Can I have some explanation on all the achievement numbers?

Registration provided no info, FAQ doesn't work and the message I got after registering said it was "too much to cover" and said to come here. So... yeah.

From what I can see this site has 4 focus areas, Steam and game news, game sales, achievements and user walkthroughs, reviews etc. I'm mainly concerned with the achievement side of things. I suppose to start with some explanation of the numbers would be nice.

From the games tab under the main menu, there's a big table. What do the score, TSA ratio, gamers (I'd assume users of this site that have played the game), completion % and rating mean? How are these values calculated? Also, what is my TSA Score and how is that number arrived at?

I've found that my profile and individual game pages have some useful information on. Finally are there certain useful features that I might want to know about? Thanks for the help its just there's a lot of pages and not much introduction.

Dunno why this has been ignored for so long, but I'll take a stab at answering;

1. Score is your total points achieved, each achievement is assigned a point value, with 10 being a base value. The more people who achieve an achievement, relative to the number who own the game, the lower the point value.

So if 100 people own a game, and 99 people achieved achievement #1 it is valued at 10 points. On the other hand, if say only 1 person has achievement #2, then it is assigned a value of say, 90, because it is rarer, and therefore, it is assumed to be a more difficult achievement to gain.

This ties into:

2. TSA Ratio; This ratio is the number that multiplies the score of the achievement. Again, a 10 is a ratio of 1, base value. The higher the number, the bigger the ratio.

So, to go back to your original question about the 'games' page:

The Total score is the total number of the value of all achievements that you can earn in that game. A small, or easy game might have a low value of 300 across all its achievements. A game with a lot of achievements (like Logistical) will have a higher score, like 40,000+. Some games have low achievements but are difficult and so will have a higher score anyway.

The Ratio on that page is linked to the difficulty and/or rareness, so if a game has a high ratio, it means a lot of the players haven't quite managed to achieve the achievements within it. Some games are very difficult, or have a lot of achievements that haven't been earned throughout, and so their ratio is higher.

Compare and contrast, Life is Strange (easy, short game) that has a ratio of 1.3 and Civilization V (long, often requires lots of playthroughs) which is 3.2. Like I said though, sometimes a game is just not popular, so doesn't have many players, so it inflates the achievements (see: Joe Dever's Lone Wolf, which is 2.6, or Expeditions: Conquistador which is 3.3 - Lone Wolf is easy, Conquistador is difficult, but neither game is popular.)

3. Completion % is obviously how many people who have won an achievement on the game, have gone on to 100% it.

4. Rating is just user rating, like reviews, but from people on this site.

5. Your TSA score is simply the addition of all your achievements earned (point value). The points fluctuate as more people earn the achievements (lower), or as more players start the game (higher).

Hope that helps.

RVallant said:And points fluctuate quite a bit on new titles.

Dragonpwnsz said:That is completely true. Here on TSA the points, like RV said, fluctuate depending on the rarity of the achievements and how many gamers registered on TSA have obtained the achievements. This leads to averaging both percents together to determine if the achievement should be worth more or less

Could someone please explain what the number next to the 'G' is? I know over on the Xbox site this is your Gamerscore but there doesn't appear to be an equivalent on Steam so what does that number represent? Sorry for the Noob question.

DJ_TwilightUK said:You can just call them gamerpoints if you want here on TSA, but in short it's a necessity in order to give a value to the achievements at all.

On the main site for TGN - TA, for Xbox, gamerscore are assigned at the dev/pub discretion - with varied values like 5, 10, 15, 20, 50, 100 and many others. Then the rarity is calculated and a TA value is given based on base and ratio.

On Steam, there is no value to the achievements so it would be impossible to calculate TSA without a base score, so I believe ALL steam achievements are simply given a base score of 10 so that the TSA can be calculated by way of the ratio.

TA/TSA Ratio calculation: v=TA Ratio = Square Root(Gamers With Game/Gamers With Achievement)

TA/TSA calculation: [Root (Total gamers / Total with Achievement)] * Gamerscore of Achievement

DLC TA/TSA calculation: The Geometric Mean has the following calculation:

((Gamers With Game * Gamers With DLC)/(Gamers With Achievement^2))^0.25

Additionally:

Capping the score of spam games
We’ve listened to your feedback and have decided to take action. We’ll be implementing a system whereby any and all games that are marked as “spam games” will incur a 200 point cap to their total "base" score - beforehand each achievement would have been worth 10 points, now they are worth 200 divided by the number of achievements in the game.