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Nah, that's just wrong, here's literally the first post on this page: (or at least it was until this pushed the thread to a new page)
You check which achievements are in that 25% range? I'll give you a hint, it's some of the crystal Hearts, and 1/2-B. 3-B is outside of that range since it's at around 18%.
so yeah, people are crying over the fact that they could barely handle the first B-sides, and even just late game levels in general.
Edit: honestly the fact that that complaint is addressing 4-A (that's the first level achievement below 50% if you can't be bothered checking) is pretty hilarious, not even a late game level and they're crying because it was just so hard and the steam achievements don't agree.
i don't see him saying anything about "barely handling" something either. "sweating" can carry a rather wide connotation.
if you want to say people have skills issues based on the "assumption" of "one" person though...
did you use assist-mode? seems rather relevant since you are calling people out on skill.
if you used a guide or not is also relevant since you called people on that.
the dictionary definition of "sweat" for that context is "hard work; effort." or "(of a person) exert a great deal of strenuous effort." and y'know, I'm pretty sure that people that are barely handling the stages would fit that.
Honestly what else am I supposed to assume when I load up the thread, go to the last page and the first thing I see (and only thing that isn't addressing someone else's comment) is complaining that too many people have finished the game. Celeste isn't that hard if you're not getting into the really serious challenge stuff.
and to actually address the first point, I don't imagine that they did have specific levels in mind, just that they finished these levels after a serious struggle, got the achievement then got mad that Steam wasn't stoking their ego hard enough.
but it's a complaint that doesn't hold up to any amount of scrutiny because the actually challenging stuff doesn't fit the generalisation.
I was going to nearly tear my hair out holy ♥♥♥♥.
Just to further clarify, I don't entirely align with the quote you mentioned. Even though 25-50% are really weird numbers to be use as an example since it's absurdly common, the point is definitely that the dude wants to use achievement rarity% competitively.
The only argument that stands up to this is based on the statistics granting value to scarcity, in essence that clearing 2-B is less significant because around 25% of users have done it.
Which is why I've been pointing out that a selection of extremely hard achievements (Farewell/Moon Berry and C-sides) Have extremely low completion rates, which is evidence that the strawman of users that just blow through with Assist Mode to get easy achievements is a fabrication and Assist mode hasn't supposedly damaged the value of the achievement for clearing 1-B, it just isn't as hard as the people complaining think it is.
however, "people making a fuss about achievements" is rather vague and i'll address it now.
just because something else exists for people to exploit the system, doesn't mean everyone should ignore both issues. you may not find assist-mode an issue for gaining steam achievements, but that doesn't mean i'm going to ignore it just because you will.
although, i had no idea SM even existed, i'll be arguing in a different forum section after hearing about it. i'd never expect a perfect comparison number, but i'd like to see something as accurate as possible. i'm far from the only one who would like this too.
most of that is a bit outside of this topic though
well, you actually do align with my quote then. my point was that it's possible, if not likely, that he was generalizing numbers "to" make that point.
i don't believe he was actually complaining about a certain lvl, although i'll grant that he could have been.
i think i've mostly addressed this above.
knowing you are talking about someone else...
i don't expect you to have read it, but i have pointed out prior in the thread that i believe C-sides, Farewell and some others, to be an exaggeratedly high #.
i do not believe even half of that number was done without assist-mode.
comparisons to Hollow Knight were made earlier which;
1. i find easier to obtain achievements
2. has an abnormally large modding community.
3. "still" has lower % completions
it's like a... "with great power comes great responsibility" thing. people legit are slaving away for those achievements there even with excessive access to mods.
in short. i believe Hollow Knight should have relatively much higher completion % with end-game achievements than Celeste. Celeste end-game is much more demanding than any achievement in Hollow Knight imo.
i'll state once more i don't have issues with cheating/modding or w/e you want to call it.
the issue for me is that assist-mode is much more than just "easy" difficulty. it takes all mechanics out of the game, all risk.
getting the in-game achievement is one thing, but getting the steam achievement should be a separated thing imo.
Assist mode is great. Any developers that take the time to build easy modes, assist modes, etc. show that they care about reaching a larger player base and ensuring that more people enjoy their game, and I wish more games had some way to increase accessibility because I want to recommend more games to my friends (who aren't interested in super difficult challenges). There's absolutely nothing wrong with using assist mode; I even recommended one of my friends play it on assist mode because she's new to gaming.
However, it's pretty much standard practice to reserve some achievements for a portion of players (achievements for completing things on hard mode, beating certain challenges, etc.). I personally can't think of a single other game that allows full 100% achievements while playing on an easier setting. Case in point, we all know that even Celeste originally blocked off achievements for people using assist mode—that's the norm, and to argue anything otherwise would be incorrect.
Why does it matter? Well, ultimately, it only matters to players who enjoy and take pride in obtaining trophies/achievements/accomplishments/whatever-you-want-to-call-them with really low obtainment percentages (like me). It's purely human satisfaction with knowing that you completed challenges that most players couldn't; it's pretty simple and obviously not a life-altering thing, but it really does affect a lot of people's enjoyment. Meanwhile, players who play more casually mostly don't care about fancy achievements and numbers. A retort I keep seeing from people is basically "Why do you care?" or "Achievements don't even matter" and the like.
So my question, then, is this: What's the point of changing the game in a way that doesn't affect a portion of the playerbase (i.e., people who don't even care about unlocking achievements in the first place) and negatively impacts another portion (the people who really enjoy obtaining hard achievements)? If you (the people on the opposite side of my view) don't care about them, shouldn't it be totally fine to just continue blocking them off like games usually do? That way, everyone's happy—the people who don't care about achievements can still happily play assist mode, and the people who do care continue having their satisfaction. I see it as an absolute win. In other words, ironically, a lot of the people on the opposite side of my argument don't even care about achievements or don't consider them to be a big deal, so then if you don't even care about it, why are you even arguing? If you aren't even invested in completionism, blocking off difficult achievements should have absolutely 0 effect on you, right? It's a win for everybody.
Something else I keep seeing is people pointing out how people use editors and whatnot to unlock achievements, but the number of players who do that is miniscule, and I feel like it's an irrelevant point anyway; I don't see how it's even remotely related.
some of the achievements you're referring to are extremely different styles of challenge too, Celeste has zero achievements that require starting a new game. speed-run achievements and no-death runs do, just play through everything and you'll have almost all of Celeste's achievements, whereas even your first example requires opting into a harder difficulty.
it's related because the entire argument that achievements should be exclusive is based on the idea that only by completing the specified challenge should this be given, that there should be absolutely no shortcuts or work-arounds.
People pointing out the existence of stuff like Steam Achievement Manager are doing so to highlight the hypocrisy in all of these arguments; nobody cares about cheating for achievements unless they get to be able-ist in the process.
I agree that the base game of Celeste isn't that hard (though it most certainly isn't easy), but all of the optional challenges are definitely hard. Completing the C-sides is completely out of the question for a lot of players, especially given that it requires you to beat all of the B-sides as a prerequisite. Of course, maybe I'm completely wrong and I'm overstating the difficulty of the optional content, but just based on my own gaming experience, 7.3% for Thanks For Playing and 5.5% for Wow seem incredibly high, and those are most definitely highly difficult feats. Also, I agree that everything does involve a lot of muscle memory, but that's true for pretty much every platformer, so I don't quite understand what you were saying there; there's still no doubt that beating all of Celeste's optional content takes considerable skill.
I understand the point you made about the other achievements I referenced requiring different playthroughs or game modes; I imagine that there's definitely a considerable drop-off in percentages once you start getting into optional content. But that doesn't really help here because the B-sides, C-sides, and moon berry in Celeste are completely optional too; you have to go out of your way to even have access to this stuff (especially C-sides), so they too count as challenges that go beyond the normal flow of the game (i.e., working towards beating the main story). By unlocking and playing them, you really are opting into a harder difficulty. I think my point with comparing the numbers to other games' achievements still stands.
I see. Well I don't think that makes any sense. The fact that people resort to cheating is definitely unfortunate and shouldn't happen; however, it's impossible to prevent people from doing it (as far as I'm aware. I don't know a lot about that kind of thing), and I don't think there are enough people doing it to really inflate numbers anyway (otherwise, there would be no achievements that are 0.5% and below).
Meanwhile, the decision to allow achievements on any given difficulty setting is completely controllable by the developer and has a much larger impact on the percentages than the occasional cheater. Cheaters obviously shouldn't be able to just edit their achievements, but not only is that an entirely separate issue, but it's an issue that can't really be entirely combated. I still fail to see how bringing up cheaters is relevant; that's a global issue with gaming stats overall and has nothing to do with this very specific discussion on how Celeste handles accessibility and achievements.
You bring up a fair point, but I feel like I should say that things like SAM and/or similar do actually inflate numbers more than you think. Maybe not as much for popular titles like Celeste, but in my own experience I've sunk about ~4.3k hours into a game and have a couple achievements that would actually dive deep into 0.1-0.2% territory (mostly proven by the game's leaderboards, these aren't numbers I'm bringing up out of the blue), but are inflated via people with only a few hours or less using SAM and it's actually enough for all those rarest achievements in the game to reach a wall at 0.5% or higher instead, even for achievements that were known for a single digit number of people to actually obtain legitimately. Achievement sites like AStats or similar shows these people right on top as 100% completionists for the game (if they are registered within the site, that is. There's probably quite a few more than what any achievement site says). Perhaps this could be very much an outlier but that's just my experience anyway.
Quick edit for my thoughts as for here--it's mostly about what people hope to gain from proposing this, at least from my perspective.
You see a lot people wanting to use Steam's achievement system as a way to indirectly compete or a way to feel more validated for their accomplishments, but the problem is that even if Celeste did not give achievements with Assist Mode or ended up doing it at a future point, it would not solve their problems because of something much more grand scale. The point covers what many games do but it still includes Celeste.
Addressing this does not invalidate people's negative thoughts on Assist Mode specifically, but what they hope to gain just seems like they're ignoring the bigger issue for something that isn't all that feasible and prohibits their enjoyment out of some great games.
Granted, you could say that Celeste still needs a change regardless of the bigger picture anyway, but it does makes sense why developers appeal to a broader audience instead of making achievements only to those who can play at base difficulty, especially when they're approached with something that is not only externally managed but mostly out of their control & unable to maintain. This may sound utilitarian but the positives severely outweigh the implied negatives to begin with.
It's mainly why I personally say that that the solution for the player is to not care & set it aside to enjoy the game for themselves. If their enjoyment is genuinely being impacted by it then the game itself just ain't what they hoped to get out of, but these things shouldn't be taken as absurd or needing to be "fixed," the game's just not for them at that point.
Just as a tinier just for fun thing, there's actually a few games that I can think of right off the bat, all with their own quirks:
Dead Cells actually explicitly allowed its accessibility features to be enabled for achievements once they were added (which I can assure you as quite a few have been enraged over)
Rhythm Doctor has a toggle for more difficulty options, including an Unmissable difficulty, which you can still get all achievements with. Same goes with Freedom Planet 1 with its Casual difficulty.
As far as I know, all Persona games have achievements that require reaching a story-related event or collecting a certain item, or beating a certain boss, all of which can be accessed with any difficulty, I'm pretty sure quite a lot of things probably fall under this category.
The furthest comparison from this (although still worth bringing up) is that the developers of Darkest Dungeon have explicitly stated that they allow mods to be used to gather achievements, and a lot of mods pretty much offer options to make the game easier.
1) Not only do you have to care enough about stats to even consider cheating, but you also have to be unskilled enough to fail to get the achievements and desperate enough to use editors to unlock them while also not caring about the risk of getting banned or called out. That's far less likely than someone using assist mode.
2) The numbers. You gave the example of 0.1%—0.2% achievements being inflated to around 0.5%, but that's nothing compared to Celeste's Wow achievement having a whopping 5.5% when it should really have way less than 1%, especially considering that it's DLC, which is a point I'll clarify right now.
DLC tends to have a big drop off in players since a lot of players have already reached closure and don't come back. For example, achievements related to Ms. Chalice in Cuphead have very low percentages. The one for literally just beating one boss with Ms. Chalice is sitting at a mere 6.9% when the base game achievement for beating one boss is at 77.8%; that's an insane difference considering you barely have to do anything to get initial access to the DLC (seriously. You only have to beat one Run & Gun and complete the very easy Mausoleum challenge). That's not even mentioning the fact that Cuphead is ridiculously popular.
So for the Wow achievement in Celeste—a highly difficult achievement that is DLC and also requires you to have beaten many other challenges prior—to legitimately have anywhere near 5.5% is absolutely absurd; it just can't be true.
Since I don't think cheaters have that large of an impact, I also still don't think bringing up cheaters is too relevant. Also, I get that you're saying that blocking off achievements for easier settings won't completely eliminate the issue since cheaters exist, but in my mind, it's obviously better to eliminate as much of the problem as possible. Inflation due to assist mode + cheaters is worse than inflation due to just cheaters. Since all this is purely for the sake of my dumb monkey brain being happy because of really low achievement percentage numbers, all I care about is ways to alleviate the issue even if solving it entirely is impossible.
I don't think Celeste needs a change, and I don't think anyone else does either. Why? Because it's too late. There's no point in making the change now since so much time has passed, and retroactively revoking achievements is both inhumane and probably infeasible. However, it's still important to talk about things like this since A) feedback for a game is important in general, and B) games affect other games.
I disagree with the idea of developers making achievements completely accessible regardless of game mode; I want it to stay the way it has always been—if you don't have the skill, then you don't get the achievement. Or at least keep in-game achievements active while disabling the global Steam ones; that actually makes the most sense to me. I also completely disagree that the positives far outweigh the negatives—I think the exact opposite is true. I pointed out in an earlier post that the people who play with assist mode most likely don't even care about obtaining really rare achievements; they just want to be able to enjoy the game. The only people really being impacted by inflated achievements percentages are the people who do care about trophies (again, I realize that it's not exactly a life-altering issue, lol. This is only important in the scope of game design and enjoying gaming).
In other words, here's the impact that enabling achievements on assist mode has:
-- People who just play to casually enjoy the game possibly go from neutral to positive or just stay neutral since they didn't care about achievements in the first place.
-- People who play to enjoy the game and get the satisfaction of working to legitimately pull off difficult feats go from positive to negative.
^ With this being the net impact, the decision just doesn't make sense to me. I did consider that maybe more casual players care about achievement stats than I thought; maybe a lot of assist mode folk do care about trophies and whatnot. I highly doubt that though.
Also, to say that a game isn't for someone if their enjoyment is partially tied to achievements is incredibly unfair and untrue. I really don't have much else to say about that statement. But it does wrap back around to something I said previously; if a portion of people don't even care about the achievements, then keeping them blocked off shouldn't affect them at all; everyone stays happy.
I actually didn't know Dead Cells did that. I don't like that. I played Dead Cells a little bit in 2018 during Early Access and actually plan to play it again now that it's so complete, and that does put a damper on things. I'm okay with easier games like Persona doing stuff like that, but games like Dead Cells that are supposed to appeal to audiences that enjoy super difficult games (I'm assuming here. I don't remember how difficult Dead Cells is, so correct me if I'm wrong) don't need to make that kind of compromise. Add assist modes and easy modes all day; again, I love when games include extra accessibility options so I can actually recommend stuff to my friends. But allowing global Steam achievements to remain active feels like such a needless move.
Now, as I said somewhere above, maybe it's possible that people on easier modes also care about achievements. In that case, I think the best solution is to separate in-game achievements from the global Steam ones (e.g., beating challenge XYZ on easy mode will give you the nice achievement pop-up in the game and lets you feel good, but it won't unlock the Steam achievement, which shouldn't matter since if you're playing on easy mode, you don't care about showing off rare skill-based Steam trophies to begin with). The entire point of seeing global percentages on trophies on any platform is for the sake of comparison, and it satisfies people's competitive nature. I don't understand how taking that satisfaction away from people helps anyone. Yes, achievements are mostly personal accomplishments—learning that Celeste allows achievements on assist mode certainly didn't stop me from enjoying the hell out of getting all of the achievements and getting the moon berry. But at the same time, another large part of achievements for a lot of people is rarity, and I was definitely disappointed by how high the percentages on those of Celeste are—it just makes it less satisfying; that's all.
I mostly never intended to compare achievement managers to Assist Mode, I moreso just wanted to say that it's more than you think.
"Way less than 1%" is a value that you think the achievement rarity should be at, which is fine, but isn't inherently backed up by anything in particular other than what you perceive the difficulty of Farewell to be at. "it's not that hard/easy" are things that aren't worth making a point about because it's subjective at the end of the day and nobody can change anyone's initial experience regarding the difficulty of the chapter.
I would back up my reasons why my own example are not numbers that I personally feel like it should be but I do feel like I would be diving too much into off-topic territory, unless you actually want it.
My example is inherently going to appear small--it does deal with the far end of rarest achievements & I did say it could've been an outlier--but if you're going to make a case that backs up people wanting to feeling satisfied over pulling off achievements that few people get, then I think saying "it's nothing compared to x" does kinda against those values. 0.1% to 0.5% is a big deal to me given how so many achievements in games are stuck above the 0.5% mark, doesn't have to be to you.
I can't comment on much on this, aside from your main reason as to why:
--
It's true that DLC achievements do drop off in %, but this is a very wobbly comparison to the point it says the opposite what you were intending to make a point out of for two massive reasons:
- Celeste's Farewell DLC is free and included directly in the base game with every purchase. People have already paid for the game and enjoyed it during that time do return especially if what they're getting is a free content patch. (Not to mention, if you have the game installed, Steam basically automatically updates it for you, notifying you that there is an update. And if you don't have it installed or still unaware of it, there's news posts displayed on your library and other social media that can notify you of the update.)
Cuphead's Delicious Last Course is paid, therefore limiting the amount of people that can actually access the content, and also have actually considered getting through it.
- Farewell was added around ~1.5 years after the base game release, and is approaching its 4th year of being around, which I can assure you the game has gotten plenty more popular and known within the time of Farewell's release til' now.
The Delicious Last Course was added a whopping nearly five years after the base game release, far past Cuphead's prime in popularity, and it's been less than a year since it's release. It's no surprise as to why these achievements are low.
This is a side ramble but regarding cost and release times--Celeste is on a 5 USD sale extremely often, it's an immensely easy game to buy for yourself and gift to plenty friends, as well as to pick up and play at literally any moment in the game since it has a pretty smooth difficulty curve.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of many reasons why achievement % is so high, as well as people looking up guides for crystal hearts since they of course care more about story progression (Farewell is unlocked right after the Core, people don't even need to complete B-Sides to know that it is something to look forward to, and more story is an incentive to do all previous challenges required to actually get past the gates), but all I can do is speculate.
Also, the speedrunning side of the community in particular has quite frankly blown up, especially after Farewell has been released, and is still gaining traction, Celeste is one of the most popular games when it comes to speedrunning and is extremely accessible when it comes to learning more advanced tech which is taught later in the game--again, wouldn't really surprise me if this was a big reason why Farewell is at 5.5%, the game already has such a large & dedicated playerbase that Farewell completion feels moreso like a standard than anything. Can't really name someone that speedruns the game Any% that has not done Farewell or isn't at least very close to doing so for clear reasons.
--
My wording was pretty vague, which I apologize for, but I think your wording with only bringing up the people that has their enjoyment "partially" impacted hints towards the thing I wanted mention anyway.
It was moreso aimed towards people that have their enjoyment mostly to entirely ruined by the inclusion of achievements--to the point they have to question what's the point when they can just burst through the game and get the achievements that way, which we've seen with people like the original poster of the thread.
If you find literally any game not fun or frustrating because of certain aspects you don't like, simply... don't play, or hope things change in the future if they can be, you don't have to force yourself to enjoy a game if something small is nabbing at you to where you find your enjoyment entirely drained, sometimes a game isn't for you for literally the smallest reasons imaginable and that's okay. I have my own subjective nitpicks about games that are completely fine conceptually.
Anyone still has the option to post feedback if they want if they do want the game to suit their needs. If I'm really wrong on this I'm willing to accept that I am, but it doesn't seem like a thing that's unfair or untrue since everyone has their own nitpicks about games that are completely fine.
--
To at least partially address this elephant in the room (((and a lot more than just this quote in specific))), I want to clarify that I do not agree with the people that are saying "you shouldn't care since achievements have no value," which most of your post revolves around debunking. Saying these things are definitely counter-productive, I'm not arguing that, but you're riding a bit too hard over this point. It's mostly "you shouldn't care since achievements have subjective value," in which I personally agree with instead. (Small note, who cares and who does not care exists on both sides of the spectrum--otherwise this change with assist mode & achievements would not have happened--it's just that the reasons for either side are entirely different. I don't entirely understand how my point really does the opposite of where I'm trying to get at)
"If you don't have the skill, you don't get the achievement" can go such in an extremely downwards spiral. Where does that line cross for you specifically? Rhetorical question, preferably don't answer that.
For the OP and sandy claws, the line was invincibility (as far as I'm aware, correct me if I'm wrong). Dead Cells doesn't offer invincibility at all IIRC and the line was crossed for others. And before that, it was Custom Mode in 2019 which people thought it was too much, which just allows the player to do a few tweaks, most noticeably filter the loot pool (which does disable achievements and break certain things if it's too small).
The line is so subjective and I believe many people realize this already. This is an extremely unfinished point, but the base difficulty settings any developers set in their games are knowingly arbitrary to their own design choices and believe it or not, they're pretty self-aware about this. Knowing you can still experience the game's full package--Steam achievements included--without having to be restricted by said strict requirements within the game's boundaries are things that I've seen pretty immense praise for especially for Celeste and Dead Cells specifically for being pretty consumer friendly, a lot more than the backlash that came along with it.
Might be reading this wrong too, but your solution about having in-game achievements sounds like more of a progress tracker that is already implemented via the sticker system on your save file--includes many things like Ch 1 - 7 completion, Farewell completion, golden strawberries, crystal hearts, etc etc. The scrapbook is also a progress tracker.
Regarding the 5.5% thing, I was referring to the Wow achievement—the one for obtaining the moon berry—not the Farewell achievement you get for completing chapter 9. I don't know how much that affects what you said, but I'll also clarify that when I said that the difference between 0.1—0.2% and 0.5% is nothing compared to the inflation that Wow has, I meant strictly numerically. Inflation of around 0.3% is nothing compared to inflation of 4.5%+ (because I claimed that Wow should realistically have less than 1% instead of the 5.5% it has now). That was to counter the idea that cheaters have even close to the same impact as allowing achievements on assist mode. And believe me—I had <0.1% achievements that rose to 0.5%+ as well, so I'm no stranger to that at all.
But I think I get your point about the impact of cheaters a bit more; I have considered in the past that maybe those former 0.1% achievements got higher because of cheating (but I never cared to put much thought into it). The jump from 0.1% to 0.5%+ isn't large numerically, but it is still significant in a different way (i.e. in the way you described. I won't attempt to paraphrase; I think we both understand).
Also, I'm gonna be real with you: I'm realizing that I heavily misremembered what getting the Wow achievement entailed. In my mind, the path to completing the normal route in chapter 9 ended fairly early, and then there was an optional path to getting Wow that involved a much longer path that ultimately ended in that room with the moon berry. Obviously, that's wrong; most of that was actually just part of the normal route, and then the option to get Wow happens pretty much at the end (I was mixing up what starts where). With that being the case, it makes sense why more people would go for the moon berry since you don't really have to go too much out of your way to attempt it (I hope I explained that clearly). However, since getting Wow still involves beating all of chapter 9, my mistake doesn't really change my mind about how it should be far rarer than it is.
I agree with what you said about the timelines of Cuphead and Celeste, and I forgot that the Ms. Chalice DLC wasn't free. So being DLC doesn't have as much relevance as I thought. Additionally, since Celeste released the DLC while the game was still very much alive, and since getting the moon berry doesn't really add that much additional content to the chapter (as I thankfully remembered in the previous paragraph), I can see why drawing parallels to Cuphead doesn't work well. I can also somewhat understand the point that maybe looking forward to chapter 9 inspired more people to get better and complete the B-sides and whatnot, but I'm not completely sold on that because it is speculative as you said (also, that group of people could still largely consist of those who use assist mode, driving the numbers up more).
That being said, I do still think the percentages are surprisingly high. This includes things like Thanks For Playing (beating all C-sides—7.3%) and even Say Goodbye (for beating all of the B-sides—10.9%), but I'll keep looking at just Wow (which involves beating the normal route of chapter 9 and then taking the optional path from that electric box at the end to get on the moon berry path—5.5%). We all know that for the majority of people, chapter 9 is harder than any of the base content in Celeste, right? This isn't just some "everything is subjective" situation; generally speaking, chapter 9 is very difficult. I have a hard time envisioning over 1/20 people beating an incredibly long chapter that demanded consecutive wave dashes, wave dashes into multiple wallbounces, and just a general overall challenge that surpassed anything in the base game.
I'm sticking to the small handful of percentage comparisons I picked out when replying to SmallGespenst—just to pick one, Beat The Devil At His Own Game (the easier, non-DLC Cuphead achievement for beating the game on expert) should not have 2.5% while Wow has 5.5%. Maybe that's flawed because, as you pointed out, chapter 9 is a true continuation of the story and getting the moon berry doesn't require a lot of extra effort, while beating Cuphead on Expert is understandably farther past most people's point of closure for the game; in that case, we can take Thanks For Playing instead, which is completely optional in every sense of the word, very difficult, and sitting at 7.3%. Celeste is hard enough that a lot of people will use assist mode to complete things that they normally couldn't (which is great), so it stands to reason that a large portion of the achievement percentages comes from those people. Sure, speedrunning in Celeste is big, but I don't understand how that would have a significant impact on how many people are willing to get and capable of getting the hardest achievements in the game.
I don't know; is this just an agree to disagree scenario? Because unless you have something that'll make me realize some massive oversight on my part, I simply cannot fathom how Celeste's achievement percentages could just naturally be this high.
Okay, that makes a lot more sense than what I thought you were saying originally. In fact, I think you're right there. Initially, I thought you were including people like me, who are just mildly disappointed by the inflated achievement rarities but don't care enough to have it ruin the gaming experience; that would definitely be unfair and untrue (imagine I complete all of Celeste and then someone tells me it wasn't for me in retrospect, lol).
"you shouldn't care since achievements have subjective value," ← To me, that makes sense to the extent that anyone should be allowed to feel accomplished for completing challenges no matter how they did it, but I don't think it entirely addresses the whole global percentage/comparison/competitiveness stuff I talked about at the end of my previous post. At that point, we're not talking about just the value of having accomplished the achievement itself, which is valid; we're talking about an entirely separate value in terms of the rarity of the achievement from a numerical standpoint, which is also valid (small numbers make dumb monkey brain happy). Pointing out that achievements have "subjective value" seems like an oversimplification if we're talking about the value tied to rarity; am I missing what you're saying here?
Adding onto that, the thing that then becomes an issue for people who care about rarity is knowing if a game has tight constraints on what constitutes achieving some global XYZ achievement (global here just meaning that it's an online trophy with global percentage stats tied to it). For most games, achieving XYZ means doing it without special modes or clear advantages and the like (mostly because a lot of games either don't have different accessibility options or they do have different options and explicitly set aside certain achievements by saying things like "on hard difficulty" or "without so-and-so" or by just disabling some achievements altogether). From that, players can assume that everyone who accomplished XYZ beat a fixed challenge and employed the same level of skill in doing so. In Celeste's case, that assumption no longer holds because the challenge is no longer fixed; anyone and everyone can use assist mode regardless of the reason, and a lot of people do. For people like me, it just lessens the satisfaction because I like the small numbers and like knowing that everyone else who got the achievement faced the same challenge with the same constraints.
I'm gonna answer it anyway because the answer is simple. For me, the line is drawn where the game forces all players to work under the same set of rules, and if different playstyles are applicable, that's still fine as long as part of the challenge still includes figuring out what playstyle works the best and then executing it. If there's a game mode that very clearly gives undeniable advantages that you don't have to work for or "figure out" (e.g., assist mode in Celeste, which very obviously takes undeniable advantages to the absolute extreme), then I consider that crossing the line. In other words, I'm in favor of the way I've know most games to handle it. And I think it's something most gamers would agree with too, even if they don't have any stake in it; it just makes more sense. I'm not sure why you preferred I not answer; I can't imagine what heinous thing you thought I might possibly say lmao.
To clarify, I meant 1-to-1 in-game achievements that mirror the Steam ones. For example, Superliminal has its own in-game UI for achievements, and it matches exactly that of its Steam achievements—names and descriptions and everything. You can look at the Superliminal achievements from the main menu and see the checklist with stuff marked off as you complete them, and from my experience, that's very satisfying on its own (at least to me). At the same time, I still enjoyed seeing the Steam achievements because of the global percentages because I care about that kind of thing. I believe that Celeste could have benefited from doing something similar—having a full in-game list of achievements that can be unlocked even if you play on assist mode. That sounds like it would satisfy everyone; I imagine that the people who pushed for achievements to be accessible to all players did so more so that they could share in the satisfaction of seeing those trophies as a representation of their personal triumph and not because they care about the rarity/comparison/competition associated with them. I don't know; that sounds like something that would need to be researched—I would be very interested to get a deeper understanding of the impact of achievements on players and how different methods of distributing them change people's perception of their value and impact people's motivation. Maybe I'll get lucky and there'll be a Psych of Play video about it or something.
In any case, I seriously doubt that someone who's disabled or not great at games considered achievements to be the deciding factor in playing the game or enjoying it. The praise Celeste (and presumably Dead Cells?) got is for allowing you to experience the full package on assist mode as you said, but I doubt that much of that praise is because of the inclusion of global achievements stats specifically. Now that I think about it, I can't think of a single time I've seen someone initiate the conversation of assist mode achievements in a positive light; it has always been negative, and the responses are never from people who actually benefited from getting achievements on assist mode themselves. Maybe I'm totally wrong, but that's always what I've happened to see.
Same thing about the dashes, to recharge dash midair or grabbing walls would already sort of break most of the game if player had to wait like 1s after (so you could grab a wall, wait and dash again).
The way assists are made I dont see it as "difficulty layers" neither as "accessibility" either as I dont think people with physical disabilities need this (maybe different tools to play the game but not this) and people with lack of reflexes and such (or slower muscles due to some physical disability that reduces movement) could have slower gameplay as "layer of difficulty), but going from "hell-a-hard" to "too easy and cheasable" with dash assist enabled then "full story mode" with all assists enabled is a it too much.
I think a "slower gameplay" or "allowing 1 or 2 extra hits" would do the job better and could be also options at the assists menu.