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Sometimes I can't tell if the mission I'm attempting is bugged or it's wanting me to do something more specific than what it asked. For example:

  • Kill xx enemies with one shot.

Seems a simple description, right? So you make a shotgun and RPG class, or you go into hardcore and equip a pistol. The enemies have full health, you shoot them once and they die. One shot kills. Play a few rounds, check your progress - zero. Because what the challenge actually wants you to do is get xx One Shot, One Kill medals, which you can only get with a sniper rifle.

  • Get xx assists.

This can be difficult to do in a hurry if the challenges are about to reset, because you can thwart yourself by killing the people you engage with too effectively. So why not fire up Infected, where you get assists all the time you're an infected when enemies die? Oh, that's not really an assist? So why does it pop up on screen with ASSIST and give you assist points?

  • Best of the Best 7/7 - Get a Quad Feed (Four uninterrupted kills on the kill feed)

Again, a very simple description but I have no idea WTF this wants from me. I kill four people with one explosion, all appear one after the other on the feed - pops up with quad kill, not a quad feed. Be the last survivor in Infected, so you appear on the kill feed like 8, 9, 10 times in a row without any other kills interrupting you? Nope, not a quad feed. It seems like people have only really had much luck with this in Ground War, which makes no sense because there's far more people on both sides interrupting your feed. The only time I've got it in regular games modes is when I called in a cluster strike, the first bomb killed two, I killed someone with a shotgun and then the second bomb killed someone. Of course I didn't have the mission active. Do you want me to kill four people in four seconds at a rate of one per second and no slower or faster than that? If so, tell me that! Or does my personal kill feed not always match the order seen by other players or the server?

I feel there's also some weirdness about what counts as a vehicle in "destroy xx vehicles while..." depending on the challenge and if it includes things like personal radars, recon drones or not but I can't be sure because sometimes you think a few legit mission objectives have been completed, you look and it's zero, and then three minutes later without you doing anything else it's five. If you wanted to be a massive pedant you could say the police cars on Piccadilly are certainly vehicles and you can destroy them.

I've also wasted my time restarting games when trying to complete missions like "Kill 8 enemies with a banana with SpongeBob as your coalition operator" before I realised you can complete so-called SpongeBob specific missions without playing as his once as long as he's who you would have been if you were playing as coalition.

And don't get me started on guessing what counts as "in proximity to smoke".

The other game I run all the time from Battlenet is Hearthstone and they do loads of work changing text to make sure everything is clear and consistent, sometimes to the ire of regular players, just because it should be clear even to someone who's not played before exactly how interactions work. There's really not that much text in this game, so surely it's worth spending a bit of time making it clear and concise?

External link →
about 4 years ago - /u/ashtonisVULCAN_IW - Direct link

Appreciate the feedback. Gave this link to the guys who work on these.