Implement achievements leaderboard
issueid=3255 07-31-2014 02:01 PM
Senior Member
Number of reported issues by sylph: 26
Implement achievements leaderboard
Rate players according to their ADOM accomplishments, as an alternative to rating characters in the hiscore list.

(preface: Please note that the 'achievement goals' here are NOT sensible suggestions, they're just placeholders to help me put forward the concept.)

Hi!
After talking about the final score, and how currently it means very little to a lot of players, I wanted to post 2 RFEs. One of them is to bring the score more in-line with what players seem to want out of it...
The second, here, is to suggest an 'achievements leaderboard', where players can be ranked based on the amount and class of achievements they have gained.

The basic idea is this:
1. split achievements into 'bands'.
2. Create a hiscore table, sorting players by the number of their best achievements.
3. Offer players cosmetic awards (if possible) for reaching new achievement bands, or completing many achievements within a single band.

For example, achievements could be something like:

Code:
Iron:       obtain the fire orb
Mithril:    Close the chaos gate
Adamantium: Become a god 
Eternium:   Become a god in under 30,000 turns
Artifact:   Become a god at Clvl:1

Iron:       obtain a chaos orb using no spells, no pets
Mithril:    Win the game using no spells, pets, or missiles
Adamantium: Win the game attacking with only fists
Eternium:   Win the game attacking with only improvised melee weapons
Artifact:   Win the game without equipping or using any items at all

Iron:       obtain the fire orb in under 20,000 turns
Mithril:    Win the game in under 50,000 turns
Adamantium: Win the game in under 30,000 turns
Eternium:   Win the game in under 4 hours
Artifact:   Win the game in under 30 minutes

Iron:       Clear the bug-infested temple
Mithril:    Clear the bug-infested temple without using music, spells, wands, or alchemy
Adamantium: Clear the bug-infested temple without using music, spells, wands, alchemy, or missiles
Eternium:   Clear the bug-infested temple without the above, at level 20 or below
Artifact:   Clear the bug-infested temple without the above, entering at level 1

Iron:       Clear the pyramid without using melee attacks or missiles
Mithril:    Clear the pyramid without using melee, missiles, pets or wands, in under 1000 turns
Adamantium: Clear the pyramid without melee attacks, missiles or pets, 
Eternium:   Obtain the ankh with only 1 kill in the kill list
Artifact:   Obtain the ankh with zero kills in the kill list

etc
A player that manages to get 2 eternium achievements, and 4 adamantium ones, would be rated above a player that had 1 eternium achievement and 20 adamantium.


Obviously, NONE of these achievements in the example above are real suggestions (I haven't really thought them through, just typed them out here to use as examples of the kind of things I was suggesting)

I've got a pretty big feeling that it will give ADOM players more direction, encourage more innovation, and most importantly, it'll be a better competitive environment for the 'global hiscore'. I don't think I'm the only one here who thinks that completing eternium man, lithium man, and carbon fibre man is a more impressive feat than getting an archmage to a few billion XP. The beauty of this system is that it ranks players according to their net adom accomplishments, instead of rating characters based on their individual game results.

Interested to hear thoughts. Please note that these suggestions are NOT sensible suggestions, they're just placeholders to help me put forward the concept.
Issue Details
Issue Number 3255
Issue Type Feature
Project ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery)
Category All
Status Suggested
Priority 7
Suggested Version ADOM r50
Implemented Version (none)
Milestone ADOM Team Play Edition
Votes for this feature 1
Votes against this feature 0
Assigned Users adom-admin, jt
Tags (none)




07-31-2014 02:46 PM
Joe Joe is offline
Senior Member
I like it. The point scoring system doesn't make too much sense to me.

07-31-2014 03:10 PM
Ancient Member
I generally agree with the concept. Score is too limited to really capture the breadth of possible approaches that people can take, and having specific achievements with relative difficulties attached seems like a good approach toward making the leaderboard more interesting.

One problem that I can immediately foresee is that it's probably not possible to capture all of the possible variance in victory styles or challenges. So something that might be really hard to do, but hasn't been thought of as an option (complete the game confused by the IBM guild manual, say), wouldn't count as a legitimate challenge simply because it hasn't hit the leaderboard. I don't think that there is any way around that if you want a challenges board at all... it's just not possible. It's just unfortunate. The other problem I can imagine is that some victory conditions require a fairly active implementation to monitor what the player is doing. You need one counter to make a note of when you first used missiles, what missile you used, etc. Most of the conditions probably wouldn't be a big deal, but I could imagine a few being kind of hard.

The other problem is ranking challenges in a manner that the completion difficulty is at least somewhat plausible. Say, for example, "Clear the pyramid without melee attacks, missiles or pets" is much much easier (you can just use spells or wands) than "Win the game in under 30,000 turns", yet both have the same difficulty value. Yes, I realize that you weren't trying to make these challenges line up, but somebody (TB) will have to do this at some point, and it won't necessarily be easy to do.

As another question, some of these directly overlap. Eg. the eternium level bug temple challenge also uses all of the requirements of the previous 3 metal levels. Does this mean that completing this at the eternium level gives you four ranks? Or do you have to complete each one separately?

07-31-2014 04:35 PM
Ancient Member
I also agree with the concept.

JellySlayer asked about the bug temple. In general, I prefer achievements to score it and all earlier. So the bug temple should score all of them that you qualify for.

You can also just give each achievement a # of points, and rank you by # of points completed. That does mean that a lot of adamantium is better than 1 eternium (unless the points scale ridiculously), but it also helps encompass the sense that the player has a done a variety of different things.

Finally - I'd really like to be able to flag an achievement or achievements at the start of a playthrough, and let the game tell me when I've failed them. Or at least be able to check which achievements I'm still eligible for (so passing turn 30000 would disqualify that one).

Useful if I accidentally do something that I forgot about.

07-31-2014 06:32 PM
Senior Member
You can also just give each achievement a # of points, and rank you by # of points completed. That does mean that a lot of adamantium is better than 1 eternium (unless the points scale ridiculously), but it also helps encompass the sense that the player has a done a variety of different things.
To explain my reasoning - the trouble I had with this approach, is that players seeking the top of the highscore would have to go back and 'collect' all the 'easy' challenges. It's not an issue in situations where the top-difficulty challenges include the earlier ones (since you could just get them all in one fell swoop), but would be a pain if the acheivements end up being less 'grouped'. In the examples I gave, for instance, a player that had won the game in under 30 minutes might have to go back and do it in under 30,000 turns, then go back again and get the fire orb in under 20,000! I know it's doubtful, but there would be something liberating in thinking 'yes, I'm adamantium level, I don't have to worry about going and picking up all those mithril achievements anymore'.
More importantly, it lets a player that doesn't like, for example, speedrunning the game, play without it! That is, you're not forced to play the game a certain way to acheive a high score. If you don't like playing melee characters, you can simply skip the easier melee challenges and still work your way up the leaderboard.
Also, it doesn't seem as straight forward as just trying to get more adamantium acheivements than your rival!

That being said, I'm probably just being me here, and giving 'points' for achievements depending on their difficulty might well be a better way of doing it. Tthe suggestion is, essentially, ranking players based on their acheivement total, however it's ultimately acheived (points, tiers etc).



One problem that I can immediately foresee is that it's probably not possible to capture all of the possible variance in victory styles or challenges. So something that might be really hard to do, but hasn't been thought of as an option (complete the game confused by the IBM guild manual, say), wouldn't count as a legitimate challenge simply because it hasn't hit the leaderboard.
That's true, but it's not a 'problem'. It's not lacking something that the current hiscore offers. :)

(Also, by making the 'top' challenges intentionally impossible (or close to), there's plenty of futureboth in the currently-supported system of forum challenges and bragging, and in working out how to 'do the impossible'.)

07-31-2014 10:34 PM
Ancient Member
Quote Originally Posted by sylph
To explain my reasoning - the trouble I had with this approach, is that players seeking the top of the highscore would have to go back and 'collect' all the 'easy' challenges. It's not an issue in situations where the top-difficulty challenges include the earlier ones (since you could just get them all in one fell swoop), but would be a pain if the acheivements end up being less 'grouped'. In the examples I gave, for instance, a player that had won the game in under 30 minutes might have to go back and do it in under 30,000 turns, then go back again and get the fire orb in under 20,000! I know it's doubtful, but there would be something liberating in thinking 'yes, I'm adamantium level, I don't have to worry about going and picking up all those mithril achievements anymore'.
More importantly, it lets a player that doesn't like, for example, speedrunning the game, play without it! That is, you're not forced to play the game a certain way to acheive a high score. If you don't like playing melee characters, you can simply skip the easier melee challenges and still work your way up the leaderboard.
Also, it doesn't seem as straight forward as just trying to get more adamantium acheivements than your rival!

That being said, I'm probably just being me here, and giving 'points' for achievements depending on their difficulty might well be a better way of doing it. Tthe suggestion is, essentially, ranking players based on their acheivement total, however it's ultimately acheived (points, tiers etc).
The problem of scoring, say, 1 adamantium more than 20 mithril is that then, for the leaderboard to make any sense at all, you have to make sure that all the achievement sets are balanced among each other (i.e. that there is no mithril achievement that is easier that a given adamantium achievement). That sounds very difficult (as achievements can be about widely different things and it's hard to evaluate their difficulty) and I don't think it's even desirable - it's OK if relatively new players can get a decent-level achievement in an easy category. For example, there could be a carpenter achievement line where killing the carpenter is iron and saving him is mithril - this mithril will obviously be way easier than ending-the-game mithril, but that shouldn't break the ranking a lot. However if that mithril scores more than 20 irons it's problematic.

07-31-2014 11:16 PM
Ancient Member
Quote Originally Posted by Al-Khwarizmi
The problem of scoring, say, 1 adamantium more than 20 mithril is that then, for the leaderboard to make any sense at all, you have to make sure that all the achievement sets are balanced among each other (i.e. that there is no mithril achievement that is easier that a given adamantium achievement). That sounds very difficult (as achievements can be about widely different things and it's hard to evaluate their difficulty) and I don't think it's even desirable - it's OK if relatively new players can get a decent-level achievement in an easy category. For example, there could be a carpenter achievement line where killing the carpenter is iron and saving him is mithril - this mithril will obviously be way easier than ending-the-game mithril, but that shouldn't break the ranking a lot. However if that mithril scores more than 20 irons it's problematic.
Well, Olympic medals work kind of the same way. 1 gold ranks higher than 20 silver, even if the gold is in an "easier" event.

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