I repeat, a timed achievement should never rely on the coordination of a full map’s worth of players for completion.
Ok, first of all, the timed part doesn’t matter. What you’re trying to say is that there is a special, difficulty-increasing achievement which a large group of people has to win together.
For sake of argument, if the Hologram achievement was that no one in the entire group was hit by any laser ever, that’d be equivalent. The whole group has to succeed for individual players to get it.
But, I’d say, no, these things should exist.
Why?
Because there’s lots of achievements. It’s ok to make them quite diverse.
There are:
- Trivial achievements. The ones you get automatically, like reaching level X.
- Modifying achievements. They ask you to do something you already do in slightly different. These can be further divided into the ones which make the activity more difficult (6 minutes is one of these, but read below), and the ones who don’t.
- Branching achievements. These ask you to do something you normally wouldn’t do. Exploration achievements asking you to scale up walls via mesh bugs, playing solo in a team-PvP-game, playing fully non-lethal in a stealth game, etc. These can usually be divided into the ones which are obvious, the ones which are hidden (often the achievement is fully hidden, not just cryptic) and the ones which are context-sensitive.
In all of these cases, you can further differentiate personal achievements and group-based achievements. For example, killing Magda in 30 seconds or less in Diablo 3 can be either, while the 6m achievement is a group achievement, and Master of Entropy is a fully personal one.
My point is: Why not have some of each category?
We have lots and lots of fully personal achievements. What’s so bad about having some which aren’t personal? Some which aren’t trivial? Some which are trivial? Some which are automatic? Some which task you to do a dungeon?
Why not have this diversity?
You’re essentially arguing that it’s bad to have the choice to go for this achievement. Why is such a choice bad? It’s not like the game deletes your character if you don’t get it, so if you’re not interested in organizing it (which is the way to guarantee that you get it :P ), then just don’t go for it and you’re done.
For another example, I personally dislike the type of modifying grind achievements. “Get 500 kills with a shotgun” (these can be automatic if the game requires you to kill more than 500 times with the shotty, anyhow). I hate them. But, that’s a very easy thing to fix, I won’t do them.
Likewise, you don’t like achievements like the 6m one (or I suspect the 30s Magda kill one in multiplayer in D3 :P ). Then well, don’t do them. No one is forcing you to, and no one is forcing me to do the 500 Shotgun kills one in a shooter.
The strength of heart to face oneself has been made manifest. The persona Carighan has appeared.