I've been considering a number of possible changes to the game, some more radical than others. This is probably one of those more out-reaching cases. Unlike many of the decisions made during development, however, changing around achievements is almost entirely a matter of if the players find it preferable or better. This is why I'm posting it here, to see whether or not it's even a remotely likeable idea.
Right now badges are fun because they give you something to strive for: goals that are close and goals that are far. On the other hand, I find there to be two big flaws in the badge system:
- badges are gained exactly once, at which point who cares if you do achieve the exact same thing any number of times
- the total badge possibilities indirectly limit creativity on the player's part to achieve something other than what any particular badge has to offer
This second point is particularly important. If you need an example, try to think of how many times you actually played on Hurt Me Plenty prior to version 0.9.9.5: there were almost no badges that were HMP+, with Silvers in the HNTR range and Golds in the UV range. If you were a player aiming to get more badges, you pretty much skipped HMP (at least I know I did). The same goes for Angel of Pacifism: prior to 0.9.9.5, the only badges required were either "any difficulty" or N!, so almost no one bothered to play it on HMP or UV. It's a simple and enjoyable system at first, but it ultimately nudges players with its invisible hand toward badges and ONLY badges (and perhaps medals on occasion). Badges aren't bad in and of themselves, but by existing as a "thing to have" people can often overlook just how much they're missing by sticking only to the badge route. (Note that, if you don't really care about badges in the first place, I doubt you'll take much exception in changing the system. If anything, I'm hoping that this makes badges more attractive in general.)
With these things in mind, I'm suggesting that we do away with the current badge system entirely. The way I see it, there's a far more obvious method of the player keeping track of their victories, and that is to literally have a badge for each challenge, each difficulty, and each victory type. We already have something like this, something that you probably pass over every time you check your badges: the challenge/difficulty "spreadsheet" of wins. Part of the new system's implementation would be to expand the spreadsheet to include standard games, as well as keep track of each win type, and possibly round it off with the total number of attempts. Here's a quick example of what it might look like:
| Mode | E (ITYTD) | M (HNTR) | H (HMP) | U (UV) | N (N!) |
| Stnd | Pt 1 | Pt 1 | Pt 4 | Pt 0 | Pt 3 |
| St 5 | St 2 | St 1 | St 1 | St 0 |
| Fl 0 | Fl 3 | Fl 2 | Fl 1 | Fl 1 |
| Tot 15 | Tot 104 | Tot 87 | Tot 211 | Tot 358 |
| AoB | | Pt 1 | Pt 4 | Pt 0 | Pt 3 |
| | St 2 | St 1 | St 1 | St 0 |
| | Fl 3 | Fl 2 | Fl 1 | Fl 1 |
| | Tot 104 | Tot 87 | Tot 211 | Tot 358 |
| ... |
Obviously it'd have to be expanded vertically, but I think this would be a great place to quickly establish your overall experience with the game. With such an implementation, all of the current badge pages can be removed outright: as a matter of organization this makes the player info page a little more navigable.
The second half of this suggestion regards the badges themselves: that is, what you get in your mortem for winning a given challenge on a given difficulty with a given victory type. The idea here is to mostly use the names we've gotten used to for badges, but customize them entirely based on the aforementioned criteria. There are a number of ways to work with the naming scheme:
- Stick with what already exists. Keep the titles (AoMr = Marksman, AoPc = Pacifist, etc) and set Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond to be for ITYTD, HNTR, HMP, UV, and N! wins, respectively. For instance, a standard UV victory would be a UAC Platinum badge, an AoMC HNTR victory would be a Destroyer Silver badge. This doesn't include victory type immediately but we could probably include words (see below).
- Use a word for each criteria and the badge is a compounded form of those words. This could retain the challenge words, but we'd need special words for each difficulty and could include words for each victory type. Something like, a full UV standard victory could be a Masterful Brutal UAC Badge, and a partial HNTR AoPc could be a Heroic Neophyte Pacifist Badge. (Not saying those are good words, but I'm sure we can come up with something better.)
- Customize each badge individually. This would take a lot of work but there are a lot of us here to brainstorm for all 225 possibilities (not including any new challenges that might show up later on).
We could also combine some of these, like having a standardized naming scheme for most of the badges but introduce unique badge names for particularly difficult badges.
While a huge part of badges regards winning games, there are a lot of badges that don't. For these badges, it would be a matter of deciding if it's important enough to be considered an achievement on its own and, if it is, turn it into a medal. I really don't mind having a huge number of medals, and it retains their "achieveability", so to speak. The obvious keepers are the level-specific badges, whereas throwing out Technician/Armorer/Heroic series aren't that much of a deal.
Regarding unlocks: it's not too big of a shift to require that you collect so many unique badges and/or medals, possibly even particular ones. There are a few ways to make the unlockable system work with this new idea, which isn't within the scope of this topic. I should also note that some of the badges would essentially be "lost" (mostly on the Diamond end of the spectrum): as it stands, almost all (if not all) of these are known through challenge/difficulty/victory and a combination of medals, so I don't consider it a huge loss. If there are some that would be unexplainable through the mortem itself, we can see about including medals to reflect their status.
First and foremost, of course, is whether or not it seems better than the current system: if nothing else, let me know why it's good or bad relative to how we do it now. I'm mostly concerned that a change to the current system wrecks the compatibility of player data, but I believe that the suggestion laid out here is ultimately a better record of the player's achievements, which should be organized as well as possible before we move on to bigger things like an online record-tracker.
So let me know what you think! This is the kind of topic that doesn't require a person to be experienced with DoomRL to have a significant standing: everyone should feel free to respond to the idea and know that their opinion will matter.
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Topic: Badge Overhaul Brainstorm (Read 8489 times)