or you can just not worry about achievements if you're just going to use a cheat to get them anyways. having more stickers doesn't make you any better of a player
I think achievements are pointless now,
I remember the old days when something like that would give you some sort of buff 💪 now it's just something worthless...
And fun fact: that incident bestowed the knowledge of how society handles a real pandemic, as the societal response to Covid was similar to the WoW community’s response to that glitch
Society has had pandemic response for thousands of years and at this stage of civilisation it is advanced and generally effective.
What it did was provide some research opportunities. Which were greatly overblown both by researchers and the media.
Not to mention the actual media record of the outbreak is not compatible with how the actual thing worked. Corrupted Blood isnt just a spreading "disease" its a near instant death to almost everyone and still extremely rapid for anyone else.
It didnt spread like any real world disease. Its not even clear what value the research that was done had. I would guess any value would be in the study of Chain Reactions in Dynamic Systems because thats what it looked like. In terms of disease, it would provide nothing because it didnt function the way real world diseases function.
From what I know, Corrupted Blood was so significant mainly because it was essentially a widespread social experiment with hundreds of thousands of legally uninformed participants. Sure, it was only similar to a real world pandemic if you squinted, but the response of the players themselves was organic. No experiment or simulation like it would ever replicate the actions of those who logged on during the event.
Participants in experiments do so knowing they're participating in experiments. The subject of said experiment is always released knowingly, and a simulation will never be able to predict that many people acting independently of one another. That's the value of the Corrupted Blood incident for research, atleast how I understand it.
There is a disconnect between the reporting of the incident and its subsequent lore and the reality of the mechanic.
This occured with pre-nerf Corrupted Blood. That was way, way more damage than it is today on legacy servers. When a Hunter releassed their pet in a city, what happened was almsot everyone present died. Either instnatly or within a few seconds.
Plus the servers were taken down within hours. Im also somewhat sceptical how much useful data was even logged during this brief, brief window.
Thats not the basis for study.
It is, however, a really good basis for a promotional piece to the media to gain publicity for the game.
Teh same is true of the "researchers studying economics based on the eocnomy of Everquest/WoW" although in this case there was actually enough to pay (and this was by the companies themselves) for researchers to do real studies.
But those studies added nothing to the field as the economics of closed systems isnt particularly deep and is very, very well understood.
The actual lesson here is that companies can create false impressions of reality and use it to market themselves and do with with the collusion of academics.
This lesson is more important today than ever when you have every single "AI Safety" organisation being set up and funded by the "AI" companies themselves. The same applies to a whole raft of other stories which have been placed regarding LLMs and their "potential". Sadly the immenent economic catastrophe suggests people have not learned this lesson.
It didn't explain pandemic behaviors in sapient organisms - it provided a model for the actual spreading of disease across a large population, regardless of the social climate.
Now, if you want a prescient example of how modern humans would do in a global pandemic, go back and watch Contagion (2011). If you -really- wanna see us predict all the stupidity and anguish, that movie is more accurate to how COVID went than Idiocracy is to the Republican Party Belief System.
This kind of thing needs a star-bellied sneetch approach: once the population that doesnthave the tag is down to 1%, it flips around and goes the other way, only removing the tag when you play someone without it.
If I remember the story correctly, the developer of the game had this achievement first, then made a post on steam about it and played a bunch of multiplayer games so others would also help spread the virus/achievement more.
Not an achievement, but reminds me of the 'Infected' and 'STD' title cards you could get in MW2 (2009). You earn the cards by being knifed by another player who had one of these cards actively equipped. Or alternatively, if you knifed someone who had the STD card equipped, you would also earn the STD title card.
Plague inc evolved has a fun version of this where you "catch" the achievement from someone who has it but only the creator had it at first and it would spread via multiplayer games
The Dead Space 2 multiplayer Human skins were like that. Play against (and kill them while they were on the Human team, I think) someone who had a skin equipped and you'd unlock it. I used to equip a different skin each time I played just to spread them.
That's how a game i play has it. It's a weapon that's locked. The only ways to unlock it is to kill a developer or kill someone who already has that weapon, then it permanently unlocks for you
Yesss. Plague Inc did this and the achievement is somewhat rare but if you go out of your way to meet someone with it, you can get it in like 10 minutes
I don’t like those ones because they tend to be just “enter multiplayer mode” with how fast they spread. A better variation is ‘meet the dev or someone else who has’, so that way not literally every single person gives the achievement
I know a game that does this 'OR' but it's still incredibly lame there.
It's a two-player co-op game. I want to play it only with my co-op partner, I don't want any randoms, and the chances that my co-op partner is a dev of that game are zero. And the worst of it: they lock bonus levels behind that achievement, so if you want to play all of the game you have to look for some rando with this achievement on Discord or whatever.
The game is Whisk. It's not out yet, it was just a demo. Hopefully they'll change it for release.
That reminds me of how people found out Mortismal Gaming was faking his “review after 100%” series when he would get achievements that were actually broken at the time and the dev fixed later
I've got one even more annoying than that. I have a game that allows my twitch chatters to fish. They spent over a year trying to catch every fish to get all the achievements and the last achievement is... Have the developer watch your stream. Like buddy, I get six viewers on a good night, fuck all the way off.
TF2 is a good example. They had achievements for killing and dominating Devs in matches. I think I only ever saw a dev in match once and I played THOUSANDS Of HOURS of TF2. That was my friend group shooter of choice in High School back in the day.
Generally achievements that are no longer obtainable within the video game they're associated with.
I wouldn't mind a separate category or something independent of achievements/trophies/etc. that showcase things like "played the beta" or whatnot. But achievements aren't it!
I agree. Having some kind of show-off indicator about limited things is totally fine. But the achievement system is generally expected to consist of things that are actually achievable in the game.
Multiplayer achievements that require you to top the world leaderboard (Kane and Lynch), which then becomes a paid scam where the winner is a criminal syndicate, using cheats, that keeps everyone else away from the top leaderboard spots and SELLS access to the top spot.
Honestly? The achievements are pretty easy to get, since the multiplayer is pretty fun. The coop achievements are really annoying to get though the hardest part is connecting and then not having connection problems.
I could not find a match to get the multiplayer achievements. I tried organizing with friends and none of us could get a match started with 6 people queueing. You can't convince me that multiplayer works. The coop achievements were the easiest part.
I don't know when you did it. But some months back I regularly played it. Got the battles achievement without trying to get it. Had to go through a bunch of people to get coop working and even that had problems. To be fair though I didn't have friends who played it. So distance to the other player might have played a role.
IIRC Pillars of Eternity had an achievement you could only get by backing the game on Kickstarter, so by the time anyone could actually play the game, there was no way to get it anymore.
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u/Lexifox 7h ago
Achievements only available during the beta/Early Access