From what I can see in RA forum posts people have brought it up on numerous occasions but it gets shot down as being a way people could cheat and RA being designed with online play in mind.
Have any efforts actually been made to enable offline achievements? It would be nice to have for handheld emulators that do not have built in WiFi. Even if it was something that was synced locally and you couldn’t upload it to RA’s website I’d be interested.
Hell I’d even be curious to try out a self hosted solutuon.
The team seems rather inconsistent, or perhaps erratic, from my experience some years back. Not glaring issues, but small things that keep building up. In the RetroAchievements case, I can’t help but wonder if they either want to have a walled garden, or if, looking at precedents from other companies, such as Microsoft’s “EEE” strategy (“Embrace, Expand, Extinguish”), if they aren’t trying to kill competition. And for the second point, it reminds me that the owner would throw hissing fits, at least up to some years ago, when projects he’d fork into Retroarch would change licenses, which, along with being an all emulators in one place project, making people draw in in detriment of stand-alone projects, makes me I fear it might be a precedent.
Why offline?
Its the biggest issue and only reason I stopped using RetroAchivements. Because it turns every game with achievements into an online only game (like a DRM), if I care about the achievements. Playing a game offline means I need to do the stuff again to earn it, or it might be too late (like in an RPG).
Why doesn’t have it then?
The maintainers and developers said already multiple times that there are no plans to implement an offline feature. There are two main reasons for: a) It would be incredible difficult or impossible to maintain their leaderboards. They really care about that, because people could cheat much easier. It would make it much more complicated with anti cheat too. b) They may not have the technical knowhow how to do it correctly, the time and resources. It also costs money and complicates the servers and codes much more and they might not be in a situation to support that.
My suggestion
Let people opt-out of leaderboards and allow them to save and earn achievements in offline mode. And maybe hide that account on the website, as private only. This would solve both issues, because nobody cares if such a person cheats at all and him or her can play offline for themselves (which I would prefer). Off course that account is no longer able to go back and participate in the leaderboards; its like a lifetime ban.
And you know what? There is kind of a similar system already in place. I’m not exactly sure how it works, but if you cheat, then you get banned. And you can keep using the service and earn achievements, they just don’t contribute to the overall score or leaderboard anymore. I never cheated and don’t know how it really works. My point is, the suggested solution is not far from this concept that is already in place. So its definitely doable I think.
