Developers aim to stop achievement exploitation in Team Fortress 2 and City of Heroes.
Achievements have rapidly become a dominant force in gaming. Not only do they provide hardcore gamers a way to be demonstrably leet, they create an incentive to replay games that would otherwise find themselves dust-covered on a shelf (or greyed-out in Steam). For those who don’t focus on achievements, they create random moments of self-congratulatory glee when they pop up mid-game. The unfortunate side effect of this is that if people can find a way to exploit achievements, they will.
This largely rests at the feet of developers and the game design. In a closed environment like Xbox Live or World of Warcraft, the difficulty of obtaining achievements can be largely controlled. But put even a hint of power in users’s hands and they’ll exploit the crap out of the system. We see it with the concept of ‘achievement servers’ in games like Team Fortress 2 and the messy launch of City of Heroes: Mission Architect.
But developers are fighting back. As explained over the weekend on the official blog, recent changes to the way items are earned in Team Fortress 2 have been made to unlink items and achievements. This removes the fixation on people running servers tweaked to ensure rapid getting of said achievements, or even using programs to unlock achievements and, hence, items. While there have been some teething problems over the weekend, the new system is designed to reward items according to time played.
People will still strive for achievements – there are plenty of hardcore gamer completionists out there. But there won’t be the strange subculture of bending the rules in order to get the items as quickly as possible.
City of Heroes, on the other hand, has a whole other problem with its Mission Architect. What was conceived as a cool way for players to play new content rapidly turned into a means for facilitating achievement farming. In City of Heroes, the system awards badges for completing certain achievements. The badges sometimes add abilities and costumes to the game, as well as being used for in-game titles. Unfortunately, some of these badges involved the kind of numbers designed to only be achieved over a long time.
When NCsoft let players create there own content, the badge-fixated community moved in. Missions were designed not only to help people power-level, but to provide enough spawns to cheapen the harder to get badges based on numbers of mobs killed. NCsoft clamped down on this in a brutal way, first going after the power-leveling crowd and now doing a complete revamp of the badge system. It is removing the majority of Mission Architect-related badges and completely junking the idea of ‘count’-based badges. From now on, badges will largely be designed in a binary fashion – complete a task once and the badge is unlocked.
One can argue that the problems which emerged with Mission Architect should have been predictable. This achievement-fixated gaming world means that the hardcore will always strive for points, or items, or badges, or whatever achievements reward. But, on the other hand, nobody actually enjoys a repetitive in-game grind, so they will inevitably follow the path of least resistance. Be it through a rethink and simplification of the achievement system, like City of Heroes, or completely divorcing it from tangible rewards as Valve has done, there is obviously going to be serious thought put into how such a system works in a world where the content is not strictly controlled by the developer.
Supporting our habits:
2009.05.25 14:34
Err… Valve hasn't done any good in staving off the urge for farming. I've not only noticed a spike in achievement servers since the sniper/spy update, but also the introduction of a new variety: the idle server. You don't need to be playing to pick up new/duplicate weapons, after all.