Or in general, I think you can classify these as 'achievement content', i.e. 'there's an achievement for killing 1000 XYZ so killing 1000 XYZ is now content."
This is totally backwards and the only game that has ever done it right is Skies of Arcadia. In Skies of Arcadia, you can get to any interesting landmark and get back a relatively trivial amount of money in some centralized location. However, even though the random encounter system in this game takes way too long, the landmarks you explore are genuinely interesting and they're stuff that you'd think 'wonder what's this for' even if there's no reward involved, and indeed the reward for them sure isn't anything you really need. You need to find enough of them to recruit a guy for your crew but you probably get half of what you need just from game events (e.g. you'd always be the one discovering The World is Round).
As I'm playing Guild Wars 2, it's got a pretty standard 'exploration' system where you got these "Points of Interest" that usually involves jumping through a bunch of stupid platforms, starting from a spot that'd give no indication why it'd lead to this spot 15 screens away, before you arrive at a spot that looks the same as any other spot in the game. Of course it's hardly alone in this. But if the Places of Interest isn't really that interesting, that means it's not really content. Now you can try to get around that by placing big rewards for finding them but then in that case you're doing stuff for the sake of reward. It's no different than how you often have to do some of the stupid Final Fantasy minigames to get your best weapon. And that's not content, at least not useful content. Achievements are along the same lines. There's no point to beat a boss while doing backflips if you have no reason to even beat the boss once while not doing backflips. If the content is interesting enough that you'd want to beat it while doing backflips then that's fine, but it's the content that drives the achievement not the other way around. Anybody can slap on some bogus criteria like 'play Megaman while only using uncharged X-Buster" but the game has to be fun enough to make you want to do something like that. You can't just say 'you should play it in this totally artifical way because there's an achievement for that'. I've found that a lot of MMORPGs people complain about lack of content, and the game developer would often be shocked that they'd be spoken by people who never explored anywhere, did only one dungeon, and may or may not do any raid. It doesn't matter that anybody could go back to do the newbie dungeon under whatever strange handicap you want. If a guy isn't even interested in doing the newbie dungeon once he clearly doesn't care about any content that involves further artificial restriction on the said dungeon. Likewise if people don't like your game's PvP then it really doesn't matter how involved your PvP is. This also applies to raids.
This is totally backwards and the only game that has ever done it right is Skies of Arcadia. In Skies of Arcadia, you can get to any interesting landmark and get back a relatively trivial amount of money in some centralized location. However, even though the random encounter system in this game takes way too long, the landmarks you explore are genuinely interesting and they're stuff that you'd think 'wonder what's this for' even if there's no reward involved, and indeed the reward for them sure isn't anything you really need. You need to find enough of them to recruit a guy for your crew but you probably get half of what you need just from game events (e.g. you'd always be the one discovering The World is Round).
As I'm playing Guild Wars 2, it's got a pretty standard 'exploration' system where you got these "Points of Interest" that usually involves jumping through a bunch of stupid platforms, starting from a spot that'd give no indication why it'd lead to this spot 15 screens away, before you arrive at a spot that looks the same as any other spot in the game. Of course it's hardly alone in this. But if the Places of Interest isn't really that interesting, that means it's not really content. Now you can try to get around that by placing big rewards for finding them but then in that case you're doing stuff for the sake of reward. It's no different than how you often have to do some of the stupid Final Fantasy minigames to get your best weapon. And that's not content, at least not useful content. Achievements are along the same lines. There's no point to beat a boss while doing backflips if you have no reason to even beat the boss once while not doing backflips. If the content is interesting enough that you'd want to beat it while doing backflips then that's fine, but it's the content that drives the achievement not the other way around. Anybody can slap on some bogus criteria like 'play Megaman while only using uncharged X-Buster" but the game has to be fun enough to make you want to do something like that. You can't just say 'you should play it in this totally artifical way because there's an achievement for that'. I've found that a lot of MMORPGs people complain about lack of content, and the game developer would often be shocked that they'd be spoken by people who never explored anywhere, did only one dungeon, and may or may not do any raid. It doesn't matter that anybody could go back to do the newbie dungeon under whatever strange handicap you want. If a guy isn't even interested in doing the newbie dungeon once he clearly doesn't care about any content that involves further artificial restriction on the said dungeon. Likewise if people don't like your game's PvP then it really doesn't matter how involved your PvP is. This also applies to raids.
