The topic of achievements came up during beta and to put it in a tl;dr fashion before a wall of text: in a 1P game, I'm all for achievements, I love collecting them for the sake of collecting them and am proud of myself while doing so but in a 2P competitive game I am not convinced that achievements are a good idea.
To summarize my lengthy train of thought from the beta forums:
- Achievements would need to be limited to league games to be of any value (i. e. not cheese-able by playing against a friend or yourself).
- Achievements modify behavior by shifting priorities. As it stands right now, winning a game is your only objective - but once there are 30 achievements to strife for, you have a lot of side-goals. Build more Medics than you usually would for that achievement or do some move that is clearly disadvantageous but you really want that achievement.
- Most importantly, achievements in 2P competitive games leads to griefing and frustration. Many ideas which have already been mentioned and many that will probably come up after my post fall into one of two categories:
- Grind Achievements - build X of a unit or destroy Y or a unit. Win Z games or conquer ∑ Wit Spaces.
- Extraordinary Situation Achievements - heal a Heavy with 1 HP and kill another unit with that same Heavy in one turn. Scramble a unit with a scrambled Scrambler. Destroy all enemy units except Medics and then block their Spawn Spaces.
Both of these types of achievements would lead me (as an achievement-collector) to the following moral conundrum:
I have practically won this game, but I can use it to either boost my progress on these grind achievements or to do some of these only-going-to-happen-once-every-hundred-games achievements. All the while my opponent is twiddling his thumbs. He knows the game is over. If I go ahead and drag the game on for my own purposes I am diminishing my opponents enjoyment and if my opponent forfeits the game, I'm frustrated because I missed an opportunity to work on my achievements.
And given that there is a chat you can bet that some games will eventually start with "hi, would you mind if we did achievement X before starting the game in earnest?" or flat out achievement grinding games.
In conclusion: in my opinion (and I'm ready to be convinced otherwise) achievements would not add any enjoyment to Outwitters (or any other 2P competitive game for that matter) but lead to frustration and generally bad behavior.
