Spiral Knights - Ranting about Achievements

Ranting about Achievements

13 replies [Last post]

Wed, 11/02/2011 - 16:34

Antistone

OK, something recently reminded me about the achievements in Spiral Knights, and overall, I'm pretty disappointed.

Let's go over the basics. An ideal achievement should:

Encourage you to play in a way that is fun for you and the others playing with you
Give you insight into the game, or make you look at some part of it in a new way
Make the player feel like they've accomplished something when they get it

A good achievement should NOT:

Require more play time than necessary to fulfill their basic concept
Require you to do things that are less fun than ordinary gameplay
Frustrate your allies or make the game harder for them to play while you are attempting them
Be a transparent attempt at self-interested manipulation on the part of the designers

That's mostly common sense, right? I mean, I don't think any of these should be particularly subtle controversial. Achievements are special things you can achieve. Achievements that make the game more fun to play are good, achievements that make the game less fun to play are bad. Obvious reasoning is obvious. So let's review some examples from the game:

Survivor achievements are GOOD. They demonstrate skill and perseverence, they encourage you to play well, and you feel like you've done something impressive when you get them. Kudos, you got a couple of these right.

Defeat This Boss and Tier N Access are OK. They're simple and obvious stuff that virtually everyone would do anyway, but they serve as progress markers. I guess that's a legitimate function, though calling them "achievements" is a stretch.

Deposit One Jillion Minerals achievements are BAD. That's essentially just a measure of how much you've played. There's no skill involved, no insight to be gained, no bragging rights worth having. They're a skinner box, not a game. Boo!

Fully Loaded and similar achievements are MORALLY OFFENSIVE. That's like having an achievement for "pay us $50". The ONLY meaningful step involved in acquiring this so-called "achievement" is spending energy, and you've even set things up so that it's impossible to do on pure mist, so you're literally guaranteed to receive actual real-world monies for every person who earns this. Spiral Knights would be a better game if you deleted these right now. I'm completely serious. Whoever came up with this deserves a serious scolding.

Now, let's brainstorm some good achievements:

Icebreaker: Free a frozen ally by attacking them
Murder Pinball: Knockback a monster into a bomb explosion or mist cloud
Not On My Watch: Knockback or interrupt a monster that is about to damage an allied knight
I've Got This One: Disable a trap beefore your allies run through it, or hit a timed switch to open a gate they're standing near
Decoy: Run to the other side of a monster that is tracking you so that an ally can attack it from behind
Hammer and Anvil: With an ally, combo a monster from opposite sides, so that it stays within range of both of you
Synergistic Specialists: Hurt a monster with a damage type it's weak against while an ally hurts a different monster with a different damage type that IT is weak against
Improvised Explosives: Kill an enemy with a dying blast cube
Final Foot: Shield just before a trap you're standing on activates, and then get off of the trap without being hit
Don't Scratch My Shield: Shield bump an enemy about to hit you so that it doesn't hit anyone
Got to Catch Me First: Don't take any damage between when your shield is broken by a monster's attack and when it recovers
Fatal Interaction: Kill a monster by poisoning it and then allowing it to be healed
Stop Hitting Yourself: Kill a monster by cursing it and then allowing it to attack

Wed, 11/02/2011 - 16:53

Madadder

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/achievements

this was going to pop up sooner or later

Wed, 11/02/2011 - 17:23

Giannii

Nice, some of those will be

Nice, some of those will be hard to code, some of those are more random chance than things you'll strive for (or should even strive for in regular play ie. kill by healing).

Id go with something like do 20 shots in a row without reloading or something that helps the player learn a technique. Defeat x boss without receiving damage (or deaths) would work for the experts.

Wed, 11/02/2011 - 18:20

Juances

If at least they gave a

If at least they gave a golden medal accesory....... i'd care about them

Wed, 11/02/2011 - 18:24

Antistone

Well...

Well...poisoning enemies when there are healers around is generally a good idea in regular play. And if an enemy is taking damage from poisoned healing, allowing it to continue to take damage while you focus on a different enemy is generally a good idea (means more total DPS and avoids wasting the poison). I'm sure there will be some situation where someone could increase their odds of getting the achievement by not fighting at all, but even that is arguably good play (less risk, monster still dies), and it's unrealistic to expect an achievement to align with good play in absolutely 100% of all cases. There will also be situations where someone going for survivor may sacrifice their teammates to save themselves, or where someone trying to do 20 shots in a row without reloading will compromise their damage output.

Which of them do you think is hard to program? I mean, programming any of them is obviously more work than NOT programming them, and programming anything at all COULD be hard if it's incompatible with the design assumptions of the engine you're working in, but I'm a professional programmer and they all seem pretty straightforward to me.

Suggesting "beat a boss without taking damage" seems very weird after complaining about other suggestions being dependent on luck.

Thu, 11/03/2011 - 01:11

Giannii

I'll accept I have never

I'll accept I have never tried poisoning enemies in order to kill them with the poison, but I had the idea that poison damage is a little fraction of the healing, which is a little fraction of the total health, so all in all it would take two minutes to kill a monster like that and no vials will last that long. So besides using Venom Veiler, using poison to kill via healing is not the expected tactic. You just use poison to reduce enemy damage output, and increase yours, the healing damage just being a nice side effect. In my opinion a better achievement would be one awarded when you survive a killing blow by having the enemy poisoned and as such its damage reduced.

You'll see I favor achievements that lead the player towards learning aspects of the game, so I like the healing plus poison idea. It's just I find the situation too random to be useful. It is not as random as TF2's medic über achievements but it goes that path.

Again you may have named that achievement thinking purely on Venom Veiler, but designing an achievement around a single weapon I don't find too useful. being an achievement about poison it should be doable with all the poison weapons.

About survivor I guess, I just assumed people do them solo. and 20 shots is a big number, I'm happy with 5 its just some guns have the clip size (if they code it badly the autogun could complete the achievement in one burst and that's not the idea :P).

About programming difficulty Icebreaker is easy, and possibly others, I realized if I make a list it will be too much work... when I mean hard I mean hard to include and optimize, because you can include it and make the game worse and not care because it was included but...

Pinball isn't completely hard but they'd have to store who was the last knockback "applier" which means the game has to use more memory, and that means more game freezes. Not on my watch is average, im not sure if they store the desired target (sometimes a monster can hit you despite it was targetting someone else so I assume they dont). I've got this one is hard, needs to store and calculate stuff that is only done for the achievement's sake. Decoy is easy but again adds unnecessary processing. The rest are mostly the same. A game that gets flak from bad optimization can't afford to add achievements that add unnecessary memory usage and loads the processor with unnecessary code, that will only help to make it slower.

That's my only gripe, because the ach ideas are good. But the gripe is major too :P

Thu, 11/03/2011 - 06:19

Twiddle

Some achievements I can think

Some achievements I can think of:

Speed run achievements: Get to <destination> in under <x minutes>
Low level challenge: <color> survivor while underleveled (example: silver survivor using 1* equipment.)
Decoy: While in a group of four, have an enemy locked on to you for over 2 minutes.
Escort: Complete a tier while shieldless and unarmed.
Medic: Complete a Teir. Do no damage. Always health revive fallen allies.
Pacifist: In a group of four, Complete a level without hurting a single monster.
Face the Dark: Complete a candlestick keep level without lighting the candles.
D'awww: Encounter a love puppy. Don't kill it.
Hoarder: Amass over 100 level 10 items in your arsenal
Friends to the end: Cradle and all with the same four players. No one in, no one out.

Thu, 11/03/2011 - 07:39

Khamsin

"Face the Dark: Complete a

"Face the Dark: Complete a candlestick keep level without lighting the candles."

Not possible on a number of Candlestick Keep layouts.

Thu, 11/03/2011 - 09:58

Kentard

Few More Ideas

Some are interesting, some are challenging, some are plain silly:

Ironclaw Tactician: Defeat Roarmulus Twins/Red Roarmulus Twins alone without taking any damage.
Quick Draw: Kill an enemy with a gun's normal attack at the same moment it hits you at point blank range.
Six-Gun Shooter: Kill 6 enemies in succession; one enemy with each shot of an Antigua (or similar upgrades).
Touche: Kill 5 enemies within 1 second of each other with a sword.
Enemy Specialist: Kill 20 of the same type of enemy consecutively.
Oh No, You Don't!: Kill a Lichen Colony just before it forms into a Giant Lichen Colony.
Chain Lightning: Pass on the shock status to 3 enemies before shock runs out.
Sacrificial Lamb: Jump in front of a projectile to save a teammate who would otherwise die from the hit.
Slow and Steady: Cradle and All using only heavy swords.
Lone Ranger: Cradle and All alone, with nobody joining in the party halfway through.

"Selfless": Be the only surviving knight in a team of four to make it to the elevator, and with full health.
My Precious: Steal a large mineral from the player that destroyed the mineral and make it to the elevator.
You Fool: Damage a fellow knight by knocking an enemy back in the midst of its attack.
Cuteness in a Pile: Herd 7 snipes together in Haven.
Meat Shield: Use a teammate to block a homing rocket or dying Howlitzer head.

PvP Achievements (if any):
Blast Network:
Fully Loaded: Max out the Bomb Blast Up and Bomb Count Up powerups.
Nuclear Tendencies: In Free For All, kill all other players with one bomb.
Nowhere to Run: Block off a player from all directions using bombs.
Bombophobia: Complete a match with no kills and no deaths.

Lockdown:
One Man Army: Defend one point from an entire enemy team at once.
Assassination: As a Recon, kill a Guardian directly after uncloaking.
Huntsman: Complete a match with the highest damage, but no captures or defends.
Shieldbearer: Complete a match with the highest captures, but no damage dealt.
Maddest of All: Using only Bombs, complete a match with the highest damage.
Dynamic Visual Acuity: Using a Gun, kill a dashing Striker.
Poke Poke: Using a Sword, kill a cloaked Recon.
Clean Sweep: Capture all 5 points at once. All 5 points must belong to your team and captured only by you to gain this achievement.

Thu, 11/03/2011 - 10:36

Antistone

Twiddle: Pretty much

Twiddle: Pretty much everything you suggested is a textbook example of something I said in the original post would be BAD. Lots of those strongly encourage people to leech from a group (Medic and Pacificst explicitly require it). Face the Dark and D'awww require that everyone in your group go out of their way to cooperate with you or you can't get it. Hoarder requires that you play for a really long time and spend a bunch of money, but doesn't require anything memorable or challenging. Did you actually read any part of the OP?

Some of these are vaguely amusing, but they actively make the game worse. Save them for the April 1 patch notes.

@Gianii: ANY achievement at all requires SOME additional processing of some kind. But a little abstract game mechanical data is unlikely to cause a noticeable performance hit. Graphics, AI, and realistic physics are generally the big expensive things in games. Keeping track of the last character to knockback you means you're storing one additional pointer or ID in memory. That's a few bytes. Not megabytes, not even kilobytes, bytes.

Not to mention that the Murder Pinball achievement could plausibly only work if the bomb has already been planted when the knockback occurs, which means you could probably do the entire calculation right then and not need to store anything at all.

Your no-reloading achievement also requires a new data field for storing number of shots fired since last reload. No, they almost certainly DON'T store that already, they store the number of shots left in the current magazine, which resets every time you "avoid" a reload by waiting for a while, which is the entire point of that achievement idea.

Fri, 11/04/2011 - 05:07

#10

Twiddle

@Antistone

I thought the hoarder award would be a good award because it takes a lot of effort to obtain that many level 10 weapons and armor. It's not something someone would do normally, and something I feel would be worthy of an award. But, I can see your point about it taking a lot of energy and crowns (aka real life money) to attain.

Lots of those strongly encourage people to leech from a group (Medic and Pacificst explicitly require it)

For the Pacifist and Escort awards, I'm hoping you run in something other than an Pick Up Group. In fact, for Escort, I'm pretty sure you will be kicked from a PUG if you try it. As for Medic, it's a different way of playing the game. Yes, you have others do the work, but you repay them by reviving them whenever they die. This puts pressure on you to maintain as high health as you can. This can be an interesting dynamic in certain levels (such as arenas, candlestick keep, graveyards, and so forth.) It's a different way of playing, which is a nice thing for achievements to encourage.

Face the Dark and D'awww require that everyone in your group go out of their way to cooperate with you or you can't get it.

I thought cooperation is a good thing. Besides, you can solo and still get those achievements.

Fri, 11/04/2011 - 05:41

#11

Twiddle

A few more awards

Golden Spiral: Win 10 Lockdown matches in a row (random team). (I have seen it happen. This is possible though skill.)
Super Team: Win 10 Lockdown matches matches in a row (guild team).
Good Game: Lose a Lockdown match while earning 100 rank points.
Determinator: With no health potions in your inventory, play for 10 minutes with less than a pip of health and survive.
Never say die: Health revive your teammates 5 times in the same level.
You shall not pass! Die after everyone else is on the elevator.

Fri, 11/04/2011 - 06:53

#12

Shihizu

I'd really like to see some

I'd really like to see some of those achievements. That would totally rock. Thumbs up. :)

Fri, 11/04/2011 - 20:40

#13

Nekroskoma

i wouldn't mind some more to

i wouldn't mind some more to come

if you wanted to you could even have another tied with tf2 to bring some of those who came for the sallet back

or get those who didn't to give it a try

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Ranting about Achievements