Guild Wars 2

Heart of Thorns added a lot of new achievements, but I cannot help to think that it added way too few new achievement points. Lets have a look what was added since HoT:

Heart of Thorns: Act 1: 20 achievements – 75 AP
Heart of Thorns: Act 2: 15 achievements – 60 AP
Heart of Thorns: Act 3: 14 achievements – 60 AP
Heart of Thorns: Act 4: 9 achievements – 40 AP

Tradesman: Scribe – 1 achievement – 40 AP
Explorator: 4 new achievements – 20 AP

Bosses – 4 new achievements – 35 AP for old content

Verdant Brink: 41 achievements – 146 AP
Auric Basin: 35 achievements – 145 AP
Tangled Depth: 44 achievements – 139 AP
Dragon’s Stand: 29 achievements – 83 AP
Mastery Insights: 23 achievements – 23 AP
Specialisations: 23 achievements – 185 AP

PvP Conqueror: 2 new achievements – 40 AP
(these were for the revenant, old classes give 35+45 AP, so this was nerfed greatly for no good reason)

Raid Spirit Vale: 21 achievements – 91 AP
(the hardest content in the game so far offers a whole 91 AP?!, 20AP of those coming from doing all 3 bosses without anyone dieing)

Fractals of the Mists: 17 new achievements – 107 new AP

Fractal Frequenter was nerfed from 70 AP to 15 AP, 55 AP lost. What kind of joke this is? Do you think it took no time to do 500 fractals?

total: +52 AP if you count in the lost AP from Fractal Frequenter.

Basic Collection: 32 new achievements – 110 new AP
Rare Collection: 6 new achievements – 26+x AP (one still unknown)
Specialisation Collections: 15 achievements – 45 AP
Legendary Weapon Collections: 72 achievements – 216 AP
Legendary Armor Collection: unknown, but probably 3 AP each
Legendary Backpacks: 3 achievements – 18 AP
Black Lion Collections: 3 new achievements – 9 AP

Halloween 2015: 10 achievements – 64 AP, about half of previous years

Total: 1777 AP for the whole expansion including all the very time consuming and/or very expensive collections
I might have missed some tiny hidden achievements which I havent discovered yet, but they should not change the total by much.
So the current maximum of achievement points is roughly 31483 AP.

Now why is the total of new AP so low although the amount of new achievements is quite high? A lot of achievements simply give way less AP than the effort suggests. Gold in tough adventures should give 25 AP and not 1 AP. Silver 10 AP and Bronze 5 AP. Time consuming collections such as the auric weapon collection give 5 AP while they take as much effort as the ambrite collection from dry top for 50 AP.
I would have imagined a fair amount of AP for doing all the new achievements should be roughly 5k AP.

Why are the low AP a problem? People need 30k AP for a full set of AP armor and 39k for the first AP backpack skin. But if you started playing late you loose upto 5051 AP from historical achievements. That seems fine to me, but currently that almost 3x HoT worth of achievement points lost. So how will people ever reach 39k AP for the backpack skin or 60k for the highest data mined title, if people can only progress their achievement points at such an glacial speed? The total amount of AP released this year was less than 2k.
I suggest reworking all the achievements to reward a more fair amount of points depending on their difficulty, time and resource investment. Raising the daily cap is no acceptable solution though. It would be silly if you could continue earning 10 AP per day for 5min of dailies, but spending 50 hours on another achievement gives you merely 3 AP.

Did you account for all the WvW ones that are now actually obtainable?

A significant and growing chunk of the player base is now finished/maxed out on daily/monthly AP.

For Myself I have reached a little over 25K ap with only HoT achievements left and no further daily AP available. ( NO AP left in areas I enjoy playing)

I am aware that the AP armor etc is mainly for people who play all areas of the game including GW1. It is unreachable for some of us.

It is a bit of a relief to not feel compelled to login chasing AP anymore.

PS I have all bar the two SMC, WvW achieves completed and do not anticipate completing those as a roamer in the near future.

Ayrilana.1396:

Did you account for all the WvW ones that are now actually obtainable?

Of course not, that is old content and would be unfair to count it towards HoT.

Ayrilana.1396:

Did you account for all the WvW ones that are now actually obtainable?

but did you account for WvW being dead now since hot ?
i seen a que maybe twice since hot ..

Ayrilana.1396:

Did you account for all the WvW ones that are now actually obtainable?

If the WvW-achievements were new achievements, they would reward you with way less achievement points. Good thing they are old ones and only got easier to obtain.

Another comparison:
Bioluminescense Armor Collection (pre HoT): 30 AP
Leystone Armor Collection (HoT): 5 AP
Bladed Armor Collection (HoT): 3 AP

This really makes no sense at all, all three collections should give about the same amount of achievement points.

Ayrilana.1396:

Did you account for all the WvW ones that are now actually obtainable?

Why are they actually obtainable? Did they lower the numbers? If so, I missed this. Good news, of course. I just didn’t think it would happen.

Celtic Lady.3729:

Ayrilana.1396:

Did you account for all the WvW ones that are now actually obtainable?

Why are they actually obtainable? Did they lower the numbers? If so, I missed this. Good news, of course. I just didn’t think it would happen.

Yes, numbers were lowered!

Chaba.5410:

Celtic Lady.3729:

Ayrilana.1396:

Did you account for all the WvW ones that are now actually obtainable?

Why are they actually obtainable? Did they lower the numbers? If so, I missed this. Good news, of course. I just didn’t think it would happen.

Yes, numbers were lowered!

Great! Took ’em long enough. lol

I don’t even know what they were thinking to have even used those numbers in the beginning. SMH

Celtic Lady.3729:

Ayrilana.1396:

Did you account for all the WvW ones that are now actually obtainable?

Why are they actually obtainable? Did they lower the numbers? If so, I missed this. Good news, of course. I just didn’t think it would happen.

I think i auto completed every wvw achievement, when hot went live because i already met the new requirements, except ultimate dominator, which wasnt lowered.

Jenne.1836:

Ayrilana.1396:

Did you account for all the WvW ones that are now actually obtainable?

If the WvW-achievements were new achievements, they would reward you with way less achievement points. Good thing they are old ones and only got easier to obtain.

Another comparison:
Bioluminescense Armor Collection (pre HoT): 30 AP
Leystone Armor Collection (HoT): 5 AP
Bladed Armor Collection (HoT): 3 AP

This really makes no sense at all, all three collections should give about the same amount of achievement points.

Bioluminescence collection required more work.

The reason that I brought up WvW ones was that quite a lot of them required a very large time investment that was not obtainable for the most part. Some of them were just outright not obtainable such as yak slapped. When they adjusted the numbers, all of these points became more available to players. Yes, you’ll still need to work for them.

If you think Bladed armor collection is 10x easier than Bioluminescense Armor Collection, you are wrong. Bioluminescense was actually pretty fast to get before they nerfed event tagging.

Yeah the lack of AP is kinda dumb. 5ap for finishing great reformer title, gg wtf.

You get 400 gems for every 5000 achievement points. Keeping the amount of achievement points low will help them sell more gems.

It’s not just AP though. They introduce these awesome systems and then never develop them into something robust.

• The old guild system was never iterated on past its initial design. Bosses in bounty missions are still bugged to this day.

• AP rewards. Look at the laurels. The laurel rewards were great back in the day. Now they are a pittance compared to the login laurel rewards.

• Fractal improvements that were supposed to come in the “Fractured” update took 2 more years before they came out and rewards and high-end Fractals are hidden behind HoT’s paywall. Fractals are NOT HoT content. Period.

• SAB and the Infinite coin debacle.

• Dungeons could have been improved, instead they were gutted and left by the side of the road to rot.

• 2+ years after the blog post, we are still waiting on proper PvP ladders and leagues.

• The Legendary system was supposed to be released almost 3 years ago. What we got seems like what they had intended to give us 3 years ago. I guess they just wanted to hide that behind the HoT paywall too and use it as a bullet point on the box of “features”.

I have always been impressed with ArenaNet’s QoL updates. They are great. The issue I have is they introduce systems and then leave them as is or overhaul them and remove some form of progress and make you do it over again.

MyriadStars.5679:

You get 400 gems for every 5000 achievement points. Keeping the amount of achievement points low will help them sell more gems.

I would prefer them to remove the 400 gems from the chests if that is their issue.

Malediktus.9250:

MyriadStars.5679:

You get 400 gems for every 5000 achievement points. Keeping the amount of achievement points low will help them sell more gems.

I would prefer them to remove the 400 gems from the chests if that is their issue.

I’m not saying anything against your original post. I was just pointing out what might be the real cause.

It seems to me that 400 gems every 5000 AP can’t be that big a factor. What is that? One bag slot expansion?

Iason Evan.3806:

It’s not just AP though. They introduce these awesome systems and then never develop them into something robust.

• The old guild system was never iterated on past its initial design. Bosses in bounty missions are still bugged to this day.

• AP rewards. Look at the laurels. The laurel rewards were great back in the day. Now they are a pittance compared to the login laurel rewards.

• Fractal improvements that were supposed to come in the “Fractured” update took 2 more years before they came out and rewards and high-end Fractals are hidden behind HoT’s paywall. Fractals are NOT HoT content. Period.

• SAB and the Infinite coin debacle.

• Dungeons could have been improved, instead they were gutted and left by the side of the road to rot.

• 2+ years after the blog post, we are still waiting on proper PvP ladders and leagues.

• The Legendary system was supposed to be released almost 3 years ago. What we got seems like what they had intended to give us 3 years ago. I guess they just wanted to hide that behind the HoT paywall too and use it as a bullet point on the box of “features”.

I have always been impressed with ArenaNet’s QoL updates. They are great. The issue I have is they introduce systems and then leave them as is or overhaul them and remove some form of progress and make you do it over again.

And then they add more new systems on top of the existing ones, in ways that aren’t very future proof…

• Masteries that are entirely zone-specific

• Elite specs that can only be chosen in one specialization slot (e.g. don’t have a slot of their own) and are obtained via hero points, which are basically worthless once you have elite spec unlocked

• New class weapons that can only be used through use of the elite spec

What else am I forgetting? I’m almost certain there was at least one more.

They really need to take some time to work on improving the systems they have, without doing the whole “we’re going to do a major overhaul that no one asked for or wanted.”

They seem to have two speeds when it comes to systems. Speed one is “add new” and speed two is “complete overhaul.” More middle ground would be nice.

I’ve noticed the low amount of AP being rewarded for HoT achievements aswell. As someone that doesn’t bother with dailies because I find it ‘a game playing you’ rather than playing the game myself I am sitting at around 9.7k AP and slowly rising. I have been doing alot of HoT achievements and barely gained a few hundred AP. Some were pretty difficult (Fungus Among Us gold, some story achievements etc). I’ve reached a point where I no longer cared much about AP a very long time ago, but it just seems to me like they don’t want us to earn alot of AP for some arbitrary reason. It’s very consistent through all of HoT’s achievements so it must have been something they decided on consciously. I doubt this will be addressed though. They probably just want to stretch out the AP skins reward-time for as long as possible.

What is the point of stretching them out? If the AP gain continues like this, the game will shut down before the top 10 reaches 60k.

Looks like lvl 4 precursor collections only give 2 AP, so remove 3 AP from the total.

I never bothered to do the math of how many APs we got with HoT so thank you for that.

The initial game started with a little more than 7k Achievement Points
Then during LS1 and LS2 they added another 7k Achievement Points
Then we got the 10k Daily cap for a grand total of 29k Achievement Points (almost 30k)

And now HoT adds just 1777 APs? I expected 7k new APs to be added with HoT, especially if we consider the Historical Achievements that are un-obtainable anymore and give way more points.

At the moment they have enough Radiant/Hellfire skins to give up to 42k and Pinnacle skins up to 56k but the maximum is only 31k? Barely enough to get the Radiant or Hellfire chest piece and if you missed some historical ones, or you ignore a lot of the gold-wasting ones (legendary weapons) you might not get them even if you do absolutely everything else in the game.

If HoT gave 7k, the same amount the initial game got and the same amount we got with releases in-between, the total would be 35k, just a tiny bit away of getting the second Radiant/Hellfire chest piece. Which sounds more reasonable to me.

Then another 7k in-between expansions for another 42k to get both back pieces, then the second expansion can start new achievement armor sets. At least that’s how I expected Achievement Rewards would work

Heh, i remember worrying about exactly that trend before in one of the radiant/hellfire armor threads and OP defending their price with the argument that a lot of APs will be coming with HoT. I’m definitely not glad that i ended up right on that one.

Astralporing.1957:

Heh, i remember worrying about exactly that trend before in one of the radiant/hellfire armor threads and OP defending their price with the argument that a lot of APs will be coming with HoT. I’m definitely not glad that i ended up right on that one.

Yes, I remember that. Noone of my friends expected less than 3k new AP, some even 5-6k. But now we have ~1774 if you do everything even the legendary collections and other very grindy collections.
Maybe I should not have given Anet the benefit of the doubt when people datamined titles upto 60k.

Fact is, Anet did an underwhelming job in the AP area, since they introduced them.
They are wasting everywhere in all of the achievement sections tons of potential, that they either not see, or just willingly seem to ignore, because they maybe think its not yet the right time to work on these things, because they believe, other things have higher priority now, than to work constantly on more achievements to keep the most active players of this game for a longer time busy.

I would love to see for once a Patch for this Game, which consists only out of 3 things:

• Bug Fixes
• Good fitting Class Balancing Changes
• Tons of added new Achievements everywhere worth of like 10000 AP, so that they give themxself for some longer time some space to breathe, that keeps palyers for a longer time busy again, before they need to repeat such a patch to set the Ap bar a next level worth of again new 10000 AP higher …

thats the wasy of how they should do it and the game easily has all the so fare wasted and ignored potential to do that.
Just look on the by season 2 introduced new Region Achievement Category, that so far is totally incomplete just with the new Hot Maps, SW and DT being affected by that new Achievement Category, while all the rest of the game gets ignored so far.
GW2 has 27 ignored regions that could give the game easily between 150 to 250 AP per region that could easily mean already between 4050 to 6750 new AP that ANet currently is just wasting by not implementing Region Achievements in a complete and proper way… or they just ignore this so far, because they keep this stuff back for later for whatever a reason they might have… and we have to rember, we are still far far away from beign able to explore all of tyria, we have set yet no single freakign foot into Cantha, nor Elona.. so theres tons of more explorable regions in the tfuture that could mean also new Ap together with Region achievements for all the Vanilla Game Regions that need to be made to not let the whole implemention look like a typical Anet’s switzer cheese implementation that is full of holes from started but yet not completed things that Anet is famous for so far …

Just to call some other started but incompletion messes that Anet fabricised so far over the last years:

- Jeweler/Chef still not Rank 500, while all other Craftign Jobs are and they introduce Scribing with JL 400 instead of directly as 500 to make it consistent with the rest of the system /facepalm
- Still certain Stat Combinations until now have not Ascended Versions as it seems, as i keep hearign from people requestign for Ascended Versions for Stats like Givers, Zealots, Carrion, Sentinel ect. and especialyl in regard of Sentinal finalyl again a proper integrated option of gaining azurite orbs as they removed them from the game from being gainable for totally absolutely no senseful reason, while keeping the option to gain Azurite Shards where the only place still in the whiole game to get them is only the LS fractal from LSS1 about rox n braham going against the fiery moles where you can mine them from the mithril nodes also, when it should be somethign, that we should be able to mine from ALL mithril nodes of the game and not just only from that fractal only including rarely also azurite orbs!!

• still not having implemented stuff like Bar Brawls or especially Polymok, while bar brawl achievements were even for some time in the game and got them removed by a stealth patch, never ever heard since then anythign about it anymore…
• Still not completed SAB and leaving us all in the dark sicne years, if they ever will, nor declarign us, whats takign them so long to fix on SAB so that they can reimplement it back for now at least with world 1, 2 and their hardmodes so that we get at least that content back and fix that way at least for a beginning the eternal coin fisco, so that the coins aren’t anymore wasted money at least!!

And im sure, if i continue diggign in my memories, id find alot more of incomplete thigns anet did in the past and hasn’t eithe fixed yet, nor completed at all, think about it as it seems, that if they let it just rot around for long enough, that people will forget it over time … NO, things like this won’t get forgotten.

So, by all of this, it was for me personalyl not surprising, that Anet will underwhelm us with HoT and its achievements.
However, I think, if they would begin with it by the lets say – Feature Pack to continously add massive Achievement Packages worth 10000 AP, then I think that they could keep the active players that way always busy enough, together with small living Story APs every few weeks in between, that this achievement drought could be easily overcoem this way while keeping players easily busy enough, that they won’t scream anymore permanently so far for new AP to be able to reach some new AP caps that are required just to gain somrething thats needed to complete an AC armor design, like those newly added ac armor desogn back items now, which most likely will we earn first somewhere aroudn the 40k+ap or even later first.

ANet has to get out finally of this snail speed development in regard of Achievement implemention and to speed the things in my opinino finally more up… or we won#t have reached still 60k Ap, before this game will be already like 6+ years old or older and near its lifespan end or before anet already maybe asnnounces a GW3 being in the works oO

I’m glad someone posted a topic like this as I have felt for the longest time that this is the one system in the game that had soo much potential for creating many more hours of gameplay.

Not only are the AP numbers all wrong but simply adding some titles to some of the harder categories would entice players to put more hours into the game.

There are very little ways to distinguish yourself since the game is about cosmetic differences instead of statistical ones so adding some hard to obtain titles based on the AP system has soo much potential.

I really hope some day soon we get a patch dedicated to this system.

MyriadStars.5679:

You get 400 gems for every 5000 achievement points. Keeping the amount of achievement points low will help them sell more gems.

I’m going to go with this being the reason, there seems to be a trend with cutting everything back and making everything cost a fortune, dungeons got nerfed, the new maps are terrible for earning gold and they added scribe and guild halls to kill your gold, so yeah they prob don’t want all the new players getting that 400 gems.

I demand a “Gold Sink” title and 50 AP for paying over 2000g in fees and taxes on the tp every month.

There are already tons of gold sink titles if you think about it. Think of the Emperor title or all the collections you can only reasonably complety if you buy things from the trading post.

1 AP for getting Gold in hard adventures that took me days to master is really a slap in the face. Luckily you do get a mastery point.

luzt.7692:

1 AP for getting Gold in hard adventures that took me days to master is really a slap in the face. Luckily you do get a mastery point.

Such a shame that there are more than enough mastery points in this game, so even the 1 mastery point for the hard adventures is a joke.

Now if only achievement points would actually mean something, then it would matter how many they added in HoT.

kolompi.1287:

Now if only achievement points would actually mean something, then it would matter how many they added in HoT.

They only matter for those who like the armor skins and for the “free” gems

kolompi.1287:

Now if only achievement points would actually mean something, then it would matter how many they added in HoT.

They mean something to people interested in achievements