Deleted

[Mark Gibbons]

Deleted

[Reggit]

I'd never noticed this before a few days ago...
But achievements seem to be coming and going every few hours now...

[Deekyfun]

Seems to happen every weekend since the start of this year (maybe earlier, but that's when I started seeing it) - the achievements panel just vanishes and they stop triggering for a bit. They slink back with their tail between their legs, sometimes hours later, having gone God-knows where. No word from Valve what's actually going on, so hard to say if they've noticed it, understood it, or are fixing it. It's all a bit annoying.

[Cursed Life]

So even If i unlock them right now they wont count?

[RiO]

引用自 Charmed Life：

So even If i unlock them right now they wont count?

The requests to the server back-end appear to be timing out, probably due to it being overloaded for ... whatever yet-to-be-established reason. So if the request to unlock an achievement (or update progress towards unlocking an achievement) times out, yes that means it might 'not count.'


The actual final effect of it 'not counting' depends on the individual game.

Some game developers over the years have gotten wise to the sheer and utter lack of reliability and error-resilience in Valve's system and incorporate their own fail-over systems that kick in when e.g. the game is started and which runs a basic sanity check, re-sending unlock requests to the Steamworks API for any achievements the game believes should have been unlocked according to system save data, but that the Steamworks API is indicating are still locked.

Others don't do that.
In which case one of two things happens:

Either you can retrace your steps and get the achievement unlock request to be resent to the Steamworks API again. Hopefully properly this time, causing the achievement to pop.

Or the game internally kept track that the achievement should already have been unlocked; does not incorporate any fail-over/recovery logic like aforementioned; does not re-send the unlock request through the Steamworks API and you are semi-permanently screwed out of obtaining the achievement. (Semi-permanently, because in this case you could probably fix it by disabling Steam Cloud; fully wiping all local save data and system data; and restarting from scratch.)


If you want to protect your achievements then either:

1. Do not play anything that has achievements still pending on the weekend or during sales while platform usage is high and overload tends to occur. And probably also don't play anything on Tuesdays, as Steam has scheduled maintenance on Tuesdays and Valve will pull the plug on you, unannounced and uncaring for the results of doing so. Or
   
2. perform a paranoid look-up of all the unlock conditions for all achievements for a game, and consciously and judiciously avoid triggering any of it when playing at those times. ... which of course means completely spoiling any story-dependent game for yourself while you're at it... but them's the breaks.

Or alternatively: select a different platform to play on.
Sony and the PlayStation platform had this particular problem with server-dependency on achievements basically nailed down properly since day one, recording everything to a central local cache that is part of the game console hypervisor OS itself - i.e. part of the logical equivalent to the Steam Client itself - and having it all centrally managed for syncing from there. Which more or less guarantees you won't get stuck with the kind of stupidity Valve's duct-taped system invites in.

[Lar Dass]

seems to be back now, well, see you all next saturday!

[ุMenezesss]

Si

[No Longer In Use]

This seems to have been going on since the Winter sale, Jesus Steam, fix it or remove achievements altogether, or at least remove timestamps so broken achievements won't look out of place once they unlock.