If you’ve played any games on Xbox Live, Steam or the PS3, then you should be familiar with an achievement system that allows you to compare your in-game accomplishments with other players. We’ve discussed adding a system like this to EQII for quite some time and today we’d like to announce that this system will be coming soon. How does the Achievement System work?EverQuest II will start off with hundreds of achievements in all areas of game play. These will include achievements related to combat, tradeskills, exploration, harvesting, you name it! Similar to the quest system, the game will recognize when you do something that updates an achievement. When you’ve completed all the requirements for an achievement, you and the players around you will be notified of your accomplishment. Some achievements might even reward you with titles or other items. Each achievement will have a point value based on the difficulty of earning the achievement. Your overall point score will serve as a quick method of comparing your accomplishments with other players. You’ll also be able to view the achievements of other players simply by inspecting them.We already have Achievements in the game. What will the system be called?This has been a source of discussion for quite a long time internally. We’ve gone through many different names and none of them just feel right to us. After lots of debate, we felt the best thing for the game, long term, would be to bite the bullet and rename the existing achievement system. So the existing achievements that you earn through achievement XP will inherit the name from EverQuest Live and become the Alternate Advancement System. You’ll continue to earn “AA” points the same way, and can spend those points in your “AA” trees. We hope this will be an easy transition as many players are already familiar with this name. The new system will be referred to as the Achievement System, and “Achievements” are the badges or trophies that you earn by completing tasks around the world of Norrath. We also plan on converting the existing “Slayer” quests into the new Achievement System since they are virtually the same concept.
What do you think?Our goal with the Achievement System is to give you another method of progression through the game. It’s a great system for quantifying your accomplishments and encourages friendly competition between players. We think this will be a fun addition to EQII and would like to hear your feedback. So, let us know what you think!
( Below are the answers to some of the questions that have come up since my original post. )
Rewards
As far as rewards, please don't get hung up on them and if they'll be game-breaking or not. We plan on giving rewards for achievements very sparingly. The main reward of the achievement is the completion of the task. We already have a quest system that is designed to reward you for specific deeds. The achievement system is there to track the types of things you'd be doing anyway, like completing quests, killing mobs, clearing zones, etc. So the reward *IS* is the achievement and the points you earn towards your total.
Now, with that disclaimer out of the way, some achievements will offer you rewards. And yes, some of them will be titles. Whether you find titles pointless or not is up to you. Some people like them and they are a nice way to show off something you've done. However, some achievements might be appropriate for rewarding something else, especially if the achievement is difficult to complete. You can most likely expect those rewards to be things such as house items and maybe appearance armor or fluff spells/pets.
Will achievements be retroactive?
Some achievements will be retroactive. Any achievement requiring quest completion will check your quest journal the first time you log in after the achievement system is added. Achievements that require mob kills or exploration events that we track through the AA system will also count towards your achievement progress. Existing slayer quests will be converted to achievements and your kill progress will be retained.
How can you see the list of achievements?
The quest journal will have a new achievements tab that will display all achievements (completed and not completed) by category. You will also be able to see your progress towards each achievement. In addition, we are modifying the inspection window so you'll be able to see the achievements of other players when you inspect them.
Are you accepting ideas for achievements?
Sure, but no promises that we'll use it. 
If you're going to suggest some achievements, please follow these guidelines to make them easy for us to spot later on. Limit the text to 1 line per achievement and put them in a bulleted list. Use a light-blue color to separate them from the rest of your text. For Example:
- Kill 10,000 gnolls
- Complete every 'daily double' mission in The Shadow Odyssey.
- Craft 10,000 items