"Achievements/medals/badges/pavlovs dog buggery"

With regards, to the latest kickstarter update, I just hope you bear this in mind.

http://penny-arcade.com/report/editoria ... ont-starve

You mentioned "winner of a 40 player game" as a possible badge, which is fine, because that's what people would be aiming for anyway, but as soon as you start adding badges for anything other than that, it becomes a goal in itself and changes the way people play the game, even if it doesn't have any reward other than the badge itself. In battlefield 2, which sort of started the whole persistent badge system, you'd see people using the pistol where it wasn't appropriate, just to get the pistol badges, and that had a detrimental effect on the gameplay.

So stick to the "badges for stuff people would be doing anyway" approach, with great care, even if it means having hardly any badges. Because you don't want badge chasing to ruin the game. Pet peeve of mine.

PA will be interesting, random badges are just a nice addition imho.
The GPGnet achievements were nice, too.
I like this.

First law of game design. For any proposed feature people will imagine the worst possible implementation.

I want a badge for each custom commander I've beaten :twisted:

Well...
If we think that way we can more appreciate the best way of implementation.

That's different than what I said. I agree many people have great ideas on the best way. You guys have heavily influenced my thinking on a number of issues and will probably do so even more once the alpha is out.

The "Win a 40 player FFA" example is from the kickstarter update and a good example of a really bad implementation, so I think in this case imagining the worst case scenario is a little bit justified

I think a good implementation would be something like "Be above ranking X on the ladder." together with a player losing the badge, if the requirement isn't fulfilled anymore.
In other words it isn't "See badge, get badge, forget badge".

You don't think getting a badge for winning a big game is something cool? There are ways to make repeating the act show up as well...

Winning a 40 player game is a hell of an accomplishment, if badges or shiny's are given out for anything I would say that's definitely a valid reason.

with a principle human thought process in the internet age like this:
- start to read an info
- assume the worst
- start a rant
- start to think
[optional] - edit your rant
[optional] - finish reading the original post

this is kind of a natural law

Yeah, I even do the same thing sometimes.

Shogun 2 has an achievement for beating one of the developers or beating someone who has, that's kind of neat .

On topic, I personally am not afraid of a bad implementation in this case, but there have been pretty lazy achievements in games in the past, like: (Yey, I have booted up the game!)

On the other hand, there are cases where it can be useful to know whether a certain player has completed the tutorials ...

I think achievements should not try to get you to do something irrelevant, but can be cool to show off achievements that do matter (like winning a 40 player match), I think that was more or less the point of the OP...

Win a 40 man FFA is what I'd consider a good achievement. It promotes players in doing something that is both 1) fun, and 2) what they should be doing anyway - fighting.

Save up 1,000,000 metal is the antithesis to that.

Bingo. That's what I was trying to say.

I already posted much on achievements a while back so I'm not going to retread all that. I think I can articulate another attribute to why I hate them so much and feel they are bad.

It's because as a player, achievements exist to make you feel bad. Instead of discovering things for yourself which no one could anticipate and reaching constantly higher levels of play, which makes you feel awesome, you are presented with a laundry list of things to do where everything becomes expected, otherwise you are a sub-par player. This is one of the worst things a game can do to you.

Every Battlefield installment after 1942 went downhill. A big part of that has to do with all the introduced player profile bullsh!t. I had way more fun trying to stand on the wings of fighter planes through my own volition, whereas going through the rounds of unlocking things in Battlefield 2 was work.

If you don't like achievements just ignore them?!
Having stuff like "You overall build 2236261 tanks" is pretty nice to have and can't hurt.

Until you try and play a team game and the rest of your team get you killed because they do nothing but build tanks.

Exactly this.

Achievements that promote playing badly/in ways not intended for the game are bad. If you're doing them on your own, then fine; it's your time to waste. But for the love of all that is holy, don't ruin other player's time playing.

I'd just like to point out that lots of developers put (seemingly lazy) story/completion achievements in games because they want to know where players quit playing a game. There is no good system to get these metrics without including intrusive phone-home type code into their game, so they use the achievement system to ghetto track players.