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Blom

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Achievement Overhaul 🎉

TL;DR at the bottom!!
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CubeCraft Java has a system called Achievements. These are hard, fun, challenging and sometimes plain stupid tasks you have to do to get a small reward and a little progress towards completing all these tasks on the server. Achievements have long been a part of CubeCraft, being added all the way back in 2015. It has single-handedly built a community full of people dedicated to complete CubeCraft in its entirety, a thing that still keeps on driving people to the absolute limits of the game, being as close as 3 achievements away! Safe to say, achievements are worth putting in time and effort, no matter how much of it. It keeps a big community of CubeCraft together, a community that is as old as the drive for CubeCraft to be an enjoyable place for players.

If you are relatively new to the game, you probably have seen a pop-up message of an achievement every once in a while, when you did something random by accident or when you actively tried to get that Cubelet prize out of it. If you look in the Achievements menu, you can see there are quite a lot of these to complete. Currently, there are 270 achievements active, while 538 achievements have been kept in a legacy section, as an ode to the removed games from the Future of Java update. Sadly, the 270 that are active are not perfect, hence I plead for an overhaul of the current achievements with some remarks of how I would like to see this system continue in the near future.

Current Achievements 💪


Down below, I will list what is wrong with the current achievements, and after that some suggestions to improve. Note that I will not elaborately talk about what is already good, as I have a lot of good words for the system as a whole, the puns and the stupidity in the challenges. I will talk about it briefly, but that is not because I think the system is completely terrible, because I don't.

That being said, here are a couple achievements that are either unobtainable or not working anymore. The shortlist:

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EggWars - Mr. Fahrenheit and Deviled egg

These achievements are only possible on a very select amount of maps. With Java's Map rotation, this is quite tricky. If all maps that feature anything fire related would be subbed out, these achievements would not be possible anymore. This is due to the removal of the enchantment shop with one of the later Emerald updates in EggWars, which also featured a flame enchantment for bows and fire aspect for swords

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SkyWars - Defeat the beast

This achievement is a perfect example of what I described above. Due to the map 'Warden' being out of the rotation, this achievement is officially not possible to obtain anymore, until CubeCraft puts the Warden map back into the featured map rotation.

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SkyWars - Relight my Fire

With the 1.19 update, this achievement is officially not possible to obtain anymore. It is not possible anymore to craft two of the same item together to melt their durability. The above mentioned achievements should still be obtainable if all the environment factors line up perfectly, but for this one, that is not the case.

Besides these, we also have some rewarding issues. I think there have been a lot of great suggestions about the progressive achievements and how incredibly unbalanced the reward is compared to the effort, but I want to address a different point. If you are interested in other good suggestions, I'd recommend this thread by @Eli or this thread by @SanCookie, they explain the progressive system and imbalances in further detail.

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Lucky Islands - Yer a wizard

Being one of the better created achievements in my opinion, both because of the pun, the stupidity and difficulty of the task and the use of the gamemode specifically, I think this achievement is quite outdated, and is only an example of many more achievements. This sounds weird, but I'll try to explain. See, when this achievement got added, the game consists of a lot less block drops, gamemodes, maps, kits etc. When we connect that to wands, they only had 6 (Dragon's Breath, Shield, Regeneration, Invisibility, TNT and Slime Wand). The achievement when I got it also included the Frost Path, Fake Lucky Block and Potion Wand, being a total of 9 wands deep. Currently, with the Mob Wand and the Lightning wand being added as well, it gets harder and harder to 'casually' complete an achievement as such. Besides the amount of wands, the amount of possible loot openings per block is also much higher, making the chance of opening the wand you just need only a whole lot smaller. When going forward, seeing new updates for the game and more content being added, achievements like this become impossible to complete. I think the achievement should be back in balance with the difficulty of the challenge, either increase the reward or decrease the requirements.

When making an update, I don't think CubeCraft looks at their achievement system enough. Having 7(!) non-working achievements before that were only removed almost a year after the update that broke them, it is save to say the achievements deserve some more attention every now and then.

So, I suggest to keep working on achievements when doing bigger updates like we had before. That way, everyone can enjoy achieving these challenges at the fullest

New Game Achievements 🆕


When Among Slimes hit the network, it did not have any achievements, but in under two months, after it was known to be a successful game, 56 achievements were added to the game. During the time this game was on the network, I've heard a lot of people wanting to grind out all the achievements, working towards completing them all. With a lot of new games being made and also added to the Java network, I personally believe these games should also have achievements being added. Currently, besides enjoying yourself and possibly getting onto a leaderboard, there is no incentive to play the games. As an individual, I don't mind, but I could understand from a company perspective that having that incentive is far more profitable, hence it would be worth putting time into making stupid puns for even more absurd challenges.

With temporary games, it is always the question how much effort you want to put into the game. BedWars for example does not nearly generate enough players to make it sustainable, definitely compared to Pillars of Fortune, while also being newly released (thus it should still have a bit of the 'hype' factor). Would it be worth putting more time in it to generate more players? I don't know. Would it have gotten more players if more time was invested in the first place? Probably. Pillars of Fortune however generates over twice as much players as EggWars does, which is considered the main game of CubeCraft since forever, at any given moment. CubeCraft already showed to be willing to put more time in the game, making a voting system and patching some critical flaws (Ender Dragon Eggs, no fall damage in the first 3 seconds, potions that are 100% useless etc).

I think achievements fit in both of these cases. Either generating an incentive or keeping players play a silly gamemode for a bigger purpose. And mind you, it is not hard to come up with a ton of achievements, definitely not when your game uses almost all of the items in Minecraft. There are already threads made dedicated to possible achievements for either game. References is also a trademark of CubeCraft, which is why I think this should not be a limiting factor. I don't know if more Beta games are coming but I would advise looking forward for these games, making achievements for them and generating more incentive to play. I believe this would retain more members and eventually pay off in the form of profit for the company, which is why CubeCraft still exists in the first place.

Setting a Goal 🥅


As said, there is a big community regarding achievements. Here is a screenshot of one of the external Discord servers that also revolves around Achievements and other stats. Note that this is not the only Discord server to do so, and there are much more people involved than you might actually predict.
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The owner of the server would probably be happy if I advertise the server, so you can join here!

The fact that all of this has to go external is quite a shame, if you ask me. Competition is a driving force behind a lot of actions in our life, including which games we play. We can see this back in a lot of leaderboards on the network, where the number 1 position is barely secure at any moment (for example, FFA). Because of all of this, I think it would be very cool to add a leaderboard for most achievements completed and most legacy achievements completed to the lobby. This could be in the form of an NPC (maybe even a leaderboard NPC, containing all other leaderboards (maybe even the legacy leaderboards?? Different suggestion, lol)), but being added to the achievement menu in your hotbar would be great as well.

Besides that, I think there is something else that would give Achievements a bit of a charm around it. There are 270 achievements as for now, and I even though I know some people's number of completed achievements, I wouldn't know which achievements they have completed. For that matter, there are so many players on the network, I wouldn't even know which achievements are more completed than others. I know this is a long shot, as this costs much, much more resources, but in the far future it would be cool to see how many % of the players have completed a certain achievement. Obviously, not everyone plays every game, so to qualify for this you should have at least one achievement in that game completed, so you aren't in the top 10% on every single achievement. Again, this is a long shot and I don't see this added anytime soon, but it would definitely be amazing to have something like that, making players feel more unique because of their achievements and pushing them to complete tough achievements only a select group has.

Concluding 📜


I think achievements are valuable for the network on a higher level than just enhancing players experience. This is why I think CubeCraft should invest more time in these. This can be done by updating the current achievements to work in a new, updated environment, be rewarding at all times and to make them more unique in a ton of ways. Making these more competitive could also help in retaining members and therefore be more profitable in the long run. It would also help the community that is already behind achievements as a whole and make it a lower entry requirement for new people to become part of this community. Overall, I believe achievements are neglected as a whole and should be valued more.

To finish off, I also want to validate that last point of being neglected by something that annoys me a lot and has already been marked planned, being the order of the achievements, which is really annoying, definitely when it comes to progressive achievements. You can find the thread on that here (thread by @99th_DutchScary).

Please vote if you agree with this!! :agree:

TL;DR - Please fix broken achievements and work on the effort/reward ratios of some achievements. Add achievements for newly added games. Enhance achievements so that they are more competitive, e.g. a leaderboard for most completed.
 

Eli

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Wonderful suggestion! I hope some of the more unobtainable/broken achievements get the necessary rework/maintenance, and I think a global leaderboard for most achievements would be a fantastic idea.

I have a few points that I somewhat disagree with however:
  • The warden achievement doesn’t seem like much of a problem to me, as its name suggests the map “rotation” is ever changing and maps are supposed to circle back every once in a while. Considering how the path to reaching 270 achievements is a rather long term goal, I don’t think having to wait a few months to complete 1 of these 270 is that much of an inconvenience.
  • I would personally not invest any time or resources on achievements for bedwars, I agree that the game does not have the same amount of traction as other game modes, and much less in comparison to Pillars of Fortune. And I do not think achievements are mainstream enough to signify an increase in that player count, completionist players that go for achievements tend to be a bit more niche, so bringing achievements over to bedwars would likely give us a very minimal increase.
 

UncleSpect

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I tried many times to do the "defeat the warden" and "fire and steel" achievements in solo skywars, but I could not succeed. Really good suggestion, I hope they fix this and the map rotation comes faster.
 
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