Multiplayer Achievements

[MTesseracT]

So I was wondering how it's possible that somehow so many players of this game have all the achievements. It doesn't look like many of them are easy to get either. Have they all cheesed the achievements one way or another? Since I find it a bit hard to believe that 10% of the playerbase has played like 400 rounds of all these gamemodes (assuming they win 25% of the time when playing with 3 others, that's how many they would need to play on average to get it fairly). The other serious sam games don't seem to have such ridiculous achievement rates, like even ones where you just need to make 100 kills in multiplayer in total have a (much) lower rate, so what's different here? Even assuming everything to be optimal (So everyone willing to just die to you, not playing a single game per gamemode more than needed) you need to play like 2000 matches, which doesn't really match what I see of people who have all these achievements (many seem to have like... 100-200 hours?).

[inuyasha]

TSE only has around 600 reviews, TFE has around 6000, there are probably more dedicated fans of the series playing TSE, which includes achievement hunters that want to complete everything in the franchise, so that could justify having those achievements at higher percentages.

Meanwhile in TFE the more difficult achievements like Diverse Fragger are at around 2% instead of 10%, most likely because of a much larger playerbase with many casual players, making it more diluted and dropping the percentages.

Now for multiplayer, there are methods to make each match very quick, for the Deathmatch Champion achievement that requires 1000 deathmatch wins, you could do many things to speed up the process, such as:

1) Set the frag limit of a match to 1.
2) Use the samRestartMap() console command to bypass the 10 seconds countdown before the next match starts. You can bind the command with a macro to make it even faster.
3) Choose Hoodlum's Backyard map as it's very small.

That way you can easily get 1 win in less than 10 seconds, assuming both players have the intent of grinding for the achievement, it doesn't take much more than 3 or 4 hours, you'll also have plenty of progress for the 1337 achievement.

For Diverse Fragger there are plenty of steam groups dedicated to Serious Sam achievements, and you can add people to help with it, and that doesn't add much to your playtime since you can very quickly start a server just for trading kills, which takes less than 3 minutes.

If one is grinding multiplayer achievements optimally it really doesn't take that long to do these. There are also plenty of resources for the difficult single-players achievements as well, so it's not really that surprising to see people with less than 100 hours. But I'm sure there are also plenty of cheaters using SAM that increase those percentages.