@mferr11 said in Saying Goodbye to The Arena:
Am I missing something here? Surely if Rare removes acheivments, and you haven't unlocked them, they just won't appear or count towards the 100% completion rate?
That’s the case for Steam achievements, but not for Windows and Xbox achievements.
For Windows / Xbox - once an achievement exists, it cannot be removed. It can only be discontinued. Which means for people who haven’t unlocked the achievement, it will display as a locked achievement. And will never be obtainable.
This is what a Discontinued achievement is. It basically locks people out of 100% completion for that game on their Xbox account. If you can’t unlock every achievement, then you will never get 100%.
This is very common on Xbox games, because we’ve seen it happen over the last decade and a half. Ever since we’ve had Xbox achievements - since the start of the Xbox 360 generation - there have been games which have closed their servers and this discontinues all online achievements.
Some publishers unfortunately close their servers quite prematurely, only giving players about 2 years to unlock online achievements before closing up. Other publishers are generous and give players a decade or even longer.
So discontinued achievements are quite common, but they normally happen with games which are going offline altogether. This will inevitably happen with SoT one day in the (hopefully) distant future.
What is also more common nowadays, is developers closing down a portion of online content in their game service. This discontinues any achievements associated with that closing service (Arena being a perfect example here).
Most of these developers change the achievement requirements so that the achievements don’t discontinue. This is a decision made because of the history of backlash from completionist (and gaming communities in general) who severely dislike developers discontinuing achievements whilst their game is still in service.
An example is how a Stranger Things DLC for DBD was closing down. Achievements associated with using those DLC skins was changed to other available character skins so the achievements were still unlockable.
Another example was Destiny 2, they closed down some of their content and changed the associated achievements so they could still be unlocked in a different way using content still playable within the game.
Here’s another example - Rainbow Six Siege - used to have lots of grindy achievements based on Terrorist Hunt game mode. But the online side of the game became incredibly popular, and people asked for them to reconsider changing those achievements to reward completion to players who are participating in online games. So this wasn’t even an online closure discontinuing achievements… this was the opposite. An offline / co-op mode was less replayable and not as popular - so the developer just changed their achievements from the offline / co-op mode to their popular PvP online mode just so completionists were steered down a better path.
So bottom line… unless a developer changes the requirements to unlock the achievement(s), they will discontinue and block existing and new players out of 100% completion.
There is still hope. Even if Rare doesn’t change their mind now, they can still park this polarising topic, and eventually revisit in the future when they have more time to focus on it. They are capable of reactivating these achievements. Providing there’s no T&Cs from Microsoft that stops them.