Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux

[mmcirvin]

Achievement Servers in Team Fortress 2.

For people who don't speak Gamer: Team Fortress 2 is an online multiplayer combat game in which you play characters of various classes with different abilities. I haven't played it but I've heard it's fun. Anyway, as with many modern games, aside from the main object of the game (to beat the other team), TF2 has a system of "Achievements": specific little tasks an individual can do that unlock the ability to use new items within the game.

It's also possible to host a user-created combat environment on your own server. Apparently there exists an underground of "Achievement Servers" contrived specifically to make it easy to get achievements. What happens there is somehow sad, hilarious, and fascinating as a study of emergent properties of weird social environments, all at the same time. Not only is the whole thing a perverse emergent phenomenon of the game community, there's this whole second layer of people playing merry hell with the Achievement Server world itself, while everyone shouts insults over chat. It's sort of like something Beckett or Boris Vian might dream up in a sadistic mood.

As I remarked when I was sent this link, it's the sort of thing that actually gives me the science-fictional shock-of-dysrecognition feeling about the world I live in. This scenario would have made a nice satirical short-short about cyberspace as late as the early Nineties.

Comments

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Achievements are a requirement for any game that will end up on XBox Live, and so they're filtering out into the rest of the world thanks to multi-platform games such as TF2.

That's not to say they weren't there before; the "Battlefield" games, starting with the first sequel, Battlefield 2, have all had achievements in the form of "ribbons" "medals," etc. which give you points which accumulate towards "promotions" which mean you can choose weapon/utility unlocks which really do modify the game quite a bit. However, in order to submit your points to the national rankings, you must be playing on a "Ranked server," which has the prescribed official maps, as well as the server rules and settings (things like victory conditions, gravity, and such) must be right on--- the only variation is whether Friendly Fire is on or off, i.e. do your weapons damage your teammates.

That's not to say stat-padding isn't rampant, widespread, etc. Furthermore, though there are official servers run by EA, there are plenty of ranked, unofficial servers where points count, but admins can cheat. One guy I heard about has never ever lost a round of the game, because he can change teams at the last second. Not in the way you or I could change teams--the stats-server would catch that-- but by telling the server to switch him to another team. Other guys rank up the kills by having a willing victim and medic on standby. Sometimes the victim is unwilling, but has no chance to escape the repeated stabbing/revival cycle.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I guess the real mistake here was to insufficiently constrain the conditions under which somebody could get achievements. (Assuming the TF2 developers even consider this state of affairs to be undesirable enough to worry about.)

Unlockables abound in some of Nintendo's games too. Mario Kart has half of its tracks locked until you win trophies in single-player Grand Prix mode (though the track locking doesn't affect online games), but there are also a bunch of unlockable player characters and vehicles. The unlockable characters are mostly just cosmetic trophies, since the main thing that matters about them is whether they're classed as small, medium or large (which is what determines which vehicles they can drive), but the vehicles have several different axes of handling characteristics, in the typical manner of racing games.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Oh, and: One of the unlockable characters (Rosalina, the helpful god-princess in Super Mario Galaxy) is much easier to unlock if you have a Super Mario Galaxy save file on your system, which is evil in a clever way. Fortunately it's just the one.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Nintendo doesn't seem to be as hard-core in the cross-promotion thing as it was in the Game Cube days, when it seemed like every game had a special deluxe feature you could only get to by having a Game Boy attached with a link cable. Or four.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Valve (Orange Box, incl. Portal, TF2, and Half-Life 2 and following episodes) put in a lot of initial achievements, but most of them would be accomplished in the course of gameplay, or with very little extra effort, especially in Portal and HL2, because, well, they're single-player games. TF2's initial achievements were all really smart, forcing the "overachiever" player to play every class, every map, and accomplish challenging versions of good class behavior. E.g. Spy: Get an enemy medic to heal you; Engineer: teleport 20 players with a single teleporter pair. Both require some developed skill in those classes, and require that you don't neglect your class's major advantage.

Then they patched it and added 27 medic achievements and the first of the unlocks, also for medic "weapons." Valve was collecting a ton of gameplay stats through Steam, so presumably they were detecting a deficit of healers out there, especially since the medic has such a hard time being an aggressor, except for 10 seconds out of every 3-4 minutes. Any map will do for stat-padding, just fill it with medics; just as easily any server can limit members of a class.

I think you're right that TF2/Valve needs require the achievements to happen during real gameplay on legit maps. On the other hand, Valve has aways favored the mapping community, because it has gotten so much back from them (and the Mod community--heck, the original Team Fortress was a Quake Mod, and Team Fortress Classic was a very popular Half-Life Mod, superceded only by Counter-Strike). Valve might not want to do anything that stands in the way of mappers/modders.

Unlockable tracks and cars (well, vehicles) are traditional for racing games, but multiplayer always adds a complication for unlockables-- some players will always have an advantage of time-in-game over others, and therefore unlocks as well. Skill-matching is a good solution (the upcoming free PC game from the Battlefield crew is advertising skill-matching on its servers, and apparently all servers will be official ones) but that is limited by the available players.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

MK Wii does skill-matching; there are all sorts of different ratings a player accumulates over the course of play, and one of them is based in some obscure way on win-loss stats in online races. There's some wiggle room in the skill matching, though, so there's likely to be a couple of significantly stronger racers in any given competing group.

I don't think there are any unlockable vehicles that just have godlike powers; they've all got trade-offs and require different skills to master.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I wish it had occurred to me earlier, but for PC users, TF2 had a free weekend (well, maybe it's true for Xboxers, but I don't know how) this weekend. They have a couple each year, often 3-day weekends (presumably that means that many gamers will be out of town anyway).

The more I think about it, the more intrigued I am at the idea of cyberspace occupants having alarmingly perverse incentives and goals compared to real-life, which, by comparison, is evolved, not designed by well-intentioned madmen. Then again, the original game's incentives can be a bit bizarre, but they result in a fun output that exceeds 311 barrels-of-monkeys/second at peak hours, a mere day's output of which could, if properly harnessed, conceivably power over a dozen primetime sitcoms, 8 theme parks and a water park, or 1200 pie-fights in the war-room. Frankly, it would revolutionize the economy of fun, which as you know is currently powered by children on slip-n-slides and the usual Orgone Energy conversion.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, several of the comments to that article complain that Valve released the new Pyro achievements at the same time as the free weekend, thereby giving new players a radically skewed experience of the game with vast numbers of Pyros all over the place.

I'M GONNA HEADBUTT YA!

[timchuma.livejournal.com]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YimrJtLaSqo

Cannot stop laughing!

Re: I'M GONNA HEADBUTT YA!

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Ah yes: the one thing worse than stat-padders is griefers. Some of them are really funny, though, which is why I love to watch their hilarious movies... as long as they don't grief my servers.

Re: I'M GONNA HEADBUTT YA!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I've also been told that TF2 is known for generally having a slightly politer and more emotionally mature clientele than other online games.