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Tag: Achievements
Valve Addresses Fake Steam Games Again, Again, Again, Again
Valve is once again taking on fake games plaguing Steam, this time focusing on achievements. In a leaked post to the private developer forums, Valve announced that games will now be subject to confidence constraints that will limit how many achievements a game can have and how those achievements affect your account, until the game is validated as being an actual product that people are buying and playing.
The post notes that, until a game is validated as being genuine, it will be limited to 100 achievements and progress will not be visible, nor will it count toward global achievement numbers. Achievement games have become more prevalent on Steam due to Valve’s lax restriction and quality control on products, with an entire genre forming around games that offer thousands of achievements with no real underlying game, generally simply requiring the game to be launched and idling to generate achievements.
This move is very similar to one that Valve took against trading cards, where Valve placed limits on which games would be eligible for the marketable, tradeable cards. It is important to note that unlike trading cards, where an entire black market of mostly Russian bots formed to farm games developed purely to profit off of fraudulent card sales, that achievements are absolutely worthless in Steam other than for decoration and ego purposes.
(Source: Twitter)
MMOments: Marvel Heroes Anniversary Achievements
Marvel Heroes is in the fourth week of its second anniversary, and that means if you haven’t already started working on the related achievements, you’re probably too late. If you haven’t been tuning into the ARPG these past few weeks, you missed out on a lot of free stuff. A random hero, Angel team up, Iron Man team up, Groot pet, cow portal drops, and more.
There are five achievements to obtain and they are pretty self-explanatory even if they require a fair amount of grind in order to obtain. One thing to keep in mind is that the achievement tracking system right now is hot garbage. It won’t properly update its numbers unless you literally have the window open while you progress. Your count is still being kept, but don’t be scared if you find forty-odd cake slices and check the window to find that it still shows your old number.
You need to log out and back in for the tracker to update itself.
1. Marvel Heroes’ 2nd Anniversary
The goal here is to obtain all of the other four anniversary achievements. Self-explanatory.
2. Collection Cakewalk
Not so much of a cakewalk. The goal here is to find 365 2-year anniversary cake slices. Cake slices drop at a much faster rate than eternity splinters do, I counted around four to five drops of cake slices for every eternity splinter, but my findings aren’t scientific and shouldn’t be used as a measuring tool. With a drop about every two minutes, this is going to be a long haul.
Assume about six hours of game time, assuming there isn’t a farming method.
The good side is that you won’t have to interrupt your regularly scheduled grinding in order to churn out these cake slices, they drop during virtually all combat situations (that I’m aware of). Personally, I’ve been leveling up Cyclops while grinding cube shards, and managed to grind out pretty much all of the slices in six and a half to seven hours.
This is the longest achievement in the anniversary event to obtain, so my advice is to not focus on it. Look at what else you need, and grind for that. The cake slices will come and, before you know it, you’ll have enough.
3. The Cake Is Not A Lie
Easiest achievement to get, you should already have a year 2 cake.
4. Defeat Mandarin with the Iron Man Mark II Team-Up
Also straightforward, but timely. You’ll need to obtain the correct team-up character and take him through the Hydra Island terminal. Defeat Mandarin with him active and you’ve got it made.
5. I Want You Back
Defeat 2,015 enemies with the Potted Groot Pet. This one will be difficult if you didn’t pick up the Potted Groot Pet while it was available. And by difficult, I mean impossible. This one is easy, since the Groot plant can’t be attacked and won’t be phased out during combat.
As hard (or as easy) as it is to believe, you’ll beat the 2,015 enemies with Groot long before you find the 365 cake slices.
Marvel Heroes Introduces Achievements
Marvel Heroes players have another set of things to collect, with the introduction of in-game achievements. Today’s update adds hundreds of achievements, rewarding players with credits, costumes, pets, and more. Achievements span everything from leveling up, collecting items, defeating enemies, and more.
You can find the announcement at the link below. Also coming with today’s update is new content tasking heroes with battling Ultron, tying in with the new Avengers movie.
(Source: Marvel Heroes)
Guild Wars 2 Impressions Part 2: Crafting, WvWvW
First off, I would like to apologize to the servers currently fighting Blackgate. Sorry we are completely dominating the board, that is. I kid, but seriously my server is whooping some major ass in the world vs world scene. Anyway, in the previous hands on I had a chance at discussing the questing of Guild Wars 2 and the overflow servers. For today’s hands on I looked at the World Vs World Vs World and crafting.
1. Crafting Myself A Better Headline
Guild Wars 2 allows you to take on two crafts at a time, but with a catch: Apparently you can swap them at any time and still retain the levels (don’t quote me on this). Additionally, it doesn’t matter what your professions are, you are able to collect resources from any skill as long as you have the requisite tool. Each tool has a certain number of uses before it breaks and needs to be replaced, and each tool has certain tiers that must be purchased in order to gather higher level items.
Crafting should be familiar to anyone who has played an MMO. You find materials by salvaging items (which, like Guild Wars, is done with a kit and is not its own profession), gathering resource nodes, and gutting mobs for their delicious flesh and skins. Unlike its fellow games, however, Guild Wars 2 has a fancy ability to deposit your crafting goods remotely. So if you are running around and suddenly find yourself filled up with ingots, fibers, pelts, and more, you can hit a simple button and deposit them in your collections bank. Later on when you are at a crafting station, you can just as easily withdraw said items.
Naturally some of the materials you won’t be able to get at all from the wild, forcing your hand to purchase from the many in-game NPCs. Certain resources also can only be purchased with karma points, which are obtained by completing live events. Additionally, crafting is quite a bit more involved than your average MMO. Most crafting skills have raw materials that are crafted into components, but also require another step before they can be turned into armor/weapons. For instance, in order to make a leather vest, one must first create a couple of vest parts which are then crafted into the vest.
The monetary restrictions of crafting prevent you from out-leveling your character in skills.
2. World Vs World Vs World: My Word
There is a word for Guild Wars 2’s world vs world vs world mode, but I’m too busy beating down the hordes of the other servers to think about it. World Vs World allows players to represent their server against select opponents in rounds that last two weeks. At the end of the two week period, the scores are tallied and the servers with the best scores win. This takes place on four massive maps where players fight for control over various territories. The zones act as any normal Guild Wars 2 area, so there are also mobs (both passive and aggressive) and resource nodes to be mined for goods, as well as merchants, trainers, and profession zones.
The number of options to help your team in World Vs World is truly astounding. You can fortify keeps, protect caravans, attack enemy keeps, defend your own keeps, operate siege weaponry, and rebuild after a devastating defense. Handy markers on the map let you know where battle is taking place, and keep assaults quickly turn into massive sieges with well over a hundred players present. The experience of being in one of these sieges, both as attacker and defender, is quite difficult to express without experiencing it for yourself. The guilds already in place are doing their best to make the experience as epic as possible.
It is also possible to gain drops off of your enemies. You aren’t stealing any of their loot, but the game treats it as a mob kill and will spawn loot bags with random materials, weapons, equipment, etc. You won’t gain much experience or loot from PvP in this fashion, but it does provide an incentive for players who might otherwise not bother.
3. Daily/Monthly Achievements
I can only assume my monthly achievements will be reset at the end of August, a pity considering the game only launched the 25th. Guild Wars 2 offers daily and monthly achievements, with rewards for completing sets of achievements as well as the whole list. Daily achievements are rather easy, from number of kills, variety of kills, gathering, etc. Monthly quests are a bit more involved, including salvaging items in mass, experience without death, number of invaders killed, and completing events.
The rewards for completing these events is well worth the effort required, however.
4. Next Time…
Next time I hope to talk to you all a bit more about the auction house. As I said yesterday, it is still offline.
Fallen Earth: Now With Achievements!
Log Entry for the second week of May 2051: After my most recent encounter, I have determined it best to find myself a suitable permanent residence. Traveling for miles over these burned out plains, I pass by numerous, if not countless, houses and buildings in varying states of disrepair. Entire sides of the buildings gone, if not completely crumbled. In my passings, I find plenty of the various flora and fauna of the wilderness, and although I am not exactly living in style, there has yet to be a point where I become too hungry to walk.
But I write this because one day as I was foraging vegetables, a man approached me. Dressed in ragged clothing similar to my own, I presumed him to be the owner of the farm, readying my pistol only to find some cosmic force preventing me from willingly drawing my only means of defense. The man, however, simply approached me, extended his arm, and shook my own. When he spoke, I felt myself awash in heat, his voice reminding me of the depictions of God on the various radio shows, yet not as low pitched. He said;
“You have proven yourself to be a masterful survivalist, and you have foraged more than a thousand fruits, vegetables, and various other plants. For this, I want to give you a special reward.”
He reached into his pocket and retrieved an egg, which I immediately recognized as a prairie chicken egg, and number of chips reminiscent of my own poker-chip currency. Handing each individually to me, he turned and was gone in the blink of an eye. I will still remember his departing words;
“Keep hold of those. You will find use for them in the near future.”
Far overdrawn introductions aside, Fallen Earth has finally introduced achievements! The first batch of achievements, totaling five hundred, have been split into five categories of varying difficulty, and include everything from PvP encounters to killing bosses, scavenging, and crafting. The achievements are retroactive. And if you did not catch it from the above story, a second achievement pack is on the way, bringing with it rewards for achievements. The vanity pet reward system is really just speculation on my part.
Achievements are an interesting line in MMOs. On one hand, you have people who will grind out achievements just to say they got them all, even if that includes killing ten thousand of one particular NPC (I’m looking at you, Champions Online). On the other hand, you have people who absolutely hate the idea of grinding out achievements for rewards. Somewhere in the middle you have the casual gamer, who tries to go for the easiest achievements first and then sporadically goes up from there.
Achievements, if done right, can add a whole new level of involvement to an MMO. Warhammer Online is one of the few MMOs to take the achievement book and turn it into an integrated part of the game, the Tome of Knowledge, that gives you a lot of information on the world and the characters who inhabit it.
And to answer your question: Yes, I will be opening every Fallen Earth article with my little ongoing story.
MMO Fallout 