Thanks for the great feedback everyone. Lots of the discussion here is rich and is useful to us, thanks for being mostly constructive. I’m going to drop some honest conversation in here to keep this going:

’Luck Based Nature of the Longshot Achievement

Okay so first up, my comment stands. This isn’t luck based. There are some elements involved but both are highly common in Versus - Longshot pickups and players rolling. These aren’t anywhere near as rare as the Ole ribbon for example, where you have to grenade tag a Retro charging enemy.

What we do agree with in this feedback is maybe the number of Super ribbons is too high based on the skill involved in pulling it off COMBINED with those circumstances - and we’re definitely open to potentially reviewing that. We were aware we were setting the bar high when we made it. But let me provide a little insight into why it is where it is right now.

We have some really avid Versus players asking us for bigger challenges to prove themselves against. The Mastery list, which is our second to last achievement set (the last will be designed solely by all of you in an upcoming opportunity), is meant to be about proving you have something - well - mastered.

When you look at the Longshot achievement, it’s by far the hardest in the set and we acknowledge that. But we also want it to be something that feels earned and takes time - and most importantly, skill - to earn. At this stage of the game, we don’t want to throw in achievements that you complete in a day without thinking about them.

Again, this isn’t us defending where the Longshot achievement now - we are open to reviewing it once we’ve seen how it does in the wild - I’m just explaining the reasoning for the initial design. We toned down the 10K kills achievement based on feedback and plenty of people have come out since to say they wished it wasn’t as low as 5K. So it’s a balance.

Adding Achievements Without Content

One of the other pieces of feedback that’s clear here is around adding achievements without new content. As we’ve mentioned before, major feature support for Gears 4 ended in October and we have a small Live Team working to support the game as best they can.

Achievements are one way, in combination with our Weapon Skin Challenges, we can provide players with something to pursue if they choose. Don’t like these? That’s okay! Don’t go for them. Our previous achievements have received similar criticism because they aren’t earnable in a day, but we’ve seen a lot of people actively work for them after their release and be proud to show them off.

Completionists

This is the one bit we’ll completely hold our hands up to - our game is not completionist friendly unless you’re willing to play a LOT of Gears in a LOT of different ways (and with a decently high degree of skill).

We made the conscious decision to provide new challenges for different types of players post-launch at the cost of making 100% completion considerably harder. Our goal hasn’t been to do push the bar for 100% chasers, rather it’s been to provide new challenges for different kinds of players. Just today I had someone tweeting how much they liked the Inconceivable Solo achievement, but many other’s don’t. Again, it’s a balance between player wants across Campaign, Versus and Horde.

We definitely have learned a lot from this approach and we don’t think our achievements has been perfect by any means. But we chose to go down this path last October, and we’re happier providing new goals for players who want them than none at all.

Keep the discussion coming and - again - thanks for your great thoughts so far.