Are Avatar’s six Achievements really worth 1000 points if they can all be unlocked in a minute?
I’ve managed to score a 50k+ Gamerscore in my years with the 360. And while that pales in comparison to the guys with 6 digit Gamerscores, it still sometimes manages to illicit some responses from players in online matches (both good and bad). But what is the point of the Gamerpoint score anyway? In this discussion topic, cmfl3x and I will discuss our thoughts on the implementation of Microsoft’s Achievement system and this new site we joined called TrueAchievements.com.
I honestly never believed in a point system for the Achievements. I actually like the PS3 Trophy system better because it makes note of the feats you achieved in a game without assigning some arbitrary value to it. The value was up to the viewer to decide: “Oh wow this guy beat the final boss of the game on the hardest difficulty? Cool. What else has he done?” Instead, the score simplifies everything into pretty much how many Achievements you’ve gotten rather than which ones you went for. While I’ve never played a game simply for its Achievements, there are obviously some people that do – ask anyone that has Avatar on their game list, for example.
Recently, this site hit the gaming blogosphere: TrueAchievements.com. What it does is check your Achievement profile, and actually give a weighted calculation based on what your score actually should be rather than the arbitrary values assigned by the developers. The true score for a particular Achievement is instead based completely around how many players have actually played the game and if they were able to get it or not. A game like Avatar, for example, where everyone that plays it gets the 1000, would still have a True Achievement score of 1000, but a more difficult game, like Devil May Cry 4, will have an actual True Achievement score of over 4000 since only a small fraction of the people that played the game manage to get all of the Achievements, making them “worth more”.
Personally, I love what the guys at True Achievements are doing. Some games only associate a 10 point value to huge fetch quests, and in the current system it feels kind of unfulfilling to put 10 hours into 10 points. At True Achievements, they will assign a more “accurate” value to the number of Gamerpoints you “should” get. Their algorithm isn’t perfect, but I think they set up the system pretty well all things considered. I highly recommend that everyone check it out (which they have, they temporarily closed registration earlier because they were getting slammed).
Overall, I think Microsoft’s regulation of the system has been a good thing: keeping Gamerscores to 1000 points and 50 achievements makes sure everything is more “standardized”. I do like having a Gamerscore over just trophies, just because it gives you a concrete thing to point at. Of course the problem now is, some people who have had the system since launch have like 200,000 Gamerpoints and people who are buying the console now have no chance to catch up. It could be cool if Microsoft had some sort of Gamerpoint average, like # of Gamerpoints divided by games played or something.
People have floated the idea of using points to accessorize Avatars or something. Or if Sony had points associated with Trophies they could have people “buy” things for Home or something. I think it’s something that could work if done the right way.
Achievements, Trophies, and all that seems to be a win/win all around and a good step forward to the gaming industry. For those that don’t care about them, it won’t necessarily change anything but for those of us that do care, it’s revolutionary. With the Achievement/Trophy system, it seems like gaming now has become more social, because we can see how other players play games and what they’ve accomplished. I remember subscribing to Nintendo Power when I was a kid and people would mail in screenshots of their high scores in video games (Cliffy B., the lead designer of Gears of War, even sent in his high score in Super Mario Bros.). Now all of that stuff isn’t really necessary since we not only have Achievements, but online Leaderboards. So for those that want to compete, it’s a great thing.
I’m a big fan of the ability to unlock new Avatar clothes or Home outfits based on certain gaming accomplishments. It seems to be the general next step in making gaming even more social. Now we don’t just have names, but we have physical characters to represent ourselves in the gaming universe. As long as you don’t have to pay for them, I’m definitely interested. Even now, I love my current Gamerpic – only unlockable if you can beat Ninja Gaiden 2 on Master Ninja mode. Imagine how cool it would be, for example, if you could unlock a Gears outfit for your avatar if you solo’ed it on Insane or something:
Unlockable clothing for Avatars adds sort of an MMORPG-style heriarchy to console games – which would work very well, in my opinion. People that play games or are good at them should be able to earn things that demonstrate their prowess in gaming. Wasn’t there like a Halo 3 recon armor that only certain players got and others wanted to buy for thousands of dollars or something?
Anyway, going back to one of the things you mention, cmfl3x, about how you don’t like that people who got an early start on the 360 would be in the 200,000 by now. It’s not too big of a deal to me and what I alluded to when I mentioned that I was more a fan of the PS3’s score-less Trophy system. The point system makes all of gaming seem like a race – with everyone subconsciously worrying about their overall score rather than the actual accomplishments themselves. I’ve never been a fan of that, but rather, support more of a more customized but less competitive approach. Taking away Achievement points for all games is obviously a very crazy idea, but let me explain it differently – perhaps with Avatar clothing, as an example.
Say Microsoft implements a system such that each Achievement you unlock was really tied to an unlockable clothing article you could earn, rather than a point score. So if you were to get all of the Gears of War 2 achievements, you could unlock all of the Gears of War armor and weapons your Avatar could wear. Say Ninja Gaiden 2 is the same way. But see the constraint is such that you only have one head. You can only wear one helmet. So that means, you can really only choose to wear the Gears of War 2 helmet or the Ninja Gaiden 2 ninja mask. Thus, people can play the games they really want to play, and for those that play more, they simply have more Avatar accessories to choose from. Instead of seeing 200,000 Achievement points on one guy to your 5,000 Achievement points, in an Achievement system that was only tied to Avatar clothing the 200,000 point guy would simply have a bigger closet and more clothes to select from. But he obviously can’t wear everything so it evens out (similar to the gun unlocks in Call of Duty 4 – more options, but not necessarily better). Say your 5,000 points only come from J-RPGs since that’s all you play. What’s wrong with that then? Why would you want Gears of War 2 clothing anyway? This makes it so there’s less competition, but still promotes individuality in my opinion.
What’s also neat is that with clothing, you’re pretty much promoting your best Achievements that you earned – something the current Achievement system does not have. And it’s not like you’re just plastering them all over your profile – the clothing hint is much more subtle. Some guy could be walking around with a gold ninja mask (maybe from beating Ninja Gaiden 2 on Master Ninja), a scientist labcoat (maybe from beating all of the Gold Medal challenges on Portal), and wearing Halo armor pants (maybe from beating Halo 3 on Legendary). It could be a totally clashing outfit, but I think the idea would be pretty cool. I guess in a way, my wish for Achievements to be tied to Avatar clothing could still be added as a feature on top of the current Achievement point system and what not. But yeah I love the idea of Achievements tied to your gamer profile, but I’m honestly not a fan of Achievement points – especially with them not being weighed accurately.
The thing with Avatars is, we hardly use them. It’s not like we are walking around in Sony’s Playstation Home. I wonder if Sony will make a trophy room for people’s individual spaces? What I like about the Avatar idea is, even though we don’t use them, we see all of our friends’ Avatars. So if I’m in the dash and I’m navigating my friends list I can see you wearing your Master Ninja Helmet and maybe my Avatar would be rocking the Katana from Halo 3. But how would we advertise our Achievements to non-friends? I know people enjoy comparing the Achievements with random strangers every once in awhile. So it would be great if Microsoft (or Sony) made a process that was a bit more streamlined.
Going back to the True Achievements website, I like how you can check out someone’’s “Best Achievements.” They basically take your top 5 Achievements (according to their scoring system) and paste them on your profile. I can’t imagine it’d be too difficult for Microsoft to do something similar, just take the number of online users of a certain game and factor in the percentage of users who have gained a certain achievement to calculate a “difficulty score”. I mean, Microsoft has all the information from Live, so they could just use that and then for everybody’s profile include “Top 5 Achievements”. Then if I’m browsing my friends’ profiles I can see who’s gotten what, and we could compare that way without having to worry about points.
Unfortunately I don’t see Microsoft changing their system right now. But hopefully they will tweak it, especially taking advantage of the Avatars. Right now I don’t even feel like customizing my Avatar too much, but if I could dress him up in something that reps my gaming prowess, I think I’d have a lot of fun with it. Because even if Avatars aren’t used too much, at least I will get to see and appreciate my Avatar brandishing a gold Lancer!
I wish the friend dashboard was a lot faster to load. It takes like a whole minute before the characters are fully downloaded and I barely go to it anymore since it’s faster to just go to the Friendlist with the guide button to see what my friends are up to. But I do like seeing what everyone looks like and who they’re playing with. If only it loaded faster.
I honestly think the Avatars and clothing options could still work quite well given the current limitations. We don’t need Home to enjoy it – I think Home is more a bunch of bloat anyway because people ultimately want to play games instead of walking around and wasting time. Simply seeing how your character is dressed on the Dashboard or on websites may be adequate enough. Besides xbox.com, there’s even some sites I visit these days where if you enter your Gamertag, your Avatar is automatically populated in your profile – which really goes to show you that the idea of Avatars can still be fun without necessarily having a Home-style playground to walk around in.
The “Best Achievements” thing on the True Achievements website is a great idea. I agree with you though, that Microsoft will most likely not change anything since the current Achievement system works and no one is really complaining. One issue I have with the “Best Achievements” section of the True Achievements website though is that it’s still basing the Achievement calculation off of originally assigned point values.
For example, my top two “Best Achievements”, according to TrueAchievements.com, are Master Ninja for Ninja Gaiden 2 and beating Inferno Mode for Earth Defense Force 2017. Ninja Gaiden 2’s Master Ninja Achievement was originally assigned 100 points. Inferno Mode for EDF2017 was assigned 250 points. But the difficulty ratio for each Achievement differs dramatically – Master Ninja has a ratio of 8.94 (as of this writing), making its True Achievement value 894, while Inferno Mode has a ratio of 2.49, making its True Achievement value 746. Notice how both of the True Achievement values are pretty similar but one is a lot more difficult than the other. The Inferno Mode’s True Achievement value is close simply because it had a much larger base value.
It would have been better if the site didn’t use the base values, and instead calculated the True Achievement value for all Achievements based on how often it was earned from those that played it, and how many people played the game altogether (similar to what you suggested earlier). I don’t know the exact formulas that the website uses, but basically something that doesn’t rely on the “sometimes arbitrary” Achievement value assigned by the developers. Some developers give a 1 point score to the hardest Achievement value in their games, and even with a 100 difficulty multiplier, it’ll never show up on the “Best Achievements” table on the site. Of course, all of these calculations pique my interest due to my engineering background, so maybe it’s lost on the typical gamer that just wants to have fun or isn’t as hardcore.
It could be neat though to customize your own Gamercard to show icons of your top 5 Achievements instead of the last 5 games you played. But I guess giving too much customization to users may make Gamercards and profiles more confusing. Still, I would have loved the ability to at least hide games you don’t want to show on your Achievement list. In the most recent Dashboard update Microsoft finally allowed us to at least delete games that we had no Gamerpoints on, but we still can’t get rid of games that have some score. I’m probably in the minority about this, but there are honestly some games I would love to remove from my Gamertag. Games like Tomb Raider: Legend & Armored Core 4 – ones that I only got an Achievement or two on are now stuck on my Gamertag. I doubt I’ll play them again, so I’d rather have them off my profile altogether. But ultimately, I guess it’s not really a big deal and I’m in the minority on this.
So to summarize my thoughts on this discussion, I think this True Achievements website is going in the right direction to make Achievement scores more balanced. I would love for Microsoft to get rid of the original values of each Achievement altogether, and instead have them calculated based on a formula similar to how the True Achievements website is doing it – but of course, to not use the base values in their calculations. And giving us unlockable Avatar clothing options associated with particular Achievements would definitely make me a happy camper.
Sounds like you’ve summed it up pretty well. There are definitely games I’d want to delete too, like Doritos: Dash of Destruction! Haha. Hopefully True Achievements will end up creating a “Top 5 TrueAchievement Ratio” List. That would help take care of the base score issue. As for the dashboard loading faster, I guess that’s best left to another discussion!
