Achievement System problems and what can be done about it

Gulkaur · November 2022

Hello everyone, this is my first discussion in this forum, please excuse me if I made a mistake. Now, to explain what I mean by better achievement system. I think there are good and bad sides to the achievement system in the game right now.

Let's start with the good sides of the system. First of all, the fact that achievements are account-wide is a fantastic feature in my opinion. The reason why this feature is good is that when players open a new character, they travel around the whole Elder Scrolls Online world and find titles, paints, etc. that are not in that character. It saves you spending time trying to get each achievement again to unlock many achievements such as The second good feature is actually part of the first good feature. All the characters you have are making joint progress for the achievements you want to unlock. This allows you to continue where you left off when you want to play with your different characters.

I will explain the bad sides of the achievements system according to my personal opinion. First of all, new/recent achievements get to the top in the achievements window and in their category. This may not be a problem for many players, but if you ask me, this system is very simple and put aside. I think this system needs to be developed. Second, the date on which achievements were earned. I don't think this feature is necessary.

So what can be done to fix this? For example, Final Fantasy 14's system is one of the best achievement systems I've ever seen. In the last 5 achievement systems earned, you can still see the new earned achievements and when you view this achievements folder you can see that they all have a fixed location, you can also see the unearned achievements are all gray while the earned ones are much brighter colored. The same can be applied to The Elder Scrolls Online, thus helping players access their achievements with ease. Second, the achievements could categorized better for example we have character achievements and under this category we have Player Level, slaying mobs, loot treasure chests, gearing and dueling achievements. So the achievements can be organized in their fix positions starting with Player Level achievement at top after that, gearing achievement (it can be changed similar to Player Level achievement),loot treasure chests achievement and so on so forth.

I'm not saying that "this system we have has to change" but making a small update like this can help new and old players to find what they are looking for in the achievement windows. I would love to hear your thoughts and talk about it.

Necrotech_Master · November 2022

i personally like the date of when the achievement was first earned, but i hate the "earned by" tooltip (and have an addon specifically to remove this tooltip)

im kind of indifferent on the sorting, as its not terrible, although it would be better to have a slightly larger least of "most recently earned" achievements

i also kind of feel that the few achievements which remained "per character" should not count towards achievement point totals as it no longer makes sense in the current system

i am also really happy about the account wide achievements as well, so i can keep my toons with specialized purposes to still work on achievements instead of trying to literally make 1 toon a jack of all trades

whitecrow · November 2022

I like the date as well. I would hate to see that go away.

kargen27 · November 2022

Account wide achievements for me personally is one of the absolute worst decisions that could be made for this game. I liked getting achievements on different characters and didn't want an achievement to advance on one character because another did something.
Should have been an opt in/out thing so those of us that enjoy playing different characters could continue doing so. There is no fixing the achievement system at this point. Before the change I had three Master Fishermen. Now I have 18 and no character can ever earn that achievement again. Fifteen didn't yet they still have access to the title. That isn't right. Takes some of the incentive out of fishing. Same with trophy hunting. Used to be something you felt good about when a character actually got the achievement. Now it is just meh.

Wrecked a lot of what I did in the game so consequently I don't play as much as I used to.

heaven13 · November 2022

kargen27 wrote: »

Account wide achievements for me personally is one of the absolute worst decisions that could be made for this game. I liked getting achievements on different characters and didn't want an achievement to advance on one character because another did something.
Should have been an opt in/out thing so those of us that enjoy playing different characters could continue doing so. There is no fixing the achievement system at this point. Before the change I had three Master Fishermen. Now I have 18 and no character can ever earn that achievement again. Fifteen didn't yet they still have access to the title. That isn't right. Takes some of the incentive out of fishing. Same with trophy hunting. Used to be something you felt good about when a character actually got the achievement. Now it is just meh.

Wrecked a lot of what I did in the game so consequently I don't play as much as I used to.

I completely agree. There's a lot less incentive for me to work at "getting good" with characters because one of the things I liked doing was learning a new role or new class and seeing if I could do hardmodes or even trifectas with them. Maybe I still could, but there's no way to know for certain since I already have the achievement. It's also so much harder to track who has been where and done what. ESO already was lacking, imo, on replayability of quests since there's not much in the way of choices and even smaller actual consequences of those choices; by taking away character achievements they stripped that replay value away almost entirely for me.

Jaimeh · November 2022

heaven13 wrote: »

kargen27 wrote: »

Account wide achievements for me personally is one of the absolute worst decisions that could be made for this game. I liked getting achievements on different characters and didn't want an achievement to advance on one character because another did something.
Should have been an opt in/out thing so those of us that enjoy playing different characters could continue doing so. There is no fixing the achievement system at this point. Before the change I had three Master Fishermen. Now I have 18 and no character can ever earn that achievement again. Fifteen didn't yet they still have access to the title. That isn't right. Takes some of the incentive out of fishing. Same with trophy hunting. Used to be something you felt good about when a character actually got the achievement. Now it is just meh.

Wrecked a lot of what I did in the game so consequently I don't play as much as I used to.

I completely agree. There's a lot less incentive for me to work at "getting good" with characters because one of the things I liked doing was learning a new role or new class and seeing if I could do hardmodes or even trifectas with them. Maybe I still could, but there's no way to know for certain since I already have the achievement. It's also so much harder to track who has been where and done what. ESO already was lacking, imo, on replayability of quests since there's not much in the way of choices and even smaller actual consequences of those choices; by taking away character achievements they stripped that replay value away almost entirely for me.

Agreed with both comments, there's little incentive to repeat things anymore on alts, not to mention tracking woes. Having that notification pop up on alts, even when not specifically hunting for an achievement but just happened to get it was always a pleasure. Why on earth would they opt to reduce the replayability of their own game....

BahometZ · November 2022

Yeah, Account Wide Achievements is a real mixed bag. My playtime on ults has plummeted, I ignore so much because there is no point to it anymore, maps auto-fill, delve quests get ignored. I started afresh on multiple characters over the years and thoroughly enjoyed the sense of achievement. That is gone.

However monster trophy consolidation is nice, and not struggling to get all difficult trial achievements on one character is great.

AwA basically moved me from "never feel like I'd stop playing this game" to "I'm this close to finishing the game".

The change was apparently done to improve performance, so yeah, if the game plays as poor as it does now, imagine how things would be without it.

Tandor · November 2022

I also dislike account-wide achievements, for the same reasons others have stated. In my case I've adapted by no longer playing my 2 original accounts with 50 characters on them and instead playing a single new account - so 50% loss of revenue for ZOS. In the new account one server has a single character whose achievements can't be interfered with, and on the other server I have currently 11 characters who were developed from scratch under the account-wide system so I knew I would be developing them differently because of that.

AzuraFan · November 2022

kargen27 wrote: »

Account wide achievements for me personally is one of the absolute worst decisions that could be made for this game.

For me, it wasn't so much the idea as the implementation. Do I want to do Jee-lar's quest 150 times on each character to get the achievement? No. Do I want to kill some WBs 30 times for an achievement? Not really. But if every character contributed to the achievement progression, that would be more manageable. I thought that's what they meant by AwA. I was shocked when they basically took a sledgehammer to 99% of achievements and destroyed the area map in the process (can no longer see what each character has completed).

Having said that, I like the date, but the tooltip of which character achieved an achievement is meaningless. Not that it matters. Due to AwA, I no longer play my alts.

TaSheen · November 2022

I don't play games for "achievements" - i play games for fun. I absolutely do NOT think "achievements" need to be something a game promotes. I realize I'm apparently a huge minority - but I got over gold stars in kindergarten.

So yeah, AWA doesn't mean anything to me, and I don't care what the game does with it.

And I'm absolutely NOT posting what I really think about this whole subject.

AzuraFan · November 2022

TaSheen wrote: »

I don't play games for "achievements" - i play games for fun. I absolutely do NOT think "achievements" need to be something a game promotes. I realize I'm apparently a huge minority - but I got over gold stars in kindergarten.

I see them more as goals to achieve in the game. They're also a way to keep track of what I've done, which helps in a game like ESO that has a massive amount of content. Unfortunately AwA did away with that aspect because you can no longer use achievements to track what each character has done.

Natakiro · November 2022

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i personally like the date of when the achievement was first earned, but i hate the "earned by" tooltip (and have an addon specifically to remove this tooltip)

Which addon? I hate that one of my alts stole some achievements I was working on with my main, notably getting the Grand Master Crafter. I deleted the alt and now it doesn't list anything at all for the name, which is nice. But I don't wanna delete all of my alts just to remove the "Earned By" tooltip; editing to say "Stolen By" would also make me feel better lol Now I never play my alts and make them stick solely to daily writs.

Overall, I like the date being shown, but I despise one of my crappy alts being the one to earn something, which I am reminded of every time I scroll over those achievements. I am honestly debating deleting the one alt that took a High Isle achievement from me, but it was my most-liked alt.

wolfie1.0. · November 2022

The earned on date should stand. Because now that you can get achievements on every character the Date you earned said achievements matters more to me than ever. Please don't cheapen them by removing it.

Also, please do NOT compare eso to FF14. That game is different from eso on so many levels. Mostly, it's because FF14 is set up in such a way that you are designed to have a single character that can learn all classes and jobs but eso isn't quite set up that way.

Necrotech_Master · November 2022

Natakiro wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i personally like the date of when the achievement was first earned, but i hate the "earned by" tooltip (and have an addon specifically to remove this tooltip)

Which addon? I hate that one of my alts stole some achievements I was working on with my main, notably getting the Grand Master Crafter. I deleted the alt and now it doesn't list anything at all for the name, which is nice. But I don't wanna delete all of my alts just to remove the "Earned By" tooltip; editing to say "Stolen By" would also make me feel better lol Now I never play my alts and make them stick solely to daily writs.

Overall, I like the date being shown, but I despise one of my crappy alts being the one to earn something, which I am reminded of every time I scroll over those achievements. I am honestly debating deleting the one alt that took a High Isle achievement from me, but it was my most-liked alt.

@Natakiro look up ExoYs Achievement Anonymizer (should be available through minion)

i frankly do not care which toon earned said achievement, just that i did at one time earn it, which is why i find that tooltip pointless lol

TaSheen · November 2022

AzuraFan wrote: »

TaSheen wrote: »

I don't play games for "achievements" - i play games for fun. I absolutely do NOT think "achievements" need to be something a game promotes. I realize I'm apparently a huge minority - but I got over gold stars in kindergarten.

I see them more as goals to achieve in the game. They're also a way to keep track of what I've done, which helps in a game like ESO that has a massive amount of content. Unfortunately AwA did away with that aspect because you can no longer use achievements to track what each character has done.

Well, luckily, I don't have that problem. I always know where I left each of my many many alts, what needs to happen next, etc no matter how long it's been. It is obviously a problem for others, and for that reason I posted my agreement with those requesting that AWA not be implemented, but it doesn't affect me in any way.

jle30303 · November 2022

My belief is that COMPLETION - doing each location (including Delves, Dolmens, World Bosses) - ONCE, to turn it from black to white on the map, should have remained character specific.

Related achievements for doing the same thing multiple times (e.g. 30 delve quests, 30 world boss quests) should have been account-wide. It's then your choice as to whether to do them across multiple characters, or all on one (and your future characters would then still have the location in question marked as "not completed" until that specific character was to personally score a completion for the location).

MreeBiPolar · November 2022

The only problem with the AwA is that it got really messed up.

The questline progress tracking achievements, random encounter tracking achievements (at least they have fixed the Murkmire one this week), you name it. Or even worse, e.g., True Style Master (Collect and learn 50 full motifs). It doesn't even check if they are different now. You learn 9 blue racials on 6 characters, you've got it.

Tandor · November 2022

MreeBiPolar wrote: »

The only problem with the AwA is that it got really messed up.

The questline progress tracking achievements, random encounter tracking achievements (at least they have fixed the Murkmire one this week), you name it. Or even worse, e.g., True Style Master (Collect and learn 50 full motifs). It doesn't even check if they are different now. You learn 9 blue racials on 6 characters, you've got it.

No, the only problem with AwA is that it wasn't made optional, or at least supplementary to the character-based approach so that achievements were made account-wide but with individual character progression also recorded.

ArchangelIsraphel · November 2022

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

The earned on date should stand. Because now that you can get achievements on every character the Date you earned said achievements matters more to me than ever. Please don't cheapen them by removing it.

Also, please do NOT compare eso to FF14. That game is different from eso on so many levels. Mostly, it's because FF14 is set up in such a way that you are designed to have a single character that can learn all classes and jobs but eso isn't quite set up that way.

This right here. The switch from character specific achievements to forced account wide achievements was heartbreaking to many of us who loved recording the dates we earned an achievement on a specific character or using the achievement system as a character building tool and a record of each characters journey. Having what little is left of the old achievement system taken away again would be very disheartening.

Kesstryl · November 2022

I still only log into one character and have all my other alts not logged in yet to merge my achievements because many months later I'm still debating starting them all over again to make sure the right achievements go to the right characters so my achievements are not a mess. That's how much AwA messed up my enjoyment of my characters. I only have the achievements recorded for one alt only.

I still teeter totter on the fence on whether I want to have achievements lined up with the proper characters and blow away all my furnishing plans and crafting progress, or keep years worth of progress and have messed up achievement records. I'm happy to do the quests all over again, I know which alts belong to which stories, but it hurts to lose rare and expensive crafting plans on the alts that learned them.

I also think the map filling in through achievements and not per character is too confusing and a huge pain. I'm happy the known bugged quests have been fixed and moved to per character again, but seeing the map filled in for places alts have never been to destroys the joy of exploration. I'm not even going to mention the mess of not being able to keep track of character progress. We now need a better quest journal system. I think ZOS underestimated how much many of us relied on the achievement system for replay-ability and tracking. I won't mention the loss of individual dates and my using the achievement system as a means of building my characters' stories.

Natakiro · November 2022

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Natakiro wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i personally like the date of when the achievement was first earned, but i hate the "earned by" tooltip (and have an addon specifically to remove this tooltip)

Which addon? I hate that one of my alts stole some achievements I was working on with my main, notably getting the Grand Master Crafter. I deleted the alt and now it doesn't list anything at all for the name, which is nice. But I don't wanna delete all of my alts just to remove the "Earned By" tooltip; editing to say "Stolen By" would also make me feel better lol Now I never play my alts and make them stick solely to daily writs.

@Natakiro look up ExoYs Achievement Anonymizer (should be available through minion)

Thank you, this is just what I was looking for!

Gulkaur · November 2022

Ok I believe I found a way to fix the achievement system to everyone's liking!

First let's start with the elephant in the room! That is the progress to some achievements while playing with alts. We have some players that wants to have this and some doesn't want this. To solve this I have come up with two ideas, first one; achievements shouldn't be account-wide but the rewards should be so that players that want's to earn the rewards for their alt's can use titles, dye's and other reward they want. This will help players that want to earn rewards and players that doesn't want to earn achievements for other alt's. The second solution is a bit different. Second solution is developers adding a mechanic into the game where you can toggle on or off to progress the achievements with other characters.

jle30303 wrote: »

My belief is that COMPLETION - doing each location (including Delves, Dolmens, World Bosses) - ONCE, to turn it from black to white on the map, should have remained character specific.

Related achievements for doing the same thing multiple times (e.g. 30 delve quests, 30 world boss quests) should have been account-wide. It's then your choice as to whether to do them across multiple characters, or all on one (and your future characters would then still have the location in question marked as "not completed" until that specific character was to personally score a completion for the location).

For discovered locations such as Delves, World Bosses, Dolmens, etc. This shouldn't be white for all the charters but they should appear as black but discovered. We can also address this issue after the first problem I mentioned in this reply I believe because of the achievements been account-wide and all.

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

The earned on date should stand. Because now that you can get achievements on every character the Date you earned said achievements matters more to me than ever. Please don't cheapen them by removing it.

Also, please do NOT compare eso to FF14. That game is different from eso on so many levels. Mostly, it's because FF14 is set up in such a way that you are designed to have a single character that can learn all classes and jobs but eso isn't quite set up that way.

In my previous quote I mentioned about achievements having a fix place like in FFXIV rather than the recent achievements earned going all the way up. I am NOT saying the two games should have same achievement system what I meant is that the achievements having a FIXED position rather than moving up or down. This might help many players to find and link achievements and will look better and organized in my opinion. And for the removal of dates the achievements earned was just my personal opinion because it was annoying to look at for some reason so don't get offended by that

I am hoping everyone will like some of these ideas and be happy about it if developers change it this way! If you see anything that I am missing or skipped please reply me so I can try to come up with much better and agreeable solutions for everyone's liking.

heaven13 · November 2022

Tons of people proposed changes during U33 PTS, including similar to what you are proposing now. We asked for there to be an account tab that did pretty much what AwA does now to consolidate stuff to the account level and reward things based on that but leave character achievements intact as a separate tab. We even asked if AwA could be delayed until a character journal could be implemented since that’s what a lot of people really used achievements for.

All we got was silence.

boi_anachronism_ · November 2022

I think one thing they could have done was keep unlockables (skins, mounts, ect) account wide but leave the map blacked out for things you haven't completed on each character. Example: if I completed maelstrom on one character it is filled in white, logging on to my alt, if I haven't completed it then it would still show up black on that character. Just my thoughts.

kargen27 · November 2022

"First let's start with the elephant in the room! That is the progress to some achievements while playing with alts. We have some players that wants to have this and some doesn't want this. To solve this I have come up with two ideas, first one; achievements shouldn't be account-wide but the rewards should be so that players that want's to earn the rewards for their alt's can use titles, dye's and other reward they want. "

This was suggested before the change. I was opposed to characters being able to use titles they did not earn but that doesn't matter now. There is no going back. If you have a balloon and pop it there is no way to put the same air that was in the balloon back. ZoS popped the balloon.

peacenote · November 2022

The longer I play post AwA I have realized two things:

1. This really was the worst change ever for me. I have gotten used to a lot of changes in this game but every time I do play all the brokenness and chaos just makes me cringe when I remember how well things used to work. Running by a map item on a new character and having it look "done" without interacting with it is just so awful that it ruins events I used to find fun, like the explorer one.

2. It is really a ridiculous shame that they didn't take the time to overhaul the entire concept. All rewards should be account wide. Achievements should be things you'd only WANT to do once across your account, generally speaking, or should have re-tooled to be account wide. "Beat this dungeon for the first time on any character." "Learn x motifs across all characters." As examples. Anything that is tied to character tracking (exploration, dungeon challenges, etc.) should have been made into their own journals like stickerbook, quest log, lore book, etc with optional pop ups for milestones with the data transferred first. Then you could re-experience the game again, you would only earn achievements once, and maybe there still would be a layer of character achievements for things like "hitting level 50." But for example, getting an achievement for walking into a house I didn't decorate just because a different character decorated it... we don't need things like that. Stuff to work towards, on the other hand, is nice to keep the game fresh and keep me logging in.

What we got instead was a mishmash of nonsense that was a compromise from every angle. It could have been done so much better, I am certain of it, if it had been looked at as a full enhancement instead of a quick win.

Nestor · November 2022

As someone who is not an achievement chaser, i do miss how they tracked progress for an Alt. Account Wide Titles would have been a better

Tandor · November 2022

TaSheen wrote: »

AzuraFan wrote: »

TaSheen wrote: »

I don't play games for "achievements" - i play games for fun. I absolutely do NOT think "achievements" need to be something a game promotes. I realize I'm apparently a huge minority - but I got over gold stars in kindergarten.

I see them more as goals to achieve in the game. They're also a way to keep track of what I've done, which helps in a game like ESO that has a massive amount of content. Unfortunately AwA did away with that aspect because you can no longer use achievements to track what each character has done.

Well, luckily, I don't have that problem. I always know where I left each of my many many alts, what needs to happen next, etc no matter how long it's been. It is obviously a problem for others, and for that reason I posted my agreement with those requesting that AWA not be implemented, but it doesn't affect me in any way.

Do your characters all do the same content, possibly even in the same sequence? I ask because it seems to me that those seriously impacted by the change in achievements are those who adopt different approaches to different characters so that, for example, those characters that don't do content in the Thieves Guild are adversely impacted in the player's mind by a change that means they are given Thieves Guild achievements that were earned by another character and which the player was studiously avoiding on the impacted character.

TaSheen · November 2022

Tandor wrote: »

TaSheen wrote: »

AzuraFan wrote: »

TaSheen wrote: »

I don't play games for "achievements" - i play games for fun. I absolutely do NOT think "achievements" need to be something a game promotes. I realize I'm apparently a huge minority - but I got over gold stars in kindergarten.

I see them more as goals to achieve in the game. They're also a way to keep track of what I've done, which helps in a game like ESO that has a massive amount of content. Unfortunately AwA did away with that aspect because you can no longer use achievements to track what each character has done.

Well, luckily, I don't have that problem. I always know where I left each of my many many alts, what needs to happen next, etc no matter how long it's been. It is obviously a problem for others, and for that reason I posted my agreement with those requesting that AWA not be implemented, but it doesn't affect me in any way.

Do your characters all do the same content, possibly even in the same sequence? I ask because it seems to me that those seriously impacted by the change in achievements are those who adopt different approaches to different characters so that, for example, those characters that don't do content in the Thieves Guild are adversely impacted in the player's mind by a change that means they are given Thieves Guild achievements that were earned by another character and which the player was studiously avoiding on the impacted character.

No. Every character is his or her own person. None of them do every quest - only the ones that make sense for their backstories (which live in my mind to the point that I get "nudged" fairly frequently to play someone). It's just that no matter how many of them there are, once I log into someone, I know exactly where that character left off, and where to go next. I know that's hard for people to believe, but I just have that sort of mind.

It's like when I've taken a longish break from writing, and then pick up it up again - I don't have to read back through to figure out where to take the chapter ahead.

Amottica · November 2022

Gulkaur wrote: »

Second, the date on which achievements were earned. I don't think this feature is necessary..

Technically the achievement system is not necessary so this is an easy comment to make. However, the achievement date earned has been part of the achievement system in ESO from the beginning. It is also a common feature of achievement systems in MMORPGs and even single player games.

So it is not necessary but it is a very odd thing to complain about especially since it is such a common and pretty much standard feature in games.

The first two comments in this thread highlight this as both like the dates.

TBH, I stopped reading at this point since the first two complaints are this and there is a list of recent achievements highlighted. How are these issues to complain about?