Achievement Earned: Non-Achievement

I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Good achievements can be hard to come by. Bad achievements can pile up by the dozens. The nature of achievements is extremely important in a game, especially in an MMO. Achievements can help define player behavior; bad ones will create aberrant behavior, good ones encourage good behavior. If you take this theory and put it into an MMO, you see how wildly dangerous or beneficial an achievement system can be. What is the difference between a good achievement and a bad achievement in an MMO? 

Before you make an achievement, you have to ask yourself, "What sort of behavior am I encouraging?". This is something that Matt "Positron" Miller taught me through his experience, and it has been an invaluable lesson. You want your achievements to reward some skill, good behavior, and fun. No one ever creates an achievement thinking, "this will be absolutely no fun at all". Plenty of people create achievements that they think are funny or interesting without thinking about what sort of behavior they're encouraging. If you have enough of these bad achievements in your MMO, players will begin to expect to be rewarded for bad behavior and will actively try to do bad things to get rewarded for it. I'm going to go over my laundry list of bad achievements, and then give some examples of where I've seen really good ones. 

MMO's are littered with the, "kill a whole lot of this guy" achievements. Achievements for killing 500 enemies over the course of gameplay might sounds good, especially if your combat system is enjoyable, but it does not create fun. People who hunt achievements will figure out the fastest and easiest way to achieve them, even if that way is incredibly dull. An achievement meant to be done in the natural gameplay of the game now has players trying to run one mission over and over again to get those kills. That isn't fun, and in a multiplayer setting, that is encouraging bad behavior. The end result of achievements for doing a single action a repetitive amount of times is grind, and it will be grind in the worst way possible.

Then there are the achievements that designers find funny. Sometimes these fall in line with good behavior... and sometimes they don't. Many people see giving a player an achievement for dying in a dumb/funny way to be the punchline to a joke - you stood in the fire and died, have a laugh, here's the, "Burning Man 2009" achievement. The goal there is to make the player laugh, maybe not take their death so seriously. However, the outcome is that now all players who want achievements are going to get themselves killed in this way. This is bad if you're in a solo mission and outright poisonous if it's in any sort of group context. If you start doing this in an MMO, people will actively seek dumb ways to die in your content to see if they're rewarded for it. These sorts of achievements, while made with good intentions, have one consequence: the destruction of good gameplay.

Throw the achievement into the fire and be done with it!

Finally, there is the combination of the two above. I've recently seen this in Guild Wars 2, and it bothers me to no end. The game gives you random daily achievements to strive for, which I think is a fantastic system that more games should do. However, one random daily achievement is to kill 35 ambient creatures, like rabbits, squirrels, etc. This isn't fun and it isn't challenging. It could be funny, seeing super powered warriors stomping on wildlife, but in my experience, it was just aggravating to hunt down enemies who possess no threat or challenge. This ends up just being a mindless and tedious grind that I was all too happy to be done with to get my reward.

Good achievements encourage players to play to the best of their abilities, and that method of gameplay should be fun. Team Fortress 2 can be hit or miss with their achievements, but one I particularly liked was for the spy, called, "The Man with the Broken Guns". It is rewarded for a spy backstabbing an engineer, then disabling three of the engineer's buildings within ten seconds. In the game, this is the best way to be a spy, both for your own gameplay and for helping out your team. This achievement encourages fun gameplay and good behavior, because people going for this achievement will be helping everyone on their team. 

I may or may not regularly play a spy.

Another good example of achievements are ones that record you doing something particularly difficult. Diablo 3 (another hit or miss with achievements) has the achievement, "Don't Stand in the Fire!", where you have to defeat a boss without being hit by any of its area of effect attacks. I personally love these types of achievements, as long as they are realistic. This is the designer saying, "try to beat this in the best way possible". 

This type of achievement can go south really fast, and I have personally done this in my career with the achievement, "The Midnight Dodger Which Dodges at Midnight". It was an achievement rewarded for avoiding being hit by land mines in a boss fight. However, these land mines were all over the place and somewhat random. In the end, it encouraged weird behavior because it was so hard to get the badge through normal gameplay that players had to come up with ways to cheese the fight. That isn't the fault of the players, that is the fault of the designer.

That is something I want to end this post on. As a designer, you are the one  (for the most part) who is creating the behavior that players will adapt to. Note that some players will always try to exploit or break your system, and for those, you can just do your best to guard against them. However, if you find yourself creating bad achievements that I've mentioned above, then you're the one setting up bad behaviors for players to follow and continue to follow. It is not the fault of the player for playing the game in a bad/boring way, it is the fault of the designer for setting up the system where that is the best or most rewarding way for playing the game. What you always have to keep in mind is the question, "What sort of behavior am I encouraging, and what sort of behavior am I rewarding?"