haven is missing something to show off for all your effort

[Aerona]

If you think this is a good idea, I would suggest you not seek to promote it by expressing how little you think the developers' time is worth. I am literally cringing.

[VDZ]

Also if you genuinely think opportunity cost is an issue you should spend your time in the Announcement patch threads rather than posting your cringe takes on good ideas.

Opportunity cost is definitely an issue in general. The dev team consists of two people. It's just not an issue in this case, as achievements can be very low-effort to implement.

That's just the thing, achievements and trophies don't require coding. Sure, someone could slap together an html page or ten, but that's not necessary. No one used computer programming to award a blue ribbon to the biggest hog at the county fair, they just weighed it themselves and got on with the festival. We're in for a Bad Future if humans think they can't make judgement calls or hand out accolades on their own and need to depend on a computer program to do it for them.

As someone who has actually made 'community achievements' for a game, no, it just isn't feasible for Haven. It requires
a) availability of data to authenticate the achievements (in my case I just pull the data from the same endpoint used by the in-game leaderboard display); and
b) a place for people to see the achievements (in my case I was already running a leaderboard site as alternative for the game's shitty in-game leaderboard display).
Haven lacks a feasible means to collect and verify the data (you could have people send in screenshots, but that would take tons of work and could easily be cheated), and the only places to find information on specific players are on the forums and in-game - again, a result of the fact that end-users can't fetch other players' data (for good reason in this game). It's not possible with (partial) automation, and it's clearly infeasible done manually.

[Aerona]

Cheating is a fact of life in competitions... I read a news story earlier this year about a real-world fishing competition that was skewed by competitors putting lead weights inside their fish. Technology can help detect cheaters, but it's neither strictly required nor foolproof for that task. Tech itself can be fooled, as when someone uses an exploit to climb to the top of a leaderboard, and that has to be detected and remedied just like it would if the competition was designed from the start to be a based on popular acclaim or a judgement call. Most competitions rely mainly on the honour system and on shaming/blacklisting those who are exposed as cheaters, and most cheaters who get caught are detected because something seems "not quite right" about their entries or the way they compete.

I can't speak to how much access to server data Jorb and Loftar would be comfortable opening up for players to dig through and make something of, even of the status of a world that's about to be reset. If they're the ones who create the user interface that displays it, they get to control what's available, so there's that. The kind of comparisons and awards I'd be most interested in (hearing about, not so much receiving) would be the kind where legwork, screenshots, and interviews are more relevant to collecting the data that's used to make a decision than what's in the game files... you can't write a script that tells you the top ten places to visit, who the MVP of a realm or village is, tells you what were the greatest battles and most epic sea voyages, or other things of that nature, so those methods that "take more work" would be the only possible methods for many awards players could strive toward.

We have different ideas of what an achievement looks like... I'm not a fan of the kind that can be automated. It seems like they'd increase engagement with the game engine but not so much with the world or community, and I feel it has a calcifying effect on parts of the game players would otherwise want to avoid or do away with but might not when the prospect of using them as a nexus for competition shows up.

[abt79]

cacophony of voices (one stubborn smoothbrain wall of texting nonsense against the idea while everyone else Agree!s) so jorb will not be considering this backbreaking and unnecessary suggestion for “thing that the entire playerbase agrees would be fun”

-as proven by the fact that several top players share end of world stats and axe/anvil qs after reset announcement

[TheServant]

cacophony of voices (one stubborn smoothbrain wall of texting nonsense against the idea while everyone else Agree!s) so jorb will not be considering this backbreaking and unnecessary suggestion for “thing that the entire playerbase agrees would be fun”

-as proven by the fact that several top players share end of world stats and axe/anvil qs after reset announcement

Jorb replied the thread with positive answer, also in private message. Just ignore the wall text and discussion is good.

[Aerona]

There's more than one way to be haunted by the ghosts of an entire world's worth of skinned cats. Or if you're not sure what that means, there's a lot of ways to implement some form of meta-progression other than any of the many proposals already described in this thread, not all of which take the form of achievements, competitions, or leaderboard rankings.

It's ironic to use the 'smoothbrain' insult to deride someone whose opposition is mainly to the specific form that's been copied and implemented in the same pattern ten thousand times before, mostly for the purpose of ensnaring those with short attention spans.

There's plenty of good ideas in here for those who aren't scared of paragraphs, and not just mine. You can always get others to summarize them for you if that's not your thing. I hear there's even AIs that can do that, and are used by academics for that very purpose. Certainly better than just making the sign of the cross when faced with a page of text.