my gamerscore is bigger than yours - achievements and trophies: classic or dud

there are some really good achievements knocking about but the cult of the gamerscore is a bit much

I'm not sure how trophies work on PS3 : /

No real point in getting competitive about it, at some point you will realise that there will always be a 16-year-old with NOTHING ELSE TO DO.

I like the achievements on WoW, they mostly seem to be there to recognise when something happens. And one or two alert you to things I never thought of doing (fishing in the opposing faction's capital). I can see myself slowly working towards the set.

Apart from the PVP ones: 100,000 player kills?

I started off not caring one iota about the gamerscore, and I have a quite unimpressive score of 4161. Quite unimpressive considering the amount of time I play xbox. But it's so low because of the amount of time play CoD4 and Pro Evo 6. Now I care about it slightly, but still not really. But the achievements themselves are sometimes quite cool, in that they sometimes require you to do something quite difficult and you do actually feel like you've accomplished something when it flashes up telling you you've got 30G or whatever.

yeah its def nothing to get competitive about, but it's nice when the little achievement unlocked icon pops up and it's sometimes good for getting you to play the game in a way you otherwise wouldn't (geo wars 2 is good for this)

some dudes have crazy gamerscores tho (think the highest on my friends list is 60,000+) and apparently there are people who pay for gamerscore?

wow, that's insane. Yeah, Gears of War 2 is a good example, I tried to kill someone with every weapon to get an achievement and it ended up being pretty cool, tagging a dude with an ink grenade to get my last kill for example. Also completing puzzle fighter on hard mode with Dan was pretty tough but I had a laugh doing it.

its mostly fun this stuff to compete with youf riends

lol @paying for it tho

thats something this dude would do

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1151/877040314_a4a912d946_o.jpg

yeh people scout for gamerscore business on ebay. i don't really understand why you would do this??!

one of my fb friends had a status about hitting 400k. but he works in the industry. still...

still haven't gotten the graveyard w/ only gravity gun one in HL2 dammit

When you said "lol@paying for it", I assumed it was a dig at the xbox live price. People actually buy achievement points?! That's totally crazy, not least of all because one I just looked at you have to give the guy your login details so he can do it!

I think I only have a couple of hundred points, but they're almost all from Braid and stuff I've accidentally achieved on GOW 1&2 so far.

I have to go with 'Dud' because I'm one of these people that plays a GTA game til I've done the main bit, then never does any side quest stuff after, and I suppose all the ancillary stuff is where you get all the gamerscore points from.

no lol @ paying for achievements

there was a story awhile back about a kid gunning down his parents for not letting him play halo 3. comment under the story: "achievement unlocked". I lol'd and felt shame.

trophies/achievements in the context of free-roaming games = total classic. I'm one of those gamers who (as opposed to CraigG) spends more time dicking around w/ games than attempting to tackle the main story, so having little microincentives to direct my around-dicking complements my playing style perfectly. the best example IMO is probably Assassin's Creed (which I played on the 360 back before I saw the light and switched) - I thought the game (or at least its ridiculous narrative) was insultingly asinine, but the way the achievements rewarded just fucking around and exploring the gameworld kept me playing long enough for my misanthropy to cool off and actually get into the game.

by contrast, trophies/achievements which basically reward you for going through the main narrative (or even going through the main narrative in a more thorough manner than a cursory playthrough would involve) = eh. I don't want to call them a total dud since it's not like they evoke real anger in me or anything and I can see the value (or at least "value") of having empirical proof that you beat a game in order to demean your friends and fellow gaming acquaintances, but I mean who cares, you know?

related point: I was reading someone bitching and moaning about how MGS4 would never have trophies patched in and someone chimed in to say Japanese developers "don't get" the appeal of trophies/achievements. thoughts?

still haven't gotten the graveyard w/ only gravity gun one in HL2 dammit

― goole, Monday, January 19, 2009 8:56 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

That was so much fun, though it takes at least 2x as long.

related point: I was reading someone bitching and moaning about how MGS4 would never have trophies patched in and someone chimed in to say Japanese developers "don't get" the appeal of trophies/achievements. thoughts?

this is so dumb that i just want you to die for even thinking it merits discussion

btw, http://bestmessageboardever.com/style_images/2_blachievement.jpg

i found trophies/achievements for completing tutorial levels mad condescending

I'm guessing you guys have all seen this, right?

http://www.kongregate.com/games/ArmorGames/achievement-unlocked

japanese games go overboard x999999999999999999 about collecting random shit that has nothing to do with the game, so yeah, I think they'd be all over achievements.

http://img172.imageshack.us/img172/1562/trampstampty1.jpg

http://gaygamer.net/images/6f24981e0478.jpg

Sonic games give me CARDS. What the fuck am I going to do with CARDS?

Sonic games give me CARDS. What the fuck am I going to do with CARDS?

Wow, you're really riled up about those cards! :)

Yeah, I would have totally though the Japanese would be all over the achievement thing. Though maybe I'm judging entirely based on Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh games. Anyway, I agree with s1ocki and cobo that achievements for tutorials or even main story arc just seem pointless (save for, perhaps, an achievement for completing the game). The rest of them don't really appeal to me as I'm not much of an online gamer, and I don't think my IRL friends need me to prove that I completed a game or whatever.

There's a bitter irony in the fact that these things are called achievements, given that they do tend to eat up time I should be spending away from my fucking xbox, achieving other things of real actual worth.

But yeah, I do find myself keeping an eye on total gamerscore, and getting a minor kick out of passing each 1k milestone. The problem is in the imbalances of some of them - when I can rack up 500 points just by playing Scene It for an hour, the motivation to fart about picking up the last 100 or so I need in fable 2 gets reduced significantly.

Might be nicer if there was a tiered system or something, with specific (say) bronze, silver and gold achievements, all tallied separately in addition to the overall total.

thats what trophies do

All achievements should be worth (10 / (number of users who have that achievement / number of users with any achievement in the game)) and it should be dynamic. Meaning if I have 10k gamerscore it might depreciate if I don't continue adding to it. THAT would be genius.

plus you'd have completely random people shooting up the "top" leaderboards and dropping back down to earth every time a new game came out, which would be intriguing

Oh, I didn't know trophies did that. Good work, Sony.

I'm pretty new to achievements, but I agree that they're nice on the level of getting people to play in unconventional ways. Sometimes that goes too far (see the bizarre achievements in TF2 to unlock certain weapons for the medic, for example) but generally it's a nice thing - pretty ignorable if you don't care about it.

Is there a way to turn off achievement/trophy notifications?

that's cold dude.

Hedgehogs give me SARS. What the fuck am I gonna can I do with SARS?
I don't know about actually _buying_ achievements, but I've seen crappy used game collections on ebay that tout how many easy achievement points you'll be able to get if you play through.
I like achievements as another bell or whistle; it also provides an easy metric as to what I have and haven't found in the game. Like an appendix.
Castlevania Delicatessen does the same thing in that it shows your percentage of game completion on about six different levels. It allows you to be as through as you feel you want to be and I appreciate the guide.
Competitive achievement hoarding is beyond me, but I'm not above having played N+ or Zuma levels to beat friend scores and show off my manliness.

you can put your gamerscore on your CV: y/n?

you know, just after d.o.b.

genuine lol.

I am so bad at games that I get the little ding and the whole "you have turned on xbox without soiling yourself: 5g" I've turned it on 4 times and only have 15 points. HOW DOES IT KNOW?

I'm on 8785, and Cozen is on 8641, and I am arbitrarily deciding that I WILL NOT LET HIM GET AHEAD OF ME.

HAHAHA I have 200 points I can get on fight night pretty easily. I might farm them later tonight just to wind you up

GRRRR.

Although I've got GH Metallica and Lego Batman both virtually untouched, so I can crack on with those.

someone on my fl has 80884 gs

QQ

I arbitrarily decided I'd beat my friend Andy to 10,000 because I was on 9300 and he was on 9800. But I knew if I told him this plan, he'd win, so I decided on a fair plan: I wouldn't try to get the gamerscore, I'd just play games I wanted to play and if I wanted a specific achievement I'd chase it (usually some 10gs Space Invaders Extreme bs). I ended up beating him, but since neither of us were playing ANYTHING (except SFIV for a while which didn't give a huge amount of gs) it took seriously like 5 months.

i actually think trophies/achievements for completing a game's main story make total sense. the idea is to have a record of your achievements, right, and getting thru a game is an achievement.

I don't care about my gamer score, but I love achievement hunting simply as a way to keep a game fresh. I can't tell you how much time I spent hunting for Peggle achievements, as sad as that might sound.

Full agreement there. The artificial "score" mechanic is silly at best but when you are hitting bullshit little "milstones" like 10,000 at the same time as one of your best buddies it's fun to make it a little race. A sort of over-arching metagame, if you will. But yeah, when achievements are well-implemented they make the game for me (Geometry Wars 2 springs to mind-- a gmae made MUCH BETTER by its cheevos).

might try whore 160gs tonight to overtake jimd

I just picked up another 90 by finishing the main story in Fallout and passing level 20.

^^^doesn't matter

:D

i think that the lack of achievements is directly responsible for how little i play my wii

oh that and most of the games sucking - but tbf i just dont have the same commitment to finishing stuff on the wii, and despite the fact that i have no real reason to care about my gamerscore, it still hits some hindbrain need to collect all the junk or whatever.

DAMN YOU.

Hold on, how come you're playing RIGHT NOW, at 11.15 on a tuesday morning? Get a job! Or else it's not a fair fight! :-)

took a holiday to beat your gamerscore