I bet you're wondering -- why hasn't more of the site moved over to Kumos? And there is a very simple answer - achievements. They're everywhere, on almost every page on Subeta, and we use them more for tracking than we do for actually giving an acheivement for doing something cool.

The achievement system is tied in to almost every area of the site, and somewhat haphazardly. There is custom code throughout the site, and some areas take advantage of the automatic counting. There is background processing (if you get an achievement for something that happens in the cron), but not always - sometimes you have to go to a page to trigger an achievement. There is tiers, but sometimes they break and we just add a new achievement. Some achievements count your items in locations (inventory? wardrobe?) and some make you go to a page that has that information.

And then, we never had a real philosophy on how achievements should work, or what they should reward. Why do we have so many wardrobe achievements for having specific items, when you can just take them out and send them to other users. That isn't an achievement, and we should stop doing that!

The achievements admin panel frequently times out because there are so many attempts to load data from across the site.

The way we store it in the database also leaves a lot to be desired. I wanted to keep it simple, so we have a json field called tiers which holds the appropriate details for each tier (and if those tiers have prizes), but that has turned out to be incredibly easy to break :(

BUT! Work has begun on getting the achievement system on to Kumos, and thus, making it much easier to start transfering over full features that have achievements on the site. There is likely going to be a mass retirement of achievements that we don't want to move over, or feel could be better represented in another fashion. I used to feel bad about this kind of retirement, but realized most games do this with every major update. WoW moves achievements to 'legacy' when they're no longer able to be earned, and older users can feel proud they've got a batch of achievements, and new users don't have to worry about how to earn those broken/old/weird feature achievements.

So this is an update without an actual update, except to say More Coming Soon, with hopefully a new and improved achievement system and more thought around how achievements work on the site in general.