A message for Achievement Hunters and Completionists about revisions

Let's start jumping directly to the conclusion:

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If you mastered a game and then it received a revision, don't feel frustrated! Keep in mind that changes come for a better quality.

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Now let's elaborate why we are saying that.

RetroAchievements is a "young" project and is constantly evolving. It was launched in the late 2012, and in the early days the emulators and the site (database stuff, PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) were developed by a single person: Scott. Therefore the evolution occurred slowly.

Another thing that was occurring very slowly in the early days was the diffusion of knowledge about achievement creation. Specially about good practices when creating achievements. There wasn't documentation at that time (RADocs only started in November/2017). People were learning to create achievements by sharing knowledge on forum threads and/or by personal messages.

In the early days the community didn't have a very clear a concept of what a good achievement design is. And it resulted in many poorly designed sets compared to our current standards (e.g. sets with only progress-based achievements). We also didn't have much experience of how achievements could be protected against in-game cheats or battery save abusing. That's why from time to time some achievement sets receive revisions. We make set revisions with quality in mind, and to show actual respect for the game.

When a revision is going to happen, we try to involve the community by discussing on our forums (usually the official game's topic) and/or on our discord server. We are aware that this is insufficient to reach all interested people, but it is the way we are currently using.

We are working on new ways to discuss revisions with the community by implementing some new social features on the RA website, but while those features are not implemented, we'll keep using the forums and discord.

If you would like to propose new methods for discussing revisions, we are open to suggestions.