Response of Departed Developer UnsolidSnake of Retro Achievements [Mirror]

To see UnsolidSnake’s developed sets on RA, click here.

Mirrored at the sole discretion of clymax for sake of transparency on Retro Achievements, which was one of the aims of Moderator BahamutVoid in leaving his farewell letter not long after Administrator televandalist’s own resignation letter dropped. If you have any concerns with this mirror, please reach out to clymax directly.

Related Post:

Departure of Developer UnsolidSnake of Retro Achievements [Mirror]

Snake’s Dissection of Retrograde Unachievability

November 18, 2025

First up: I will not be leaking any private info and I’ll keep expletives and specific names to a possible minimum. There are other people and places for that, I assume you already know where to find them. Every single thing I’m about to mention was (or still is) publicly available online at some point before being stricken from all RA-controlled environments.

Despite this, I am certain that RA’s staff will go to great lengths to censor this information. I have also prematurely spread it to other resources outside of RA’s control. Recent events have made it abundantly clear that anything you say on RA’s forums, Reddit or Discord can be taken down, misrepresented, or even used to endanger you and your private life. Nobody is safe, regardless of their contributions or standing in RA’s community. Thus, I have ensured that this information will stay up elsewhere for all to see. It will never disappear, not even if I actively want it to.

I am known on the site as UnsolidSnake. I’ve been a member of this community for 3 years, the first of which was as a junior developer, the second as a full dev, and the rest as a passive observer who occasionally looks back to see how things are doing. Here are my observations of RA’s overall state, the problems in the community, a few suggestions to fix some of them (and introduce plenty of others) and basically everything else RA-related that I feel like writing about. This is written from the viewpoint of a player and developer. As I have never been part of RA’s staff, my understanding of their specific problems is extremely limited and largely comes from isolated writings of other devs. Therefore, those will only be briefly mentioned.

I will not sugarcoat it: RA is a broken mess, pure and simple. It is home to numerous problems, both systemic and isolated, that have been present on this site for years. Most of these problems are ones that RA’s staff either cannot or will not address. These go well beyond simple scope creep or abuse of power by specific individuals. They are inherently baked into RA’s technical underbelly, go back many years even before I joined the community, and are actively propagated even now by staff members, regular users, fundamental site policies, and even RA’s very structure itself.

From my experience here, I can pinpoint three big problems that are all present in a multitude of different aspects of RA, big and small. Each could also be viewed as a set of smaller problems, but the way I see it, almost everything aside from technical issues can be boiled down to a combination of these three. I intend to dissect them in as much detail as I am able. With that said, let’s begin with what is perhaps the most subtle and insidious one:

1. Overemphasis on Masteries

I say that it is subtle and insidious because most users here do not consider this a problem. They joined this community to hunt achievements and pull teeth for shiny JPG’s on their user walls, and oh boy, does RA ever know how to give them that. To many, this is an integral part of the site. Yet after thinking enough on the topic, I find myself doubting if the word “mastery” even has any weight here. Many of my criticisms here can also be applied to other achievement hunting communities and even the concept of achievement hunting in general, but RA’s particular structure serves to make all of them many times worse.

Let me explain. Achievements are arbitrary goals in a video game made to be fulfilled by other players. In the cases of PSN and similar sources, as well as in-game achievements, they are created by the game developers, usually with the intent to challenge the players and test their skills and knowledge of the game. Therefore, it is somewhat reasonable to look at a completed achievement set as proof that you have conquered everything the game could throw at you and squeezed every drop of life out of it – hence, that you have “mastered” the game.

RA introduces one significant difference to the concept that completely flips this affirmation on its head. On RA, the achievements are designed and implemented not by the game developers, but by the users and staff on the site. This means that RA’s achievement sets, by definition, do not necessarily have a clear goal or design philosophy in mind because that is up to the specific RA devs that work on developing achievements for any particular game. Depending on the game, set dev, and limitations of the developer toolkit, mastering a game could require you to simply beat it, complete all of the content, find secrets and easter eggs, use glitches and exploits unintended by the game developers (mostly seen in subsets now), or complete any number of custom user-made challenges that significantly vary in difficulty, creativity, time commitment, and how well they fit into a particular game. That last category has only gotten more divisive as time passed, despite being a staple of the site ever since its inception.

Since RA has so many different kinds of sets and achievements to choose from, it is home to different kinds of players that are drawn to different aspects that can be accented in an achievement set. Some players like skill-based challenges, some players like grinding, some like quick 20-minute romps for a meme badge, some crave insane bloodthirsty monstrosities requiring precision and endurance on par with that of veteran speedrunners, and some just want a checklist for 100% completing a game they’ve never touched before. There is simply too much variance in set design, game design and player preference to give any inherent weight to a mastery.

The problem here in RA’s context is that RA artificially compels you to go for masteries in many ways that directly go against all of that. Notable ones include:

• The entirety of your profile page. You have tangible rewards for masteries in the form of shiny JPG’s on your user wall, you have progress trackers on every set you’ve ever earned an achievement on, you have a separate Completion Progress page that outlines said progress in extensive detail, and you have an “average completion” percentage metric for how close you are to a perfect record of masteries. Said percentage metric is currently hidden behind a “show more” button, but this didn’t use to be the case. I can confirm cases of certain players routinely resetting their unlocks for multiple entire sets because they were unable to unlock the last couple of achievements in said sets and thus keep this particular metric at 100%.
• The game pages. They show you the progress of users that you “follow” (because of course an achievement hunting website needs to shoehorn a social media component into itself) and allow you to compare your progress on a set with that of any other user. They also have a leaderboard that shows your hardcore points on the set in relation to those of every user to ever earn achievements on the set. I believe this speaks for itself.
• RA’s events. In simple terms, these are specific timed challenges on the site that require you to fulfill a series of tasks in a set timeframe and reward you with different tiers of badges upon completion. Most events require you to master sets out of a specific group for the biggest rewards, and some are explicitly framed around getting certain quantities of achievements and masteries, such as Peak Streak and Master of the Month.
• The #mastery-showcase channel in RA’s Discord. Self-explanatory.

All of this plays a big part in fostering a community that is obsessed with squeezing achievement sets dry even without already having a completionist mindset, and one where players frequently feel obligated to engage with achievements they dislike or can’t obtain. Keep that last sentence in mind as you continue reading – it will inform the mindset behind a lot of the stuff that will come up later. This is a fundamental issue that no amount of set design guidelines or new features will ever mitigate simply because it is impossible to please everyone. To wit, the progression feature was one of the few additions to the site that explicitly tried to address this, and it still failed miserably because simply beating a game only shows you plain, non-shiny, barely visible consolation prizes in all of the same locations listed above without changing any of the mechanisms that push you towards masteries to begin with. Softcore mode also doesn’t help because all it does is allow you to use the full scope of the emulator features and, in doing so, exercise less effort to achieve (mostly) the same result.

I believe it is vastly understated just how many facets of the site suffer for this. I am not exaggerating when I say that every single gripe anyone on RA has ever had regarding set design has its roots right here and nowhere else. To wit, Steam, PSN and Xbox are all arguably healthier environments for achievement hunting specifically because their achievements don’t have this humongous infrastructure constructed around them – they’re just an unchanging background element that you aren’t directly incentivized to engage with.

When a player is a few difficult achievements away from mastering a set, there are many actions they can take with this in mind. Some will drop the set. A few will reset the set to keep the “average completion” metric at 100% as mentioned above. Many who can’t tough it out fairly are compelled to sidestep the offending achievements by cheating, messaging the staff to remove them for one reason or another, or, if they’re a dev, starting a revision vote to remove the achievements. These votes usually win because most other devs and staff members share the mastery-focused mindset described above. I myself have done all of the above at least once. I’m sure others could name examples of this if asked. Let that sink in: I actually LIKE this stuff, and I still ended up caving in to the metaphorical Dark Side because pretty much any player will hit a wall sooner or later and they may not have the good sense to just stop and move on.
The only real “compromise” option is to switch to softcore mode and unlock the last few achievements with full use of savestates, cheats & rewind. This marks your progress on the set as “completed” and earns you a notably less shiny badge on your profile. This is not a very common choice because hardcore mode is considered the “default” and is outright required for events & leaderboards.

You may think that RA’s set design guidelines should help mitigate this at least a little, but the problems with that are twofold. The first is that many of their stated unwelcome concepts are arbitrary in and of themselves. Extreme difficulty, extreme grinding and luck requirements are all things that every player will perceive differently. They are worded extremely vaguely in RA’s Code of Conduct and offer no insight as to where exactly the lines are typically drawn – this should at least be doable for RNG requirements since those can be numerically expressed as probability values. From what some staff members have said, DevCompliance is typically flooded with reports from users pegging all kinds of achievements as UWC’s and asking for them to be removed. It’s not difficult to see why.

The second problem lies in the sheer scope of the site. In the 3 years since I joined the community, RA’s user count has nearly sextupled. New achievement sets are pumped out more frequently than ever before, and the amount of work needed to support the site has only increased as time passed. RA simply do not have the resources or manpower to keep even the majority of all sets on the site, old and new, up to their current standards, not when they change so frequently and not when there is so much other work that demands their attention. Most of these initiatives come from user reports and revision votes.

Speaking of revision votes, some words need to be said about the concept of set revisions. RA is unique among other achievement hunting communities in that their achievements are also subject to be changed and revised over time. In theory, this is good because user-created content is subject to human error and this mechanism provides a means to address that and reevaluate the content with a more robust set of policies. In practice, players are very rarely happy whenever a revision is announced and implemented. When it adds achievements to a set, players get pissed because they can’t consider that set “mastered” until they come back and unlock the added achievements, which can necessitate a whole new playthrough of the game or a challenge beyond a given player’s capabilities (this is despite the fact that your mastery badge stays when this happens unless you manually reset an achievement from that set). When it removes achievements or makes them easier, players get pissed because some of them put in the time and effort to unlock the achievements before the revision, and now that time and effort has been rendered moot. Even if the bulk of the revision is something like adding missing content (i.e. something that the game rewards you for and should have been in the set to begin with), many players will still be unhappy that the revision “invalidated” their mastery in a sense. It still says “mastered”, sure, but it’s not a full progress bar and it’s an eyesore to the players.

This same mindset informs the design of most new sets being made today. Only the bare minimum of content and little to no custom user-made challenges – only that which is presented to you by the game itself, whether that be a difficulty setting, unlock, easter egg or other completion metric. Even then, it’s not uncommon for a large chunk of it to be arbitrarily sectioned off into a subset for being too difficult/time-consuming. Adding custom challenges to a set post-launch requires a revision vote and is generally a futile effort – this mindset is now so prevalent that winning a majority vote with such a proposal is basically impossible. You can’t please everyone, yet in a misguided attempt to do just that, RA ends up pleasing only the kind of people who are the most averse to achievement hunting. It’s common for players to treat RA primarily as a fancy backlog or a resource to find new games to play, because its current direction implies it just… doesn’t want to be an achievement hunting website anymore.

How do we fix this? Honestly, I don’t think this can be fixed – only mitigated somewhat. An idea put forth by many disgruntled players is to keep all custom user-made challenges separate from the main sets. I actually think this can work – not as an isolated change, but as part of a cohesive restructuring of the entire site. This would be intended so that the average “weight” of masteries would be greatly reduced and players would be less pressured to engage with content they don’t like. Other changes would include allowing complete creative freedom for the separated content and making it more accessible from a technical standpoint. This would still need a lot of work, because properly addressing the issue would require a full overhaul of the structure and design standards of achievement sets on the site.

RA fosters a mindset that compels you to go for masteries above all else. Masteries are, generally, a massive timesink. It can take you hundreds of hours to master a set if the game is big enough. This ties nicely into:

2. No Respect for Users’ Time and Effort

This is the big one. Out of everything I will touch on here, this is the thing that drives me up the wall more than anything else. RA is an extreme timesink that demands as much time and effort as you can give, and yet all of it can be taken away at the drop of a hat. Any and all efforts you put forth towards the community can be removed or modified to the point of unrecognizability for a slew of different reasons. This is most likely the chief reason for many disgruntled users leaving the site.

I already described users’ dissatisfaction with set revisions above. Here are some other ways in which their time and effort is frequently disrespected:

• The time commitment required to get the bigger rewards from an event is obscene. If you have a day job, study in college, or have any other hobbies you regularly partake of, you will not have the time to routinely dedicate 6+ hours a day to playing random games most of which you won’t even like. I speak from experience – trying to balance this stuff with real life obligations is a fool’s errand even if you have money and physical well-being in abundance. The same thing applies to the global leaderboard once you get close to the top 1% of players. The only difference there is you have more variety with which to go about earning points to stay high up on the rankings.
• There are many cases of entire sets being removed or rearranged. Notable examples include the recent Clover-adjacent dumpster fire that is currently still being stoked, Pokemon sets supporting multiple versions being split into one set per version, and any set amassing enough tickets to be indefinitely demoted and put on a list of broken sets to be fixed later. In the last case, recall that scope creep is a real thing and very rarely does anyone get around to repairing the set, and this process is done in the form of a revision – meaning the initiative can come with any number of other changes and piss off any number of players if a developer decides to cut the set’s content in half due to arbitrary preference or RA’s increasing standards for set design. I haven’t even gotten into how this disrespects the original developers of the set.
• Users have ways to contribute to the site without necessarily being involved in achievement development. These include creating icons and text for achievement sets. However, this means they are also very easily replaceable through public voting or staff intervention. You like how a set has a cool badge to put on your wall? It can arbitrarily be replaced at any point and there’s next to nothing you can do about it. The Icon Gauntlet votes which precede this process are frequently called “Press B simulator” – “B” here refers to the new badge that is proposed to replace the old one. Most of the time the newer badge wins the vote by a mile regardless of how good it looks or how well it fits the game or achievement set (likely due to a “shiny new thing is always better” mindset). This turns away players who were willing to master the set for the sake of putting a specific badge on their profile and can also hurt the achievements themselves if the icons show a hint for how to unlock them (let’s say they’re for a puzzle or point & click adventure game). The same thing applies to achievement titles and descriptions – there are confirmed cases where staff initiatives resulted in the new descriptions being vague and misrepresenting the requirements to unlock the achievements.
• RA’s standardization also fosters disrespect. RA’s policies for set design change so frequently and drastically that what is considered pristine today can be arbitrarily deemed a broken mess in a few months’ time. This is used as an excuse to do all of the aforementioned whilst disparaging old sets and developers from before any particular policy was implemented. Additionally, the list of unwelcome concepts has grown so large that basically anything outside of 100% completion + easter eggs can arbitrarily be considered a badly designed achievement and therefore removed. I’ve even seen cases where achievements pertaining to actual secrets inside of the game were removed because their wording was arbitrarily deemed unsatisfactory.

And that was just the stuff that all users have to deal with. Developers in particular have to deal with so much more:

• One of the most egregious proponents of developer disrespect is the claim system itself. Recall these two golden rules present at the beginning of RA’s Developer Code of Conduct:

Make room for other developers to get a chance to work on games they like, in their own way

Do not discourage anyone from working on any game, in public or in private

In practice, the claim system is commonly used and abused to go directly against these rules. Claim sniping is absolutely rampant, particularly among high-profile developers and staff members. If you are a developer who is taking a long time to make a set, or if you’re disliked by the staff, your claim can be arbitrarily removed, or you can be denied the right to extend your claim past the 1-year mark. Generally, your set then gets claimed by another dev within days or even hours of this happening. Your code notes are then promptly pocketed by the other developer and all of your other work on the set goes poof, never to be seen again.
It also works the other way around – if you want to work on a game that’s already claimed by someone, you’re out of luck unless said someone drops the claim for one reason or another. If you want to work on an already existing set that isn’t solely your own, you need to win a revision vote and then make a revision claim before being allowed to do so, which almost never succeeds. This, in turn, further ENCOURAGES claim sniping because losing the opportunity to ever develop achievements for a particular game you happen to like isn’t just a possibility – it’s inevitable unless you make a claim on the game beforehand. I myself have had cases where I would lock down a claim for a game with no set months in advance before having time to actually develop anything, because not doing so right now would lead to forever losing the opportunity to develop the set later.

• On the topic of revisions again – having a set revised poorly hurts far more when you are the developer who created it to begin with. While you are required to be notified 3 days in advance before the revision vote begins (and only if you still have your dev role), it ultimately doesn’t matter. You cannot dispute or veto the revision at any point during the process. The most you can do is vote or argue against the revision, which almost never helps considering most devs tend to be overwhelmingly in favor of revisions to remove or nerf content on the site. If someone proposes to cut your set in half or section it off to a subset – most likely it’ll happen regardless of what you do and you’ll just have to live with it. Overturning such decisions is typically impossible, particularly if certain achievements get shunted off into a subset because subsets are considered the universal “DANGER, EXTREMELY SOUL-CRUSHING, DO NOT TOUCH” zone outside of most players’ intended scope. Recall the above point about it being difficult to make significant amendments to an existing set – this makes it nigh impossible outside of freak accidents because you’re just never going to win a revision vote with such a proposal.
• Developers are allowed to change the code notes of other developers. This can be due to the wording, formatting, or lack of information on any given addresses. However, changing a code note also transfers its authorship from the previous developer to you. This also effectively undermines a large portion of a developer’s work on any given set – increasingly common if that set is claimed by a junior developer. Recall that RA’s set design standards incentivize doing this for many old sets that were made before said standards were ever in place.
• Out of all currently present DevQuests, I can only count three that legitimately compel you to do useful work for the site. They are DQ1 (solving tickets), DQ2 (repairing broken sets), and DQ13 (adding missing content to incomplete sets). The rest are either Set Creation type quests (which require making new sets with the bare minimum of standards and thus exacerbating the problem described in Part 1 – DQ6, DQ15, DQ19 and DQ20 are especially egregious in this regard), or small adjustments to existing content that mean little in the grand scheme of things. All of these initiatives except DQ1 are acted on through revision votes, meaning that even the good ones could, again, change any number of other things and leave many players and devs unhappy. The newly minted DQ22 is one such quest and is commonly abused to disparage the work of older devs as outlined above.
  I should particularly mention DQ4 in this regard. “Veteran Developer” is considered one of the highest honors on the site, and yet most of the stretch goals necessary to attain it are strictly based on the quantity and time commitment of your work, not the quality. Particularly insulting is the fact that your only reward for doing this is a shiny JPG on your user wall with no additional privileges.
• One of the latest updates to the developer toolkit allows any dev to outright DELETE unofficial achievements that have 0 unlocks. For those not in the know – unofficial achievements were once able to be unlocked and counted towards a player’s point total, but that has changed. There is currently no way for a player to unlock an unofficial achievement without staff intervention. If you don’t have them backed up anywhere else, they’re gone. This applies to:

1. Anything made by junior developers before release. When a junior’s set is in review, the CR can delete any achievements at their discretion even if they completely fit RA’s current standards for achievement design. There is no way for the jr.dev to dispute this when it happens, and any attempt to do so can lead to them being removed from the role. This will be further discussed later.
2. Achievements a developer created and put in unofficial, but dropped the claim before finishing development for any reason.
3. Achievements a developer created, but arbitrarily deemed a poor fit for the set and decided not to promote them.
4. Achievements a developer created, but deliberately left in unofficial as “secret” achievements that do not go towards your mastery of the set.
5. Achievements that just so happen to have 0 unlocks for other reasons. Maybe they’re broken, maybe they’re too hard, or maybe just no one got around to unlocking them.

I should also briefly mention the concept of “inactive” developers. This term refers to a developer that has lost his developer role for one reason or another. It does not necessarily indicate whether they are active or inactive on the site. Realistically, the only difference in the context of disrespecting a developer’s time and effort is that it will happen quicker to an “inactive” developer – there’s no need to notify them of a revision in advance, and their status implies they do not care about their work on the site and allow it to be reshaped and reabused with impunity. There are plenty of statements from retired developers on the topic that indicate this could not be further from the truth.

A little bit about my own experiences with all of this. My Rockman 5 PS1 set (intending to be an exhaustive, ~100 achievement monstrosity) abruptly ceased development after 2 months due to the suspension of my developer status, while it was effectively days away from being released. It was then promptly sniped by another developer despite me explicitly asking not to. What came out of it was a comparatively bare-bones and inoffensive set released 5 months later than mine would have been.
Months later, another set of mine (Rockman 2 PS1) was abruptly taken down by someone in QATeam due to a blatantly false claim of requiring an unsupported core. I got muted for attempting to dispute the decision (in fairness, I was very pissed and did not bother being polite), the set was later reinstated with no apology or acknowledgement that they messed up. Furthermore, two other sets for other games in the series were subject to the same false claim, yet they were untouched. I assume this was because the developers for those sets still had their status while I did not.
Finally, one achievement from the Rockman 2 set was demoted as part of a revision which I had no control over. This is despite the fact that said achievement was in the set from release day and was approved during the Code Review for that set (this was the set that led to me graduating from the jr.dev program).

As a final point, this is all fundamentally endorsed through one of the golden rules of the Developer Code of Conduct: “Like a wiki, once a developer publishes work, they are giving it over to the community to be reviewed and reworked over time”. Fair in theory, but if we were to continue the wiki analogy, a significant portion of said reviews and reworks amount to what is effectively vandalism. Every developer has the means to vandalize the work of another, and the overall mindset of the average RA user as outlined in Part 1 combined with certain technical aspects of RA like the claim system means you are actively encouraged to do so. In the case of the claim system, I genuinely think the site would be better off if it were removed altogether and developers were allowed to add new content to the site at their leisure, coupled with significant restrictions for removing existing content. This is completely counter to the general mastery-focused mindset of RA, but it would foster creative expression and greatly increase the growth of the site.

With that being said, we can now discuss the third and most overbearing problem here. Anyone who is aware of my time on RA should not be surprised in the least:

3. Overabundant Control

I am not an online anarchist. RA is a big community with a big user base. I acknowledge that RA’s content and user communication should be held to some standard of quality and civility, and such standards should be enforced appropriately. However, the lengths to which RA’s staff and site policies go in this regard are absolutely beyond reason, and have only become more so in recent years. Fact is, RA’s control mechanisms have grown so much that they’re now actively hurting the site and the users who engage with it.

I already discussed a few such mechanisms, such as the claim system and the constantly increasing standards for set design. Here are some others:

• Further on the topic of revisions, the staff is well aware that revisions generally make players unhappy. Over the years, they have been making the procedure of revising a set increasingly more difficult and restrictive. Compared to 2022, revision votes now take much longer to be settled, revisions require a significant majority vote to be approved (as opposed to simply getting over 50% votes), are unavailable to junior developers, and are generally controlled by a handful of staff members, who can overwhelmingly influence the vote in any direction they choose so much that their opinion is effectively guaranteed to win. If you’re planning to add anything to an existing set that already covers all of the content, you have no hope.
  One last thing: a relatively new standard is that each revision should be exhaustive with the intent of being the final revision for the set. This is asinine because it goes against the very idea of a revision and the dev CoC rule mentioned above. Sets are always open to being reworked, and even if the revision somehow addresses every possible issue and satisfies pretty much everyone, RA’s everchanging standards can arbitrarily manifest new issues into existence that were never considered when the revision was proposed and implemented.
• An active developer is severely discouraged from taking extended breaks at any point during their activity on the site. If you go 2 months with an unresolved ticket or 1 month with at least 5 of them, you lose your developer role and must then politely ask the staff to give it back. If you go a year with no dev role or if the staff doesn’t like you for any reason, you are either denied outright or forced to undergo a fresh start in the junior developer program (I’ll tell you more about that in a bit). This is coupled with the fact that during your entire period of not having the developer role, you are especially vulnerable to having your sets die by a thousand cuts from everything mentioned above.
  You may believe that this is justified by frequent updates of the developer toolkit and constantly needing to learn new features. I regret to inform you that the toolkit has not had any significant updates since 2022. Every addition since then was implemented specifically to accommodate GameCube support and the increasing complexity required to develop achievements for newer, more advanced hardware – they are not needed when developing for most other systems.
• Muting users is excessively restrictive. When you are muted, you are locked out of any avenues of communication on the site except for PM’s – and those only work when messaging RA’s staff teams. Notably, this means you are unable to create tickets, solve tickets, or ask specific users for any information that might be necessary for fixing issues in any particular achievements. Whoever came up with this made the restrictions so resolutely strict that they lock you out of the most critical features of the site. You can’t even request a manual unlock because those explicitly require you to create a ticket beforehand. As a developer, a long enough mute period effectively guarantees losing your dev role. As a player, getting muted can realistically lock you out of a mastery because one achievement refuses to unlock properly and you’re physically unable to report the issue in an appropriate manner. I’ve seen users here muted for very long periods of time, up to 1 year, for not really saying anything divisive or offensive.
• Speaking of which: in light of recent events, it’s only fitting to discuss the blatant censorship of users on the site. RA’s staff has a long history of silencing specific users and opinions they don’t agree with. From my experience, I am almost certainly one of them. Everything on the forums and Discord is extensively monitored, and any good points a disliked user might raise tend to be ignored. I myself have given a significant amount of feedback on multiple aspects of RA, such as technical issues, site policies and certain bureaucratic procedures like claim extensions. None of it ever went anywhere. Players, developers, new and old users – everyone is expendable and any critique can and often does lead to a mute, dev ban or full account ban.
  Another increasingly common practice is to wipe or replace entire forum threads – during a revision vote, it’s common to “replace” a game’s forum thread with another one and then archive the old one, effectively killing it. If the staff doesn’t like a particular thread, they can also hide it from 99% of users, which amounts to basically the same thing. Other users and places on the web have already documented many instances of this happening in far more detail than I ever could (perhaps the site you’re reading this on happens to be one of those).

Now, this was all about the developers. Having read all that, you might be curious: where do RA’s developers come from? What does it take to become a developer? That is where the Junior Developer program comes in. Its purpose is to allow interested users to learn how to develop achievements and ultimately become a full dev.

It’s also excessively micromanaged to the point of insanity. In RA’s current standing, junior devs are THE most restricted role on the site, bar none. I have seen dozens of juniors that got removed from the program or quit on their own before getting anywhere close to becoming a full developer. Several of them did so before ever releasing a single set. Only a very small percentage of juniors end up graduating, and trust me – it’s not because achievement development is extremely difficult.

Let’s set the stage with some numbers: when I was making my way through the program back in the summer of 2023, it took a little over a month for each of my sets to be reviewed after being put in the queue. From what some newer juniors have been telling me, that number is now up to an average of 3 months. It usually takes 3-5 finished sets for a junior developer to graduate and attain full developer status. The math should tell you of the time commitment required to get through the program. Under current circumstances, I can’t imagine it taking any less than 6 months for even the most hardworking and talented of jr. devs to graduate. For most it will take close to a full year, possibly more.

For reference: realistically, the basics of RA’s achievement development toolkit can be learned in a couple of weeks with no programming experience required. The discipline of properly supporting your work and keeping it free of issues is a good deal harder to learn, but is also doable if you have enough patience and common sense. Writing and graphic design can be a struggle if you’ve never used Photoshop (or similar image editing software) or aren’t fluent in English, but standards aren’t that high – decently coherent English and basic screen cropping will usually suffice. Compared to, say, programming or scripting (even in a high-level language like Python), achievement development on RA requires a relatively small and accessible skillset and does not necessarily warrant an equivalent time period to a college semester in order to become proficient at it.

With that being said, here is part of what you can currently expect to deal with if you wish to become a developer on RA:

• Before even starting work on developing a set, you must present the CR team with a detailed plan of all achievements in the set, their requirements, points and writing. The plan must then be approved by a CR before you are allowed to claim the game and begin development proper. You are currently required to do this for every single set you develop during your time as a jr.dev, and you must prematurely do so for your first set before you can even attain junior developer status. Recall how RA’s mastery-focused mindset generally informs set design – anything outside the median is likely to get shot down. Creativity of achievement development suffers immensely because of this.
• Once you’ve developed your set, you must submit it for review before it can be released. Before you are allowed to do this, you are heavily incentivized to standardize a whole slew of things in both your code and aesthetic design of the set. Read RA’s dev documentation for more details. Depending on how you go about it, your set could be denied from the review queue or lead to you getting a lower score on your code review. The number of such standards has nearly doubled since I initially went through the program 2 years back.
• While your set is in the review queue, you are not allowed to work on any other sets. The most RA lets you do is practice RAM digging on other games without saving your notes to the site. Recall how long it generally takes for your set to get reviewed. Realistically, you could develop a basic, relatively stable set in a few weeks and then spend several months waiting for someone to get to it because you’re not allowed to do anything else.
• While your set is in the queue, you are encouraged to submit it for playtesting by members of RA’s dedicated playtesting team. Generally, this is good because it allows you to catch & fix issues in your set before the code review begins proper. However, the playtester’s personal preference can inform their opinion of your set and their ability to playtest the set. If the playtester finds certain achievements too difficult or time-consuming, or poorly designed, you are heavily incentivized to address their complaints with the set even if they are based on arbitrary player preference. Maybe your set is getting playtested by an unskilled player or someone who dislikes the genre of the game in question for one reason or another – it doesn’t matter. If your playtester doesn’t like the design of your set, they’re likely to use psychological manipulation to compel you to downsize the set. If you do not comply, that will be a strike against you on the code review and will prolong the time it takes for you to graduate. Issues can be trivial things that have nothing to do with RA’s design standards, such as the number of achievements in the set, or the time & amount of playthroughs required to master the set.
• The code review itself is not, in fact, strictly about improving code like some of you’d expect from commercial software development. Factually, your CR has full control over every minute detail of your achievement set, including code logic, design, text formatting, RAM digging, and the process of promoting the set to the site. You are strictly required to comply with the CR’s every demand, such as removing or changing certain achievements, changing the formatting of your code notes, descriptions, or points – that is, if the CR doesn’t do it themselves, since they can ACTUALLY JUST DO THAT now. Even the actual “best practices” of coding achievement logic are just one of many ways to code achievements, and are optimal in some cases and suboptimal in others – yet you are often required to slavishly adhere to them regardless of the set. Just because pauselocks are a powerful tool for ensuring achievement stability doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to put one in everything you make, even if I did that myself on a few of my sets – in hindsight, I should have put more effort into implementing anti-cheat protection than forcing you to reset if one particular address gets looked at funny.
• You think full devs have it bad with inactivity periods? Juniors get their role taken away if they don’t touch the devkit for a month or fail to fully address a ticket within 2 weeks. The former period is mercifully paused while your set is in the review queue, but it’s a very small mercy that is only granted because it’d be nigh impossible for most juniors to graduate without it. You are not allowed any extended breaks during your learning period. If you ask for your role back, it’s generally treated as a fresh start from scratch with all of your prior experience ignored. The same thing applies if a full dev is demoted and then wants to return to achievement development for any reason. If you had a claim on a game when this happens, you will usually be forced to claim a different game, which also directly violates the “do not discourage developers from working on any game” rule mentioned above.

Also consider that with the increasing influx of new users on the site, the CR team is terminally understaffed and overworked. I distinctly remember a news post where, in desperation, CR roles were bestowed upon 2 new developers fresh out of jrs. with little experience under their belt simply because the CR team can’t keep up with the mountain of juniors in line and feel the need to increasingly micromanage their activity on RA. This fosters a dismissive attitude towards jr.devs where the juniors are constantly scrutinized for any perceived wrongdoings or excuses to kick them out, so as to lighten the CR team’s workload. Basically anything that can be perceived as an unwillingness to learn, support your work, or follow the CR team’s every whim can lead to your junior dev role getting temporarily or permanently removed.

I’d like to cap off this section with some musings on scope creep. It is very much real and a crucial factor in most of the site’s problems. Everything you’ve read about up to now is continually exacerbated by the fact that RA’s resources are both too few and spread too thin to address the aforementioned issues with any degree of adequacy. The frequent influx of new sets compels more standardization and control such as what was described above. These initiatives require increasingly more staff to help enforce them, and RA’s administration frequently resorts to desperate measures to fill the ranks of their staff for this purpose. RA’s emphasis on incessant micromanagement of developers compels many of them to leave or keep their activity to the minimum required to retain their developer status, which further increases scope creep and creates a vicious cycle where RA can never muster the resources to properly support its content.
Meanwhile, if a user wants to become a developer themselves, it’s not enough for them to simply learn the ins and outs of achievement development – they must spend at least 6 months regularly wading through some of the most comically extreme micromanagement I’ve ever seen from a volunteer community centered around content creation. If you’ve ever had an interest in some adjacent things like game modding or romhacking, the difference is night and day. Those are significantly more difficult and require much more technical knowledge before you can ever get remotely good at them, yet you can always learn them at your own pace, creatively express yourself without having to deal with a mountain of arbitrary standardization, and not worry about your work getting bastardized years after being released.

A particularly asinine remark I’ve seen from some staff members is that RA currently has TOO MANY active devs, which is laughable and easily disproven by looking up RA’s user counts and set counts & doing the math. Also consider that a significant portion of RA’s staff members are actually present in multiple staff teams at once – this is not only evidence of how few hands on deck RA actually has, but it also concentrates too much power in the hands of too few people, reduces accountability and further validates the dismissive attitudes described above. That said, it would explain a lot about why exactly developers are treated so poorly on the site. Perhaps the ones who call the shots are willing to actively hurt the site for the sake of having fewer devs to micromanage – Devember has already suffered for this, if the numbers are any indication. Having never had such administrative power on RA, I can only speculate.

Some suggestions to help deal with all this:

• Put less incentive on making new sets and more on improving existing ones. Get rid of DevJams and all Set Creation DevQuests.
• Make development more accessible and vastly tone down the restrictions on jr.devs.
• Allow developers to mentor juniors in the art of achievement development. This would greatly increase the influx of new developers on RA – a developer could pitch the idea to his friends, and if they’re interested, they’d have a massive advantage of being able to learn directly from someone they trust. I seem to recall this idea was once seriously discussed on RA, and many groups were in favor of implementing it.
• Tangibly reward developers for actually useful initiatives like DQ1 with things other than shiny JPG’s. The rewards could be something like additional privileges, claim extensions, an extra claim slot, etc.

4. Miscellaneous

Aside from the three big issues outlined above, there are a number of smaller things I’d like to briefly touch on.

Technical Issues

• The notification system remains a broken mess that does not function unless you funnel it into a sacrificial email address (which will only be flooded more and more densely as you become more active on the site). The checkboxes in your settings which pertain to site notifications currently do nothing. This notably applies to subscriptions to tickets or comments. If you fixed a ticket for any achievement you did not create (for example, as part of DQ1), have fun manually checking if anything breaks again, because that can suddenly become your responsibility at any time. This has been the case ever since I joined, likely long before that.
• Subsets are a broken, overengineered mess and what they’re used for still goes all over the place. An increasingly common scenario is using them as a mechanism to permanently remove certain achievements from the bulk of the community. This is effective for two reasons:

1. Subsets have an ironclad reputation of being “the hell zone” where all of the toughest, most unfun and most blood-curdling achievements are locked away from the main bulk of the site. This means it is nigh impossible to appeal for any subset achievement to be instated into a main set, regardless of whether it fits in one as per RA’s set design standards. I myself have tried multiple times to no avail.
2. Subsets have different hashes from regular sets. This means they require you to apply a specific patch to a specific ROM of the game just to play them. This is a fairly unintuitive and time-consuming process that most users here struggle with. Most don’t bother to even try.

Unofficial achievements already exist and function just fine without requiring you to patch the game beforehand – a much simpler and more user-friendly approach would be to implement another achievement group using the same mechanism. While this would prevent you from earning another badge for doing them, subsets are already niche enough that most will pay them no mind. The only reason I see to keep subsets is for ones which specifically require a modified version of the game such as SM64’s Lazy Lakitu subset (even then, perhaps they could be reclassified as romhacks instead). Unfortunately, the current implementation of subsets is one that RA has chosen to stick with, so I do not believe this will be improved.

Some Good Things

Hardcore mode is a neat concept and a very good fit for the whole “retro” vibe the site goes for. It also helped me break my savestate addiction and start actually enjoying old videogames like a normal person, so that’s nice.

The developer toolkit is probably the only technical aspect of the site that I’d consider 100% appropriate for its intended function. It is simultaneously:

• simple enough that you could feasibly pick up the basics in a week without any programming experience;
• flexible enough to allow for most kind of achievements one could want;
• expandable with certain third-party tools that allow using programming constructs to greatly cut down on busywork;
• limited enough that most achievement logic can be easily understood by an experienced dev – this is crucial for fixing achievements of other devs. This also lets it foster creative problem solving whilst still being all of the above;
• open-source so that its functionality can be adapted into another resource if/when the need arises for one.

Aside from that, it also includes some of the best RAM digging tools around that happen to be universal for any system supported by the site. I’ve been branching out into similar things like Lua scripting, and I still liberally use the toolkit for finding specific memory values and addresses because most other such tools for various systems are very cumbersome at best and nonexistent at worst. If there is any technical aspect of the site worth borrowing for a potential alternative, this is probably it.

Clovergate

I will not go too deep into the events surrounding the banning of certain choice games from the site. They have already been extensively chronicled by many developers and former staff members. I have nothing specific to add and no reason to doubt what is already known.

I should highlight, however, that this whole mess did not just spontaneously appear out of thin air. It was the logical conclusion of several compounding problems that have been present and actively propagated on RA long before I started activity there in August 2022. The censorship, the miscommunication, the negligence, the refusal to address core issues in the community – all of these have been present long before this blew up. Pokemon Clover was simply a fuse that attracted enough attention and controversy to compel immediate action, and the public bore witness to a masterclass in all of the aforementioned, pulled out into broad daylight for all to see. The result: the community is in an uproar, several high-profile users and staff members left, and suddenly the hack in question has attracted far more attention than it likely would have if this situation was handled better. Never doubt the Streisand effect.

To RA’s staff and founder, I have the following to say: I do not particularly care for any of the games that were removed from the site in this decision as of the end of October – I am aware that there are already other games liable to be removed. However, the way this decision came to be is inexcusable. If you are willing to let threats from random nobodies dictate your site policies, you deserve no respect. Not from the developers, not from the players, not from loudmouthed idiots looking to force their views upon RA, and not from anyone looking to collaborate with RA in the future. I have been made aware of some of the reasoning behind the decision – none of it justifies destroying your integrity and the community’s trust.

5. Closing Statements

I’m going to be entirely honest with you here: this was primarily written just so I could get this stuff off of my chest and spread the word. I have no hope that any of this will ever be addressed. Even if RA’s entire staff was somehow magically replaced with people that are able and willing to deal with these issues, too many things have been set in stone and too much damage has already been done. The only thing that I am able to do about it on RA itself is mourn the rotting carcass of an online community that played a big part in making me enjoy video games beyond a casual level. It was already rotting long before I joined the site, but… well, I guess the idea intrigued me enough to push onward even despite all of the rotten things about it.

If it wasn’t already obvious, I have zero desire to return to RA. Between RA’s mistreatment of me and my contributions, my lack of free time, other hobbies, and other video games that have nothing to do with RA, I only show up there in sporadic bursts to see what changes happen on the site. The rest is private communications with the handful of devs that I’ve become good friends with.

Would I be open to an alternative to RA later down the line? Possibly. I’m toying with the idea myself, have an idea for a project along similar lines. I cannot say when, or if, it will see the light of day – these things take time and I don’t have as much of it as I’d like. Don’t hold your breath – most likely it’ll be months before I get anywhere.

I hereby thank:

• JAM – Total bro for life. Never give up. We will make something of all this… hopefully sometime before the heat death of the universe.
• clymax – Total bro for life. Your meticulous documentation of RA’s many misgivings is much appreciated. Your talent deserves more respect and recognition than what RA can give.
• Salsa – Your “Master Without His Buster” achievements in Mega Man 1’s bonus set are a gloriously fun idea and it’s a shame that I couldn’t implement it in a game with an actually decent weapon set. I may disagree with you on some things involving set design, but most of your contributions to RA are legendary and should be cast in iron.
• TheJediSonic – I love NES Punch-Out to bits, and your bonus set for it still makes me salivate at the bottomless well of player expression that this game hides under its boxing gloves. Thank you for being awesome.
• tatoonie – Your Project Justice set inspired me to try making handmade combo trials just as you did, and was a jumping off point to something else I’m currently working on. You are a lunatic and I love you for it.
• Everyone who supported my efforts on RA while I was still active;
• And YOU, for reading this all the way to its conclusion.

This post has been viewed 78 time(s).