Drinal achievement grants

Achievements on Drinal / Theer should probably work differently. Either killing with more then one should count for all the lesser achievements as well (preferable, since killing 2 is in fact also killing 1), or it should be broken down by the type of well instead of number.

We have no plans to change the way the achievements are awarded for Theer or Drinal. If there is a bug and one of the achievements is not awarded let us know but it giving a separate achievement for each difficulty level is intentional for the same reason that normal and challenge mode bosses have separate achievements.

So are you denying that killing 2 soulwells is not also killing 1 soulwell? It seems incredibly silly to say that, sorry, I know you did that, but you added something on to it without removing anything so we're not going to give you credit for it.

Killing 4 Rune Theer updates both hard and easy by the way. You know, because you killed both hard and easy at the same time.

In most cases killing HM should update easy. Very few are the scripts where the HM is something completely different then the easy. Only Waansu comes to mind. There's no reason not to award easy for doing hard. I would love to hear the reasoning and logic behind the decision.

It comes down to a matter of is the risk of changing an already complex script worth the outcome. In this case we do not feel the outcome is worth the risk of breaking something. Setting up the achievements to trigger off the same values that are used to determine loot is fairly simple and does not touch his script. Setting it up like you describe is much more intrusive to the script of the encounter and opens up a large amount of risk of it interfering with the mechanics of the encounter.

So instead of making something work in a manner that makes sense you're too afraid to touch it because you might break it?

We don't feel guilds having to kill a boss in multiple ways to get multiple achievements is a big enough reason to dedicate time toward adding different functionality to a system that already works and is only to please the top few guilds out there that don't want to spend the time to go back and kill lesser difficulty settings. You can kill the fight in the different configurations like everyone else. We somewhat understand your frustration but I do not feel the complaining is justified.

If 3rd party websites want to take the information of having killed 4 soul Drinal as meaning they defeated the lesser version then so be it but the system in game will not be changing.

So you're telling me that a mob should give an achievement isn't one line of code on a mob that says give this achievement, and it couldn't just be added on as an additional line? I can't see how this would be hard, time consuming, or risk breaking anything at all being as mobs already count towards multiple achievements. It's faulty that doing the exact identical mob, but with something additional added on to it's script and nothing removed from it does not count. It seems to me more that you'd rather argue with me and say I'm complaining then actually look at changing it.

I like how giving constructive criticism on how a system can be improved in a manner that has logic and makes sense is considered complaining. I also like how your responses are inconsistent. The first one is "we have a reason for the way it is," followed by "If we change it we might break it," then continued by "It's just not worth our time to improve the system."

I'd rather have a thought out logical reason why killing 2 soulwell Drinal should not count as 1 soulwell Drinal. You can call this complaining, but no one can come up with a logical reason as to why that shouldn't be the case.

Slippery, Gninja has explained in clear and uncertain terms that your proposal is a nonstarter due to the complexity and fragility of the codebase involved. He's stated that your suggestion, after being taken under advisement, is not a goal of the team right now.

Tell ya what. The rest of us -- the 99.9% of us who play the game and enjoy it -- would rather the development team members (of which there are precious few, as you better than most are well aware) spent less time on boutique issues, and more time developing content. I'd rather Gninja, Kander, Roger, and the apprentices, devote their time to making Siren's Grotto full of fun adventuring quests, itemization, solo, heroic, and raid zones, plus spend any other time they have fixing bugs and issues which affect significant portions of the player base. Your argument is you'd rather they fix your concern, which doesn't come close to affecting 80% of the raid guilds, much less 80% of the player population, so that a few guilds can say "I get credit for killing 4 Eidolons I've never pulled, because I killed Amalgamon who is the HM version of said Eidolons" and in the process, engage Gninja in an endless flame war, taking up his time? And you know you can't have both because, again, as you are aware of better than most, the development budget of this game is miniscule. Allocations of that slim budget are very, very precious and have material cost opportunities.

Slippery,do us all a favor. Take up these concerns via email or on these forums directly with Holly and Dave Georgeson. After all, you know exactly how to contact them. Please stop taking away development time for the rest of the EQ2 universe who doesn't know, nor care, about these kinds of inanities.

Since this conversation is not about broken achievements, we've moved it into its own thread. Please remember to post by our forum guidelines, and keep the conversation constructive and on track.

Thanks.
~Dexella

You're cute.

I think you should reread this, because it doesn't play out at all like you suggest. I gave my reasoning why I think the current working of the achievement system is flawed and how it could be improved. You know, this thing called constructive feedback. An opinion that I am apparently not alone in feeling. To which I got a response of we have a reason to keep them separate. So I gave further reasoning asking for clarification on that reasoning for why they should be separate. Then I got called a complainer and told we don't want to take the time. 3 different responses, one as an attack towards me for no reason. Odd that.

Not wanting to take the time is somewhat reasonable, but it doesn't seem like something that would actually take more then a few minutes to me. So I responded with my guess on how this system would work, because I can't really see it working any differently. A check on death if it needs to update any achievements, to which you could just add more achievements, a system that would already be in place since some mobs award credit to multiple achievements.

Also funny you throw in Amalgamon, a mob I never once even kind of mentioned since it is in fact nothing like Drinal. There is a reason I didn't ask for him to be changed, because the scripts are different. Drinal is literally identical with more things higher in difficulty. No difference, just more.

I'm sorry if for some reason you feel that the thread about Achievements isn't the place to talk about Achievements. If you have a better suggestion on where it should be or who it should be addressed too (as opposed to the dev apparently working on these things) then I'm open to your suggestion.

You ignored the overarching point of my post completely, which I'm surprised at. Your constructive feedback benefits a couple dozen people, and the benefits of allocating scarce resources elsewhere dwarf your suggestion.

I'd say it probably benefits a lot more people then you think, especially if the change only takes a few minutes. Why should a guild killing 2 soulwell Drinal have to sacrifice gear to kill the same exact mob with less abilities to get an achievement? That seems to defeat the purpose of the system to me.

Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe the system is done in some crazy funky way. To me it seems like if I was coding the achievement system kill achievements would just be an on death check when a chest gets popped. It's part of that whole area of code. Is encounter dead? Yes, roll loot/check achievement. In which case it would be seemingly simple to fix to tie an additional one too it as there are already multiple mobs that give credit to multiple achievements. It would be very little different from say adding another item to a mob, except without having to figure out drop chance.

You don't speak for the entire EQ2 community, not even 99.9% of it, so don't claim to do so.
Slippery has a completely valid point.
I don't see you telling the people that want to have 25 different guilds of 1 person involved in a 24 man raid all demanding to get a guild achievemnt for it to go away, and they are wanting something that they haven't met the requirements to earn
Drinal is a PERFECT example of a fight that should do what he is asking, each soulwell he consumes add to his abilities, so if you can kill 4SW you can do 1-3 and you HAVE done 1-3 as well, period. I don't understand how or why earning any particular achievement could not be made to trigger another without the need to modify the 1-3 soulwell kill code, maybe it was dismissed too quickly without thinking outside the box.
It is a waste of time to kill that mob at 1 or 2 soul wells when you can do more. It sounds like though we those that want them will have to waste time and a lockout on current content for gear that the don't even want for their alts.

What is more important for your guild slippery in terms of priority of a project: fixing drinal once and for all or relocating resources to change achievements granting codes?

You sound really upset about both things, but which one is really really important for you and your guildies?

I would say fixing achievement granting process is not the first priority.
Eventually when everything done and working soe would probably work pn codes. But you saw Gninja replied that they are not going to do it at least i am suspecting now. Why to argue and stress over it?

Cheers,

Have to say I'd rather clear 1sw/2sw/3sw and the warders with alts for the guild achievement than have them break it.

On a semi related note, we killed Soren last night with 12 in guild and 6 out of guild and didn't get an update. Is the achievement a known issue or do you need more than 2/3rds and 2/3rds exactly isn't enough?

why are you promoting a LACK of dialogue? because of some anxious feeling when someone voices a concern you arent in agreement with? This game and its developers have a problem with saying things in ways to protect their current and future actions. This game only gets better with a clear line of communication about the problems and its possible solutions or lack of solutions.

The bottom line is the OP is just trying to help people make the game look more legit, this is a place for his concerns, not some place to weigh out who is the majority and voice their concerns first before talking about them.

agree w/ slip on almost everything, but on this one, considering the game's age, how easily things seem to break / not work, and the lack of dev resources to fix that ****, i hate to have something else break for a fairly minor thing.

I will do some testing with it on monday but I am pretty sure it should be working if you have exactly 2/3rds. If it isn't I will try to get that changed.

Yes, it's been a while since the last post in this thread but allow me to give an example of why changing the way this achievement works might not be quite as easily as it seems. I'm a programmer as well and it often ticks me off when I see something I think should be changed and think it should be very easy to make the change, but the programmers aren't willing to do the simple fix to change it.

Let's say the info on a mob is stored in an XML file on the server. That XML file has all the info needed to tell the game how to handle that mob, pointers to the loot tables it's supposed to use, etc. Let's say that file has a property within a node that points to the achievement that it's supposed to grant when the mob is killed. Let's also say that there are other properties that determine the threshold for flawless, shorthanded, and sense of urgency achievements if applicable. When a mob dies, it looks at these properties to determine which achievements to award.

Now let's say that in the Drinal fight, the XML file gets loaded into memory and a script kicks in that changes the property for the achievement based on which version you do, but it's still a single value in a single property.

I'd wager that this method is closer to how it actually works than going through lines of code that are specific to this encounter and which determine which achievement to award.

If it granted the achievement through lines of code, yes it would be simple to add the line of code for 1 to the block of code for 2 so it awards both.

However, if it works closer to how I described above, where objects are reading properties from XML files and manipulating those values through a script, modifying it to grant more than one at a time based on the script would require it to have more than one value for a single property which wouldn't work. To fix it, it would have to be an array of values instead of a single value and everything that reads that information about a mob would have to be re-written to handle both arrays and single values.

If that is in fact the case, then I can see how this is not a simple fix and not worth the development effort.

But that's just my 2cp.

Being as mobs can give credit towards multiple achievements for just kills and you can be awarded multiple achievements for killing a mob I can't really see how it would be more then a copy paste. Copy paste the 1 well trigger into the 2-4, etc.