The challenges players are often asked to do in the game can come off as a little unfair sometimes...
Recurring challenges
- "Play Ranked matches" challenges tend to be unpopular: people who prefer Casual don't like being put in a higher-stakes game where their mistakes will negatively affect others, while Ranked players don't like the influx of less-experienced Casual players who come for the sole purpose of completing the mission.
- The "Get 150,000 Healing in a single match" challenge tends to not be well liked among casual players. It requires three conditions to be met; to be the only Support on the team (or the only one that'll do the bulk of the healing), both teams need to have a Frontline (which is up to the whim of other players' decision-making), and the match needs to last at least 15 minutes on average, meaning if your team performs too well, or if either side does too poorly, you won't ping the challenge. Of course, the whole point of the challenge is to encourage teamwork among players, so one easy solution is get some friends to play with you.
- Once the Event Pass and Trials of the Realm were released, complaints about unfair Challenges became more frequent, since most of the free rewards such as Emotes, Poses, and free Crystals were removed from the Event Pass and made into Challenge rewards. Prior to that, the only incentives to complete Challenges were extra Experience Points (which could be earned in other ways), or Titles (which was geared towards crazy completionists). The Ticket system didn't help matters, as players only get two of them. One must be spent to unlock a set of challenges, and the only way to get them back is to complete the whole set of challenges.
From Prior Trials of the Realm Challenges:
Game On Event Pass:
- "Get 10 Kills with Explosive Flask (Pip)" quickly became infamous since Explosive Flask only deals 150 damage. Getting an enemy's health that low and hitting them with the ability while hoping nobody Kill Steals you is difficult enough to inspire a lot of complaining.
- "Get five headshots in a row as Octavia" also became infamous for the sheer skill required to pull off such a feat, along with a bug that misaligns Octavia's scope with the actual shots.
Gen:LOCK Event Pass:
- "Hit 5 players with Rend Soul 15 times (Seris)", which requires hitting all enemy players with her primary fire to mark them before using the ability (marks don't last very long, so if just one enemy is respawning, or flanking, you won't make it). It's very unlikely that all enemies will be close enough, even if you use her Ultimate (which pulls enemies towards one point and stuns them). And you have to do it fifteen times, when pulling off this feat once is already a though task. And finally, the challenge was only released during the final week of the Event Pass, giving little time to complete it. Fortunately, the complaints were loud enough that Evil Mojo reduced the number of hits needed to just 3 during server maintenance.
- "Kill 15 players with Potion Launcher within 5s after hitting them with Explosive Flask (Pip)", which, due to a bug, instead counted kills with Explosive Flask, making it a harder repeat of an already infamous challenge from the Game On Event Pass. During a server maintenance session two days after the region was made available, the Trixx spray this challenge unlocked was just given away for free to all players.
- The Game On and Beach Bash Event Passes had "Kill 2 players with Dredge Anchor (Makoa)". Killing enemies with an ability that only does 200 damage and is meant to initiate a fight, not end one, was a pretty tricky ask.
Beach Bash Event Pass:
- "Kill 5 enemies with Stone Spear within 5 seconds of hitting them with Seismic Crash" is hard due to the specific "Kill" requirement. Usually, getting eliminations off of it isn't hard as you stun people, but other players immediately flock like birds to the stunned enemy to kill steal you, meaning getting this challenge was a nightmare.
Dark Depths Event Pass:
- "Hit 2 enemies with Shell Spin 5 times". This is considerably trickier than it sounds, as it requires the enemy to be in a specific formation for the shell spin to connect, which isn't going to happen all that often, not to mention the enemies in question have to be pretty slow, otherwise they can simply run out of the way. Mercifully, this is far better that what it used to read; "Hit 5 players with Shell Spin 5 times", which basically asked you to hit an entire team while spinning as Makoa*
- "Kill Azaan 5 times". While made somewhat easy by how Azaan is the newest character in 4.7, it comes with the problem of being strong enough to beat him, as he's quite notorious for being hard to deal with if you're not a frontline, what with all the walls he can spawn and the crowd control he has. It also suffers from the same issues as any other "Kill X champion" challenge does; eliminations do not count.
Abyss Hunter Event Pass:
- "Deal 25,000 damage in 30 seconds" essentially asks you to spawn camp and spam high-damage projectiles at the enemy team. Naturally, this caused a lot of complaints due to its perceived unfairness.
Starforged Event Pass:
- The "Get five headshots in a row as Octavia" returned from the "Game On" Event Pass, and it still remained just as annoying to do as it did back then.
- "Deal 150,000 damage in a single match twice". This is tricky for various reasons, chief among them being you have to hope the match lasts long enough to get close to this number, not to mention being skilled and aggressive enough to succeed.
From Prior Battle Passes:
- For the Steel Forged Battle Pass, Plus Tier 4 had "Kill 20 players with Torvald's Hyper Beam". Hyper Beam deals very little damage but pushes enemies a great distance away, so you'd think "I just have to push them off a cliff", but no. It only counts deaths caused by the beam's damage, rather than knockback. A lot of people just gave up after seeing that.
- For the pirate Battle Pass, "Expend 1000000 rounds of ammo" is the most infamous challenge, since even if you only play as champions with a large clip and fast fire rate and constantly waste as much ammo as possible, you are bound to reach the maximum Battle Pass level just from end of match XP before completing the goal. The next Battle Pass, Wild West, brought back the challenge but with the requirement lowered to 100000, one tenth of the original.
- The Darkness and Dragons pass had "Kill Viktor 50 times as Strix" and "Kill Furia 50 times as Khan". Even if you pick the right character, there's no guarantee that your opponents will have the other on their team, so you'll have no choice but to play through a match where no progress can be made before trying again and hoping you will have better luck next time. It was so bad that it was announced the challenges would be changed to "Play 50 matches as a Support" and "Play 50 matches as a Frontline" during the midpatch.
Star Sisters Battle Pass:
- "Kill 25 Players With Seismic Crash (Inara)". Seismic Crash is Inara's Ultimate, so you get very few opportunities to use it, and its damage is very low (500 damage) for an ultimate, with most of its power being from its stun, so charging up your ultimate, getting an enemy's HP low enough for the Ult to kill them, using the Ult, and hoping that they won't get killed by another teammate or go somewhere you can't hit them while the attack is channeling is extremely unlikely to happen, to the point where at least one player
has completed every other challenge without getting a single kill, let alone 25 (fortunately, a bug gave the title for 60 challenges complete anyways). - it also had "Kill 15 people within 300 seconds", which asked you to kill 15 people within 5 minutes, which sounds fairly easy, until you realise just how many assists you'll get by trying to kill people others are also trying to kill. A similar challenge; "Kill 5 people within 30 seconds" basically asks you to do a team wipeout without anyone on your team interfering with your killspree, which leads to the same problem.
- "Kill 25 Players With Seismic Crash (Inara)". Seismic Crash is Inara's Ultimate, so you get very few opportunities to use it, and its damage is very low (500 damage) for an ultimate, with most of its power being from its stun, so charging up your ultimate, getting an enemy's HP low enough for the Ult to kill them, using the Ult, and hoping that they won't get killed by another teammate or go somewhere you can't hit them while the attack is channeling is extremely unlikely to happen, to the point where at least one player
Deprecated:
- Back before its removal, Getting top play with a specific character. Even when trying to grind with bot matches, this was not as easy as it sounds, largely because other people were trying to get the same challenge completed on the enemy team.
