I've been seeing the rise of those achievement mills and my opinion is that many of those games would sell way less if it wasn't for the hundreds of cheap and easy achievements. If someone wants to bloat his/her account with cheap zero effort cheevs that's their business, but the problem is when the flood of zero effort achievements being awarded 10 points each is counted against the actual achievements in the charts altering the scores.
Compare The Quest for Achievements to Payday 2: the first one will give you more than 11k points in a very short time, while on the other hand Payday 2 with all its DLCs will take several hundred hours to give you around 6k points.
The Quest for Achievements Achievements (one thousand achievements in a couple of hours - 11k points)
PAYDAY 2 Ultimate Edition Achievements (around 600 achievements in several hundred hours - 6k points)
But besides that, check the score and effort for single achievements:
The Short Fuse achievement in PAYDAY 2 worth 34 pointsOn day 3 of the Rats job, get away with 7 bags without defusing any bombs. requires the combined effort of 4 players to be done
The No Punctuation achievement in Alan Wake worth 33 pointsSpecial 2: Complete the episode without reloading the game or restarting a checkpoint. requires learning the enemy positioning, the timing for some jumps (and multiple attempts)
does it need an explanation?
They are not easy, yet each one of those will net around 30 points on the scoring system, while a zero effort achievement will net a third of that, by doing nothing.
The scoring system is flawed, and I believe should be adjusted to avoid such abuses if it wants to keep some fairness and avoid catering to the "game developers" who abuse the system.
EDIT: Just found this other one
Sisters in hotel Achievements (7k+ achievements in
6 hours - 75k points!)
Really?
WTF!