Is Logistical a spam game?

Given the amount of points in question for this game and its standalone DLC, it seemed worth creating a separate thread to discuss it.

I don't have a particularly strong opinion one way or the other, but perhaps my view will be evident in this post.

So let's imagine that Stanley is a hardcore achievement hunter and spam killer.. and let's say Annie is arguing that Logistical isn't a spam game.


Stanley: Logistical achievements are simply too easy to unlock. They require very little effort, and there are loads of them. I've heard of players completing over 100 towns in an hour, thereby unlocking over 100 achievements in that single hour. That surely constitutes spam.

Annie: First off, the fastest player to 100% the main Logistical game averaged about 32 achievements per hour, but the fact is that most players average around 15-20 chievos/hour. Moreover, in order to get to the point where you can unlock 100 towns/achievements in an hour, you need to do some strategic planning first, and you'll most likely need to upgrade the relevant industries first too, which can be quite time consuming and even a puzzle in its own right. You may have noticed my mention of the words 'strategy' and 'puzzle'. That's right, this is a time consuming strategy puzzle game that indeed requires thought and planning. It's not a spam game.

Stanley: Granted, Logistical isn't the same as the Achievement Hunter series, since those are idle spam games. But why should the Zup! series be considered spam and Logistical not? After all, Zup! isn't idle either, and guess what, it's a puzzle game too.

Annie: There are a couple differences between Logistical and Zup!. First of all, Zup! rewards several achievements for completing a single task, such as opening a level. Logistical is different in that regard. Also, if you look at achievements per hour (one of the criteria for spam games on TSA), the first (and least spammy?) Zup! game of the series grants over 100 achievements an hour, unlike Logistical. What's more, Zup! 7 allows over 1,000 chievos/hour!

Stanley: Fair enough, and speaking of fairness, what about the fact that the Logistical standalone releases were able to circumvent the Steam achievement cap, thereby allowing for loads more overall achievements and points than other games? Is that what you call fair?

Annie: It was never the Logistical dev's intention to take the route of standalone DLCs. The implementation of the 5k cap on Steam left the dev with little choice. He would have had to continue developing the game without achievements altogether.

Stanley: With all due respect to the dev's intentions, it doesn't make the situation any less fair.

Annie: I agree with you to a point, but given that Logistical is clearly different not only from idle achievement spam but also from games like Zup!, it simply wouldn't be fair to treat Logistical in the same way either. Therefore, IF anything is to be done about Logistical at all as far as a cap is concerned, it should be treated in an individual, special way in this case. That way, justice would be served to the special sort of achievement game that Logistical is. I realise that more moderation is required here, but in this case, it's surely worth it.

Stanley: As long as you change your IF to WHEN, perhaps we can reach some sort of agreement. Well, it's back to Dark Souls III for me. Nice chatting with you, Annie.

Annie: I've been playing Logistical during this whole chat, lol... peace out.

I feel like Logistical would have probably been fine as one game, since Steam capped any single game to 5000 achievements, but Logistical as a series is the exact same game/gameplay over and over with new town names and an incredibly bloated value with its insanely overly-granular achievements. The developer shows no signs of slowing down and has already released tens of thousands of achievements into the Steam platform, all for solving very simple "puzzles" which are each easier than a Zup level, for example. Games like Payday 2 and ToME are certainly pressing up into this realm because of their stacking difficulty achievements which basically multi-award you for the same achievement, although it IS typical for most players to work their way up the difficulty levels as they are learning the game since both games are quite difficult and have steep learning curves.

While I have played some Logistical, I've only completed 4 modules, 3 of which are considered easy modules. That being said, I've gotten more stuck on Logistical puzzles than Zup! ones, personally. Then again, I've played Logistical for hundreds of hours compared to just the few hours it took to complete the Zup! series, so it's hard to compare the difficulty of puzzles for the 2 games. I suppose the perception of difficulty could vary from player to player, though.

I also wish Logistical had stayed a single game, and I think there would have been some possible solutions as far as the achievement cap went: achievements for milestones rather than roads/towns, for instance. Or perhaps achievements for larger/harder towns, something like that. Maybe I'm oversimplifying the situation though, since Logistical was already at almost 10k achievements once the Steam achievement cap hit, which would have meant deleting/restructuring most achievements for the main game in order to make room for the future installments.

Yeah, of course 99.9% of devs aren't thinking about "achievement hunters" and their impact to them when they make their games, haha, but Logistical would be a totally fine and great game if the achievements were just for completing entire states/regions/counties or something rather than every single town and every single road and every single industry upgrade + meta achievements for the regions and all-roads and such.

To me, a spam game is a game with a lot of achievements that the vast majority of people who play can unlock the vast majority of within a short amount of time.

I would say that given, at 281 hours, I have only 30% of Logistical's achievements, that categorically decides that it's not a spam game.

Indeed, the average completion % is one of the important criteria for deciding whether a game is spam or not, but it's not the only factor.

Apparently, the TSA spam algorithm also takes into account: total achievements for a game and average time taken to unlock an achievement. The former is something which presumably doesn't favor Logistical Main, considering that it has nearly 10k achievements. The latter is slightly more debatable, since the average time taken to unlock an achievement in Logistical is clearly lower than, say, Zup! games, but higher than the average non-achievement-spam game, if that makes any sense.

The thing which is still a mystery to me is how much weight is placed on each factor: average completion %, total achievements, and average time to unlock an achievement.

I just looked at my numbers. Wow, base logistical is worth 100k. That's excessive.

I don't think it should be cut back as much as the spam games, but adopting a change where a typical TSA achievement is worth 10, a logistical achievement is worth 2-3 points.

That would bring the ratios and points back down to a reasonable level, at least for this site. With how TA/TSA/TrueTrophies works, rebasing the points is better than writing a new algorithm or capping the game out completely. (in my opinion)

Yeah, some sort of compromise seems like the right thing to do in this case.

Categorically no.

Just to address the main points that were brought up:

This is not possible without several hours - usually tens of hours - of prep in the form of upgrading all of a modules industries to level 3. I completed 100 towns in the Switzerland module in 28 minutes, but I had 44 hours in the module before I was able to do that.

Zup! awards multiple achievements for the exact same action (completing one level), Logistical does not. If the Zup! series gave one achievement per level I doubt it would be considered spam - there's hundreds of puzzle games that fit this bill, but they never get included in spam lists. How many people here have even heard of Dexodonex?

"were able to" is interesting wording here, considering it's still possible. I really don't understand why this actually matters. Perhaps if PPU or Zacc ever hit the 5k mark and the developers didn't wish to create new appids (and couldn't get the DLC solution to work) then it would be a discussion worth having, but until then it's not like this is unfair on anyone: Logistical isn't getting special treatment in that regard.

I disagree heavily. No game should be singled out and have the rules change for it specifically, this goes completely counter to the concept of a points system. This is just begging for people to campaign for games they dislike/don't own/whatever to have their values changed on a case-by-case basis. If a game is genuinely overvalued, that can be fixed algorithmically, and then applied consistently to all games. Anything else opens up a Pandora's Box of opinions on what games should be worth and shit-flinging between anyone who disagrees. For example, if we're going to start treating games individually, when does Devil Daggers get a 20x points multiplier? It's just an unsustainable discussion.

@Sellyme, those are some nice points. It begs the question though:

Should the current spam algorithm be tweaked, and if so, how?

private_pile said:I don't believe that the current spam algorithm necessarily needs any drastic changes (beyond fixing its seeming incapability of accounting for broken achievements), but rather that the entire points system needs an overhaul to be representative of the true value of any individual achievement. Right now, the average incredibly high value achievement is somewhere in the region of 100 points. My most valuable is worth 106 points. So the effect of the current points system is that some of the hardest (possible) achievements on the entire site are worth less than buying 11 games that give a single achievement on startup - or even one game that gives you an achievement for every character you press from A-Z.

TSA has by far the smallest range of regular achievement values (10–110, factor 11x). AStats (0.1–80, factor 800x), MetaGamerScore (0–2500, factor ∞x), and SteamHunters (0–40, factor ∞x) all make it so that difficult achievements are actually worth getting.

That said, it may not necessarily be worth the time to overhaul the system entirely. There's already sites with good points systems, that's never been TSA's strength. Even though the current system is a joke, it doesn't need to be changed, because anyone who wants an accurate points representation is already using other sites. There's no point just duplicating a model that already exists.

tried this once, and had basically zero clue how it works. it's certainly not a spam game though. and I just tried out astats and it's a confusing mess. this site has the best system