So, I'm trying to start adding goals to my playthroughs and I encountered some problems:
- Lack of information: In some games, you either spoil yourself or you won't be able to know which goals to set (aka defeat certain boss, get certain item, etc.)
- Too many achievements/goals: Well, adding 276 goals to TBOI:RE or 257 to Cookie Clicker manually one by one seems a bit time consuming...

So, how do you guys deal with these issues? I was thinking on adding goals as I complete them while playing but then the porcentage would not change from 100% ever.
Also, do you add certain goals to your playthrough you know you won't ever complete (like completing 100% a bad game, for example)?.

I can definitely chime in on the "Too many goals" aspect of this!

Having entered every individual unlock for Binding of Isaac as an individual goal I definitely wouldn't recommend that amount of detail for most people. It's just a pain in the ass to do.

Instead, I would recommend finding ways to group them up to make broader goals. Using BoI as an example: Instead of 9 or 10 individual goals for each character's unlocks, you could do one entry for "Unlocked all of (character)'s rewards." Right there you'd be turning around 100+ individual goals into 13. (I'm approximating the numbers, I don't remember how many unlocks each character can earn.) I'm sure not every game's goals will be possible to lump together into bulk goals like this, but I'm sure it would be possible to at least some degree.

As for lack of information, I actually covered a very related subject in my article regarding being a completionist and dealing with spoilers. Never did find a perfect solution outside of "play the game twice." First time spoiler free, second time with spoilers for completion. You can minimize spoilers on a first run through to some degree where you plan ahead with things like spoiler-free walkthroughs, various guides on missable content, etc... but it's always a risk that you'll read or hear something you won't want to.

I've actually thought about providing a text import or something to bulk load goals. I mean, you would still need to type them (or find a nice list somewhere), but it would save a little bit of time...maybe.

Personally, I like adding all of the goals prior to starting the game. I feel they work better as "goals" vs. "achievements" if you know them in advance. Don't get me wrong, I might discover there's another goal I'd like to add after loading in my initial list, but I try to have the bulk of them in advance.

Being spoiled is definitely something that was discussed when this feature was originally implemented and there just isn't a great way to handle it since nothing unlocks automatically (and never will, obviously). To mitigate spoilers, here's generally how I come up with my lists:

• Find an FAQ (or strategy guide, if I have one) and determine what the general flow for the game is (i.e. is it level by level, open ended, etc)
• Identify the major milestones, which are generally in the table of contents and add a "Completed XYZ" goal for each one
• Identify any major collectibles and either add them individually or group them (much like @dhobo described)
• Identify any random stuff that I may have known about or stumbled upon

As long as you stick to the table of contents and keep things generic, you should be able to avoid most spoilers. Some FAQS can have mild spoilers even in the table of contents if they list boss fights or something similar. I would avoid digging into the content if at all possible.

For the "too many goals" issue, I've been on both sides of the coin just to see how I prefer to handle it.

First, let's talk about Tetris Attack since it touches on another one of your questions about adding goals you won't complete. I had a whopping three goals for this game: 1) Finished Stage Clear Mode; 2) Finished Vs. Mode; 3) Finished Puzzle Mode. Now granted the game is only a couple of hours long, so I didn't need a ton of goals, but these are pretty high level. I didn't actually complete the third one because I didn't enjoy the mode itself. I decided to leave the goal unfinished because I kinda like having it documented as to what exactly I did for the playthrough. I haven't added any goals that I didn't originally plan to complete though.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I have Okami HD, which I had 180 goals entered for. For this one, I really wanted to avoid spoilers, but I had played it enough before that I knew the general flow. I added individual goals for collecting / finding / purchasing / catching / fed each brush technique, God technique, fish, wanted list, animal, treasure, stray bead, equipment, gold dust, as well as checkpoint goals for Amaterasu upgrades.

They're tough to compare because one was 2 hours and the other was 52, but I think I prefer having more goals in general. I felt it helped keep me engaged and gave me a visual progress indicator when the game did not. Sure, there were plenty of side quests and stuff that I found along the way that probably should've been goals (I know I added one because I knew about it in advance), but that's the trade-off for not wanting spoilers :P

All that being said, I still haven't entered my goals for Dragon Quest Builders, so I should probably do that :P

I just added goals for Dragon Quest Builders and only ended up with 28. I basically gave one for completing each chapter, completing each challenge in a chapter, and finding the world map in each chapter. I could EASILY add a few hundred, but I think this keeps me focused on the main milestones and I know I'll spend plenty of time just wandering around doing random stuff :D

Goals.... Most games I start I just don't know how many goals there will be initially. I have a few simple rules I go by:
- Have a goal that just 'Finish the game'.
- Define some abstract goals if you can deduct them from the game structure \ menu \ description etc e.g.:

• Telltale : goals are the episodes. Not the chapters, too many
• Clickers : Get to level xyz
• Puzzlers : How many puzzles \ chapters
• RPG : Get to level 10/20/70
• Any : Get xx% of the achievements \ trophies etc

After a first playing session you can refine those above and add some specific goals you learn as the story progresses. You do something like that in your head also while playing, and I always somehow map out the short term goals and long term goals. The latter go into my goals list.

Do this in fact after each playing session. If you made up an interesting goals, just add it to the list. It could even be something like "don't eat any pizza during this game" ;-)

Don't be afraid to extend your list, or take goals off. It's your list and you can make it as long as you want to.

In the end the game is complete when you want it to and the goals are only a tool to help you get to that point. If you are after all the achievements, write them all down, in groups or just '100% achievements'.

[update]
Moho_00 mentioned faqs as a good guide for goals, and they really are! Didn't check them out for myself but the table of content often contains a good breakdown of the game into chapters etc. Just looked it up for uncharted, tomb raider and call of cthulhu and it's really helpful. It especially gives you (me at least) a good guidance of how long a game takes in terms of progress. Wish I had thought of that myself earlier haha

Walktroughs seem to be what I was looking for to be able to add goals.
I've just addead goals for all my current playthroughs (+1000 goals!!!) and I can safely say we need an option to be able to bulk import goals xP

^^ added tons of goals and also marked them completed just to see what the progress is. Wonderful! Bulk import would really be handy.

Just a thought for some feature someday : Wouldn't it also be great if we could save these goals as some sort of template so others could benefit from our work? I have just entered a lot of chapters \ levels etc for a number of games, and would be nice if others could use those too. Or if I could just copy such a list from an existing one? So pick a game, pick an existing goal-list or just create your own.

I agree with what Marcelloz suggests, that would be indeed a very good feature that could also come hand in hand with the ability to set your Playthrough goals public.

I guess I'm the kind of guy that adds goals once I do something rather than add them up front. I have NO idea what I will consider a goal until I do it. So for me, 95% of my goals added happen while I'm playing. The other 5% come from looking at achievements and seeing what could be good goals to add.

So most of the time, you'll see my games as being 100% when I'm still playing. I'm still not completely sold on the idea that goals will be something I continue to do for games. I like them but I guess it's a feature that I don't necessarily see as something I need to do.

@Zaidel:

A lot of this discussion regarding mitigating spoilers and goal construction can be found in my Guide to Playthroughs, found here -> http://completionator.com/Article/View/10

I wouldn't mind a bulk order implementation, but as moho stated, it will still require a little manual labor on either end, so it's not a huge demand for me.

Me personally, I think it would be neat to be able to set your unlockables list as "private" (rather than displaying the goal's name, the Feed could only read as "x user completed a private goal" or something). That way, only the user could see what is actually finished, therefore persevering the game from revealing too much through goals.

Since this is already on the topic of Playthrough Goals, I thought it would be handy to have the option to partially complete a goal.

For example, say I'm playing Doom 2. I want my 5 goals to be completing the game on each of the 5 difficulties. But I could only make it so far on a harder difficulty. Rather than that goal being completely incomplete, it would be nice to see that I made it through 15/32 levels. So my goals will read:
-Complete " I'm Too Young To Die " Difficulty (32/32)
-Complete " Hey, Not Too Rough " Difficulty (32/32)
-Complete " Hurt Me Plenty " Difficulty (30/32)
-Complete " Ultra-Violence " Difficulty (15/32)
-Complete " Nightmare " Difficulty (3/32)
And my overall % will read 70%, instead of the 40% that would represent completing only the first two goals fully.

Even if I place each goal of this sort in separate playthroughs, now I can still see a % complete instead of 0 or 100 for that playthrough.

This will also help with grouping other sorts of goals. Taking the example mentioned by dhobo about "Unlocked all of (character)'s rewards.", you can still track progress within this by giving it a counter of 10, so that if you get part way (7/10 rewards), you still feel good about it.

I suppose what I've done to handle the partial goal issue is just enter a goal for each level. For example, I'm playing South Park right now and it has 17 levels, so I have a goal for completing each one. You could potentially have a goal for completing each level, on each difficulty. Sure, it would blow up your goals list, but it could give you a pretty granular view into how far you've made it.

To echo moho_00 a bit, the philosophy behind the Playthrough Goals is to give the individual user a granular view of progress. I feel like questions asked in this thread are a bit redundant in that sense, considering each goal is for personal motivation.

In the case of the larger goal lists (the games with lots of Achievements) my advice would be to compress them like I do for collaboration or HD collection games. Set up like this -> Completed 25% of Steam Achievements for X Game - this saves you a lot of time while still achieving the same end. If you need to be a little more detail oriented with that, then you can expand on that, but I have found that the more simplistic the goal list is, the more likely one will actually finish the whole thing. Even if the same amount of time is spent, beating 257 goals in the same amount of time it takes to complete 12 can feel a little counter productive in a sense.

As far as the difficulty oriented goals, or New Game+ type goals (the same tasks to be repeated) I would suggest an additional entry for that scenario, or one grand goal for the long haul at the end.

Different games will require a different amount of effort in order to create an effective list, but just remember, in the end it is for the user's benefit, so be sure to create ones that will motivate you personally.

It seems like being able to create sub-goals would be a pretty big quality of life improvement and definitely something to consider in the future.

What'd be nice if when you create a new goal, you could have an optional field that would allow a user to specify how many sub-goals it contains so you don't have to create them all one by one (though you will still have to rename/label them accordingly.) I'd set a maximum to how many could be auto-generated though, just so someone doesn't try auto-creating a goal with 999999 subgoals, haha. ;)

@dhobo:

You're a genius! That seems be kind of like how Steam does their Achievement lists when you have to do something numerically (progress bar that will read 23/50 with a bar for example). That could really come in handy also for goals that would need to be repeated in some fashion as well, without having to overlap the same goal. The milestone ticks are very fitting and motivating also!

I guess the reason I like the ability to partially complete certain goals is so that if I get to level 89/100, I can say "yes, I almost made it". It helps for games like Defender's Quest which has 201 Gold Stars to achieve or many ARPGs which tend to level a character up to 100.
Rather than, say in Diablo 2, enter 100 goals for 7 characters for 2 or 3 builds each (let's just say about 1800 goals), I could have about 18 goals with granular progress. This also prevents other goals from being buried in goals related to character progress or game-level completion. It has the same effect as making a goal for each, but cuts down the time to create the goals immensely and cleans up the list.

@dhobo
I really like your progress bar. The milestones part is perfect to help give you something to push a little further for in a game.

The main reason I like the idea of this website is for obsessively tracking progress, down to the granular level. How many games do I have, how many have I completed, how far, how many ways, with detail options, organization and stats galore. A progress bar in Goals only helps the cause. :D

Also, welcome to the site @Nocmin! Glad to see you're enjoying use of all the features here. I'm right there with you when it comes to tracking progress!

From a bigger picture, I also think it would be pretty neat to see one grand completion bar of all inputted goals across all games (to track progress of the entire collection's goals). Just another feature I think would fit well on the Profile page.

Thanks DOBERMAN_AX! I like what you guys are doing here and am excited to start throwing 100s of hours into obsessively creating my collection. :D

We look forward to having you here!

If you need any assistance with logging your playthroughs or adding completions, please feel free to reference my guides for each section (which can be found under the Articles section respectively).

I've added sub-goals to my task list, not sure when I'll get to it though

Something else we've discussed is being able to see all goals for a playthrough when viewing a user's profile. What is everyone's thoughts on how best to display this information? I was thinking maybe an icon / button / link or something that you either hover or click and a little popout is displayed that shows the list of goals and whether they've been completed or not.

I would suggest a modal that pops up when you click on the goal bar, perhaps? A mouse-over pop-up would be fine for small goal sets, but the more beastly ones would greatly benefit from opening in a larger window with a scroll bar, etc...

moho_00:

Something else we've discussed is being able to see all goals for a playthrough when viewing a user's profile. What is everyone's thoughts on how best to display this information? I was thinking maybe an icon / button / link or something that you either hover or click and a little popout is displayed that shows the list of goals and whether they've been completed or not.

I think to keep it looking consistent, (your profile, and others) instead of the "Manage" tab, how about that tab could link to the user's goal list on another page? Similar to the My Playthrough's redirect on your own page, but more of a "read-only" type of view. I think that might be the best way to avoid clutter on the main Profile page.

In order to stay on the same browser window, how about a pop up window similar to the Goal's construction window? That way, you wouldn't have to leave the page, and at the same time, you won't have to compensate for space.

Post to discuss the update for 11/19 regarding Playthrough Goals:

• I'm happy to see you took the lead on my suggestion, moho, and added a new pop up window for the goals. Massive import features are definitely welcome! Good looks there.
• To actually be aware of the clickable progress bar is a little tricky, how about possibly creating some type of hover feature (whether it be a color that changes the bar, or a hover text window similar to bounties)
• Now that we can view the entire list, I think it would be nice to also have the progress bar displayed in the Pop Up Window in order to better differentiate progress, whether it be for personal use or viewing others'.
• The font text seems rather large, especially if the goal list is huge. For shorter ones, it seems to look nice. Can this be dynamically adjusted (or automatically adjusted based on size of the list itself)? If not, I would think a smaller font for Goal names would be a bit more well suited.
• If one were to pull from another's list for their own use, a mass copy & paste does work, however if "Completed on x/x/" is present the clipboard will cover that over as well, causing a bit of adjustment to be made after importing. I would suggest a type of "copy list" button in order to shave of that time.

Excellent work once again, moho! You're hard work is much appreciated by all!

Feedback on goals pop-up:

• I agree with needing a smaller text size, it feels a lot like the Feed page where everything is too large right now.
• Not sure we need the "completed on" date, (more on this in a second) or if we do, we should have an option to sort by date maybe?
• If we got rid of the "completed on" extra text and differentiated between complete and incomplete entries via some kind of text effect instead, you could do away with the green boxes and make everything easier to copy/paste if someone wanted to use that list.
  
  
  
  • bold vs normal
  
  
  • strikethrough vs normal
  
  
  • darker vs lighter
  
  
  • etc...
  
  
• If possible, limiting the clickability of progress bars to games that only have goals entered rather than opening up a blank list when checking 0% progress games.
• Alternatively/additionally, the addition of a little eyeball glyphicon or something on the goal bar beside the percentage as a indicator that there are viewable goals for that game and to reinforce the idea that the bar can be clicked on.

Over all, this feature is the bee's knees. I've been snooping people's goal lists to see how they use goals differently. :D

To add to dhobo's list in that regard:

• For completed/incomplete goals (I like how the date of completed ones is logged) I think it would uncluttered a lot if it they were represented with a check mark (or something similar in nature that dhobo mentioned) or another slight visual tick.
• Having the option to allow users to view/hide a list. I think this would be great for a Mission/Bounty that a user didn't get a chance to be a part of, so it could drive the incentive up for joining in on them. I have mixed feelings about this, but I think if executed properly it could help preserve the risk of spoilers.
• To elaborate a bit more, allowing the privacy option on each individual goal (as well as the group of all of them in the list) could keep lists still on a personal level for those that do not like to share as much content.

A few more requests for the feature that I've come up with today:

• Adding the option to rate a goal's completion difficulty. Since rarity isn't really a thing on here, I think this could replace that. For a shared list, this could prove to be extremely valuable in determining what to play / complete next.
• Goal Titles: Being able to "name" the goal as well as provide description of it. The "description" is what we have right now for them. It would be cool to be able to have a present template to input a title (i.e. right now we have "Get 100 kills". With this feature we could have it presented as Serial Killer - Get 100 kills.) I think now that the goal list is visible, this could add a personal touch to them.
• Have the total number of goals displayed at the top of the page (along with a completion bar, as I mentioned in my last post) could save a user a lot of time with scrolling through a large one.
• Last but not least: Compare goals between users - if both users share the same game on their Active Playthroughs, having the option to compare a list (not unlike PSN's trophy comparison option) could help with the construction of new goals for everyone.

As dhobo said, I've been snooping hard on everyone's goals :P. I love this feature!