Haven't commented here prior, it's a big topic and hard to put my thoughts in order. I'm a huge achievement hunter nerd and I have tons of thoughts.
Achievements should be achievable, easy to understand, encourage play and participation in various aspects of the game, and above all they should reward a noteworthy accomplishment at all skill levels.
Achievements should not be exclusive or time limited, abundant, unreasonably hard or confusing, or too easy (no feat was made). Achievements focussed around chatting, making levels, starting battles, obtaining apples/killers/flowers etc. are potentially problematic and open the way for chat spam, low effort levels, and possibly other undesirable forms of behaviour. Each achievement should be carefully considered before being implemented. It's great to encourage players to make levels and start battles, but how can we control this to avoid low effort spam?
I really, really like the fact that you're thinking about what makes a good achievement rather than just throwing some low-effort stuff at a wall and calling it done. It's very easy to make achievements more annoying than fun.
I would add one dot-point here: an achievement should never be taken away! If you have an achievement for having 5 external WRs and you lose one of your 5, you should keep the achievement. Achievements that can be unticked are dreadful.
Consider if you want achievements to be 100%-able, or just more casual non-intended for completionism. Happy either way.
AKB is right. Achievements sets that aren't realistically 100%able are far, far less attractive. A good way to handle this is to have two types of achievements - novel, single-accomplishment achievements like "win 3 battles in a row"; and some form of "badges" or whatever that separate out the achievements-that-arent-intended-to-be-done-to-100%
For example, incremental achievements (eg. achieve something 1, 10, 100 times) can be condensed into a single multi-tiered achievement.
I think this is a must, especially in a game with as much playtime as Elma. For someone who's early in their achievement hunting journey, seeing that "win 1,000 battles" exists is incredibly demotivating as an achievement to hunt and will dissuade people from engaging with the system at all. One of the best ways to handle this problem is to have the multi-tiered achievement system Leek is suggesting. You can dress it up nicely too - "Bronze battle victor" could be to win 1 battle, where "Silver battle victor" is winning 10, etc. There's 1000 ways to dress this up
This one would work to encourage players to start exploring external level packs. We would need to be careful with this one though as it may just encourage a player to spam a bunch of level packs with one level each in an attempt to cheese the achievement. We could put some limitations in place, such as a minimum of 10 levels in the pack, or five players having achieved a total time for the pack to be eligible. An alternative would be to manually pick which level packs are eligible for this achievement and mark them with an icon on the level packs page.
Personally, I would ask that if we're looking to add achievements, it gets used as a system to provide more value and interest to the levelpacks system. The suggested achievements here are already great for that (get 10 levelpack TTs etc) but particularly the point about curated level-packs is of value to me. Curated level-packs could also go in towards achievement system expansions. Perhaps we have achievements like "get under 45mins TT in EOL levelpack" and "get over 1000 kinglist points in EOL levelpack" for curated levelpacks.
I also think that the "kinglist" feature in EOL could be brought in here for global achievements, which I haven't seen listed so far.
- Earn 1,000 kinglist points in levelpacks
- Earn 5,000 kinglist points in levelpacks
- Earn 10,000 kinglist points in levelpacks
etc. This would also serve to include a metric for one of EOL site's biggest misses with the kinglist system - no global kinglist.
I compiled this list using suggestions from multiple topics. It's pretty self explanatory. So far I think there are a good number of achievement ideas covering multiple styles of play.
Regarding the "not yet possible" achievements in this sheet, I would suggest that perhaps for some of the more novel achievements (reach x Secret area, do this fun challenge, etc) that having manual achievements to be awarded can be fun as well - it gives people an interaction and a chance to celebrate novel fun stuff in the community. Perhaps, an "achievement curator" role could be created - their responsibilities would be to handle manually awarding novel achievements that we cannot automate, and to curate level-packs and level-pack achievement sets for the proposed achievement system.
This isn't actually a quote it's just here to make my format consistent
I think there's room for tons of growth out of this system. For example, it would be a strong motivator for people to actually work on the oft-mentioned target-times-for-external-packs concepts, if we could tie formal achievements to them.
I also think there's room for specialised battle-types or crippled gameplay to have achievements, but I'm not sold on them personally. "Collect 1000 apples in apple battles" or "complete 10 internal levels without using volts" as starting concepts here.
