Guild Wars 2

(Not ranks from achievement points, but ranks of achievements.)

So, we finally got a dev response on the candidate trials: working as intended

That’s fine. My guild did Tier 4 legitimately with a full group of five. It was harrowing, and we only barely made it to the finish line, but we did. Great, I say.

The thing is, no one goes into the candidate trials expecting them to be hard—and content from some of the previous releases has been similar. One thing out of a dozen that just turns out to be extremely, frustratingly hard. The problem is communication.

People look at the achievements list for each release as a laundry list of things they should do before the content runs out, but it fails to communicate to the player which achievements they should reasonably expect to be able to complete. Sure, the advanced support achievement is worth… well, 15 achievement points, but that doesn’t say much. Due to the tiering system, you don’t even know that before completion unless you click on it.

My suggestion is for these achievements to also have rankings to give players some idea of what to expect. Two or three icons (and maybe labels) unique to each release would require no changes to the achievement panel, and go far to alleviate some of the complaints from players who feel their expectations have been betrayed when they run into incongruously difficult content.

Heck, having to categorize achievements as such might even help the content designers in providing a more even difficulty curve—though simply having one “pro” achievement per release works too, as long as we know it for what it is.