Achievement Points

[Randulf.7614]

Some quick things since I'm dcing too much to play much beyond the "disturbances"

 

- Great first instance

 

- Love the Legendary Djinn event chain. Did not love the 1AP. Why is the 1ap still a thing despite our constant feedback every episode? Can we have a discussion please about AP rewards at some point? It really isn't helpful when it gets brought up in every AMA, feedback thread and yet is always ignored. 1 AP for a a very long chain like this isn't a suitable reward when you get 1ap from communing with a mastery point - the 2 should not be comparable. From a story perspective, the event chain was fantastic though. I loved it all, even the length of it.

 

- Love the raptor skin - great work on the heavy "feel" of it

 

- Difficult to comment on the story at this juncture, but it's certainly interesting. It wont undo the damage of last episode, but it's getting back on track at least even though it isn't clear where it is going (no sure if that is good or bad, but I'll roll with it)

 

- A beautiful map - excellent work by the artists. Not seeing any replayable content at all so far, but I'm enjoying a first time exploration of it. It is vastly superior to Kourna in pretty much every way. Great work by the map team.

 

So far so good and an improvement on the ep3. Really need to rethink achievement rewards though.

[Mike Zadorojny.7058]

> @"Randulf.7614" said:

> - Love the Legendary Djinn event chain. Did not love the 1AP. Why is the 1ap still a thing despite our constant feedback every episode? Can we have a discussion please about AP rewards at some point? It really isn't helpful when it gets brought up in every AMA, feedback thread and yet is always ignored. 1 AP for a a very long chain like this isn't a suitable reward when you get 1ap from communing with a mastery point - the 2 should not be comparable. From a story perspective, the event chain was fantastic though. I loved it all, even the length of it.

 

Living World Episodes are given a range of achievement points to distribute throughout the episode. Our goal is not to blow out the point totals that players can earn between releases. This does constrain us to sometimes imbalanced point totals for various tasks. APs aren't the only reward on an achievement however, so sometimes that gets balanced around whether or not it is "required" for meta achievement completion, or just a bonus, or they'll have unique rewards. It is our goal to prevent rapid inflation of players' achievement point totals.

 

Thanks!

[Kirk Williford.2653]

> @"Randulf.7614" said:

> - Love the Legendary Djinn event chain. Did not love the 1AP. Why is the 1ap still a thing despite our constant feedback every episode? Can we have a discussion please about AP rewards at some point? It really isn't helpful when it gets brought up in every AMA, feedback thread and yet is always ignored. 1 AP for a a very long chain like this isn't a suitable reward when you get 1ap from communing with a mastery point - the 2 should not be comparable. From a story perspective, the event chain was fantastic though. I loved it all, even the length of it.

 

I'm glad you enjoyed the chain! When it comes to that event's reward, there may be more than initially meets the eye after you've completed it... :)

 

 

[System]

This discussion was created from comments split from: Living World Season 4: "A Star to Guide Us" devs here – ask us anything!.

[Randulf.7614]

> @"Mike Zadorojny.7058" said:

> > @"Randulf.7614" said:

> > - Love the Legendary Djinn event chain. Did not love the 1AP. Why is the 1ap still a thing despite our constant feedback every episode? Can we have a discussion please about AP rewards at some point? It really isn't helpful when it gets brought up in every AMA, feedback thread and yet is always ignored. 1 AP for a a very long chain like this isn't a suitable reward when you get 1ap from communing with a mastery point - the 2 should not be comparable. From a story perspective, the event chain was fantastic though. I loved it all, even the length of it.

>

> Living World Episodes are given a range of achievement points to distribute throughout the episode. Our goal is not to blow out the point totals that players can earn between releases. This does constrain us to sometimes imbalanced point totals for various tasks. APs aren't the only reward on an achievement however, so sometimes that gets balanced around whether or not it is "required" for meta achievement completion, or just a bonus, or they'll have unique rewards. It is our goal to prevent rapid inflation of players' achievement point totals.

>

> Thanks!

 

Thanks Mike for responding, much appreciated. I do feel this is heavily unbalanced at the moment and I'm not really sure why the heavy inconsistency or the reason to care about any inflation given festivals easily give +5, +10 ap. Why would giving a Legendary boss be considered for 1 ap for example given the time/effort ratio? Sure there are other things about that event that make it worthwhile, but 1 single ap? Why not 5 as normal? I just did a story based achievement and got 3 and that took about 10 seconds and happens as part of the course.

 

I'm utterly confused by the strategy and goal, largely because there is no consistency in the whole system. Why is 1 AP a thing at all? Any gap between players is largely irrelevant since GW2 is set up for players to drop in/out at any time and plenty of achievements (ls1, festival etc) are time sensitive anyway. I really hope we can return to a fairer and more rewarding system going forward. At this point any realistic gains on the AP reward track are going to take many, many years. That seems to be a barrier that doesn't really sit well with how GW2 generally works. If as a player, one of your goals in the game was to accumulate enough ap to move towards some the skin rewards on the ap track, wouldn't you feel a bit disheartened every release when u were getting 1ap a time for a lot of things?

 

I look forward to further context

[Vavume.8065]

I'm also wondering why there are so many 1 Ap achieves in this chapter, it's pathetic. I didnt know if I should laugh at how poor an idea that is or be angry at how poor an idea that is, so I laughed and then got angry.

 

 

> @"Mike Zadorojny.7058" said:

> It is our goal to prevent rapid inflation of players' achievement point totals.

 

You are never going to score enough goals to make up for the amount of own goals you have scored with festival AP. You really should rework festival AP to make it fair for new players, thankfully I am not a new player, but if I was I would have uninstalled the game as soon as I found out how unfair the AP system is to new players.

[Matthew Pennebaker.7921]

As Mike already said, there is a budget for each episode. And the alternative to 1AP achievements is fewer things giving AP, but the individual achievements giving more (closer to what festivals do). It wouldn't change episode's overall count. Having more, small AP rewards means you can get them more frequently, and have lots of things to work on to grow your total. Your specific example of a legendary boss only giving 1, while the story gives 3 should be looked at from the viewpoint of the other rewards around it. Story content doesn't give much rewards otherwise, we expect you to accomplish the achievements there and move on. The legendary boss is built and intended to be repeatedly done, by the community at large. The rewards there are intended to be the items, currencies and XP, the achievement is there as a tally mark so players have a way to see that they have done the thing, and giving 0 AP for that feels even worse.

[Dedicant.6820]

While I really do love achievement hunting there is nothing more offputting to starting a new one or more disheartening when finishing a particularly long/difficult one only to get "rewarded" with some ridiculously small amount of achievement points. For almost every achievement the points rewarded are not really worth the effort and neither are the achievement rewards which require a huge amount of points for things that aren't really worth much in today's GW2. The only real appeal is the skins and they'll take far too long to get to even matter. I think the whole achievement system could do with an overhaul to points gained and/or the rewards given upon achievement thresholds. It's just unbelievable to me that you could spend hours only to get 1-5 points when tens of thousands are necessary.

[Randulf.7614]

> @"Matthew Pennebaker.7921" said:

> As Mike already said, there is a budget for each episode. And the alternative to 1AP achievements is fewer things giving AP, but the individual achievements giving more (closer to what festivals do). It wouldn't change episode's overall count. Having more, small AP rewards means you can get them more frequently, and have lots of things to work on to grow your total. Your specific example of a legendary boss only giving 1, while the story gives 3 should be looked at from the viewpoint of the other rewards around it. Story content doesn't give much rewards otherwise, we expect you to accomplish the achievements there and move on. The legendary boss is built and intended to be repeatedly done, by the community at large. The rewards there are intended to be the items, currencies and XP, the achievement is there as a tally mark so players have a way to see that they have done the thing, and giving 0 AP for that feels even worse.

 

Thanks for the input Matthew, but the situation seems more confusing than before

 

Why is there a budget at all? That just doesn't make sense. There doesn't need to be a cap, just put in what is appropriate surely? Does loot have a budget? Do titles get a budget? Surely AP is no different as a reward.

 

As for what the other rewards there are, each reward system should be treated separately as other rewards are often repeatable, whilst AP is a one time thing. Whatever else is given should never be affecting AP since you aren't always targeting the same group of players. If you look back through the system, collections and achievements have steadily got less and less rewarding to the point they are almost not worth even having anymore. Look at the ascended armour one which gives a whopping 75 ap - very appropriate for the time involved to complete. Look at festivals which give 5, 10, 25. Why is this identical structure not budgeted to the same level as an episode which is arguably more important?

 

If I see a story achievement to aim for with 1 ap, I don't bother putting in the extra effort like I used to when they were 5 or 10. So 1 or 0, the rewards are just not there either way.

 

Now look at the AP reward track and see how unobtainable those are. There has to be a balance - hard achievements reward high AP, low effort achievements reward low. That should be the goal of anything that has rewards regardless of what it is.

 

I think the issue might be stemming from not realising that plenty of us do deem AP as actual rewards, not just a marker

[Malediktus.9250]

0 and 1 AP are a insult and should only be given to easy things like interacting with an item or NPC or when used as a progress tracker. 3 AP maybe if it is very well hidden. everything else should be at least 5 AP, all the way up to 100 AP for stuff like Dhuum CM, Fractal God or crafting all 3 legendary armors.