Achievements are everywhere now — Xbox Live, iOS Game Center, many individual games, and even in social communities with gaming elements like Stack Overflow.
A common user request of Stack Overflow is to show progress toward badges.
This has been denied by SO, as seen in this uservoice request, where Jeff Atwood made the following statement:
this is modelled on the xbox live achievements model, and that does not show progress, either.. by design
Jeff defers to the design of Xbox Live when denying the request to show progress. Certainly, SO is technically nothing like Xbox Live, so it can be inferred that this is a design decision, not a technical one.
I am working on a game where we have achievements and right now the intention is to show progress. So, I have two questions:
- If it's known that Xbox Live achievements "by design" do not show progress, is there a source for this?
- Why is this "by design"? In other words, in terms of game design, what reason is there to intentionally not show achievement progress?