Team Fortress 2 Achievements
Well, with the recent Pyro update to TF2, there are now over 90 achievements to get and I have started to notice several things have shifted the dynamics of the game from a well balanced fun team based game, so a more single-player grind-tastic unbalanced experience. Why? The class-specific achievements.
Lets rewind a few months to when the Medic achievement pack was released. I remember playing TF2 before hand and I seemed to be one of the few people who actually liked to play as a medic. I liked supporting my team-mates and winning the game as a result, it was fun, but apparently everybody else just liked to shoot other people only. Once the medic update was released, this all changed, everyone wanted to be a medic now. In fact, so much so that the game completely lost it’s balance.
Think about it, each class has it’s own strengths and weaknesses, something they are good at, something they are bad at. This promoted teamwork and caused diversity to appear on teams, you would always seem to have a good range of classes being played, this is the way TF2 is designed to be played. Now imagine a team where more than half are medics, this suddenly creates a huge weakness in fire-power and if put against a team that used a range of classes, they would usually, 99% of the time lose. All these people playing as medics wanted to get all the achievements, not play the game and make it fun. Everyone lost the attitude of “I’m going to be the class my team needs the most,” to “I’m going to be a medic and grind all the achievements, who cares what my team needs.” These players end up ignoring the team objective and pursue their own personal agenda.
This also prompted the achievement maps and servers. The maps we’re small, crap looking, cramp maps that someone with minimal skill threw together in an hour with the purpose of it to grind achievements. Servers that run these maps are just as bad, there are around 13 servers running with players in it (out of the 200 or so that are in Europe) that are called “achievement servers.” Servers designed to get the Medic and Pyro achievements.
Why has the achievement culture that we gamers live in today tends towards this? Statistically, all the achievements are easy enough to get from just playing the game regularly. Heck, I got 4 of them today with a one hour blitz on Goldrush, without even trying to get them, I was just playing the game and trying to get the cart to the end, as is the objective of the game.
Though perhaps I am being to harsh, the medic update saw a sudden rise in players choosing the medic class, a class that had been so far rather neglected. Same with the pyro, no many play as this class either, but a sudden jump happened when the update was released. However, both times the jump was too much and destroyed the game balance. This problem could easily be solved by releasing all of the additional achievements to each class at the same time.
This still doesn’t solve the problem with achievements servers. However, perhaps I am looking at this the wrong way, as long as the balance is kept in the regular servers for people who actually want to play and enjoy the game, then who cares about the achievement servers. In a few months of so, everyone would have gotten all the achievements through grinding and will then return to playing normally.
I could go into the morality of what is basically cheating the system to get all the achievements, but people only want to get their hands on the new weapons available, which are only unlocked after enough achievements have been achieved. This is a serious flaw that can easily be fixed, just make the new weapons available to all, so there is no need to do all the achievements to get all the new weapons.
All in all, the new achievements are a good idea and I do enjoy how the game keeps getting expanded each update Valve brings, but please, have a solid rethink about the damn achievement mechanic and try to help prevent the game from being ruined by grinders, this isn’t a “MaMORPGa.” Now if you excuse me, I hear there is a need for a Demoman in the next server.
