Achievement-ocalypse

[Sno]

So for a few hours yesterday, any time somebody earned an achievement on Xbox Live, people were told erroneously that their profile was active on another console, an error followed quickly by all of their achievements disappearing.

Server migration gone horribly wrong, apparently.

Others who didn't see this happen were still reporting random achievements missing from their profiles, anywhere from a few thousand to everything. Even profiles up in the 100K range were being blanked or reduced to almost nothing. Some people are allegedly missing avatar awards too.

Personally, i seem to be missing about 3k, but the only ones standing out to me are a few Mass Effect 3 ones i should already have, given where i am in the game.

So, you know, that kind of sucks. If you're into achievements, i mean.

Anyways, consider this a PSA.

Microsoft is saying that it should be fixed now, and that earning one further achievement should restore all that's missing, though i haven't tried myself yet.

What a weird fuck-up.

[Ben X]

I would be overjoyed with schadenfreude if everyone in the world lost their silly little pixel badges forever.

[toblix]

I will probably be devastated if I lose all my achievements, which is sad.

It's weird – if someone took away my PS3 trophies, Steam achievements, Battle.net achievements, Giant Bomb quest things or whatever, I wouldn't mind. The Xbox ones though... it has a hold of me.

[mikemariano]

I will probably be devastated if I lose all my achievements, which is sad.

Don't be sad. Achievements aren't for bragging to others, they're for personal milestones.

My Xbox achievements are the only record I have of when I played a game. I can look back and see the date I finished Bioshock and never went back (even after downloading DLC for it later). I can see the New Year's Eve I spent bagging the Insanity achievement for Mass Effect 2. I know when I launched Half-Life 2: Episode Two's garden gnome into space!

I need a memory aid like this or I will forget it all.

[Hermie]

Yup, achievements, like most things, are what you make of it.

You can scoff at them, you can treasure them, or just ignore them.

Like Mike suggests, an achievement can be a good thing to remind you of a memory connected to game. Just like the airplane ticket I keep in my drawer, it's inherrently useless, but it's a symbol of the first time I met my girlfriend. In the same way, the final achievement in The Saboteur might be worth 50 arbitrary points in a mediocre game, but to me it's a signifier of many hours spent in company with my very best friend, when we lived together in a flat for a short time.

Just because the original conceit behind achievements was stupid, doesn't mean you should feel bad for caring about them.

[lumberbaron]

I will probably be devastated if I lose all my achievements, which is sad.

It's weird – if someone took away my PS3 trophies, Steam achievements, Battle.net achievements, Giant Bomb quest things or whatever, I wouldn't mind. The Xbox ones though... it has a hold of me.

I think that the reason that achievements hold so much weight while the other ones don't is because there is a number associated with it. I think that they nailed it when they called it a gamer score, only so much that it is a point value that you get for real life actions. the other ones are just proof of doing something, achievements are proof that you are just better at games than your friends are. If it wasn't for achievements I am certain that the PS3 would be my main console.

[Nachimir]

I love the achievements that feel like they're for something worthwhile, difficult, or outside the bounds of just progressing through a story. They feel so much more like actually setting out to do something and attaining it, instead of incidental tokens gained for getting through, say, the chapters in Vanquish (Not to say those aren't still like little bits of crack or sugar to my reptile brain though).

I think it was an early launch title, a Madden game or something, where the designers had basically said "We've got to put what in for Xbox Live? Huh? Ok.", then squeezed in ten fifty point achievements, nearly all of which could be powered through in a single practice game.

It's got better, but especially under commercial pressure, I think it's probably quite difficult to design ones that aren't just a by-product of playing. Borderlands, Vanquish, Arkham City: The list of achievements feels quite similar from one game to the next.

"Let's make them carry a gnome from start to finish" is unfortunately quite frivolous and far down the list of priorities, and that's a shame. The best, oddest achievements are the ones players will tell stories about.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I will probably be devastated if I lose all my achievements, which is sad.

It's weird – if someone took away my PS3 trophies, Steam achievements, Battle.net achievements, Giant Bomb quest things or whatever, I wouldn't mind. The Xbox ones though... it has a hold of me.

Same here.

[Sno]

I think that the reason that achievements hold so much weight while the other ones don't is because there is a number associated with it. I think that they nailed it when they called it a gamer score, only so much that it is a point value that you get for real life actions. the other ones are just proof of doing something, achievements are proof that you are just better at games than your friends are. If it wasn't for achievements I am certain that the PS3 would be my main console.

I think a lot of it is that Microsoft has taken achievements fairly seriously, i think it's perceptible to people that they take it seriously. They've actually been more aggressive about fighting achievement hacking than many other forms of external system manipulations that are happening in that ecosystem.

For me, at least, it's also equal parts that they were the first ones to do it well, and that its the one i am most invested into because it was the first. Well, and the sound. God damn, it's a great sound, isn't it?

Gamerscore though, i think is generally a really very silly and superfluous thing. I think it's also a ridiculous assertion that it has anything to say about how good at games you are. I mean, your gamerscore does say things about you, just not necessarily the things you'd like. (From extremely high gamerscores you can infer a person is either a hacker, in the industry or covering it, or is probably a bit crazy. Extremely low gamerscores generally reveal a dummy account just as often as they reveal a newbie.)

Still, there's undoubtedly a certain primal appeal in having that number keep going up as you play, but individual achievements are, of course, what actually matter. That and it happening within a system that has perceived integrity, though the current events must be sowing some disillusionment.

I do like achievements though, there are specific achievements i have strong memories associated with. It's that this weird, passive system of developer acknowledgement is a nice bit of closure for going out of your way to push a game to its limits. I like that i have an achievement for doing a solo legendary run in Halo Reach. It was really tremendously difficult, but i had a great time doing it. Unlocking that achievement was just an awesome, awesome way to top off that experience.

Edited March 14, 2012 by Sno

[lumberbaron]

Well, and the sound. God damn, it's a great sound, isn't it?

Fuck yes it is.

I don't know, there has to be something about the score. There are countless other examples of places, most already listed on this thread, of other similar products that give you the same experience. I do understand that they were the first to do it, but I think that you are right about them being the only one that seemingly really polices the system.

The point about looking at someone's score and kind of being able to get a general sense of who they are says something too. That number is so much a part of your life on XBOX Live that it is the second thing you notice after whatever terrible drug reference the person is using as their gamertag. While I have fallen way back on how much I care about that number, mine stands around 30k something, there was a time that a couple of finds of mine had a battle over who had the higher score.

Also the fact that every time that you bring up anyone's trophy list, even your own, on PSN it takes a good minute to load any of the information does not help at all.

[TheLastBaron]

Having a friend who was one of those people that bought those games with super easy 1k points like TMNT ruined any chance I had at caring about achievements. Also The one time I played a game solely for the 1,000 points was Bioshock on 360 (I originally played it on PC) and I forgot 1 audio log which was in the room with Andrew Ryan which you obviously can't go back to. I didn't notice until I beat the game, and having already played it on PC, I didn't feel like playing it a third time just to go through the whole game to pick up a single log. In Bioshock 2 I don't think you even needed all of them, but it had achievements for multiplayer levels.

[lumberbaron]

Having a friend who was one of those people that bought those games with super easy 1k points like TMNT ruined any chance I had at caring about achievements. Also The one time I played a game solely for the 1,000 points was Bioshock on 360 (I originally played it on PC) and I forgot 1 audio log which was in the room with Andrew Ryan which you obviously can't go back to. I didn't notice until I beat the game, and having already played it on PC, I didn't feel like playing it a third time just to go through the whole game to pick up a single log. In Bioshock 2 I don't think you even needed all of them, but it had achievements for multiplayer levels.

They broke when a friend of mine went, got a Wal-Mart credit card, maxed it out on just games, unplugged his system from Live for a couple of weeks, and when he came back on had something stupid like 12,000 more points. Saw that and turned of my system for an extended period of time.

[Sno]

The only S-ranks i have are Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram, which was just silly in how low-hanging the achievements were, and the first BioShock, which was similarly easy, but took multiple runs through the game. (I also got the extra achievement that was patched in, otherwise it's not a true S-rank. Even the x-box dashboard won't count a game as complete if you only have the vanilla achievements.)

I am one achievement off from having an S-rank on the first Dead Space. I keep trying to convince myself i should just go through it on easy and get it. I know what i need to do, it would be very simple.

I had S-ranked Borderlands, but then the DLC came out, and fuck Underdome Riot.

There is one achievement i just absolutely could never get in vanilla Halo 3. (Fuck you, Steppin Razor.) I gave up once the map packs started piling on more achievements.

Most of the time i don't really care, i'm not an obsessive achievement hunter. They're just extra objectives to chase when i've otherwise bled dry a game i like.

Also the fact that every time that you bring up anyone's trophy list, even your own, on PSN it takes a good minute to load any of the information does not help at all.

This, actually, is huge.

On Live, somebody sends me a friend request? I'll flip through their game history, and if i see interesting things, i am likely to accept. That ease of access, it just always being quick to bring up from the guide, it being so centrally integrated, that's awesome.

[lumberbaron]

This, actually, is huge.

On Live, somebody sends me a friend request? I'll flip through their game history, and if i see interesting things, i am likely to accept. That ease of access, it just always being quick to bring up from the guide, it being so centrally integrated, that's awesome.

Doesn't it make it that much odd that trophies have been around for years and they still can't seem to get the most basic usage of the system down. In a lot of ways I honesty like PSN more. I like Netflix, I think the store kind of feels like an online store and not an extension of whatever "blades" or "NXE" they are trying to push that month, and I like that it will take pretty much anything bluetooth and just make it work. It is the simply crap, like waiting for things to load even though I have the fastest internet in the area and the system is wired that just kind of make me wonder if they can fix the basic crap that is wrong with their system this generation.

[elmuerte]

I think that in general achievements are stupid. Most of the time they are just a meta game over the real game (do some weird shit, do some regular shit X times) or they just record progress through the game. It's just the "find the 100 hidden packages" chore from GTA.

Rarely ever would you see an achievement for doing some special that's part of the game, but of course getting the notification of receiving a notification breaks the immersion again.

[Chaddicus]

The only achievements I care about are the ones that say you completed a game just because it's nice to be able to look back and see when you played and completed it. Otherwise, achievements are fun but I couldn't really care less if they went away or not.