Making AwA better?

Heartrage · April 2022

It’s pretty clear that AwA is there to stay. I do not think that we will get single character achievement progression back.

However, we could say that achievements were originally made with the idea that they should be achievable on a single character.

This pose a problem as some achievements, such as true style master, can be done much easier on multiple characters. It also mean that all our play time count towards the progression of one achievement list instead of being divided by alts.

With all this in mind, I think we should get new achievements that either require a lot more time to do (I.e complete 1000 pledges bestowed by maj) and achievements that require many alts to complete (I.e. learn 300 complete motifs).

What do you guys think?

Mushroomancer · April 2022

I don't see the point honestly.
Not just in ESO, but in any game, I feel much more challenged going for achievements that are actually difficult, not ones that require doing a simple or easy task a number of times.
We already have achievements in ESO which are hard to obtain for one reason or another. One of those reasons, however, should not be "Do X thing 1000 times", especially considering many activities, like pledges are time gated. That's not a challenge, that's a part-time job.
Simply put, I don't want to grind for a shiny line of text to appear, I want to feel actually challenged by the game and overcome said challenge.

Heartrage · April 2022

@Mushroomancer
I understand what you are saying and I, personally, agree that doing something hard once is more fun than doing something easy many times.

At the same time, I think that a lot of people like to grind in ESO and have lost the ability to do so to get achievements on multiple characters. Getting some achievements, such as true style master, is also much easier now than it was before.

It’s also not like we can only get achievements of one kind or that we are forced to grind and complete achievements we don’t want to either.

draigwyrdd · April 2022

They didn't make the change to AwA for any kind of reason beneficial/detrimental/in any way related to what players wanted. It was entirely a backend decision designed to aid performance and server things as ZOS mentioned. Maybe AwA is something that some players wanted, but I don't think that's why it was implemented at all.

So any talk of trying to "fix" it from a player perspective is pointless. for ZOS, if it's achieving it's backend goal, it's working as designed.

wenchmore420b14_ESO · April 2022

draigwyrdd wrote: »

They didn't make the change to AwA for any kind of reason beneficial/detrimental/in any way related to what players wanted. It was entirely a backend decision designed to aid performance and server things as ZOS mentioned. Maybe AwA is something that some players wanted, but I don't think that's why it was implemented at all.

So any talk of trying to "fix" it from a player perspective is pointless. for ZOS, if it's achieving it's backend goal, it's working as designed.

Actually, in the January World Reveal, the term "Performance was never used when discussing AwA.
It was not till their "PR Style" Q&A, which came out, and only after weeks and weeks of community PTS feedback uproar, that ZoS used performance as a excuse for implementing AwA. And the said "so called" Q&A was the ONLY response from ZoS on the subject, as they still refuse to interact with the community over this subject.

If "backend goal" was the reason, Matt and Rich would have been yelling it from the hill tops, as doing anything performance wise is welcomed, yet that was not the reason they gave, but instead, "this is what people wanted", period.

Well here is 100's of pages and 1,000s of feedbacks that say different. And really, has losing 8 years of alt history and playstyle really given us better performance?

@ZOS_MattFiror @ZOS_RichLambert
Will ANYONE ever stand up and discuss this subject with us???
Just my 2 drakes...
Huzzah!

Kesstryl · April 2022

If AwA was actually created for player benefit, ZOS would have given it to us and allowed us to keep our individual character achievements because that would have allowed EVERYONE to play the way they wanted.

I don't want more grindy achievements. I wanted my individual character data. Each alt was a unique individual that had his or her own history and accomplishments. That was how I used to play. No amount of new achievements can give that back to me.

Kisakee · April 2022

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

Will ANYONE ever stand up and discuss this subject with us???
Just my 2 drakes...
Huzzah!

If i would be the one in charge i wouldn't discuss it either. It's done and as it cost time and money to do things there are reasons on why they did it too.

Plus i don't understand why all of your characters need their own achievements at all. You play them, they explore things, they evolve. Why do you need an old sheet of paper with a "Yay, at one point you did this" for every single toon? Is it for reliving the same moment over and over again? And wouldn't it be way more interesting to explore new things?

Necrotech_Master · April 2022

the primary way i would want AWA to be better is for actually ALL achievement to be acct wide, not like 99% of achievement acct wide and 1% which are still per character

Deter1UK · April 2022

Kisakee wrote: »

Plus i don't understand why all of your characters need their own achievements at all. You play them, they explore things, they evolve. Why do you need an old sheet of paper with a "Yay, at one point you did this" for every single toon? Is it for reliving the same moment over and over again? And wouldn't it be way more interesting to explore new things?

It's the implementation.

I'm doing Coldharbour with a newish toon. Went into Village of the Lost. All Bosses already marked as done. The place is easy enough to get lost in as it is. I THINK I cleared it but I can't be totally sure; did I? Who knows!

Left feeling, not disappointed, but unsatisfied. Such a shame.

wenchmore420b14_ESO · April 2022

Kisakee wrote: »

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

Will ANYONE ever stand up and discuss this subject with us???
Just my 2 drakes...
Huzzah!

If i would be the one in charge i wouldn't discuss it either. It's done and as it cost time and money to do things there are reasons on why they did it too.

Plus i don't understand why all of your characters need their own achievements at all. You play them, they explore things, they evolve. Why do you need an old sheet of paper with a "Yay, at one point you did this" for every single toon? Is it for reliving the same moment over and over again? And wouldn't it be way more interesting to explore new things?

It's not about all my alts needing their own achievements, even though things like Master Angler and Master Crafter have defiantly lost any kind of importance or sense of accomplishment, it's because my new alts will never see Orsinium in it's rebuilding stage, that my new alts maps are all filled as "done", it's that my new alts CAN"T "explore new things" as you say, because they are marked done. XP for boss kills for first time is gone, my new alt vampire that I wanted to roleplay in Veserius (sp) storyline. They can not "Evolve" naturally.
Yes, each toon is a separate personality, race, class, religion, ideology's and they are individuals, not "tools" to reach endgame and done.
Of all the Pros & Cons of AwA, the bottom line is that a playstyle was removed. It is no longer "Play How You Want To Play".

As far as "I wouldn't discuss it either", the PTS thread on this went to almost 3,000 responses over 100+ pages in less than 6 weeks. The only other thread that hit close to that mark is a Templar thread from several years ago, so yes, this has stirred more controversy than any other thread in the 9 years of Forums, so I still think it needs feedback from the Devs who thought this was a good idea.

Kisakee · April 2022

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the primary way i would want AWA to be better is for actually ALL achievement to be acct wide, not like 99% of achievement acct wide and 1% which are still per character

..which would be total crap as it would flood the market with master writs, prevent all your toons from doing dungeon quests and vault group events and therefore lock them out from getting Undaunted reputation and skill points or simply max everything of that out right after character creation. Same goes for skyshards, Fighter's and Mage's Guild skill lines, Psijic skill line and way more..

This way you wouldn't have to play the character for the most part and ZOS won't make any money on you which essentially kills the game for the biggest part. Congrats, ESO is dead now.

Necrotech_Master · April 2022

Kisakee wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the primary way i would want AWA to be better is for actually ALL achievement to be acct wide, not like 99% of achievement acct wide and 1% which are still per character

..which would be total crap as it would flood the market with master writs, prevent all your toons from doing dungeon quests and vault group events and therefore lock them out from getting Undaunted reputation and skill points or simply max everything of that out right after character creation. Same goes for skyshards, Fighter's and Mage's Guild skill lines, Psijic skill line and way more..

This way you wouldn't have to play the character for the most part and ZOS won't make any money on you which essentially kills the game for the biggest part. Congrats, ESO is dead now.

to counterpoint:

every crafting achievement is already account wide except for "rune knowledge" ones (while it affects master writs is still reliant on your character putting skill pts into the crafting passives)
public dungeon group events do NOT give undaunted xp (since U33, when undaunted xp was moved to other sources)
others are inconsistent (maelstrom achievement is per character but vateshran is not)

the only achievements that i could see as candidates to be per character would be museum collection ones, especially if you can earn repeatable rewards (such as precursor or music box from bards college)

i personally never tracked skyshards based on the achievements, i based on if they show up on the map with skyshards addon (which was fixed to show skyshards correctly)

the achievements also in absolutely no way mean that someone shouldnt have to do the quests to say unlock and rank up the psijic skill line, the achievement merely says that you have done it before, but has no bearing on your current characters progress

FeedbackOnly · April 2022

Put dishes on zone guide for master fishers

FLuFFyxMuFFiN · April 2022

Personally I don't care either way but I am more for account wide achievements than against it. No it doesn't diminish my accomplishments because I know how I earned them and I had fun either way. I also like it because I earned the achievement not my one specific character so why not be able to have the title on all my characters.

Kesstryl · April 2022

FLuFFyxMuFFiN wrote: »

Personally I don't care either way but I am more for account wide achievements than against it. No it doesn't diminish my accomplishments because I know how I earned them and I had fun either way. I also like it because I earned the achievement not my one specific character so why not be able to have the title on all my characters.

It was never about account wide titles. I would love for that idea to just die because most of us wanted AwA and individual char achievements to coexist. I don't care if you want to put Godslayer on your level 3 toon, I just wanted to see the dates of when Kesstryl first entered Coldharbor (can't because Varla went there first), or when Kesstryl finished Clockwork City (can't because Varla did it first). It was never about titles or stopping AwA, it was about having both so everyone could play the way they wanted. ZOS definitely didn't give AwA as a magnanimous gift to the community, or they would have followed the examples of other triple A MMOs that do provide both. They had their own reasons and tried to pass it off as a gift to the community, and 95 pages of feedback on PTS showed how that backfired.

Whatever, it's done, stop asking for what little there is to be stripped from our alts. Help us to ask for tools that will help us regain some semblance of tracking per character again like a more robust quest log or accurate zone tracking, and fix the rest of the bugs AwA caused. Some of them will be fixed in the coming High Isles update, but we need to hold them accountable for all the bugs if the game is to make any sense for our alts and bring back the joy of playing again for those of us who lost in this.

SerafinaWaterstar · April 2022

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, I SHALL STATE AGAIN THIS WAS NOT ABOUT ACHIEVEMENTS PER SE BUT THAT THEY WERE THEY ONLY WAY TO MAP PROGRESS THROUGH THE GAME ON ALTERNATE CHARACTERS.

This is now gone.

For example:

Questing on alts again after events.

Get to new zone. All world bosses marked as done, all delves marked. All points of interest. All already on the map.

Sigh and reach for phone and the ESO app where I stored my alts progress before the update. Work out which delves etc I haven’t actually done on this character.

Do a delve. Get to where boss is. Or should be. Wait around for a few minutes. Kill all the adds. Check mail. Sort inventory. Wait a bit more. Finally boss appears & I can complete the delve.

And don’t get me started on the mess that is public dungeons & their bosses.

Sucked a lot of the joy out of the game.

Amottica · April 2022

Considering the trial healing, blocking and similar achievements were set before 2.0 when everything was multiplied 10 fold making those achievements rather weak yet nothing new was added to replace them I doubt Zenimax will add newer achievements to replace those made easier by this new change.

Dark_Lord_Kuro · April 2022

I was actually thinking about acheivement made to be done on multiple characters
For exemple
Complete vma on 6 different class or something along those line

barney2525 · April 2022

once you do this daily 5000 times you get this shiny new non-combat puppy.

see you in just under 14 years !

Heartrage · April 2022

@barney2525
Actually, doing a daily 5000 times can be done in less than a year with AwA. I don’t think Zos has to go that far, but we could get achievements that take more time and can still progress even if we are not focusing on completing them.

Kisakee · April 2022

barney2525 wrote: »

once you do this daily 5000 times you get this shiny new non-combat puppy.

see you in just under 14 years !

5.000 dailies? That's just 45 days in worst case for me. Gimme something REALLY hard.

peacenote · April 2022

I would rather they add meta achievements for ones that are meaningful or interesting. For example, "Become level 50 on multiple characters" and then have it pop and log the earned by for each one.

The "hard" achievements that were hard solely because they were grindy and time consuming are, in my opinion, one of the only very small benefits we got in AwA - not that I feel it was in any way worth the trade-off.

I do agree that we should move on to requesting features that we lost in AwA, because it is part of the game now and we won't be heard unless we start framing our opinions as new feature requests... but I would focus on obtaining/improving individual map and zone progress, fixing any NPC reactions or blocked quests, and providing us a way to track repeatable and/or memorable content that was only possible via achievement, like obtaining speed mode on a dungeon or a character going to a new land for the first time.

So I like the way you are thinking, OP,

but I personally don't feel the specific examples you gave need to change.

Heartrage · April 2022

@peacenote
Achievements for leveling up multiple characters are a good idea. I agree that doing a pledge a lot of time isn’t the best way zos could go about it.

However, I think that the motif achievements should get an higher tier. Right now, we can get the highest tier of this achievement with 6 characters that only learn the basic blue motifs. These motifs are found easily and can be bought for less than 100 gold (5000g to get the achievement now). What was nice about this achievement in particular was that it made you try contents that you might not have done before but gave you the option to pay a lot of gold to unlock it. Now, trying to do content to farm motifs for this achievement is dumb because it’s so cheap that you can farm enough gold in less than 30 minutes to get the achievement.

Still, I really appreciate your comment. Most people are uncompromising and just want AwA gone.

proprio.meb16_ESO · April 2022

AwA cant go away, no one can be willing awa gone... the per-character info are gone forever unless zos roll back a month of play, so the move is just impossible to undo, even if they would want to.

This, though, doesnt mean a whole lot of us is deeply unhappy and dismayed with zos unwillingness to hear reasons and bringing on something that has removed replayability on many extents (no need to repeat how many things were stripped from the game in the process - there was wide convergence between us all, back when update 33 was happening on the pts... that 95 pages thread is here if anyone want to get a peek: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/596970/pts-update-33-feedback-thread-for-account-wide-achievements#latest ).

Yep, the only way is onward, but building on rubbles that could have been easily avoided.

Heartrage · April 2022

@proprio.meb16_ESO
Do you have things that you would like to see added/changed to the awa system?

proprio.meb16_ESO · April 2022

For my personal way of playing the game, id like to see quite a lot of new per-character achievements, to compensate the ones we lost and add some replayability back, but i strongly doubt it will ever happen.

Adding something that will require a lot of time to complete, as someone already suggested, could be an addition... the antiquities system was a nice example, it gave us a lot to do and a lot of places to visit again. Maybe the card game could be something going in that direction, but honestly it does not suits me too much, hope i'll change my mind about it.

I've recently started a new char (and will start another one after that) just to get vampire and werevolves achievements, then i'll have very little else to do (except some vet hm content) and probably will move elsewhere.
Will possibly play next chapter to see what it offers, do everything i possibly can, and then pause again indefinitely.

Varana · April 2022

I haven't started a new character, or played the story on an alt, since AwA, so I can't say much about that experience.

What I really, really miss, though, are the dungeon and trial achievements popping up. It doesn't even need to track them, but just the message popping up on screen saying "gratz, that was a speed run", or "woohoo, hard mode!" would be nice. I got a few of these achievements for the first time on different characters but the game did not in any way acknowledge that because another one had been there before. That turned a great moment into a rather "meh" situation.

barney2525 · April 2022

Kisakee wrote: »

barney2525 wrote: »

once you do this daily 5000 times you get this shiny new non-combat puppy.

see you in just under 14 years !

5.000 dailies? That's just 45 days in worst case for me. Gimme something REALLY hard.

you misunderstood. This is a single Daily that must be done 5000 times - at Once per day.