Less points for the games with a lot of achievements

Leave them alone really.

Most of the suggestions pointed out would catch legitimate games in the crossfire. Logistical for example, has thousands of achievements, and is by no means an easy game to pick everything up with, especially once out of the tutorial/starting areas.

Personally, I think more should be done to ban and remove people using steam achievement manager or whatever it is. There's one guy who pops up at the top of a lot of game leaderboards, even though he's been reported several times, just seeing him there does my head in since none of his games have been achieved legitimately. @_@

I agree with some scores being a flat 0 when it comes to that. If a game is giving you achievements for not doing anything but starting a game, then clearly you have "achieved" nothing and as such the value of this "Achievement" should also be nothing. I also think that variance should be higher, so hard achievements you spend hundreds of hours on (I.E. Ark boss achievements) would be worth more than just 4 quick achievements in a 2 hour game.

>Personally, I think more should be done to ban and remove people using steam achievement manager or whatever it is. There's one guy who pops up at the top of a lot of game leaderboards, even though he's been reported several times, just seeing him there does my head in since none of his games have been achieved legitimately. @_@

Can the API show time spent in the game? SAM leaves steam time unchanged so if the guy has played time 0 and all achievements unlocked it would be easy to filter. That being said banning SAM outright is not something i agree on, because there are plenty of buggy games not awarding achievements correctly (For example Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis).

Just joined this site because I'm kinda looking around for a more 'feature rich' site than Astats (they do a great job at its core, the site is just dreadful to look at and use).

First impressions of this place were good until I looked at the leader board and I see people with a score of 5 million purely by having achievement spam games on there.

So here's my opinion about all of this:

First things first, if you call yourself an achievement hunter and use cheap ass games like these to inflate your numbers, get the f*ck out of here. You're only fooling yourself if you think that somehow counts as any form of accomplishment.

As for a solution; any form of point assignment, complicated calculations and TSA ratios can be thrown in the garbage can when there are games with 5000 achievements that are worth 10 points each.

I'm not hardcore collector by any means, but I do enjoy collecting achievements the honest way. So I purposefully stay away from inflating my achievement numbers with cheap games like that. But here's something that illustrates the problem PERFECTLY:

My entire Steam library (with just normal average games) at 100% would be worth about 130,000 points. The achievement spam game 'It's Village' costs $0,99, has over 12,000 achievements and has a total point value of 127,000 on TSA.

Now you explain to me why a website that, by its own words, tries to keep things fair and balanced, would allow something that inflates a player's achievement score THAT MUCH? How is this any different than if I would just fire up SAM and unlock every achievement in my library?

It makes no sense to even accept these achievements into the system. Even if you were to give those spammy achievements a score of 1 each, that would STILL inflate the system dramatically.

Solution:

This doesn't need to be complicated. There doesn't need to be some huge calculation with time played, number of achievements, etc.

Fact is that all of these achievement spamming games are extremely easy to recognize. So the staff of TSA should just manually flag these types of games as 'Achievement Spam' (or however you want to call it). Any game with that flag will automatically have all their achievements set to 0,01 points. In the case of 'It's Village' that would still mean 120 points towards their profile, but it would fix the over inflated profiles and make the leaderboard actually mean something (because right now it is utterly useless).

So I hope this problem is fixed at some point. I'd love to use this site more extensively, but not if the only way to partake in the 'competition' is to cheat.

Why not use the same system that is in TrueAchievemnts / TrueTrophies?

Why is TSA not updated as in TrueAchivements / TrueTrophies?

Why keep TSA open if you leave it alone?

Sorry for my grammatical error.

I ManuBAD iT I said:- TSA does use the same system as TA/TT.

- We are constantly updating the site.

- We don't currently have any active Newshounds, hence no news articles recently, but we are still active.

thirtysmooth said:Ok thanks for answered.

Astat has had similar problems and I think they just cap exploited games. It's kind of easy to find them, games with large amounts of achievements that most users have ARE exploits.

Any game where a high majority of players have almost all the achievements (say 60 percent of players have 90 percent of achievements) and have a large amount of achievements (say over 200) are at least suspicious and probably should be flagged. I don't know the exact values we'd want here, but even if someone manually looks at games, it's pretty obvious when you find a "farm" and pretty obvious when you find a game like Logistical (which shouldn't trigger any of these).

Or we could leave them alone and just make the leaderboards and score rankings worthless.

I just hate the fact someone can join up, play a shitty game like The Village and get 120,000 achievements in 8 hours or less. At least for TA and TT has quality control at Sony and Microsoft.

But what about "legit games" ... Well the thing is games with a LOT of achievements tend to be relatively hard, like Guns of Icarus, or Town of Salem. A lot of people will have some achievements but a majority of people will have under 10 percent of them. It's probably worth not awarding points or leaderboard stats for games that are primarily used to farm achievements.

"But what about legit games" ... if you are playing a game that meets this criteria it probably means you need to rethink the type of games you play.

By the way Astat made some other good changes. The first achievement in a game is worth .1 and the score rises from there, good move, though that doesn't fix these games because at 120,000 achievements .1 is still worth 12,000 points, which is a hell of a lot. So lowering the value of achievements will not work.

I finally came looking for this. The point ranking system on TSA and thus its main leaderboard is effectively worthless because of this present cavalcade of spam games and the way they're scored on the leaderboard.

This quote illustrates perfectly (as they say themselves) what the problem is.

TigerXtrm said:To illustrate it further, over this month I've acquired over 4000 points by playing various games. I like to look at the monthly Period Summary to see my progression. The thing is, I have a few friends there, and sometimes (like today) one of them plays a spam game. They get ludicrous amounts of points for their essentially no-effort achievements, while I've been tackling at Super Meat Boy and other relatively challenging games. In a single day, they top to the 1st rank of my friends' list, without any effort.

I could do the same (I own some of those achievement dispensers from bundles) but the very thought makes me feel dirty - I think there has to be some effort in getting the achievements. Unfortunately, with its present handling (or not handling) of spam achievements, the site is effectively treating me and similarly inclined people as second-rate achievement hunters.

The thing is, as a personal tracker, TSA is just fine. It's neat-looking and has some nice features that I like, like goals and genre-separated AGC% leaderboards. But its point (i.e. main) leaderboards tremendously rewards players of spam games. For me, there's no point in competing in it.

Also, for the tracker-part, I could replace it (almost) entirely with the equally neat Completionist.me, another tracker site. I visit TSA less and less because of the spam issue being so demoralizing.

IMO, Astats had the simplest solution so far, automatically capping certain games (like Kinglink above said). Similar solution might or might work on TSA.

On Astats, game is capped to 10 points if:
a) at least a number of people (maybe 10? 50?) have got achievements in the game
b) there are more than 100 achievements
c) 50% of the achievements are considered "trivial" (i.e. almost everyone having achievements in the game has got them)
- Sometimes there are false alarms. Moderation can then un-cap falsely capped games and/or cap stuff that should otherwise be capped.

Twistor said:The Astats idea could work! But what would we do to those who completed those games even if they have spam achievements? For example, TheStranger which completed "It's Village' would have his TSA Score go from 7,135,908 from the time i'm typing this to 7,021,237 which is a big drop of TSA Score.

Lets say that I did the math for this all which I will right now (Only using the 4 Most Awarding Games for TSA Score)

LOGistICAL : 276,583 - 27,658 TSA Score
Guns of Icarus Online : 150,424 - 15,042 TSA Score
The Mexican Dream : 128,579 - 12,858 TSA Score
It's Village : 127,412 - 12,741 TSA Score

Now using TheStrangers TSA Score, you'll see the impact with the slashed TSA Score

Before) 7,135,908 TSA Score
After) 6,521,209 TSA Score

That's more than 500K TSA Score removed

After all the math, if we were to give the 4 games stated above and move each achievement from their current TSA Score to 10 then it would in all remove 614,699 TSA Score from gamers who have completed those 4 games. Now how would we explain this extreme drop of TSA Score to those gamers?

It wouldn't end well, so I am downvoting because I have proof that this would effect everyone who has these games

Math done) I found the TSA Score for all 4 games, divided them by 10 seperatly to get their seperate TSA Score if they were slashed to 10 TSA Score for each achievement.

Subtracted the total when divided by 10 to their actual Score. Add them all up after subtracting them by their slashed number and then subtracted them by the gamers overall score

-TSA Patrick

TSA Patrick said:It is true that the points would go down for these people. However, they would go down for just about everybody who have played or completed such games, which would balance it out. It is true that there might be a cry-out from some people who played spam games before.

Also, a comment on this. Guns of Icarus Online is a game that virtually nobody has completed - it takes thousands of hours to do so, and I don't think that should be capped at all. Same is partly true of LOGistICAL, except it's only few hundred hours and it can be completed. It's a matter of taste whether it should be considered to be capped or not. I have played both of these particular games, and they are not capped on other sites. (disclaimer: I have and have played both of these games, though haven't perfected either)

However, I would definitely still support doing this for some other games, e.g. the "It's Village" and "The Mexican Dream" that you mentioned.

I also think a clarification on the definition of a spam achievement is in order. It's not just that a game has thousands of achievements. They have to also be ridiculously easy overall. For instance, "It's Village" has currently 12322 achievements, each of which have the same requirement, "Spend one second in the game". Another spam game, Dinosaur Hunt, has 1080 achievements, most of them that are just "kill another dinosaur".

Compare those to Guns of Icarus Online, which has 883 achievements, each of them with unique, non-trivial requirements. It's Village (and the like) can be perfected by running it for a couple of hours, never doing anything in the game, and Dinosaur Hunt can be perfected by doing the same thing ad nauseam, so that even a mere auto-clicker would do the job eventually. On the other hand, Guns of Icarus Online needs thousands of hours of playing and communicating, playing different characters and different ships, sometimes doing stuff with specific circumstances - even farming it is difficult because you need several people to just play multiplayer.

Anyway. You're free to do whatever you wish. For me, the leaderboard will stay "unfair" if nothing is done about the spam games, because I will forever be falling in ranks when more and more spam games get released and "completed" by aspiring achievement hoarders.

Twistor said:I see your POV, but on our end we would have to hear the complaints of gamers that did lose the TSA Score and in our case it'll be better if we just kept it the way it is...

Now, sometime down the road things might change but for what a small community we have it's simply not worth the time and effort to cap games like this without a valid reason
Yes they are Achievement Spam Games but the case that we aren't looking into is the countless other games that would arise everyday (Even if we don't see them) that serve the same purpose as LOG and It's Village.

In honesty, Astats seems to have such a stable community but we simply cannot reverse this to the liking of a few people. That would not only make us look bad, but the community because we didn't take any consideration that they of all people would be most affected

I understand. It doesn't make much sense from my stance, but I do understand your stance on this: the lost points would disappoint other people. That's a real shame.

Well, I can just hope a good compromise is found. Presently, I can safely ignore the points.

One idea I'd like to throw in would be to have another leaderboard beside the main one, a "spam-game free" leaderboard. A neat way to accomplish this would be to construct it like usual but simply disregard all achievements worth less than X points. If X were a small number, say, 11, it would effectively filter spam games out, while having a miniscule effect on otherwise small-valued achievements.

Additional leaderboards make the site less neat though. However, the site already has tens of leaderboards, so it wouldn't be a stretch to have another one.

Twistor said:The Spam-Free Leaderboard idea isn't going to work, mainly because the games that are spammed cost money. Which in my case, they have every right to play and obtain those achievements if it's a purchased game

I am sorry but, I have to stay downvoted because I don't see the SF Leaderboards doing anything that would stop the issues. Gamers out there would find ways to compain even if we did add them

I love this site, and TrueTrophies and TrueAchievements before it, and I've been a Pro Subscriber for all three. I still would be on TA if I had the xbox on.

I can totally get behind refusing an enforced "spam game" system, whereby anyone is effectively punished for playing a spam game.

But refusing an optional leaderboard, where just a small handful of games that ruin the system for everybody else aren't counted? Just because a handful would be upset that on this optional subset they've lost a sense of prestige they didn't earn anyway?

That seems like cutting off your face to spite your nose.

sandypantscufc said:It's more complicated than it seems here, spam games are released even more frequent and it gets tedious to find them all and place them in their specific sub-topics

With that being said, that would mean more work for the Game Information Team by which is currently recruiting right now. I cannot see this being a feature, at least as of right now. Maybe later we would consider this idea if these games are releasing at rapid numbers

Whilst I understand you not wanting to 'punish' people who play certain games, the fact is you are at present 'punishing' everyone who doesn't play those games. Basically these games are exposing a glitch in your scoring system that awards the number of achievements above the effort taken, rendering the leader board completely meaningless. I come here purely for the statistics, but it would be nice to have a leader board that wasn't just split into those who play games that shower you with achievements for minimal effort, and those who don't. It should be that you can play how you want and be fairly judged for that.

An adjustment to how the scoring works would affect just about every user across the board, and can people really complain about losing score for a game they spent only a few hour playing, which was worth 50 times more than one that took thousands of hours? My suggestion was to adjust the scale of the scoring, so that there's a bigger gap between the lowest points and the highest, so that the easiest achievements are worth 0,1 instead of 10, or something like that, but the most valued are still worth over 100. Then it would award effort above spam. Games like guns of icarus would still be worth a lot, because not many people are able to complete them, but a game with 5000 achievements would drop from 50 000, down to 500 points which is a score far more in line with its effort. I'm pretty sure if you looked at the board after an adjustment like this, a lot of the same names would still be near the top, the only ones who would drop would be those who haven't actually spent a lot of time hunting achievements.

So yes you will step on some toes, but at this point having a leader board is basically pointless, as you can literally buy your way to the top 100 with all these spam games. And most of these give achievements with doing anything other than running them, so you can be near the top of this site without demonstrating any actual ability to 'achieve' anything. It's like 'pay to win'.

yobokkie said:We could adjust the scoring range of these spam games. If we can find these games and take that extra step I believe we can lower their scoring count

But we need people to identify them for us because we are busy as it is, making articles and doing other things for TSA. It would be nice if we had a forum that was there for others to post these games, we could stop them

This guy is doing a excellent job of listing them: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/30449223-Achievement-S...

Basically he just lists the number of achievements and how many people have unlocked them as a percentage, as obviously games with high achievements and high completion rates are most likely to be spam games.

I think we can go ahead and lower the achievement count on those games listed on the his curator page

But I need to get approval by the others

There you go guys, the achievements now have been capped