Yesterday I looked at my character window and saw this recently added number under my name.
[20]
Apparently this number 20 is very important, as it took away my ear and a third of the portrait I had carefully positioned in the past to represent my face.
Looking at my alternate characters, I saw a similar number. And not just that, it was higher there than this low number on my main character.
I came to a conclusion that apparently… I am playing the game WRONG.
Achievements in EVE
Recently EVE added achievements. Knowing achievement gameplay from many other games I’ve played, this could positively be seen as a way to engage the ‘achievers’ players of the Bartle taxonomy of player types. It helps players flaunt how much they have played or what they have accomplished in the game to others.
Negatively this could be seen as a cheap way to increase player engagement by encouraging highly repetitive gameplay without adding extra content, and as yet another dark pattern in gaming.
Either way, I never thought achievements would be added to EVE.
After all, EVE is a sandbox game which encourages specialization, encourages players to find a niche, encourages creation and use of multiple specialized characters (each account already starts with three slots, if we ignore all the multiple account support!), encourages players to find their own place in the universe to live in and all that by offering not rails to play on (like a themepark game), but game mechanics to engage with like a sandbox game.
This means the idea of fitting in a generalist completionist type of gameplay which encourages players to do everything in the game on a single character and tells the player exactly what they should do and should not do, and how often they should do that is severely at odds with the original game design of EVE.
But here we are.
Achievements have been added to put EVE on rails. These achievements now tell me to do everything on my main character:
- Mining on my mining-skilled character is wrong.
- Trading on my trading character is wrong.
- And whatever I’ve been doing last month in the little playtime I had is all wrong too, because I still only have 20 points.
Achievements on Gerard
I looked through the achievement list for one that suited me.
As longstanding member of Brave the activity of salvaging always has been a bit of our identity, where people joked that enemies would be salvaged before the fight is even over.
So I looked for an achievement based on salvaging. And to my surprise it required not a ridiculous high number like 5000 combat sites or 2.5 million units of ore, but only 500 wrecks.
About 11 sites worth, or about 2 hours including the killing.
Anyway, as a dad with little playtime I smartbombed a couple sites last evening and three more this morning so now I have achieved something!
‘Recycling Enthusiast’
Okay. I guess that’s a title. I’m not really enthusiastic about it. A title like ‘scavenger’ might have been more fitting and looked nicer, but it’ll do.
In the mean time I also got 10 more points as I made progression towards 5000 combat sites, because in order to drag myself through endlessly salvaging wreck after wreck in what I guess was about 30 minutes total for the full complete salvaging achievement I did like a whole 11 more out of 5000 combat sites!
It’s not like all activities require equal amount of effort to achieve something, right?
Conclusion
I have yet to conclude something as I find it inappropriate to give opinions about something I haven’t tried yet, so stay tuned for more achievements as I drag myself this time through mining 2.5 million units of Arkanor in null sec in a T1 Procurer on my non-mining character, which I calculate should take me only about 700 hours.
Maybe if the game allowed me to use my maxed out T2 mining skills (which are on my specialized mining character) and had properly balanced the mining achievement by requiring volume instead of units so that null sec wasn’t screwed having to mine 160 times longer than high sec miners on Veldspar (which has units 160 times smaller than the types of ore in null), it could take me a far more reasonable fraction of that time.
But no, achievements tell us how to play now, so now I have to mine at my personal slowest pace for 700 hours in order for the number under my name to show I am not playing the game wrong.
Stay tuned for another update when I reach that achievement in about 3 years from now!
