Digital Cowboys: Episode 147
Posted on : 12-03-2010 | By : Alex Shaw | In : Podcasts
8
True Achievements
This week we welcome Rich Stone, founder of www.trueachievements.com
For the uninitiated it’s a site that takes the 1000 point achievements of every existing Xbox 360 game and through the use of a clever metric and analasys of the achievements of its many thousand members works out what that achievement is really worth.
In other words you deserve more than just 15 points for finishing Story mode on Beatles Rock Band in less than a da. Using True Achievements you get 21 points. Find out why and how at the start of this show.
After that, for the main body of the show, we discuss with Rich the subject of Trophies and Achievements in general. We’ve got a lot of feedback from our forums on this and a lot of your opinions get voiced. Clearly they effect how many people play games now, so we explore that. If you don’t give a monkeys about achievements… well that gets voiced too.
Many many thanks to Rich for coming on the show and especially for donating £100 to our Doctors Without Borders charity gamerscore marathon. You can still donate for a little longer.
http://www.justgiving.com/Digital-Cowboys-Haiti-Relief-Challenge
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
just finished the podcast (two thumbs up!) for me i do enjoy achievements/trophies as though’s carrots on a stick, to try and nudge you to Try or see new things. but i have never felt the overall ‘Gamerscore’ as important, that may be because i’m a late adopter to a “True Next-Gen” console, and always couch surfed playing on other friends consoles being my overall exposure, along with WoW. Or that tends to create pricks that flaunt it like the infamous Epeen, when i’m just trying to play halo online.
although admittedly i would enjoy having trophy support for MGS4. SNAAAAAAAAAAKE!
I do agree that for some games
(Heavy Rain/Shadow of the Colossus.)
it could feel artificial, or just tact on. So i’m surprised it was required by Quantic dream to have them in
Great show, as always! and Congratulations on completing the Charity Gaming Marathon!
Apathy. That’s the only word I can muster when it comes to achievements. It’s a meaningless number to be that currently hovers around the 13k mark, and I’ve owned an XBox 360 since launch. By all means lambast me for such a low score, I really don’t care.
It is for this reason that I chose not to sign up to TA. As much as I’d like to, I see no benefit in being part of a community that takes so much interest in an aspect ofgaming culture I don’t buy into.
There is also the issue of proficiency. My gaming prowess is questionable at best. I neither have the time or ability to 100% the achievements in a game. Nor will I play a mediocre game to increase my gamer score, least of all Avatar: The Last Air Bender as I rather like the TV series it’s based on and have no desire to sully that appreciation by playing a crap game based on it.
Coming out of GDC are some interesting statistics concerning achievements and it would appear the above behaviour is far from a-typical! Only 4% of gamers complete 100% of the achievements, whilst a mere 10% get above 80%. Finally 27% get half of the achievements. This means that 59% of XBox 360 players don’t actually get more than half of the achievements in a game. Food for thought there methinks. It could even indicate that maybe, just maybe, achievements are a fools errand…
Source:
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/03/14/gdc-2010-eedar-on-achievements-user-behavior/
Took a closer look at those figures, ’cause it seemed that 59% achieving 50% seemed relatively well-balanced.
Thing is, those percentages aren’t cumulative. The 10% includes the 4%, and the 27% includes both the 10% and 4%.
So it’s not 59% of XBox 360 owners that don’t get more than half the achievements, it’s 73%.
*59% NOT achieving
Firstly Krop, why would we ever lambast you?
Secondly, those figures seem to be about right, because I don’t mean to state the bleedin’ obvious, but surely the fact that most people don’t know, care about or accomplish achievements is what makes them a little bit special.
What I hoped we covered in this show is how Achievements have a vastly differing scale of importance across the board of game enthusiasts. To folks like me, they’re a fun meta game that helps me keep track of and get more out of the titles I invest in, for others they don’t matter at all and for a select few they are a way of life. This isn’t a scenario with right or wrong choices.
It blows my mind that people would choose to simply not play certain games/expansions based on achievements.
1. Rich didn’t buy Mass Effect (2?) DLC despite loving the game because it had no achievements.
2. Tony (I think it was) refused to play Street Fighter 4 because he wouldn’t get 80% of the achievements, and thus would “corrupt” his score.
In both cases I can’t help but think that achievements have LESSENED gaming for the individuals involved.
Great podcast.
Online achievements are fine, and are good ways of getting people to try something that they would not normally do; in the right game. I would not have played as Scout in TF2 without them. However, it’s when there are achievements for things that go against the teamplay that I have an issue. Medics (my normal class) gets an achievement for ubering scouts – this is just wrong.
To be fair, Tony played SF IV, just not on his gamer account, which I think is fair enough, we played games for years without any kind of account at all.