave an "explanation", so it's fine.

If the rumors are true that we can't get furnishing slot increase due to older gen console architecture limitations, its a possibility for similar reasons of AwA and database reduction. If the base game code (which is quite old I guess) is too robust to allow integration of more scalable solutions then they have to start making compromises.
Also, to my best knowledge, ESO gets the most new content (maps, dungeons, achievements) updates per year out of all big-scale MMOs so I can imagine that the amount of data in the database grows quite fast.

The two are not comparable at all, because the limit for consoles with respect to furnishings is the amount of RAM they have. When you enter a house or a zone in general, the client needs to load all the meshes, polygon data and textures into (video) memory so they can be rendered. If you have 20 of the same furnishing, those assets only need to be loaded once, and then it's up to GPU processor to draw them to the frame (which is also relatively fast because there is not much data to read, so bandwidth between the memory and processor is low too). However, for 20 different furnishings, you need to load 20 different sets of meshes and textures, and this is the main issue for (older) consoles. When you increase the furnishing cap, the client needs to be able to handle the worst-case scenario, which is that every new slot can be filled with a unique furnishing that didn't have to be loaded into memory previously.

Achievements, on the other hand, are stored and mastered by the database server and get loaded by the client. The amount of data that is actually needed functionally, which is the character id , achievement id, timestamp and progress counter, is a tiny amount data, 22 bytes per achievement to be exact. Now, there is overhead such as indexing and redundancy that increase this amount, but these are required and standard otherwise it would be too slow or prone to failure. The reason however that this kind of data becomes slow is because the indexes, specifically, can get so large that they lose their gains in efficiency. When this happens, changing your design to outright delete data is never a viable ling-term solution because eventually, the volumes increase over time and your stuck in a worse position because the because you will have to sacrifice more in terms of design for far less gains in performance. It's trying to strip weight off your racing car to go faster, eventually there's nothing left to remove without compromising basic functionality.

[edited to remove quote]

SerafinaWaterstar · March 2022

Really loving that world bosses are marked ‘done’ for characters that haven’t been near them if I just pass by them.

Same with delves. Looks like I’ve done them all. On all characters. When I haven’t. Yay.

And if I hadn’t recorded it prior to this update, would have no idea about which dungeons still need to do.

So fecking thrilled. Huzzah.

(This sucks.)

Ooh add public dungeons. Have I killed all the bosses? Don’t know! Why should I care if I’ve done it once already?

And for those that say it stops the grind - you weren’t forced to do that. Actually think those in favour of AWA care more about achievements than the majority that were against. Who cares if you get it on your ‘main’ or not - I’d just like to be able to REPLAY through some bits of the game without it now being sucky.

Can anyone explain to me how *Account Wide Acheivements* is a beneficial feature?

Can anyone explain to me how Account Wide Acheivements is a beneficial feature?