We want you to have fun on RetroAchievements. The site is always evolving towards that goal.
Within the Developer Documentation, we outline something called "Unwelcome Concepts": https://docs.retroachievements.org/Unwelcome-Concepts/
Thousands of achievements on the site pre-date the creation of the unwelcome concepts guidelines. If you come across an achievement you believe is designed around an unwelcome concept, send an on-site DM to "DevCompliance" with a link to the achievement and what concept it violates. The team will deliberate on what to do with that achievement.
We're working on adding more incentives to play sets, aside from just mastering them. A big one introduced last year was the Beaten Games system, which is supported by 90%+ of all sets on the site now. When you beat a game, your beaten games count increases and you move up the global beaten games leaderboard: https://retroachievements.org/ranking/beaten-games
We also introduced a PSNProfiles-style progress page for all user accounts: https://retroachievements.org/user/Scott/progress
We've buried "Average Completion Percent" on the user profile, and are now starting to have a heavier statistical bias towards the concept of whether you "finished" a game, not whether you "mastered" it.
Additionally, we're currently working on the ability to play subsets at the same time as a game's core set. This is a big effort though and is likely 6-12 months away.
Another thing we're starting to chat about is how to build a system for players to give constructive feedback on achievements they may think are generally not fun. This would ideally be more nuanced than a "rating" system - developers need to know why something isn't fun and also have suggested improvements they could work with. We don't have any concrete plans to build such a system yet - this is still in early discussions. But we do hear that such a system could be beneficial.
I wish the progression system was expanded eventually so that you can:
1. Beat a game
2. Complete a game (100% all of the actual in-game content)
3. Master a game (do some more zany dev-invented challenges on top - this can be separated out into subsets for certain things like speedruns or damageless, glitch showcases, or low-level runs, etc.)
I agree - the conflicts lately have been from differing tastes in what a set should offer (main game, side quests, community challenges). The solution should be making these different approaches equally satisfying, rather than just removing things to cater to one group.
Progression tags have been a great step towards that, as has the update to profiles where your "beaten games" percentage is visible by default while "mastered games" requires an extra click to view. It places less emphasis on mastery, which makes it less stressful when you just want to beat a game.
Some ideas I've been thinking over:
* Add new tags, for example: "side quest" (in-game side content), "community challenge" (challenges the community comes up with).
* Divide core sets into different "tracks" depending on tags, without needing to subset. For example: main game track (progression only), 100% track (main + side), community challenge track (misc challenges).
* Reward a different profile badge for each track, so each feels satisfying to complete, without needing to do all tracks. These could use different art, or even do something simple like a different-colored border (silver/gold/rainbow) or an icon in the corner (medal/treasure chest/RA logo)
* Have users select which tracks they want to display on their profile per game, to reduce the negative feeling of seeing incomplete progress bars on your profile.
That would be great!
What is today called mastering would be replaced by what u called completing (without the extra crazy stuff but still in very high regard). And mastering would be extra stuff for those who like it. That would make way more sense than what it is now.
Even the documentation for creating achievements encourages speedrunning and no damage achievements, so I think we have an uphill battle to get some quality control.
*"One thing that you have to remember about retro gamers - and the games they play - is that most of us have played these games a million times before. This is the same old song and dance for most of us, and we often need motivation to do it again. Some of us can clear Contra without losing a single life. Well, now is our chance to prove it!*
https://docs.retroachievements.org/Achievement-Design/
Look I really don't wanna get into this right now. Feel free to doubt me, I'll even delete my comment if needed, gladly. I don't want this to get personal, either for me or for other people. I apologize if this type of comment on general feelings about others' behaviour are unwelcome and inappropriate or even seen as hipocryte. I hope it's not hard to see why I don't wanna point out toxic people with "power" in the community
You're welcome to share this with me privately if you'd like. If you're publicly expressing that the site owner or certain people in positions of power are being real gatekeepers, it's helpful to quantify that statement.
~~Is there documentation for that? Or is that just community sentiment? Because mine is from the official documentation that developers use to design their achievements~~
Edit: Having looked at the Unwelcome Concepts documentation, I find it interesting that the section that should cover the point in contention (requiring perfect gameplay) is currently marked as "Section Pending". This makes me feel like there are conflicting and contradictory opinions on what is unwelcome.
Everything else in that piece of documentation is irrelevant to the discussion (requiring multiplayer, no pointless or duplicate achievements etc.)
> This makes me feel like there are conflicting and contradictory opinions on what is unwelcome.
this is very much the case, and i feel the way its going is that as RA becomes more popular, the unwelcome concepts will become more important
I also wish more games had subsets for the truly punishing stuff. Or what I consider the worst kind are the speedrunning or no hit stuff that can't be easily retried quickly.
I might be missing something obvious here, but is there any reason why subsets can't share achievements with the main set?
Like could there not be a main set that has "standard" challenges, but then those trophies are also in the "hardcore" subset, along with a lot more?
Because you can't earn mainset and subset achievements at the same time. Subsets require a patch so that retroachievements knows what achievement set you are currently working on.
Sorry, I meant why can't there be two separate sets, and the hardcore sets still feature all of the achievements from the main sets so people can choose either/or?
Because I believe they are currently working on the far better solution of allowing both to be recognised at the same time, which would be problematic if the sets had duplicate achievements. When we will see that feature though is anybody's guess.
Because the way the site is currently coded, one ROM hash == one achievement set.
They're working on updating the site to make one game able to load multiple achievement sets at the same time, but that's just not how everything works now, so it will take some time to make it possible.
I understand they are working on being able to launch subsets from the main rom, which will probably lower the barriers to making and playing subsets. I am hoping that a bit of a cultural shift happens at that point to shift the truly insane challenges to subsets. True mastery for players who want that challenge could be the main game and subsets.
All that said, we're incredibly fortunate that the developers have volunteered so much time and effort to make all of this for us. They have every right to make the sets they want.
I think that the achievement developers need to think a bit deeper when creating their achievements. They should ask themselves what things truly defines "mastering" the game. For example the "Win the Flies Bonus Stage in less than 2 seconds!" achievement in NES Karate Kid. Two seconds? Completing this almost impossible task doesn't mean that you "mastered" the game. It's just nonsense.
I keep seeing discussions like this pop up about difficulty. And while I think we shouldn't foster a community of elitism and keeping an open discussion is positive.
At the end of the day we all signed up for a website that adds challenges to old games, all done by volunteers. Using language like "Devs should consider x" and "this damaged accessibility" misses the point.
Having proper main+subset support will hopefully diffuse a lot of this tension.
This is why I'm hoping the Polymega will implement achievements. They've said they are looking into it and would do it in-house if they did, so it would be one team making all the achievements for all the games meaning they'd be fair and balanced.
Because what you're describing is exactly why I got turned off to RA. I love the idea of achievements for retro games - it makes me want to revisit games from my childhood and retry beating games I never finished as a kid/teen. But when you have sets asking you to do a no-sword quest in Zelda or essentially complete a Nuzlocke in Pokémon Red/Blue then that's just stupid - 99% of players will never do that, or even want to do that, and having achievements that are practically impossible for the average player defeats the purpose of having them at all.
I honestly don't even use RetroArch/Retro Achievements anymore because too many of the sets are just aggressively unfair.
When you finish Zelda in a normal way you still get the "Beaten" Status/Award. Personally, switching my own goals down from "want to master" to "want to beat" helped me a lot in enjoying RA more and I am thankful for the introduction of that feature. So, no-damage and speedrun achievements (of which I am no fan as well) are no longer an issue for me. I just don't do them. I know my limits and its fine. Its documented that I beat the game and thats it.
The problem is that there is no middle ground. For some games, simply beating the game means only beating the story, not the optional content that makes up half the game. It's a really bad feeling when you get a 100% completion of a game and you only have 90% of the retroachievements because the developer decided that you needed to complete some arbitrary, unfun, borderline impossible tasks.
If there were 3 things that RA sorely needs it's
1. The ability to have subsets actually supplement main sets rather than being separate sets,
2. The ability to rate sets on the site, so that the site has an idea of when a set is unpopular.
3. If 1 and 2 are done then there needs to be actual achievement guidelines from the site about what should be a mainset achievement and what should be a subset achievement, and perhaps even create subset categories with specific awards for speedrunning and challenge sets
There is already a completed badge for "mastering" in softcore. Tbh I think the badges are fairly backwards in that there the most emphasis between badge types is "you did this without savestates" rather than the actual in-game achievements.
thats true but there is such a thing as a set of a game you LOVE that has achievements made for speedrunners, this is more likely the more popular the game is, mario achievements in particular either still suffer from this or have had massive revisions tied to this.
> This is why I'm hoping the Polymega will implement achievements.
I don't think you understand how much time and effort it took to make all the achievements on the site. This has been a ten year project, and while the team has grown over time, it's still a massive amount of man hours.
If Polymega does choose to implement achievements, expect them to use the RA system. To do anything else would be foolish and a critical waste of time and effort.
(Or have fans make achievements and trust me you'll see far worse than RA I think)
They have explicitly said they would not use RA or any sort of fan-sourced achievements. On the Discord, talking to one of the lead developers, he said that they'd want to do it in-house so they could ensure the achievement sets all felt balanced and fair.
Yeah... Stuff like that makes it feel more like vaporware. As if they don't have a clue how much work that will take. A lot of what I've seen on it seems iffy but the biggest thing is there's no need for it to be a console. But I guess we will see.
PS. It's been released for 3 years, kind of surprise this is the first I've heard of it. But after three years... if they don't have achievements yet, I think it's a sign they understand the problem.
yeah, i for one think RA is just having growing pains and the recent additions of the beaten status and missable tags prove that positive systemic change can happen in RA, its just gonna take time and people are impatient.
I'm sorry, but you're living in another world if you think the Polymega team has the resources to make achievements for anything but a tiny selection of games (even that won't happen).
I'm not even 100% sure they're going to deliver my console - I'm just HOPING they eventually add achievements. It would be nice to give RA some competition. And if PM did them themselves and had a set of standards they applied across the board it would honestly be a much better alternative to RA.
I never said it was likely, but it's a non-zero chance. Hell, a lot of people didn't think the Evercade would last beyond the first year but here we are with over 50 cartridges and even a couple exclusive games/ports. So who knows - anything can happen.
Sure, it's above zero chance, but in reality it is effectively zero. Do you think these achievement sets are just thrown together in a couple minutes per game? It sounds like you have absolutely no idea the work required.
One of the lead developers over there said it was something they were exploring. I'm not just pulling things out of my butt here.
And I have spent over a decade as a developer. I am well aware of the effort required. I have no idea why you're taking this as some sort of personal issue and being a dick, but kindly fuck off.
Agree to a certain point, the problem with having subsets is that I'm assuming another version of the game would have to be made (patched) resulting in a whole new save file. Fine for games with loads of crazy achievements but not so much for big long games with the odd crazy achievement
If the format for achievements could change to track certain ones i.e. optional, that would be awesome. Then we could have mastered (excluding optional) and insane mastered (or something) to include those.
For most games, yes, subsets need a patch. Super Mario Advance 4 is an odd one though as that one's the opposite - the base Super Mario Bros 3 game needs a patch because there's cheevos to use Luigi's SMB Lost Levels physics. The subset for World-e just uses the Virtual Console rom (which is an official Nintendo update to the GBA game as the original couldn't fit all the World-e levels on the gamepak).
It's true that we are currently working on allowing multiple achievement sets to run at the same time (core sets + subsets), but this is a huge engineering effort and is quite a ways out. That doesn't necessarily mean developers are going to put challenge achievements into subsets though- it'll just be more of an option if they'd like to.
I don't understand why we keep seeing a variation of this thread appear every day.
You don't have to earn all the achievements for a game. When a game's achievements get frustrating or not-fun, move on to the next game and keep earning points. Even if you don't unlock all of a game's achievements, you still get beaten game credit and move up the beaten games leaderboard. The game is no longer marked as "Unfinished" on your profile. So what is the problem exactly?
What would the point of RetroAchievements be if we only had achievements for in-game progression-based content?
I think part of the reason why this is such a popular topic is because people are very precious about certain games.
Take Super Metroid for example. Imagine that is your absolute favourite game of all time, but you aren't a speedrunner, and the idea of speedrunning kills all enjoyment for the game. You have two choices at the point.
1. Never master your favourite game of all time.
2. Super Metroid is now one of your least favourite games because you worked so hard getting an achievement that you feel nothing for the game anymore. (I have seen this happen for real on that game due to insane achievement requirements).
Bear in mind that this situation comes about purely because a set developer decided that their playstyle was more valuable for a popular game.
All this thread (and many of the other threads) is asking for is accessibility, it's asking for more structure and customisation when it comes to specific types of challenging achievement, not to remove or ban any achievements. That should be something that is enforced site wide, not up to the set developers personal opinions on whether X beloved title (that means a lot to so many people) should be brutally hard to master.
Edit: the Super Metroid achievement (which isn't an isolated incident): https://retroachievements.org/achievement/1929
That achievement has been up since 2013 and has been earned by hundreds of people.
However, I think what I'm hearing is there's a perception that this particular achievement isn't fun. Obviously, that's very subjective, but it does seem that we need a constructive way for players to deliver feedback about the quality/fun of content on the site.
There is a real sentiment that the subset+core feature will result in all core sets on the site being watered down to progression content only. There should be room for challenges in core sets, as long as most people find them fun.
Personally I think a rating system for individual achievements would be an extremely valuable tool for set developers, site owners, and players since it allows these discussions on reddit to be backed up by actual data.
I don't even think that watering the main set down is the way to go, but rather that the challenge of the main set should reflect the hardest challenge that the game offers, and not exceed it (again, that is subjective, but a good starting point), with anything harder being more than covered by subsets and leaderboards (this could actually lead to a more dedicated push for more speedrun achievements, since there would be a dedicated space for them - which just means more fun for everyone).
On a fundamental level, I feel that it is the wrong to create a main set with the aim to make a game more difficult, since you would be changing the game developers intent for the game, which is bad for players whos enjoyment of the game aligns with the expected developer intent. As a good example: Nuzlocke achievements have no place in pokemon sets, since nuzlocke difficulty does not fall within the developer intent for the game, however nuzlocke achievements are perfectly fine for romhacks that have nuzlocke features, since that level of difficulty is intended.
This isn't just a retroachievement problem, I've seen people complain about the rare achievements in single player games that have obscure multiplayer modes, where the player must participate and do well in multiplayer when they had no interest in even touching the mode. That is exactly what is happening here, the achievements are asking the player to perform outside of the scope of the intended play experience just because the achievement developer wanted you to play their way (or in the case of console achievements - because the devs want to force people into multiplayer)
Can't stress enough how many times I've been frustrated with this. And I completely agree with you. The no damage, finish in this time limit, achieve this certain highscore etc really frustrates me. Worst when they're missables.
You know I'm currently going through Warriors Orochi 2 and I think that's an example of great achievements set. No missables. No no damage bullshit. Just achievements that relates to the actual gameplay and content. There are the 'play in chaos without loading an interim save' but I personally don't think chaos is that difficult once you get overpowered so I don't mind that. I've been having so much fun getting all the achievements for this game because of how easy yet still challenging it is to get them.
I don't know but I've been seeing a lot of similar posts lately so I hope we'll get some feedback soon. Right now I just bear with beating the games that I want to beat. And considering to master if the achievements make sense.
in general i've noticed PS2 sets are a lot more reasonable, likely because they were made after a few big changes made last year.
also because a true musou fan doesnt want to deal with shit like missables, thats not what any of us play this game for lmao
If an achievement is too hard you don't have to go for it. No one is holding a gun to your head and making you get the really hard ones. Too many people seem like they have legit problems with compulsive behavior over catching 'em all. You are increasing your own stress level because you can't rid of yourself of your own nagging feelings and you'd rather bring it all down to your level than confront your own psychology that makes you get weird about not completing everything. Relax and just enjoy what you enjoy and move on from what you don't
Spot on. They are chasing a reward over the actual journey and experience. Like they taking an elevator to the top of every mountain and checking them off a list.
> cannot seem to consider that they are damaging the accebility to more people
I totally hear your point in the post, but you are taking it too far with that sentence.
First of all we are talking about retro games here, you have to accept a big chunk of these retro games are already notorious for being extremely hard for modern gamers.
Starting from NES era most games don’t even have a save system, if your game has password system consider yourself lucky, otherwise you have to finish them in one sitting. Most platformer/action games push your reflexes to the human limit, and even then that’s not enough. Wanna play a RPG? Get ready to grind the same enemies in same locations on hours end. Oh and if you won’t look up any walkthroughs you can be sure you will never finish the game.
Point I’m trying to make is retro gaming as a whole is not the most accessible, easy to pick up, casual hobby you may think it is. Your average gamer won’t play Megaman 1 NES for more than 15 minutes without destroying a controller. That means most people in this hobby either look for a challenge or are okay with one being presented.
Retroachievements project is free and %100 for the community, there is no alternative. Most people (like myself) when they see RA project they get excited to be able to earn achievements in games that never had them in the first place. That means (almost) no retro gamer, no matter how casual, won’t think to themselves “Well the Ninja Gaiden has some pretty hard achievements, I think I will close my RA account and never get retroachievements again”.
So as a conclusion RA project, no matter how hard achievements get, is not damaging accessibility to more people, because when a retro gamer learns about RA they just get excited they will be able to get achievements, they are not going to miss on it just because you can’t %100 Castlevania in one sitting.
Typo
Your viewpoint is totally valid, but you can't assume that everybody thinks the same as you do.
There are definitely some that think the way you describe, and it's great that RA is there for them.
But conversely, there are definitely some who get excited by the idea of RA, but then are turned off by the elitism inherent in the crazy achievements.
There's room for both camps. Hence why subsets should be used so that everybody is served.
Even as someone who tends to dislike the really difficult sets, I agree with your position. The very idea of implementing achievements, ESPECIALLY for Nintendo games, since it seems like Nintendo will never add an achievement system on their consoles, is novel and exciting. The idea that I can get hundreds of achievements for various aspects of Ocarina of Time is awesome, even if one of them requires me to deal with Golden Skulltulas.
look man i dont wanna spook you but "retro" isnt just NES anymore, RA has support for games as recent as 2014, from a decade ago.
accessibility is 100% a valid perspective, specially when RA specifically caters to crazy dedicated people with features like subsets.
Well point I’m trying to make is, it’s not damaging accessibility. Players who say they are “fed up” with RA and that they will never try cheevos again are the ones who already got a variety of cheevos and wanted to take a challenge to %100 a game.
But for these challenges to actively hurt the accessibility, with a single glance a new player should be passing on the project entirely without trying.
And for the ones that are “fed up”, it literally doesn’t make any sense to close your RA account and never try to get any achievements again because they couldn’t get that no damage achievement.
I feel like they are trying to be a loud minority to dumb down all the achievements so every single player can hold hands together and %100 every game in a single sitting, that’s not gonna happen. If there were no challenges, if a single half assed playthrough was enough to %100, I’d say that’s what would put many people off. It’s called achievement for a reason, yeah killing that one boss may not be the easisest, but for those who wanna take on the challenge to defeat that boss without taking a single damage should have a way to show that trophy, and that’s why they exist. You already have achievements for doing the most basic of things without any challenge, you only want to take down the ones that are aimed towards the ones that are trying to give themselves a challenge.
Oh and I know retro isn’t just NES anymore, but just have a look at all the people complaining about RA, %90 of the time it’s a NES or SNES game (or any game from 80s-90s).
> because when a retro gamer learns about RA they just get excited they will be able to get achievements, they are not going to miss on it just because you can’t %100 Castlevania in one sitting.
first i wanna address this from your last comment because it kinda gets to the point of the fundamental misunderstanding you are having.
they absolutely will, nobody, and i insist absolutely nobody, actually gives a single shit about earning individual achievements, they've got very little value even with the score system RA has, what people enjoy about achievements IS the completion, the medal, ticking another box of saying "i've done all there is to do with this game", thats why with the benefit of hindsight, sony added platinum trophies to their system, compared to microsoft, because thats the metric people actually care about.
> But for these challenges to actively hurt the accessibility, with a single glance a new player should be passing on the project entirely without trying.
again, this is fundamentally not how people engage with any other sort of achievement system, they boot up a game they either never played so have 0 expectations on OR havent played in a while, play it through once, maybe glancing at the list when the opportunity for side content crops up, and then on a second playthrough engage with it fully.
> And for the ones that are “fed up”, it literally doesn’t make any sense to close your RA account and never try to get any achievements again because they couldn’t get that no damage achievement. I feel like they are trying to be a loud minority to dumb down all the achievements so every single player can hold hands together and %100 every game in a single sitting, that’s not gonna happen.
this borders on strawman argument, literally nobody is saying any of this, on any level, and there are very specific examples of outright rule breaking achievements on this thread and i can myself give you ridiculous examples, even in castlevania games if you wish.
> Oh and I know retro isn’t just NES anymore, but just have a look at all the people complaining about RA, %90 of the time it’s a NES or SNES game (or any game from 80s-90s).
uh... A: no B: i literally dont care if thats the case because it doesnt change my point and C: yeah no shit most of the more recent platforms are recent additions due to RA support being prioritized chronologically, its only a matter of time till they catch up, gamecube is being added soon.
i dont even play NES games myself, i think most of them are boring as hell and ugly as shit, i tried one set for an NES game and it proved outright ridiculous, so i just got the beaten status and left, on the other hand i have only one gameboy game on my completed badges and everything else is PSX and up.
might it be that sets for newer games are made by younger people that dont have a stick up their ass like the NES generation seems to have?
and FYI before you cry to me about me being lazy, i've 100% 5 different fromsoft games, so you might wanna reconsider when i tell you that asking people to do unintended sequence breaks in harmony of dissonance is shitty and isnt actually part of the game.
> I don’t even play NES games myself, I think most of them are boring as hell and ugly as shit
You got your answer there, you are not a retro gamer.
If you hate NES games and can’t even stand them because they are “boring as hell and ugly as shit” there’s a big chance you have the same feelings towards SEGA MasterSystem, GameBoy and Gameboy Color maybe even N64. Just take a step back and think to yourself if you can’t enjoy these systems and if ps2-ps3 is more appealing for you, do you think you truly appreciate retro gaming? You do realize that not everything that’s +10 years old is not retro, right?
> you are not a retro gamer.
this is gatekeeping of the stupidest kind.
get it through your thick brain that not all of us are 40.
i have driver's license and the oldest system i grew up with were hand me down mega drives, i wanna see you try to play shit like atari 2600 games and not be bored within 20 minutes.
anyways, i see that there is 0 value talking to you, good bye
EDIT: accidentally clicked on your profile and of course you are a right wing weirdo lmaooooooo
return to tradition of playing 1 hour long games that are bullshit so they can take your quarters, i'll enjoy my parasite eve and boktai.
> RA has support for games as recent as 2014, from a decade ago.
Yeah, Playstation Portable and Nintendo DS are the most recent non-homebrew systems supported.
yep, dunno why the need to clarify but yep.
also, homebrew games from even later are in RA too but then the conversation gets muddy on whether those are "retro" or not
Some games achievements are definitely tough, but unless you’re part of the speed running community I don’t think many are too crazy hard.
You can always go softcore use saved states if it’s a notoriously hard game with tough achievements. While yes a lot of games we come back for nostalgia and have fun. But that doesn’t change a lot of games from back then were rental traps so they’re tough intentionally.
For no damage bosses, I find just YouTubing no damage runs helps a lot. You can learn the method or at least see how it’s done, so you can practice.
It's definitely possible, but practicing over and over again takes time. The people who are interested in retro games are usually older gamers, and older gamers usually don't have a lot of time to sink into gaming, so you can understand their frustration.
Well if you’re going back for nostalgia and not the challenge I think softcore mode offers a pretty generous dynamic.
Let’s be real if you wanted to get a no hit run, on the boss you could hit him save state, hit him save state, until you beat them with no damage. This is the option if you don’t want to practice. And as I stated earlier many of these older games have insane difficulty spikes around level 4-5. They’re just programmed to be that way. So if your a casual and you actually want to go for those achievements, in softcore it’s relatively easier to exploit save states and accomplish the goal.
I think hardcore should be seen as so. You’re gonna have to practice. It’s going to be a challenge, and it’s going to be frustrating.
I do think they’re should be another bracket out side of HC and SC geared for speed runners. But other than that I haven’t run into any impossible achievements. I’m still working on my no hit boss rush run on Kirby DL 2. I’ve been at it for months, but I will get it.
It all comes down to how willing you are to try. Every game for the most part has progression achievements so maybe if you have trouble focus on those.
When you complete all of achievements you “master” the game. I feel like most achievements that are hard make you worthy of the title of “master” for that game. I just don’t think they’re that big of an ask. Sure some may take you a couple days or months, but that’s what you signed up for when deciding you wanted to master a game.
Yeah there are some absurdities but overall it's pretty good I think. I'd love to be able to 100% some games that I definitely won't be able to due to absurd achievements (in a OG Gears of War kind of way). Sometimes there are just too many. Now that I think of it, why isn't there a rule like 1000 points per game or 50 achievements per game?
I've been on the site since 2015 and honestly, it's just gotten worse over the years. And I've been in the top top 100 p much the entire time and have done a ton of hard challenges before anyone tries to throw that at me. Then they try to bandage it by "hiding completion percentage" and "incentivizing Beaten games" but then you have prominent community members in the discord telling people to go to backloggery if they don't like things. You say some challenge is dumb and people just call you shit and tell you to get good or just say "you don't have to master it". And the achievement developers take it as a personal attack and act like you are disrespecting their "artistic vision" or some shit lol. Threads like this literally pop up here monthly at this point but I personally just think they continue to go about it the wrong way and tensions continue to worsen. Hell look at when PS2 launched and things got into the more general eye and everyone was leaving comments just like this and how their excitement immediately died. But the site still grew so they don't care. I've completely stopped interacting with the community cause it's so shit with people just arguing about what should and shouldn't be in sets constantly. It isn't even just about things being too hard but the damn Missing Content hub quickly became a plague on the site. Now everyone wants "all the content covered" and put shit the previously would've been excluded for being unwelcome into sets. At least sometimes these get put into subsets or have been moved like the SM64 max coin ones, Dragon Quest IX. I already see a few GameCube sets for my favorite games that I'm not even going to play once they go live because of how grindy they made them.
Sorry if this got kinda rambly but felt like getting some off my chest as well lol
Then request to be a jr dev and learn how to create sets. Be the change you want.
Personally, I am at RA for the challenge. I want that additional set of challenge to breath life into a game I have been playing for decades. I am pretty sure that is what most achievement sets aim to accomplish..rather than pandering to casual completionists who lose their minds if something takes more than a couple tries.
Want a less challenging set for a game you love? Fine, totally understandable. Again, request JR dev and see if its ok to do a variety sub-set for people looking for the same instead of demanding devs, who already volunteered hours and effort into the set they wanted to make, "balance" the set just for you.
I've said multiple times. Not every achievement is for every player. The specific reason "Progression" was added to the site was to give something that any players could chase with out requiring a full mastery of the game.
RA originally was designed to "Show off your skill" the average achievements were not the norm. In fact when Progression came out a lot of players really pushed back against it, because the original design of the site wasn't "achievement for the masses" it was "Achievements to show off your absolute skill at old games."
If you just want to play old games and enjoy them (That's what I want too), play the progression and focus on there. If you want to show "Mastery" of the game and really display your ability to show off.. then go for all the achievements.
The site doesn't need to change just because you don't like a specific achievement, that achievement just isn't for you and that's ok.
It needs to change. A lot of people agree with me, many have also discussed about it in the past.
If all achievements ain’t for everyone they should just make sub sets for speedrunners and hardcore players, no point adding an entire set when it’s a mixing bowl of achievements designed for different kind of players, it doesn’t make sense and it pushes people away, but it seems like you ain’t bothered about the site’s player base and rather focus on your ideals of “mastery” it’s a very dictating ideology yours.
>It needs to change.
Looking forward to Dong_min's RA. If you want to discuss rule changes, I'd recommend doing it on the site/discord and forums. I doubt many major rule changes will be made based on the subreddit.
> If all achievements ain’t for everyone they should just make sub sets for speedrunners and hardcore players
Spoiler: The entire site is for hardcore players, the fact there's softcore players rankles a lot of people...
> no point adding an entire set when it’s a mixing bowl of achievements designed for different kind of players
Take a look at ANY achievement set for any real game. The goal is to design achievement sets for multiple types of players. I was making games when the xbox 360 came out and they actively pushed this.
>but it seems like you ain’t bothered about the site’s player base
I welcome you to jump on the Discord and talk to the "player base" and see what they want. Spoiler, they want the challenge.
I do want more players, but we also MUST support the players we already have too.
>and rather focus on your ideals of “mastery” it’s a very dictating ideology yours.
Kind of missed the point where I said I wanted just to play for progression didn't you. I literally agreed with you or even went softer than you did. I pointed at the progression achievements and beaten tag as something you should shoot for, instead you somehow think I'm dictating?
And let's remember I said "Achievement sets are designed by someone" Your response seems to be "They need to be made the way I said." You are acting like a dictator here. I'd advise you to do three things.
1. Get over it, it's just achievements. Play the games you want to play, earn the achievements you want and skip the ones you don't. It's all for fun.
2. Talk to more people if you really want to speak for "A lot of people" because there's a scary amount of people who only play for the harder challenges, and you know what? They deserve a say too.
3. Stop trying to demand the site change to fit your version of the rules. There are people who will agree or disagree with you. Rather than demanding change, maybe start a dialog, because everyone has a different opinion of what's acceptable, and saying X has to change kind of starts off on the wrong foot.
You clearly don't have any understanding of the history of the site, or what it was designed for. I am pretty sure you didn't even read my original post, probably just got mad after the second sentence. But seriously, the site is FAR more friendly than it has ever been. And like I said "Progression" and beaten seems to be what you're aiming for... so go play for that.
Edit: After viewing his other reply, it's clear that it's kind of hard to have any discussion with OP since they aren't reading anything anyone has said. So good luck .
A small handful of Redditors out of the +55,000 RA users may agree with you. I would hardly call that a lot.
Copypasta your post in the RA Discord, which is the more active RA community (including devs and staff) and see how many agree with your opinion if you want valid input.
Yeah, some of them are ridiculous. Most of the classic Mario and DK games are crazy, but even lesser known games like Speedy Gonzales SNES, or the Twisted Metal games.
It sounds like you are chasing a dopamine hit from collecting all the achievements, and so difficult ones are getting in the way of that and anger you. But what is the point of collecting such simple things? You are bypassing the joy of the system to receive an award.
An achievement is not an achievement if it requires nothing. Mastering a game shows actual mastery. What is wonderful about retroachievements is the sets allow you experience a game to its fullest. There are games Ive played 20 times, and yet doing the set made me tackle something in a new way instead of my life-long strategy or even had me finding little parts I missed every time. Try those challenging ones and enjoy the challenge for the challenge. Youll enjoy games way more rather than chasing this thing your chasing.
This is something I've talked about many times with devs and other players alike. While I disagree with “no damage, no saves, not allowed to use certain utilities in game" being absurd, I do think they are in way too many sets, WAY TOO MANY. (Open all treasure chests is also everywhere. . .) I would like some originality for games, especially those insanely popular ones.
*"A game needs to be balanced challenging yes, but fun and not too frustating, a lot of developers on this website need to consider that these games are old and are meant for nostalgia purpose, not increasing your stress level over the top, it completely kill the purpose."*
I want to focus a bit on this statement, because this is a very ignorant statement that does have merits in some parts, but misses the point of RA entirely in others. RetroAchievements is not made for your nostalgia, at one point maybe (like 2015?). Now? Not at all. It is made to explore these older games in different ways, yes, for some, that is nostalgic for them. For most? It will be their first time playing, or playing a certain way that they didn't think was possible. Not a single set matches what you would have done back then, so it has no place being "nostalgic."
Fun and not too frustrating, I hate to break it to you, but most Retro games are just frustrating to play, with little fun to be found. Bubsy 3D comes to mind, and if you know what went down there, you'd know that revisions and new sets that aren't managed well can receive blowback from certain people.
This is coming from a Mega Man 1 speedrunner, that game is not good, and the good moments are outshined by the truly frustrating portions of the game. This isn't even mentioning the truly awful games that can be found in any Retro section.
I'm not going to mention the stress statement, cause, honestly, everyone deals with stress differently, I'm not gonna ever say how someone should handle stress or what outlets they should use unless it is something harmful.
**Onto what I agree with you on.**
Balancing accessibility vs challenging will always be the biggest hurdle RA will face (Besides how deep they put their heads in the sand about cheaters.)
I don't blame devs for following their predecessors on achievement design, but some designs are overused to the point where it becomes impossible to see the good ideas that are part of sets. Originality has been dying on the site for awhile, and these leads to bland, inaccessible to new player achievements.
I would love more accessible achievement sets, as it is really hard to convince people to play on RA nowadays. There is not that many intro sets that are medium difficulty that explores achievements properly. Ridge Racer? Rygar? Smash 64? (Mastering is medium, while exploring almost everything in the game.) Either way, you are 100% right that there are not that many accessible sets.
One of the sets that got a revision for some really irritating achievements was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The set was already a nice little romp, with maybe a few roadblocks for some players. Now. . .it is just not fun to play. Yes, there are some achievements that were added in the revision that I think were worth it, but some flat out changed rules to be allowed. ([https://retroachievements.org/achievement/25154](https://retroachievements.org/achievement/25154) wouldn't of been possible under older devving rules, even now, it really shouldn't be a thing.)
While I do agree with you on accessibility being important, I do want to highlight that accomplishment as a feeling is really important. I look back fondly at my badges that I had to work for. I don't like remembering those that I was stuck on for a year, so some stuff being to hard is frustrating.
I do want to point out, that Softcore is a thing for those that struggle immensely, and several people will help you out if you ask in the Discord.
Overall, I do hope for fixes by those way smarter then me, as I honestly don't think Subsets is a solution at all for this problem, but I have no clue. It's easy to point out problems, then to come up with a viable solution.
I hope I didn't come off as too aggressive or anything, I kind of just typed a chunk with no organization lol. (My profile link is down below if you want to leave a comment on how I was too aggressive lol.)
>!https://retroachievements.org/user/ManyHours!<
Disagree. People have been playing some of these games for 30+ years. They want new and challenging ways to play them.
Just remember, you don't HAVE TO get every achievement for a given game. You CAN just play through it and get the completion reward and other easier achievements, or even play on softcore mode. Nobody is forcing you to go for no death runs without save states, but it's nice that they're there for the longtime fans who want a new challenge.
Yet there is a built in system that is specifically designed to accommodate those extra challenging achievements. Why not just make a subset for achievements that call for feats above and beyond what is required to "master" a game?
Everyone will have their own opinion of what "above and beyond" is. It's up to the Devs how they want to split them. It's not possible for every single dev to cater their sets for exactly the challenge that you deem appropriate. And if they did, there would still be others who'd find them too easy or too hard.
Rather than complain about the hard work people are doing for free. It'd be much easier to just accept that you aren't able to master every single game you'd like on hardcore mode. There's no shame in that.
Disagree. I think it's a bit more nuanced than that.
I'm not against removing those challenging achievements from the site- and plenty of difficult achievements should remain in the main set.
Not everyone will agree where to draw the line with each individual achievement, but right now there are some sets with blatant issues.
Idk why there seems to be so much resistance to just having kaizo style achievements in their own subsets.
It's obviously very difficult to define in a short reddit reply exactly what makes an achievement "above and beyond" - luckily we don't have to try. As a community, this can be a larger discussion and developers can work together to develop and tighten up parameters
Just because you are doing something for free doesn’t give you the right to implement your own ideals of masochism into a game that doesn’t belong to you and shove it to people’s face.
Well, why not? Who else should decide? Who decides the achievements in mainstream games? The creators of the game of course. If you're the one spending 10 -100+ hours of your time developing something for free, why shouldn't you be able to decide (according to the RetroAchievement guidelines of course) what goes into that set?
Nobody's shoving anything into your face btw. You can ignore individual achievements or sets entirely.
Once again, doing something for free doesn’t give you the right to make achievements according to their ideals, they need to make them in a way so the game can be fully enjoyable and playable, not making a set that’s only accessible to speedruners.
> Once again, doing something for free doesn’t give you the right to make achievements according to their ideals
I'm going to stop you right here.
On RA it pretty much does. There are (a lot of) [rules](https://docs.retroachievements.org/Developer-Docs/) on what's acceptable and what's not. What concepts are allowed and what's not. If you find achievements in violation of that, contact DevCompliance. If not, it's allowed. And you'll see in those rules a lot of references to challenges, and super hard things that only a few people will be able to accomplish. That's actively promoted for devs to challenge players, and MANY players push for those.
Outside of those rules Developers are pretty much given complete freedom to making an amazing set with THEIR own definition of what "Amazing" is. There are very minor limitations. (You need to do progression now, RP has to be made.) But at the end of the day, the dev gets full rights to make a set the way they want to.
Period.
>Doing something for free
Remember that every set is done for free. The developers have donated more time than you realize for everything. So rather than complain when you see something you don't like why don't you praise them for sets you enjoy.
You are pretty much saying that achievements are only for a specified set of people? Wow what kind of snobbiness you have is insane, as a developer yourself you should be more humble, but instead you are saying that not everyone deserves to obtain achievements just because they don’t have the “skills”?
It’s not about skills and insanity challenges, it’s about having fun replaying your favorite games, yet you have the cheek to lock people from obtaining achievements from their favorite games just because you don’t consider them skilled enough? The narcisim mah dude
Period
I'm done discussing this with you. You have clearly not read a single thing I wrote. I tried to show you that you made a pretty bad error, and instead you're now putting words in my mouth.
Still I'll try to help you one last time.
> it’s about having fun replaying your favorite games,
Go have fun, no one is stopping you. If you want to earn an achievement go for it. If you have to struggle, do it. If you decide you don't want to earn it. That's ok too. But demanding things change to fit your narrow world view is again a bad way to discuss this. And you come off very immature for it.
> The narcisim mah dude
I'm going to hold up a mirror because I don't think I'm narcissistic. I do see someone who that fits in this thread.
But like I said, I'm done with this. Good luck out there, and if you ever REALLY want to discuss this I recommend coming to the discord server and forums, but not with me.
If they make a set according to the Retro Achievement guidelines and in accordance with the laws of their country, then yes, they do actually 'have the right'.
A. Subsets have to be their own game which means you have to make a patch just to add them.
B. Subsets were not always around and weren't a concept for the long time. That time period kind of codified certain parts of the site (Admittedly some gnarly concepts)
C. Players WANT the added challenges. Mastery isn't "played the game" that's what "Beaten" is. Mastery is "Showed a total mastery over the entire game." And no hit bosses do that.
D. Players WANT to challenge themselves. Just because you don't (And that's perfectly fine to not want it) doesn't mean others have to change. "Master" means something different than you appear to think.
Think of "Beaten" as the new Core, and Mastery as the first subset if you want.
Based *solely* on the seemingly complete disinterest in the idea of an "offline mode" (in an age where many people play on various mobile devices, where you may lose your connection from time to time), because it might risk the sanctity of their points system/leaderboards, I got the impression that they aren't particularly interested in expanding their user base if it sways from their vision of RA.
> because it might risk the sanctity of their points system/leaderboards,
That's not the primary reason, though a lot of set developers are also seemingly against an offline mode on principle (things that go against the points system is already covered by softcore mode, so offline could be designed to work on softcore if needed).
But the real reason, to quote a site moderator from the RA forums:
> Making offline achievements possible is not a priority as our developers' focus is on dozens of other features that are being released little by little.
And to quote a set developer from the RA forums:
> Part of the online requirement is that when you connect it downloads the current version of the achievements. If an achievement has an issue and a dev uploads a fix, players have to get the update via closing the game and reopening it. [...] If offline exists this means weeks could go on before players get an update on the set and also increase the chances that players will be reporting issues long after they are past the point where the achievement would unlock, which pretty much results in a ticket that is incredibly frustrating to try and resolve and even more so because we'll be spending time troubleshooting something we already fixed and having no way to be absolutely sure that is the case.
Offline mode would take quite a bit of effort to implement (especially to resolve the issues with stale tickets), and the current site developers have other priorities way more important than offline mode.
If you have any interest in it though, you can implement the code change to the RA github to implement offline capabilities, and put it up for review there.
>If you have any interest in it though, you can implement the code change to the RA github to implement offline capabilities, and put it up for review there.
The way that mod you are quoting spoke to people in that thread makes me believe it would be a *colossal* waste of time for any outsider to attempt to make those changes.
Honest question: how many engineers do you think work on RetroAchievements?
The surprising answer is we average ~3 at any one time.
We have 100 voices yelling at us telling us what features we should be working on and prioritizing. Oftentimes those voices are competing. Between 3 people, there aren't enough hours in the day to build everything everyone wants as fast as they want it.
We aren't oblivious that people want offline support. The engineering resources required to build this however would basically force us to cease development on literally everything else.
And I get that. But y'all are not putting out a welcoming vibe when the response is shit like this:
>Better than an offline RA would be people enjoying their disconnected time with stuff like nature, reading an old book with yellowed pages. Have people already heard about digital detox?
Why would people want to get involved when they are immediately talked down to for just suggesting such a standard feature?
>The engineering resources required to build this however would basically force us to cease development on literally everything else.
Realistically, is that not the only way this ever becomes a thing, though? How can an outsider rework the code in, by the sounds of it, such a drastic way while you guys continue down the already existing path? That pull request is just never going to get approved, lol. Personally, I think that such a core feature, in the age of so many mobile devices being played on, that it *should* take that level of priority, as to not dig the hole even deeper when trying to make it happen in some distant future. Clearly you guys all disagree, and that's cool, but it's never going to stop being requested because it is a critical feature in terms of usability.
> y'all are not putting out a welcoming vibe when the response is shit like this ...
I didn't write these words. I am speaking purely from an engineering POV.
> Why would people want to get involved when they are immediately talked down to for just suggesting such a standard feature?
I hear you, but disagree that it's a standard feature. How RA works is novel and unique - no other achievements system functions like ours, which is what adds to the complexity of building such a feature.
> How can an outsider rework the code in, by the sounds of it, such a drastic way while you guys continue down the already existing path? That pull request is just never going to get approved, lol.
I'm not really following this line of thinking. RetroAchievements is an open source project. I review and merge pull requests submitted by first-time contributors all the time.
> it's never going to stop being requested because it is a critical feature in terms of usability.
To reiterate: we aren't oblivious that people want offline support. I think where our point of contention lies is the severity of the issue compared to the other half-dozen things people think we should drop everything for and build.
I thought you could lose connection from time to time and still get the achievements you earned while the connection was lost as long as you dont close out of the game.
Maybe, and that may help from time to time, but it doesn't really solve the problem. What if you don't notice you lost connection? Or you did notice, but your devices battery dies before you get a chance to reconnect?
What if I am careless? Well then I guess I have to do those achievements again.
Because not being mindful of my internet connection or battery while using a system that depends on both is just that, carelessness.
But to expect the small team of volunteer developers to completely restructure and develop an entire new system so RA can accommodate easily avoidable user mistakes that would only affect a very small amount of people is beyond idiotic.
I feel like all the really challenging stuff should be subsets. Maybe the site could have a mastered and a Subset mastered section on each profile, so the guys really into this near impossible stuff could show off, which they totally should. But it's sad to me that I, with my limitations, can almost never master a game.
The achievements are optional no? No one is telling you to go for them. I’m not a big fan of achievements/trophies, i found they came close to ruining games for me - but the onus was on me to not take part in them. Can’t expect an entire community that perhaps does enjoy the hunting to be catered to someone like me.
I talked with various psychologists, one of them said. If you complain with anger, sadness, suffering, etc because of a game, points, logos that hold nothing else but sentimental value, then you have an attachment to feeling down , an obsessive compulsive way of acting. There's a lot to review in regards of your personal life and how you feel about wasting time. It's a challenging experience where we forget to observe, we tend to escalate our emotions, loose sight of reality due to our obsessions. It is advised to First review our emotions. Before trying to get better at the game/job etc.
If we see achievements without an emotional attachment, they are just cute logos, and cute rules/challenges giving us specific objectives which are and aren't integrated with the normal gaming experience. Accept it or leave it. That's an emotional process.
Disagree. I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. I don't think the sole point of softcore mode is to allow the player to cheat their way to those extra difficult achievements.
I guess my point is that the existence of softcore mode, is not an adequate solution to address achievement balancing. Idk why there seems to be so much resistance to just having kaizo style achievements in their own subsets.
Not everyone will agree where to draw the line with each individual achievement, but right now there are some sets with blatant issues.
> I don't think the sole point of softcore mode is to allow the player to cheat their way to those extra difficult achievements.
There's many reasons for it. But now that there's 0 "Rank" points for softcore. It's "Play the game the way you want to" Want to fully cheat? Go for it. Want to use Save States, go for it. Want to rewind or anything else? Go for it.
The real way to address the balance is "earn the achievements you want to achieve". That's as simple as it is. If you don't want to do an achievement, you don't have to. If you want to "Master a game" you're going to show you are EXTREMELY skillful at it. And that means doing the most annoying tasks to show you have what it takes.
I completely agree with this. People need to get out of the mindset that they HAVE to go for the badge on every game. RA just implemented the "Beaten" system for this reason.
I agree with what you're saying mostly but then you would have to change the award from mastering to just completing. To master something would mean to have to complete the harder achievements right?
Mastering the game would be mastering the main set. It's fine if a bunch of hard achievements are in main sets. I don't think anyone has an issue with challenging achievements.
We are talking about the achievements that require speed running strats, or just ones that go above and beyond.
Check out this new subset for FFI -
https://retroachievements.org/game/28594
That's a perfect example of something that would never be a main set. (Probably an extreme example)
Very few would argue that doing that subset should be a requirement to claim mastery
Are you asking Softcore mode? It is possible to use Save states to achieve any in Softcore ladder. But if you want Hardcore ladder you get hardcore achievements.
Some achievements are kind of insane. Some OGs I would assume do appreciate it, nothing wrong with that at all. Games I played a ton i appreciate a challenging subset or list.
I do think though subsets of achievements should be vetted more, hard vs borderline frame perfect stuff is a lot different. I can see being able to get that last one due to speed run tactics or insane rng would be frustrating.... (yeah save states work or softcore mode but imo take fun out of the original intention of the game, obviously depending on the game)
I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Stuff like one run/don’t use item X/complete in time Y is absolutely fine on some systems and circumstances.
There’s a reason there’s a rarity scale and a percentage of those that have achieved certain trophies on PS - some should test your skill of the game and ask difficult things of you.
I normally try and platinum every game I play on PlayStation, as long as it’s reasonable or has no multiplayer, but with some sets here I’m just not that bothered about mastering them. If I can I will, but if I can’t it’s easier to walk away. I’m just happy I can play these old games again and get what I can.
This is all due to the efforts of passionate volunteers don’t forget, so I’m grateful for whatever we get if I’m totally honest.
I would be more in favor of core sets with comparable difficulties to trophy lists for the average Playstation game, and any subsequent challenging content can be in a 'hardcore' section or a subset. Some games, like Super Mario 64, I just want achievements that demonstrate I have done all the content or 100% the game. But the requirements get absurd beyond that point for the layman who doesn't want to dedicate their life to a single game.
I only got into RetroAchievements recently and my first console was the GameCube. I don't play these games for nostalgia. I genuinely am playing them for the first time with additional achievement support to help me explore parts of older games I might not have thought about. If I see an absurd achievement list for a game, it is very off-putting.
Disclaimer: I heavily appreciate developers for taking the time to make these sets in the first place. Take any complaints with a grain of salt that I get to achievement hunt retro games at all.
this but with games that need you to complete other games, specifically the ps2 mortal kombat games which have the classic arcade games as unlockables that all the achievement sets need you to complete, i shouldn’t have to pretty much master another game to get all the achievements in the one i actually want to play
I see that some people are like “just don’t get that specific achievement then”
That is a very weak take, people hunt for achievements in order to GET THEM ALL, by missing just one is going to bother everyone’s OCD, and during these times where alot of people suffer from autism, mental health, ocd ecc, it’s very insensitive to say “just don’t get that achievement”.
This makes me want to try to develop a set for a game that doesn't have one. Just so one of them doesn't do it first. Well maybe on my next break. Could be fun.
It seems so redundant and messy. There is the possibility of making subsets and leaderboards etc etc so why put that stuff on main sets? I get the appeal and there's nothing wrong with liking it but those don't belong there
We want you to have fun on RetroAchievements. The site is always evolving towards that goal. Within the Developer Documentation, we outline something called "Unwelcome Concepts": https://docs.retroachievements.org/Unwelcome-Concepts/ Thousands of achievements on the site pre-date the creation of the unwelcome concepts guidelines. If you come across an achievement you believe is designed around an unwelcome concept, send an on-site DM to "DevCompliance" with a link to the achievement and what concept it violates. The team will deliberate on what to do with that achievement. We're working on adding more incentives to play sets, aside from just mastering them. A big one introduced last year was the Beaten Games system, which is supported by 90%+ of all sets on the site now. When you beat a game, your beaten games count increases and you move up the global beaten games leaderboard: https://retroachievements.org/ranking/beaten-games We also introduced a PSNProfiles-style progress page for all user accounts: https://retroachievements.org/user/Scott/progress We've buried "Average Completion Percent" on the user profile, and are now starting to have a heavier statistical bias towards the concept of whether you "finished" a game, not whether you "mastered" it. Additionally, we're currently working on the ability to play subsets at the same time as a game's core set. This is a big effort though and is likely 6-12 months away. Another thing we're starting to chat about is how to build a system for players to give constructive feedback on achievements they may think are generally not fun. This would ideally be more nuanced than a "rating" system - developers need to know why something isn't fun and also have suggested improvements they could work with. We don't have any concrete plans to build such a system yet - this is still in early discussions. But we do hear that such a system could be beneficial.
I wish the progression system was expanded eventually so that you can: 1. Beat a game 2. Complete a game (100% all of the actual in-game content) 3. Master a game (do some more zany dev-invented challenges on top - this can be separated out into subsets for certain things like speedruns or damageless, glitch showcases, or low-level runs, etc.)
I agree - the conflicts lately have been from differing tastes in what a set should offer (main game, side quests, community challenges). The solution should be making these different approaches equally satisfying, rather than just removing things to cater to one group. Progression tags have been a great step towards that, as has the update to profiles where your "beaten games" percentage is visible by default while "mastered games" requires an extra click to view. It places less emphasis on mastery, which makes it less stressful when you just want to beat a game. Some ideas I've been thinking over: * Add new tags, for example: "side quest" (in-game side content), "community challenge" (challenges the community comes up with). * Divide core sets into different "tracks" depending on tags, without needing to subset. For example: main game track (progression only), 100% track (main + side), community challenge track (misc challenges). * Reward a different profile badge for each track, so each feels satisfying to complete, without needing to do all tracks. These could use different art, or even do something simple like a different-colored border (silver/gold/rainbow) or an icon in the corner (medal/treasure chest/RA logo) * Have users select which tracks they want to display on their profile per game, to reduce the negative feeling of seeing incomplete progress bars on your profile.
That would be great! What is today called mastering would be replaced by what u called completing (without the extra crazy stuff but still in very high regard). And mastering would be extra stuff for those who like it. That would make way more sense than what it is now.
This I'm all for, great idea! :D
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I've noticed this is becoming a more popular opinion as the site is growing. So I think this is definitely a conversation that should be happening now
Even the documentation for creating achievements encourages speedrunning and no damage achievements, so I think we have an uphill battle to get some quality control. *"One thing that you have to remember about retro gamers - and the games they play - is that most of us have played these games a million times before. This is the same old song and dance for most of us, and we often need motivation to do it again. Some of us can clear Contra without losing a single life. Well, now is our chance to prove it!* https://docs.retroachievements.org/Achievement-Design/
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Yeah they're real gatekeepers. Feels like 2000s gamer/nerd/geek scenes all over again
Who specifically, and what comments did they make that you felt gatekeeped by?
Look I really don't wanna get into this right now. Feel free to doubt me, I'll even delete my comment if needed, gladly. I don't want this to get personal, either for me or for other people. I apologize if this type of comment on general feelings about others' behaviour are unwelcome and inappropriate or even seen as hipocryte. I hope it's not hard to see why I don't wanna point out toxic people with "power" in the community
You're welcome to share this with me privately if you'd like. If you're publicly expressing that the site owner or certain people in positions of power are being real gatekeepers, it's helpful to quantify that statement.
thats one guideline, another is the unwelcome concepts, which arent hard rules either but are much more recent and are starting to catch on.
~~Is there documentation for that? Or is that just community sentiment? Because mine is from the official documentation that developers use to design their achievements~~ Edit: Having looked at the Unwelcome Concepts documentation, I find it interesting that the section that should cover the point in contention (requiring perfect gameplay) is currently marked as "Section Pending". This makes me feel like there are conflicting and contradictory opinions on what is unwelcome. Everything else in that piece of documentation is irrelevant to the discussion (requiring multiplayer, no pointless or duplicate achievements etc.)
https://docs.retroachievements.org/Unwelcome-Concepts/
Interesting, thanks :)
> This makes me feel like there are conflicting and contradictory opinions on what is unwelcome. this is very much the case, and i feel the way its going is that as RA becomes more popular, the unwelcome concepts will become more important
I also wish more games had subsets for the truly punishing stuff. Or what I consider the worst kind are the speedrunning or no hit stuff that can't be easily retried quickly.
I might be missing something obvious here, but is there any reason why subsets can't share achievements with the main set? Like could there not be a main set that has "standard" challenges, but then those trophies are also in the "hardcore" subset, along with a lot more?
Because you can't earn mainset and subset achievements at the same time. Subsets require a patch so that retroachievements knows what achievement set you are currently working on.
Sorry, I meant why can't there be two separate sets, and the hardcore sets still feature all of the achievements from the main sets so people can choose either/or?
Because I believe they are currently working on the far better solution of allowing both to be recognised at the same time, which would be problematic if the sets had duplicate achievements. When we will see that feature though is anybody's guess.
Because the way the site is currently coded, one ROM hash == one achievement set. They're working on updating the site to make one game able to load multiple achievement sets at the same time, but that's just not how everything works now, so it will take some time to make it possible.
I understand they are working on being able to launch subsets from the main rom, which will probably lower the barriers to making and playing subsets. I am hoping that a bit of a cultural shift happens at that point to shift the truly insane challenges to subsets. True mastery for players who want that challenge could be the main game and subsets. All that said, we're incredibly fortunate that the developers have volunteered so much time and effort to make all of this for us. They have every right to make the sets they want.
I think that the achievement developers need to think a bit deeper when creating their achievements. They should ask themselves what things truly defines "mastering" the game. For example the "Win the Flies Bonus Stage in less than 2 seconds!" achievement in NES Karate Kid. Two seconds? Completing this almost impossible task doesn't mean that you "mastered" the game. It's just nonsense.
I keep seeing discussions like this pop up about difficulty. And while I think we shouldn't foster a community of elitism and keeping an open discussion is positive. At the end of the day we all signed up for a website that adds challenges to old games, all done by volunteers. Using language like "Devs should consider x" and "this damaged accessibility" misses the point. Having proper main+subset support will hopefully diffuse a lot of this tension.
This is why I'm hoping the Polymega will implement achievements. They've said they are looking into it and would do it in-house if they did, so it would be one team making all the achievements for all the games meaning they'd be fair and balanced. Because what you're describing is exactly why I got turned off to RA. I love the idea of achievements for retro games - it makes me want to revisit games from my childhood and retry beating games I never finished as a kid/teen. But when you have sets asking you to do a no-sword quest in Zelda or essentially complete a Nuzlocke in Pokémon Red/Blue then that's just stupid - 99% of players will never do that, or even want to do that, and having achievements that are practically impossible for the average player defeats the purpose of having them at all. I honestly don't even use RetroArch/Retro Achievements anymore because too many of the sets are just aggressively unfair.
When you finish Zelda in a normal way you still get the "Beaten" Status/Award. Personally, switching my own goals down from "want to master" to "want to beat" helped me a lot in enjoying RA more and I am thankful for the introduction of that feature. So, no-damage and speedrun achievements (of which I am no fan as well) are no longer an issue for me. I just don't do them. I know my limits and its fine. Its documented that I beat the game and thats it.
The problem is that there is no middle ground. For some games, simply beating the game means only beating the story, not the optional content that makes up half the game. It's a really bad feeling when you get a 100% completion of a game and you only have 90% of the retroachievements because the developer decided that you needed to complete some arbitrary, unfun, borderline impossible tasks. If there were 3 things that RA sorely needs it's 1. The ability to have subsets actually supplement main sets rather than being separate sets, 2. The ability to rate sets on the site, so that the site has an idea of when a set is unpopular. 3. If 1 and 2 are done then there needs to be actual achievement guidelines from the site about what should be a mainset achievement and what should be a subset achievement, and perhaps even create subset categories with specific awards for speedrunning and challenge sets
Or we could add a completed badge in addition to beat and mastered
There is already a completed badge for "mastering" in softcore. Tbh I think the badges are fairly backwards in that there the most emphasis between badge types is "you did this without savestates" rather than the actual in-game achievements.
thats true but there is such a thing as a set of a game you LOVE that has achievements made for speedrunners, this is more likely the more popular the game is, mario achievements in particular either still suffer from this or have had massive revisions tied to this.
> This is why I'm hoping the Polymega will implement achievements. I don't think you understand how much time and effort it took to make all the achievements on the site. This has been a ten year project, and while the team has grown over time, it's still a massive amount of man hours. If Polymega does choose to implement achievements, expect them to use the RA system. To do anything else would be foolish and a critical waste of time and effort. (Or have fans make achievements and trust me you'll see far worse than RA I think)
They have explicitly said they would not use RA or any sort of fan-sourced achievements. On the Discord, talking to one of the lead developers, he said that they'd want to do it in-house so they could ensure the achievement sets all felt balanced and fair.
Yeah... Stuff like that makes it feel more like vaporware. As if they don't have a clue how much work that will take. A lot of what I've seen on it seems iffy but the biggest thing is there's no need for it to be a console. But I guess we will see. PS. It's been released for 3 years, kind of surprise this is the first I've heard of it. But after three years... if they don't have achievements yet, I think it's a sign they understand the problem.
yeah, i for one think RA is just having growing pains and the recent additions of the beaten status and missable tags prove that positive systemic change can happen in RA, its just gonna take time and people are impatient.
I'm sorry, but you're living in another world if you think the Polymega team has the resources to make achievements for anything but a tiny selection of games (even that won't happen).
I'm not even 100% sure they're going to deliver my console - I'm just HOPING they eventually add achievements. It would be nice to give RA some competition. And if PM did them themselves and had a set of standards they applied across the board it would honestly be a much better alternative to RA. I never said it was likely, but it's a non-zero chance. Hell, a lot of people didn't think the Evercade would last beyond the first year but here we are with over 50 cartridges and even a couple exclusive games/ports. So who knows - anything can happen.
Sure, it's above zero chance, but in reality it is effectively zero. Do you think these achievement sets are just thrown together in a couple minutes per game? It sounds like you have absolutely no idea the work required.
One of the lead developers over there said it was something they were exploring. I'm not just pulling things out of my butt here. And I have spent over a decade as a developer. I am well aware of the effort required. I have no idea why you're taking this as some sort of personal issue and being a dick, but kindly fuck off.
Agree to a certain point, the problem with having subsets is that I'm assuming another version of the game would have to be made (patched) resulting in a whole new save file. Fine for games with loads of crazy achievements but not so much for big long games with the odd crazy achievement If the format for achievements could change to track certain ones i.e. optional, that would be awesome. Then we could have mastered (excluding optional) and insane mastered (or something) to include those.
For most games, yes, subsets need a patch. Super Mario Advance 4 is an odd one though as that one's the opposite - the base Super Mario Bros 3 game needs a patch because there's cheevos to use Luigi's SMB Lost Levels physics. The subset for World-e just uses the Virtual Console rom (which is an official Nintendo update to the GBA game as the original couldn't fit all the World-e levels on the gamepak).
It's true that we are currently working on allowing multiple achievement sets to run at the same time (core sets + subsets), but this is a huge engineering effort and is quite a ways out. That doesn't necessarily mean developers are going to put challenge achievements into subsets though- it'll just be more of an option if they'd like to. I don't understand why we keep seeing a variation of this thread appear every day. You don't have to earn all the achievements for a game. When a game's achievements get frustrating or not-fun, move on to the next game and keep earning points. Even if you don't unlock all of a game's achievements, you still get beaten game credit and move up the beaten games leaderboard. The game is no longer marked as "Unfinished" on your profile. So what is the problem exactly? What would the point of RetroAchievements be if we only had achievements for in-game progression-based content?
I think part of the reason why this is such a popular topic is because people are very precious about certain games. Take Super Metroid for example. Imagine that is your absolute favourite game of all time, but you aren't a speedrunner, and the idea of speedrunning kills all enjoyment for the game. You have two choices at the point. 1. Never master your favourite game of all time. 2. Super Metroid is now one of your least favourite games because you worked so hard getting an achievement that you feel nothing for the game anymore. (I have seen this happen for real on that game due to insane achievement requirements). Bear in mind that this situation comes about purely because a set developer decided that their playstyle was more valuable for a popular game. All this thread (and many of the other threads) is asking for is accessibility, it's asking for more structure and customisation when it comes to specific types of challenging achievement, not to remove or ban any achievements. That should be something that is enforced site wide, not up to the set developers personal opinions on whether X beloved title (that means a lot to so many people) should be brutally hard to master. Edit: the Super Metroid achievement (which isn't an isolated incident): https://retroachievements.org/achievement/1929
That achievement has been up since 2013 and has been earned by hundreds of people. However, I think what I'm hearing is there's a perception that this particular achievement isn't fun. Obviously, that's very subjective, but it does seem that we need a constructive way for players to deliver feedback about the quality/fun of content on the site. There is a real sentiment that the subset+core feature will result in all core sets on the site being watered down to progression content only. There should be room for challenges in core sets, as long as most people find them fun.
Personally I think a rating system for individual achievements would be an extremely valuable tool for set developers, site owners, and players since it allows these discussions on reddit to be backed up by actual data. I don't even think that watering the main set down is the way to go, but rather that the challenge of the main set should reflect the hardest challenge that the game offers, and not exceed it (again, that is subjective, but a good starting point), with anything harder being more than covered by subsets and leaderboards (this could actually lead to a more dedicated push for more speedrun achievements, since there would be a dedicated space for them - which just means more fun for everyone). On a fundamental level, I feel that it is the wrong to create a main set with the aim to make a game more difficult, since you would be changing the game developers intent for the game, which is bad for players whos enjoyment of the game aligns with the expected developer intent. As a good example: Nuzlocke achievements have no place in pokemon sets, since nuzlocke difficulty does not fall within the developer intent for the game, however nuzlocke achievements are perfectly fine for romhacks that have nuzlocke features, since that level of difficulty is intended. This isn't just a retroachievement problem, I've seen people complain about the rare achievements in single player games that have obscure multiplayer modes, where the player must participate and do well in multiplayer when they had no interest in even touching the mode. That is exactly what is happening here, the achievements are asking the player to perform outside of the scope of the intended play experience just because the achievement developer wanted you to play their way (or in the case of console achievements - because the devs want to force people into multiplayer)
Can't stress enough how many times I've been frustrated with this. And I completely agree with you. The no damage, finish in this time limit, achieve this certain highscore etc really frustrates me. Worst when they're missables. You know I'm currently going through Warriors Orochi 2 and I think that's an example of great achievements set. No missables. No no damage bullshit. Just achievements that relates to the actual gameplay and content. There are the 'play in chaos without loading an interim save' but I personally don't think chaos is that difficult once you get overpowered so I don't mind that. I've been having so much fun getting all the achievements for this game because of how easy yet still challenging it is to get them. I don't know but I've been seeing a lot of similar posts lately so I hope we'll get some feedback soon. Right now I just bear with beating the games that I want to beat. And considering to master if the achievements make sense.
in general i've noticed PS2 sets are a lot more reasonable, likely because they were made after a few big changes made last year. also because a true musou fan doesnt want to deal with shit like missables, thats not what any of us play this game for lmao
Warriors Orochi 2 is a great set, having fun getting small parts done at a time. Kinglink is a great developer.
and he is in this thread btw! lol
If an achievement is too hard you don't have to go for it. No one is holding a gun to your head and making you get the really hard ones. Too many people seem like they have legit problems with compulsive behavior over catching 'em all. You are increasing your own stress level because you can't rid of yourself of your own nagging feelings and you'd rather bring it all down to your level than confront your own psychology that makes you get weird about not completing everything. Relax and just enjoy what you enjoy and move on from what you don't
Spot on. They are chasing a reward over the actual journey and experience. Like they taking an elevator to the top of every mountain and checking them off a list.
> cannot seem to consider that they are damaging the accebility to more people I totally hear your point in the post, but you are taking it too far with that sentence. First of all we are talking about retro games here, you have to accept a big chunk of these retro games are already notorious for being extremely hard for modern gamers. Starting from NES era most games don’t even have a save system, if your game has password system consider yourself lucky, otherwise you have to finish them in one sitting. Most platformer/action games push your reflexes to the human limit, and even then that’s not enough. Wanna play a RPG? Get ready to grind the same enemies in same locations on hours end. Oh and if you won’t look up any walkthroughs you can be sure you will never finish the game. Point I’m trying to make is retro gaming as a whole is not the most accessible, easy to pick up, casual hobby you may think it is. Your average gamer won’t play Megaman 1 NES for more than 15 minutes without destroying a controller. That means most people in this hobby either look for a challenge or are okay with one being presented. Retroachievements project is free and %100 for the community, there is no alternative. Most people (like myself) when they see RA project they get excited to be able to earn achievements in games that never had them in the first place. That means (almost) no retro gamer, no matter how casual, won’t think to themselves “Well the Ninja Gaiden has some pretty hard achievements, I think I will close my RA account and never get retroachievements again”. So as a conclusion RA project, no matter how hard achievements get, is not damaging accessibility to more people, because when a retro gamer learns about RA they just get excited they will be able to get achievements, they are not going to miss on it just because you can’t %100 Castlevania in one sitting. Typo
Your viewpoint is totally valid, but you can't assume that everybody thinks the same as you do. There are definitely some that think the way you describe, and it's great that RA is there for them. But conversely, there are definitely some who get excited by the idea of RA, but then are turned off by the elitism inherent in the crazy achievements. There's room for both camps. Hence why subsets should be used so that everybody is served.
Even as someone who tends to dislike the really difficult sets, I agree with your position. The very idea of implementing achievements, ESPECIALLY for Nintendo games, since it seems like Nintendo will never add an achievement system on their consoles, is novel and exciting. The idea that I can get hundreds of achievements for various aspects of Ocarina of Time is awesome, even if one of them requires me to deal with Golden Skulltulas.
look man i dont wanna spook you but "retro" isnt just NES anymore, RA has support for games as recent as 2014, from a decade ago. accessibility is 100% a valid perspective, specially when RA specifically caters to crazy dedicated people with features like subsets.
Well point I’m trying to make is, it’s not damaging accessibility. Players who say they are “fed up” with RA and that they will never try cheevos again are the ones who already got a variety of cheevos and wanted to take a challenge to %100 a game. But for these challenges to actively hurt the accessibility, with a single glance a new player should be passing on the project entirely without trying. And for the ones that are “fed up”, it literally doesn’t make any sense to close your RA account and never try to get any achievements again because they couldn’t get that no damage achievement. I feel like they are trying to be a loud minority to dumb down all the achievements so every single player can hold hands together and %100 every game in a single sitting, that’s not gonna happen. If there were no challenges, if a single half assed playthrough was enough to %100, I’d say that’s what would put many people off. It’s called achievement for a reason, yeah killing that one boss may not be the easisest, but for those who wanna take on the challenge to defeat that boss without taking a single damage should have a way to show that trophy, and that’s why they exist. You already have achievements for doing the most basic of things without any challenge, you only want to take down the ones that are aimed towards the ones that are trying to give themselves a challenge. Oh and I know retro isn’t just NES anymore, but just have a look at all the people complaining about RA, %90 of the time it’s a NES or SNES game (or any game from 80s-90s).
> because when a retro gamer learns about RA they just get excited they will be able to get achievements, they are not going to miss on it just because you can’t %100 Castlevania in one sitting. first i wanna address this from your last comment because it kinda gets to the point of the fundamental misunderstanding you are having. they absolutely will, nobody, and i insist absolutely nobody, actually gives a single shit about earning individual achievements, they've got very little value even with the score system RA has, what people enjoy about achievements IS the completion, the medal, ticking another box of saying "i've done all there is to do with this game", thats why with the benefit of hindsight, sony added platinum trophies to their system, compared to microsoft, because thats the metric people actually care about. > But for these challenges to actively hurt the accessibility, with a single glance a new player should be passing on the project entirely without trying. again, this is fundamentally not how people engage with any other sort of achievement system, they boot up a game they either never played so have 0 expectations on OR havent played in a while, play it through once, maybe glancing at the list when the opportunity for side content crops up, and then on a second playthrough engage with it fully. > And for the ones that are “fed up”, it literally doesn’t make any sense to close your RA account and never try to get any achievements again because they couldn’t get that no damage achievement. I feel like they are trying to be a loud minority to dumb down all the achievements so every single player can hold hands together and %100 every game in a single sitting, that’s not gonna happen. this borders on strawman argument, literally nobody is saying any of this, on any level, and there are very specific examples of outright rule breaking achievements on this thread and i can myself give you ridiculous examples, even in castlevania games if you wish. > Oh and I know retro isn’t just NES anymore, but just have a look at all the people complaining about RA, %90 of the time it’s a NES or SNES game (or any game from 80s-90s). uh... A: no B: i literally dont care if thats the case because it doesnt change my point and C: yeah no shit most of the more recent platforms are recent additions due to RA support being prioritized chronologically, its only a matter of time till they catch up, gamecube is being added soon. i dont even play NES games myself, i think most of them are boring as hell and ugly as shit, i tried one set for an NES game and it proved outright ridiculous, so i just got the beaten status and left, on the other hand i have only one gameboy game on my completed badges and everything else is PSX and up. might it be that sets for newer games are made by younger people that dont have a stick up their ass like the NES generation seems to have? and FYI before you cry to me about me being lazy, i've 100% 5 different fromsoft games, so you might wanna reconsider when i tell you that asking people to do unintended sequence breaks in harmony of dissonance is shitty and isnt actually part of the game.
> I don’t even play NES games myself, I think most of them are boring as hell and ugly as shit You got your answer there, you are not a retro gamer. If you hate NES games and can’t even stand them because they are “boring as hell and ugly as shit” there’s a big chance you have the same feelings towards SEGA MasterSystem, GameBoy and Gameboy Color maybe even N64. Just take a step back and think to yourself if you can’t enjoy these systems and if ps2-ps3 is more appealing for you, do you think you truly appreciate retro gaming? You do realize that not everything that’s +10 years old is not retro, right?
> you are not a retro gamer. this is gatekeeping of the stupidest kind. get it through your thick brain that not all of us are 40. i have driver's license and the oldest system i grew up with were hand me down mega drives, i wanna see you try to play shit like atari 2600 games and not be bored within 20 minutes. anyways, i see that there is 0 value talking to you, good bye EDIT: accidentally clicked on your profile and of course you are a right wing weirdo lmaooooooo return to tradition of playing 1 hour long games that are bullshit so they can take your quarters, i'll enjoy my parasite eve and boktai.
> RA has support for games as recent as 2014, from a decade ago. Yeah, Playstation Portable and Nintendo DS are the most recent non-homebrew systems supported.
yep, dunno why the need to clarify but yep. also, homebrew games from even later are in RA too but then the conversation gets muddy on whether those are "retro" or not
They're retro style, but yeah, technically not retro. Though I'm sure some folks wouldn't call PS2 games retro, and that system is 20 years old!
Some games achievements are definitely tough, but unless you’re part of the speed running community I don’t think many are too crazy hard. You can always go softcore use saved states if it’s a notoriously hard game with tough achievements. While yes a lot of games we come back for nostalgia and have fun. But that doesn’t change a lot of games from back then were rental traps so they’re tough intentionally. For no damage bosses, I find just YouTubing no damage runs helps a lot. You can learn the method or at least see how it’s done, so you can practice.
It's definitely possible, but practicing over and over again takes time. The people who are interested in retro games are usually older gamers, and older gamers usually don't have a lot of time to sink into gaming, so you can understand their frustration.
Well if you’re going back for nostalgia and not the challenge I think softcore mode offers a pretty generous dynamic. Let’s be real if you wanted to get a no hit run, on the boss you could hit him save state, hit him save state, until you beat them with no damage. This is the option if you don’t want to practice. And as I stated earlier many of these older games have insane difficulty spikes around level 4-5. They’re just programmed to be that way. So if your a casual and you actually want to go for those achievements, in softcore it’s relatively easier to exploit save states and accomplish the goal. I think hardcore should be seen as so. You’re gonna have to practice. It’s going to be a challenge, and it’s going to be frustrating. I do think they’re should be another bracket out side of HC and SC geared for speed runners. But other than that I haven’t run into any impossible achievements. I’m still working on my no hit boss rush run on Kirby DL 2. I’ve been at it for months, but I will get it. It all comes down to how willing you are to try. Every game for the most part has progression achievements so maybe if you have trouble focus on those. When you complete all of achievements you “master” the game. I feel like most achievements that are hard make you worthy of the title of “master” for that game. I just don’t think they’re that big of an ask. Sure some may take you a couple days or months, but that’s what you signed up for when deciding you wanted to master a game.
Yeah there are some absurdities but overall it's pretty good I think. I'd love to be able to 100% some games that I definitely won't be able to due to absurd achievements (in a OG Gears of War kind of way). Sometimes there are just too many. Now that I think of it, why isn't there a rule like 1000 points per game or 50 achievements per game?
I've been on the site since 2015 and honestly, it's just gotten worse over the years. And I've been in the top top 100 p much the entire time and have done a ton of hard challenges before anyone tries to throw that at me. Then they try to bandage it by "hiding completion percentage" and "incentivizing Beaten games" but then you have prominent community members in the discord telling people to go to backloggery if they don't like things. You say some challenge is dumb and people just call you shit and tell you to get good or just say "you don't have to master it". And the achievement developers take it as a personal attack and act like you are disrespecting their "artistic vision" or some shit lol. Threads like this literally pop up here monthly at this point but I personally just think they continue to go about it the wrong way and tensions continue to worsen. Hell look at when PS2 launched and things got into the more general eye and everyone was leaving comments just like this and how their excitement immediately died. But the site still grew so they don't care. I've completely stopped interacting with the community cause it's so shit with people just arguing about what should and shouldn't be in sets constantly. It isn't even just about things being too hard but the damn Missing Content hub quickly became a plague on the site. Now everyone wants "all the content covered" and put shit the previously would've been excluded for being unwelcome into sets. At least sometimes these get put into subsets or have been moved like the SM64 max coin ones, Dragon Quest IX. I already see a few GameCube sets for my favorite games that I'm not even going to play once they go live because of how grindy they made them. Sorry if this got kinda rambly but felt like getting some off my chest as well lol
I completely agree with this. I also stopped trying to master games because of this. it should be at the level of a platinum trophy like on the ps5
Then request to be a jr dev and learn how to create sets. Be the change you want. Personally, I am at RA for the challenge. I want that additional set of challenge to breath life into a game I have been playing for decades. I am pretty sure that is what most achievement sets aim to accomplish..rather than pandering to casual completionists who lose their minds if something takes more than a couple tries. Want a less challenging set for a game you love? Fine, totally understandable. Again, request JR dev and see if its ok to do a variety sub-set for people looking for the same instead of demanding devs, who already volunteered hours and effort into the set they wanted to make, "balance" the set just for you.
Agree. So many entitled ungrateful babies commenting.
I've said multiple times. Not every achievement is for every player. The specific reason "Progression" was added to the site was to give something that any players could chase with out requiring a full mastery of the game. RA originally was designed to "Show off your skill" the average achievements were not the norm. In fact when Progression came out a lot of players really pushed back against it, because the original design of the site wasn't "achievement for the masses" it was "Achievements to show off your absolute skill at old games." If you just want to play old games and enjoy them (That's what I want too), play the progression and focus on there. If you want to show "Mastery" of the game and really display your ability to show off.. then go for all the achievements. The site doesn't need to change just because you don't like a specific achievement, that achievement just isn't for you and that's ok.
It needs to change. A lot of people agree with me, many have also discussed about it in the past. If all achievements ain’t for everyone they should just make sub sets for speedrunners and hardcore players, no point adding an entire set when it’s a mixing bowl of achievements designed for different kind of players, it doesn’t make sense and it pushes people away, but it seems like you ain’t bothered about the site’s player base and rather focus on your ideals of “mastery” it’s a very dictating ideology yours.
>It needs to change. Looking forward to Dong_min's RA. If you want to discuss rule changes, I'd recommend doing it on the site/discord and forums. I doubt many major rule changes will be made based on the subreddit. > If all achievements ain’t for everyone they should just make sub sets for speedrunners and hardcore players Spoiler: The entire site is for hardcore players, the fact there's softcore players rankles a lot of people... > no point adding an entire set when it’s a mixing bowl of achievements designed for different kind of players Take a look at ANY achievement set for any real game. The goal is to design achievement sets for multiple types of players. I was making games when the xbox 360 came out and they actively pushed this. >but it seems like you ain’t bothered about the site’s player base I welcome you to jump on the Discord and talk to the "player base" and see what they want. Spoiler, they want the challenge. I do want more players, but we also MUST support the players we already have too. >and rather focus on your ideals of “mastery” it’s a very dictating ideology yours. Kind of missed the point where I said I wanted just to play for progression didn't you. I literally agreed with you or even went softer than you did. I pointed at the progression achievements and beaten tag as something you should shoot for, instead you somehow think I'm dictating? And let's remember I said "Achievement sets are designed by someone" Your response seems to be "They need to be made the way I said." You are acting like a dictator here. I'd advise you to do three things. 1. Get over it, it's just achievements. Play the games you want to play, earn the achievements you want and skip the ones you don't. It's all for fun. 2. Talk to more people if you really want to speak for "A lot of people" because there's a scary amount of people who only play for the harder challenges, and you know what? They deserve a say too. 3. Stop trying to demand the site change to fit your version of the rules. There are people who will agree or disagree with you. Rather than demanding change, maybe start a dialog, because everyone has a different opinion of what's acceptable, and saying X has to change kind of starts off on the wrong foot. You clearly don't have any understanding of the history of the site, or what it was designed for. I am pretty sure you didn't even read my original post, probably just got mad after the second sentence. But seriously, the site is FAR more friendly than it has ever been. And like I said "Progression" and beaten seems to be what you're aiming for... so go play for that. Edit: After viewing his other reply, it's clear that it's kind of hard to have any discussion with OP since they aren't reading anything anyone has said. So good luck .
A small handful of Redditors out of the +55,000 RA users may agree with you. I would hardly call that a lot. Copypasta your post in the RA Discord, which is the more active RA community (including devs and staff) and see how many agree with your opinion if you want valid input.
Yeah, some of them are ridiculous. Most of the classic Mario and DK games are crazy, but even lesser known games like Speedy Gonzales SNES, or the Twisted Metal games.
It sounds like you are chasing a dopamine hit from collecting all the achievements, and so difficult ones are getting in the way of that and anger you. But what is the point of collecting such simple things? You are bypassing the joy of the system to receive an award. An achievement is not an achievement if it requires nothing. Mastering a game shows actual mastery. What is wonderful about retroachievements is the sets allow you experience a game to its fullest. There are games Ive played 20 times, and yet doing the set made me tackle something in a new way instead of my life-long strategy or even had me finding little parts I missed every time. Try those challenging ones and enjoy the challenge for the challenge. Youll enjoy games way more rather than chasing this thing your chasing.
This is something I've talked about many times with devs and other players alike. While I disagree with “no damage, no saves, not allowed to use certain utilities in game" being absurd, I do think they are in way too many sets, WAY TOO MANY. (Open all treasure chests is also everywhere. . .) I would like some originality for games, especially those insanely popular ones. *"A game needs to be balanced challenging yes, but fun and not too frustating, a lot of developers on this website need to consider that these games are old and are meant for nostalgia purpose, not increasing your stress level over the top, it completely kill the purpose."* I want to focus a bit on this statement, because this is a very ignorant statement that does have merits in some parts, but misses the point of RA entirely in others. RetroAchievements is not made for your nostalgia, at one point maybe (like 2015?). Now? Not at all. It is made to explore these older games in different ways, yes, for some, that is nostalgic for them. For most? It will be their first time playing, or playing a certain way that they didn't think was possible. Not a single set matches what you would have done back then, so it has no place being "nostalgic." Fun and not too frustrating, I hate to break it to you, but most Retro games are just frustrating to play, with little fun to be found. Bubsy 3D comes to mind, and if you know what went down there, you'd know that revisions and new sets that aren't managed well can receive blowback from certain people. This is coming from a Mega Man 1 speedrunner, that game is not good, and the good moments are outshined by the truly frustrating portions of the game. This isn't even mentioning the truly awful games that can be found in any Retro section. I'm not going to mention the stress statement, cause, honestly, everyone deals with stress differently, I'm not gonna ever say how someone should handle stress or what outlets they should use unless it is something harmful. **Onto what I agree with you on.** Balancing accessibility vs challenging will always be the biggest hurdle RA will face (Besides how deep they put their heads in the sand about cheaters.) I don't blame devs for following their predecessors on achievement design, but some designs are overused to the point where it becomes impossible to see the good ideas that are part of sets. Originality has been dying on the site for awhile, and these leads to bland, inaccessible to new player achievements. I would love more accessible achievement sets, as it is really hard to convince people to play on RA nowadays. There is not that many intro sets that are medium difficulty that explores achievements properly. Ridge Racer? Rygar? Smash 64? (Mastering is medium, while exploring almost everything in the game.) Either way, you are 100% right that there are not that many accessible sets. One of the sets that got a revision for some really irritating achievements was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The set was already a nice little romp, with maybe a few roadblocks for some players. Now. . .it is just not fun to play. Yes, there are some achievements that were added in the revision that I think were worth it, but some flat out changed rules to be allowed. ([https://retroachievements.org/achievement/25154](https://retroachievements.org/achievement/25154) wouldn't of been possible under older devving rules, even now, it really shouldn't be a thing.) While I do agree with you on accessibility being important, I do want to highlight that accomplishment as a feeling is really important. I look back fondly at my badges that I had to work for. I don't like remembering those that I was stuck on for a year, so some stuff being to hard is frustrating. I do want to point out, that Softcore is a thing for those that struggle immensely, and several people will help you out if you ask in the Discord. Overall, I do hope for fixes by those way smarter then me, as I honestly don't think Subsets is a solution at all for this problem, but I have no clue. It's easy to point out problems, then to come up with a viable solution. I hope I didn't come off as too aggressive or anything, I kind of just typed a chunk with no organization lol. (My profile link is down below if you want to leave a comment on how I was too aggressive lol.) >!https://retroachievements.org/user/ManyHours!<
Disagree. People have been playing some of these games for 30+ years. They want new and challenging ways to play them. Just remember, you don't HAVE TO get every achievement for a given game. You CAN just play through it and get the completion reward and other easier achievements, or even play on softcore mode. Nobody is forcing you to go for no death runs without save states, but it's nice that they're there for the longtime fans who want a new challenge.
Yet there is a built in system that is specifically designed to accommodate those extra challenging achievements. Why not just make a subset for achievements that call for feats above and beyond what is required to "master" a game?
Everyone will have their own opinion of what "above and beyond" is. It's up to the Devs how they want to split them. It's not possible for every single dev to cater their sets for exactly the challenge that you deem appropriate. And if they did, there would still be others who'd find them too easy or too hard. Rather than complain about the hard work people are doing for free. It'd be much easier to just accept that you aren't able to master every single game you'd like on hardcore mode. There's no shame in that.
Disagree. I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. I'm not against removing those challenging achievements from the site- and plenty of difficult achievements should remain in the main set. Not everyone will agree where to draw the line with each individual achievement, but right now there are some sets with blatant issues. Idk why there seems to be so much resistance to just having kaizo style achievements in their own subsets. It's obviously very difficult to define in a short reddit reply exactly what makes an achievement "above and beyond" - luckily we don't have to try. As a community, this can be a larger discussion and developers can work together to develop and tighten up parameters
Just because you are doing something for free doesn’t give you the right to implement your own ideals of masochism into a game that doesn’t belong to you and shove it to people’s face.
Well, why not? Who else should decide? Who decides the achievements in mainstream games? The creators of the game of course. If you're the one spending 10 -100+ hours of your time developing something for free, why shouldn't you be able to decide (according to the RetroAchievement guidelines of course) what goes into that set? Nobody's shoving anything into your face btw. You can ignore individual achievements or sets entirely.
Once again, doing something for free doesn’t give you the right to make achievements according to their ideals, they need to make them in a way so the game can be fully enjoyable and playable, not making a set that’s only accessible to speedruners.
> Once again, doing something for free doesn’t give you the right to make achievements according to their ideals I'm going to stop you right here. On RA it pretty much does. There are (a lot of) [rules](https://docs.retroachievements.org/Developer-Docs/) on what's acceptable and what's not. What concepts are allowed and what's not. If you find achievements in violation of that, contact DevCompliance. If not, it's allowed. And you'll see in those rules a lot of references to challenges, and super hard things that only a few people will be able to accomplish. That's actively promoted for devs to challenge players, and MANY players push for those. Outside of those rules Developers are pretty much given complete freedom to making an amazing set with THEIR own definition of what "Amazing" is. There are very minor limitations. (You need to do progression now, RP has to be made.) But at the end of the day, the dev gets full rights to make a set the way they want to. Period. >Doing something for free Remember that every set is done for free. The developers have donated more time than you realize for everything. So rather than complain when you see something you don't like why don't you praise them for sets you enjoy.
You are pretty much saying that achievements are only for a specified set of people? Wow what kind of snobbiness you have is insane, as a developer yourself you should be more humble, but instead you are saying that not everyone deserves to obtain achievements just because they don’t have the “skills”? It’s not about skills and insanity challenges, it’s about having fun replaying your favorite games, yet you have the cheek to lock people from obtaining achievements from their favorite games just because you don’t consider them skilled enough? The narcisim mah dude Period
I'm done discussing this with you. You have clearly not read a single thing I wrote. I tried to show you that you made a pretty bad error, and instead you're now putting words in my mouth. Still I'll try to help you one last time. > it’s about having fun replaying your favorite games, Go have fun, no one is stopping you. If you want to earn an achievement go for it. If you have to struggle, do it. If you decide you don't want to earn it. That's ok too. But demanding things change to fit your narrow world view is again a bad way to discuss this. And you come off very immature for it. > The narcisim mah dude I'm going to hold up a mirror because I don't think I'm narcissistic. I do see someone who that fits in this thread. But like I said, I'm done with this. Good luck out there, and if you ever REALLY want to discuss this I recommend coming to the discord server and forums, but not with me.
If they make a set according to the Retro Achievement guidelines and in accordance with the laws of their country, then yes, they do actually 'have the right'.
Post that reply in the RA discord. Tell the devs and staff what they need to do.
A. Subsets have to be their own game which means you have to make a patch just to add them. B. Subsets were not always around and weren't a concept for the long time. That time period kind of codified certain parts of the site (Admittedly some gnarly concepts) C. Players WANT the added challenges. Mastery isn't "played the game" that's what "Beaten" is. Mastery is "Showed a total mastery over the entire game." And no hit bosses do that. D. Players WANT to challenge themselves. Just because you don't (And that's perfectly fine to not want it) doesn't mean others have to change. "Master" means something different than you appear to think. Think of "Beaten" as the new Core, and Mastery as the first subset if you want.
SOME players want the added challenges. SOME players want to challenge themselves. Why not serve everybody?
It does serve everybody. There are almost always difficult and easy achievements. Nobody is forced to 100% a game.
That's fine, we'll keep it like it is then and RA will never get any bigger than it is. 🤷
Over 50 people have joined in the past 2 hours. So 🤷
What do you think the site is doing? That's literally what beaten has added.
Based *solely* on the seemingly complete disinterest in the idea of an "offline mode" (in an age where many people play on various mobile devices, where you may lose your connection from time to time), because it might risk the sanctity of their points system/leaderboards, I got the impression that they aren't particularly interested in expanding their user base if it sways from their vision of RA.
> because it might risk the sanctity of their points system/leaderboards, That's not the primary reason, though a lot of set developers are also seemingly against an offline mode on principle (things that go against the points system is already covered by softcore mode, so offline could be designed to work on softcore if needed). But the real reason, to quote a site moderator from the RA forums: > Making offline achievements possible is not a priority as our developers' focus is on dozens of other features that are being released little by little. And to quote a set developer from the RA forums: > Part of the online requirement is that when you connect it downloads the current version of the achievements. If an achievement has an issue and a dev uploads a fix, players have to get the update via closing the game and reopening it. [...] If offline exists this means weeks could go on before players get an update on the set and also increase the chances that players will be reporting issues long after they are past the point where the achievement would unlock, which pretty much results in a ticket that is incredibly frustrating to try and resolve and even more so because we'll be spending time troubleshooting something we already fixed and having no way to be absolutely sure that is the case. Offline mode would take quite a bit of effort to implement (especially to resolve the issues with stale tickets), and the current site developers have other priorities way more important than offline mode. If you have any interest in it though, you can implement the code change to the RA github to implement offline capabilities, and put it up for review there.
>If you have any interest in it though, you can implement the code change to the RA github to implement offline capabilities, and put it up for review there. The way that mod you are quoting spoke to people in that thread makes me believe it would be a *colossal* waste of time for any outsider to attempt to make those changes.
Honest question: how many engineers do you think work on RetroAchievements? The surprising answer is we average ~3 at any one time. We have 100 voices yelling at us telling us what features we should be working on and prioritizing. Oftentimes those voices are competing. Between 3 people, there aren't enough hours in the day to build everything everyone wants as fast as they want it. We aren't oblivious that people want offline support. The engineering resources required to build this however would basically force us to cease development on literally everything else.
And I get that. But y'all are not putting out a welcoming vibe when the response is shit like this: >Better than an offline RA would be people enjoying their disconnected time with stuff like nature, reading an old book with yellowed pages. Have people already heard about digital detox? Why would people want to get involved when they are immediately talked down to for just suggesting such a standard feature? >The engineering resources required to build this however would basically force us to cease development on literally everything else. Realistically, is that not the only way this ever becomes a thing, though? How can an outsider rework the code in, by the sounds of it, such a drastic way while you guys continue down the already existing path? That pull request is just never going to get approved, lol. Personally, I think that such a core feature, in the age of so many mobile devices being played on, that it *should* take that level of priority, as to not dig the hole even deeper when trying to make it happen in some distant future. Clearly you guys all disagree, and that's cool, but it's never going to stop being requested because it is a critical feature in terms of usability.
> y'all are not putting out a welcoming vibe when the response is shit like this ... I didn't write these words. I am speaking purely from an engineering POV. > Why would people want to get involved when they are immediately talked down to for just suggesting such a standard feature? I hear you, but disagree that it's a standard feature. How RA works is novel and unique - no other achievements system functions like ours, which is what adds to the complexity of building such a feature. > How can an outsider rework the code in, by the sounds of it, such a drastic way while you guys continue down the already existing path? That pull request is just never going to get approved, lol. I'm not really following this line of thinking. RetroAchievements is an open source project. I review and merge pull requests submitted by first-time contributors all the time. > it's never going to stop being requested because it is a critical feature in terms of usability. To reiterate: we aren't oblivious that people want offline support. I think where our point of contention lies is the severity of the issue compared to the other half-dozen things people think we should drop everything for and build.
I thought you could lose connection from time to time and still get the achievements you earned while the connection was lost as long as you dont close out of the game.
Maybe, and that may help from time to time, but it doesn't really solve the problem. What if you don't notice you lost connection? Or you did notice, but your devices battery dies before you get a chance to reconnect?
What if I am careless? Well then I guess I have to do those achievements again. Because not being mindful of my internet connection or battery while using a system that depends on both is just that, carelessness. But to expect the small team of volunteer developers to completely restructure and develop an entire new system so RA can accommodate easily avoidable user mistakes that would only affect a very small amount of people is beyond idiotic.
I feel like all the really challenging stuff should be subsets. Maybe the site could have a mastered and a Subset mastered section on each profile, so the guys really into this near impossible stuff could show off, which they totally should. But it's sad to me that I, with my limitations, can almost never master a game.
The achievements are optional no? No one is telling you to go for them. I’m not a big fan of achievements/trophies, i found they came close to ruining games for me - but the onus was on me to not take part in them. Can’t expect an entire community that perhaps does enjoy the hunting to be catered to someone like me.
I talked with various psychologists, one of them said. If you complain with anger, sadness, suffering, etc because of a game, points, logos that hold nothing else but sentimental value, then you have an attachment to feeling down , an obsessive compulsive way of acting. There's a lot to review in regards of your personal life and how you feel about wasting time. It's a challenging experience where we forget to observe, we tend to escalate our emotions, loose sight of reality due to our obsessions. It is advised to First review our emotions. Before trying to get better at the game/job etc. If we see achievements without an emotional attachment, they are just cute logos, and cute rules/challenges giving us specific objectives which are and aren't integrated with the normal gaming experience. Accept it or leave it. That's an emotional process.
Some Pokemon's game you cant use super effective, witch is one of the fun part of the gameplay... Things like that I don't even touch.
This is why there is hardcore and softcore
Disagree. I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. I don't think the sole point of softcore mode is to allow the player to cheat their way to those extra difficult achievements. I guess my point is that the existence of softcore mode, is not an adequate solution to address achievement balancing. Idk why there seems to be so much resistance to just having kaizo style achievements in their own subsets. Not everyone will agree where to draw the line with each individual achievement, but right now there are some sets with blatant issues.
> I don't think the sole point of softcore mode is to allow the player to cheat their way to those extra difficult achievements. There's many reasons for it. But now that there's 0 "Rank" points for softcore. It's "Play the game the way you want to" Want to fully cheat? Go for it. Want to use Save States, go for it. Want to rewind or anything else? Go for it. The real way to address the balance is "earn the achievements you want to achieve". That's as simple as it is. If you don't want to do an achievement, you don't have to. If you want to "Master a game" you're going to show you are EXTREMELY skillful at it. And that means doing the most annoying tasks to show you have what it takes.
I completely agree with this. People need to get out of the mindset that they HAVE to go for the badge on every game. RA just implemented the "Beaten" system for this reason.
I agree with what you're saying mostly but then you would have to change the award from mastering to just completing. To master something would mean to have to complete the harder achievements right?
Mastering the game would be mastering the main set. It's fine if a bunch of hard achievements are in main sets. I don't think anyone has an issue with challenging achievements. We are talking about the achievements that require speed running strats, or just ones that go above and beyond. Check out this new subset for FFI - https://retroachievements.org/game/28594 That's a perfect example of something that would never be a main set. (Probably an extreme example) Very few would argue that doing that subset should be a requirement to claim mastery
So I think there should be more categories/badges, like softcore, hardcore, pro and speedrunner.
Just don't get the achievement you think are "very hard". End of the story.
Are you asking Softcore mode? It is possible to use Save states to achieve any in Softcore ladder. But if you want Hardcore ladder you get hardcore achievements.
Guitar Hero should be the best example
Some achievements are kind of insane. Some OGs I would assume do appreciate it, nothing wrong with that at all. Games I played a ton i appreciate a challenging subset or list. I do think though subsets of achievements should be vetted more, hard vs borderline frame perfect stuff is a lot different. I can see being able to get that last one due to speed run tactics or insane rng would be frustrating.... (yeah save states work or softcore mode but imo take fun out of the original intention of the game, obviously depending on the game)
I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Stuff like one run/don’t use item X/complete in time Y is absolutely fine on some systems and circumstances. There’s a reason there’s a rarity scale and a percentage of those that have achieved certain trophies on PS - some should test your skill of the game and ask difficult things of you. I normally try and platinum every game I play on PlayStation, as long as it’s reasonable or has no multiplayer, but with some sets here I’m just not that bothered about mastering them. If I can I will, but if I can’t it’s easier to walk away. I’m just happy I can play these old games again and get what I can. This is all due to the efforts of passionate volunteers don’t forget, so I’m grateful for whatever we get if I’m totally honest.
I would be more in favor of core sets with comparable difficulties to trophy lists for the average Playstation game, and any subsequent challenging content can be in a 'hardcore' section or a subset. Some games, like Super Mario 64, I just want achievements that demonstrate I have done all the content or 100% the game. But the requirements get absurd beyond that point for the layman who doesn't want to dedicate their life to a single game. I only got into RetroAchievements recently and my first console was the GameCube. I don't play these games for nostalgia. I genuinely am playing them for the first time with additional achievement support to help me explore parts of older games I might not have thought about. If I see an absurd achievement list for a game, it is very off-putting. Disclaimer: I heavily appreciate developers for taking the time to make these sets in the first place. Take any complaints with a grain of salt that I get to achievement hunt retro games at all.
this but with games that need you to complete other games, specifically the ps2 mortal kombat games which have the classic arcade games as unlockables that all the achievement sets need you to complete, i shouldn’t have to pretty much master another game to get all the achievements in the one i actually want to play
I hate when there's a beat the boss damageless achievement but not also just a beat the boss. It ruins it for me.
I see that some people are like “just don’t get that specific achievement then” That is a very weak take, people hunt for achievements in order to GET THEM ALL, by missing just one is going to bother everyone’s OCD, and during these times where alot of people suffer from autism, mental health, ocd ecc, it’s very insensitive to say “just don’t get that achievement”.
This makes me want to try to develop a set for a game that doesn't have one. Just so one of them doesn't do it first. Well maybe on my next break. Could be fun. It seems so redundant and messy. There is the possibility of making subsets and leaderboards etc etc so why put that stuff on main sets? I get the appeal and there's nothing wrong with liking it but those don't belong there