An Introduction To The TrueSteam Scoring System

By TrueSteam,

Hi everyone

Now we are officially out of Beta, we have had a flood of new registrations, from far and wide.

While some people will be familiar with the concept of True Ratios from TrueAchievements and TrueTrophies, we thought it would be a great help to explain how the scoring system works on this site.

There are three key points:

1. All achievements are given a base score of 10.

On Xbox and PlayStation, achievements and trophies have scores given to them by developers (on PlayStation each trophy colour has a score). This doesn't happen on Steam, so we decided to use 10 as a sensible base score for an achievement.

2. The rarer an achievement is in the context of the people that have played the game, the higher it's True value should be.

Makes sense, right? If 1,000 people have played a game and only 1 of them has managed to earn a particular achievement, then that achievement should be worth more than an achievement that all 1,000 have won. We use a formula (detailed below) to determine a Ratio that we multiply the base score by to get the achievement's True worth.

3. You add up all the True achievement points for all the achievements you've won, and that gives you your True score.

Simple!

So let's look at an example from PAYDAY 2:

No One Cared Who I Was Achievement in PAYDAY 2

At the time of writing, we are tracking 1,614 gamers who have played the game. 1,516 of them have won the No One Cared Who I Was achievement.

We use the standard True formula to calculate the achievement's ratio:

The "True" Formula

This gives us a ratio of 1.031816 (feel free to plug the numbers in to check). We then multiply this by 10 to get the True score of the achievement = 10.31. This is displayed simply as 10, but when we calculate total scores we include the decimals for accuracy.

Now let's look at an achievement in PAYDAY that takes considerably more skill to earn:

They See Me Baggin', They Hatin' Achievement in PAYDAY 2

This achievement, for getting away with 8 bags on the Garage escape, has only been won by 147 gamers.

Using the same formula, we get a ratio of 3.313547. This therefore gives a True score for the Achievement of 33.14.

So, this rare achievement is worth more than three times as much as the common one.

Please note: Because the number of tracked gamers and also the number of gamers that have earned an achievement are both constantly changing, the True score of an achievement is liable to change. That means your TrueSteam achievement score can go down as well as up!

Here endeth your math lesson for today.

If you have any questions about the True scoring method, please post them below.

Thanks!

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