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Strategy Articles
A Community of Achievers
by Rogue Shindler, Achievement Master
13th January 2012
It is hard to believe, but the achievements system has been active for over a year now (though most of us weren't aware of it for the first month of the year). As we move towards the anniversary of the Achievements announcement, we figured the best way to to celebrate would be...MORE achievements! Here's a bit of a peek at what's been going on behind the scenes.
Since the achievement system was largely established to foster a great sense of community amongst players (earning points, comparing achievements, trying different deck types, friendly competition, etc), it seems apropos to me to name each achievement set after characters from one of my favorite shows, Community. With one 'expansion' under our belts ("Abed" released at the end of summer), the Achievements team has been working a bit more smoothly on this next set. More specifically, I have developed a better idea of have long things take, and was able to better schedule the lead time for each step of the process. Design was completed much earlier in order to leave sufficient time for coding and art design to make each achievement functional and icons prepared.
With the design of the upcoming set "Britta", we expanded on the rewards for dilemmas, Tribbles, and TDs introduced in Abed, but returned primary focus to deck building. There are a number of new deck themes available, but we have also done a bit of realignment to make naming conventions consistent across the board, and prepare a few existing achievements to be parts of a larger cycle of achievements in the future.
We also introduce new point values for achievements, as well as adjust the point values of some existing achievements. The 10 pointers were largely meant for most of your deck build to be focused around them, and not meant to stack one upon the other for 100 point achievement decks. As such, many of the new achievements that are easily combined with other achievements in a single deck will only be worth 5 points. Conversely, a few extremely noteworthy achievements have increased in value to encourage players to tackle such a large undertaking. We even have a few 0 point achievements that offer an alternate reward... but more on that later.
Beyond Britta, we have already started development of the next achievement set "Troy," slated for release in the second half of 2012. In addition, plans are in the works for a micro-set of limited edition, "live" achievements that will trigger off of in-game events rather than just deck contents, as well as some potential tangible rewards down the road, for all those achievement points you have stockpiled.
On Friday, February 3 (the first anniversary of of the original Achievements announcement), we will kick things off with the release of Britta and keep running from there. We can't wait to see what else you will achieve in 2012!