Five New Achievements!
February 4th, 2016 by Lyle Maeterlinck
Announcing the release of five new achievements! Now you can get achievements for collecting Blood Vials, Lumen Vials, and for holding souls that you obtained through the Blood River, Moon River, and Blood Doll Collector achievements. You can read the specifics on these achievements in the Achievements Guide. We’ve also made some minor updates to the display and organization of the achievement rankings, and the individual achievement progress pages that we hope make them easier to read and more user-friendly. Have fun
February 5th, 2016 at 6:31 am
Lyle, some of us already have the L-2 in all of the new achievements or better, could what we already have be grand fathered in? Or do we have to start from scratch? http://www.slbloodlines.com/members/1714725 is my BL page, and I don’t feel it fair we have to start over basically, to earn what we already have. And many others I have talked to agree we should be grand fathered into the newer ones.
February 5th, 2016 at 6:47 am
I would also like to suggest some more free achievements to keep people interested, The game cost’s a lot to play as it is, and some of us play it well and make you guys n gals a lot of Linden/Real money from the sales on the vend boards we have set up on our clan lands..
Just something to think about.
February 5th, 2016 at 9:30 pm
I must say, if there is no grandfather clause, then this is extremely poorly thought out. You have alienated and embittered many of the top players in the game, people who have spent thousands of in RL currency to get very close to, or to achieve the old 185 levels, and thus “finish” the achievements. This was possible as you could make enough souls then sell them off to recoup some of the expense. Now with these 3 new soul holding achievements, you are forcing people to hold 750 MORE souls than they already are, if they are to achieve level 5 in all three. Your first mistake was in simply sliding the template counts over from the old hudding badges. 10,25,50,100,250 is too high IF you also require the souls to be held. You are talking 1700 USD upfront costs, roughly 1300 IF you sell all the blood at market resell price. That of course assumes one is doing this with massive alts (which btw, violates Linden TOS). I posit the electrum as a cost barrier in comparison. It cost roughly 1000 usd to do 250. Only 5 people have ever done that, and only 2 more have even done level 4 (100 splashes). Not only are these new badges a slap in the face to those 7 (by requiring them to pony up another 1700 USd), who all will or already have finished the old 185 levels, but it also shows that the levels for that badge, and now these new ones are and were set too high. Psychologically people will finish a task (in this case the achievements) if its is somewhat feasible. Your goal with these badges is to increase you revenue flow, some would say in a cynical cash grab, and even if one takes a neutral stance on the motivation, I can most assure you that you will drive far more revenue if you lower the bar on these badges to match the Blood Vial levels. Mercedes Benz dwarfs Ferrari in gross revenue, because many more people stretch to buy a Benz (which is still out of reach price wise for most of the globe) versus the multiple mid 6 figure price point for a Ferrari. Its all about volume. By making no grandfather clause you have alienated the top 100 plus players in the game (and thus they will create negative spillover inside their clans) and you also are deterring many more from even trying to max out levels. Holding 300 new souls is a barrier enough (if level 5 was 100), holding 750 new souls is death for all but maybe 1 or 2 people in the entire game who mix massive soul holding and also do massive achievement levels. By setting the bar so high, you will simply end up with a bunch of people at level one in souls holding, and also angry players who feel burnt by having to not only make insane amounts of alts, but then also swallow whole the cost of hudding them, minus the blood sales. SL is a declining platform, I estimate there are 900,000 SL unique users who still log in. Limbo alone for BL is over 1 million plus. Total BL accounts are 1.9 million (limbo plus huds). There simply are not enough new RL people coming into SL to drive new huds without alt making. Even taking away the Linden TOS-breaking a priori nature of the alts, you still are not going to maximise potential revenue to your firm with the current new badge levels, and in the process you are alienating your core base of players.
February 6th, 2016 at 6:46 am
I have 27 Human Souls I got through Blood Doll and 21 Lycan Souls I got through Moon River. Why do I not have the new achievement for them? I have not sold or traded them. I agree with darkstorm, if we have them already we should not have to start over.
February 7th, 2016 at 4:43 pm
Why is it that Bloodlines is using the Voyager Badge as an award for Blood Vial Collector, and substitutes a World Travels Badge for the Lumen Vial Collector?
Is this just a goof?
February 8th, 2016 at 9:29 am
@Darkstorm9215: Our philosophy for new achievements is that we’d like them to be awarded for new actions going forward to the degree that we can, instead of just rewarding actions that may have already been taken in the past. Part of the idea is to reward current, active players taking new actions, and so current players aren’t competing with players who are no longer pursuing achievements. I understand that you may have already taken some of these actions, but the achievements didn’t exist then. If we grandfathered in past actions, then everyone would not be starting on the same playing field with regard to the new achievements.
February 8th, 2016 at 9:30 am
@DarkStorm9215: Sure, please feel free to suggest any ideas you have for achievements. You can post them here or IM or notecard me in-world.
February 8th, 2016 at 9:42 am
@TheDirtyWaterOfTheRiver: I’m sorry you’re not satisfied with the way the new achievements are set up. As I mentioned in a reply to another comment, our philosophy for new achievements is to have them count for new actions to the degree that we can, so that everyone is starting on the same playing field with them, instead of new people competing with people who got grandfathered achievements for actions they just happened to take in the past. We thought it was fair to have the levels match the Blood River, etc. achievements, because then Blood River Level 5 = Soul Keeper Level 5. We don’t mean this as a slap in the face to anyone, the achievements are an entirely optional part of the game. If you want to compete for them, you can, but you certainly don’t have to. I don’t think your “cash grab” accusation is fair. We try to release new features all the time to enrich the game that cost nothing to use, such as the recent Family Enemies and Allies feature, the ability to easily switch your family leader from the website, the recent Family Roles feature, and the Secret Name feature so that deactivated souls can be traded.
February 8th, 2016 at 9:43 am
@VictoriaMarne: As I replied in another comment, our philosophy on this is that new achievements should be rewarded for new actions to the degree that we can do that, so that new people aren’t competing with people who happened to already do the achievements in the past.
February 8th, 2016 at 9:44 am
@Dana: you might be seeing locally-cached images. The icons are displayed using sprite sheets, and you will probably have to do a force-reload to get the new sprite sheets. You can do this by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+R. Let me know if that doesn’t work.
February 8th, 2016 at 12:09 pm
@ Lyle: k, I’ll buy that. You are correct, and it was a cache issue. Checking cache never occurred to me since I’d never viewed those particular badges before. Thank you for the tip! 🙂
February 9th, 2016 at 8:34 pm
The problem is Lyle, is that you are counting Blood and Lumen Vials that were already in the system. If you are going to make statements like that, you should be consistant. This still looks like you don’t mind the loss of the inexpensive product you sell but if it involves the loss of income from the sale of new HUDS then you don’t grandfather them in. I posted my response before your post. So I will say don’t respond like I should have read your post that was made two days after I made mine. I enjoy being part of the Bloodline Family and I actively participate. Acheivements are made to show activity. Past activity is still viable and you will probably find there has been a lot of trading and selling of some of the souls so the numbers will not be as high as you think.
February 13th, 2016 at 9:00 am
The number of new achievements caught many of my friends by surprise, and it might be good in the future to have a little advance notice. Some of my friends who have a number of old vials and such felt as thought they have to buy again, and so there is a little malaise about the whole thing. An option to convert existing vials might have been a goodwill gesture. Just a thought, since I’ve gotten earfuls about the matter.
March 6th, 2016 at 1:00 pm
@James: existing vials should work for the achievement, as long as they’re filled, and you get +1 for each different person you have a vial from. The achievemeent will update for them if they get passed a new vial, or fill or drink a vial.