Steam's Achievement is trash

[Hanzo The Rain]

Reason why Steam's achievement doesn't hold any relevance:

You are meant to level up by unlocking more achievements like PlayStation and Xbox. Not buying or crafting cards or getting more features from it. You don't feel anything special or satisfying at all, and no one can tell how much effort you put in or compete with you.

A level 10 player who has 50 games and 400 achievement should be at least level 20. Not a level 15 newbie with 5 games and 20 achievement.

[Albcatmastercat]

Univǝrse の投稿を引用：

aiusepsi の投稿を引用：

It's really not possible to make achievements on PC ever entirely uncheatable. Heck, it's mostly been a futile effort to entirely stop piracy or multiplayer cheating, never mind protecting achievements from being tampered with.

I suspect they don't want to resort to the draconian methods that would be necessary to even try; they'd have to prevent modding, for one thing. And no doubt if they did do that, people would claim they were getting rid of mods to pave the way for paid mods, because all they care about is money.

The only way to really secure achievements is if the authoritative game-state is only ever on trusted developer-run servers, and those servers are the only things that have the right to grant achievements. So, for example, MMOs can have uncheatable achievements. Single-player games or games with peer-to-peer multiplayer or community servers cannot.

https://gyazo.com/a04e50886506aae012f49ac48331f5b4
It is, SAM and achievement servers are the only known ways of cheating achievements.
For SAM, look at the gif above, and achievement servers would be easy to hunt down and delete.

Or: make cheating a bannable offense, or reset steam accounts, microsoft does it, and it goes well.

SAM users should indeed receive some kind of punishment. It makes hunting achievements a rare kind of hobby, seeing as "Achievement Hunters" are, 80% of the time, simple cheaters.

[Radene]

Albcatmastercat の投稿を引用：

SAM users should indeed receive some kind of punishment. It makes hunting achievements a rare kind of hobby, seeing as "Achievement Hunters" are, 80% of the time, simple cheaters.

That's simply not true. We achievement hunters don't hunt them for the "rarity" and "prestige". We hunt them for the fun of it.

Oh and so many can easily be cheated without SAM, too...some just by stacking the deck in your favor. Some by in-game consoles. Some by glitching the game. And so on and so forth.

[Albcatmastercat]

Radene の投稿を引用：

Albcatmastercat の投稿を引用：

SAM users should indeed receive some kind of punishment. It makes hunting achievements a rare kind of hobby, seeing as "Achievement Hunters" are, 80% of the time, simple cheaters.

That's simply not true. We achievement hunters don't hunt them for the "rarity" and "prestige". We hunt them for the fun of it.

Oh and so many can easily be cheated without SAM, too...some just by stacking the deck in your favor. Some by in-game consoles. Some by glitching the game. And so on and so forth.

No, you didn't get my point (which I didn't state properly in the first place). There are self-proclaimed "Achievement Hunters" which just load up SAM and cheat every single achievement for every single game supporting it, as I once heard someone say on the Portuguese forums. They were invited to a group and nearly everyone there seemed to have an addiction to SAM.

[Satoru]

You're conflating a few Things

Steam level has nothing to do with achievements

Xbox gamerscore also really doesn't say much other than "I play a lot of games". It doesn't really denote anything beyond that. You can have a high gamerscore with just trash achievements.

PSN is probably the only system currently that actually shows skill with regard to achivements

[Radene]

Albcatmastercat の投稿を引用：

Radene の投稿を引用：

That's simply not true. We achievement hunters don't hunt them for the "rarity" and "prestige". We hunt them for the fun of it.

Oh and so many can easily be cheated without SAM, too...some just by stacking the deck in your favor. Some by in-game consoles. Some by glitching the game. And so on and so forth.

No, you didn't get my point (which I didn't state properly in the first place). There are self-proclaimed "Achievement Hunters" which just load up SAM and cheat every single achievement for every single game supporting it, as I once heard someone say on the Portuguese forums. They were invited to a group and nearly everyone there seemed to have an addiction to SAM.

Meh, that's boring. I mean. I personally am guilty of "cheating" achievements by stacking in-game mechanic or even modifying the game files for my benefit - but that takes its own kind of work. Just pushing a button to get an achievement to pop up, ah well. Boring.

[Valfossa]

Satoru の投稿を引用：

You're conflating a few Things

Steam level has nothing to do with achievements

Xbox gamerscore also really doesn't say much other than "I play a lot of games". It doesn't really denote anything beyond that. You can have a high gamerscore with just trash achievements.

PSN is probably the only system currently that actually shows skill with regard to achivements

PSN replaces points, for an exp system. I do agree it's the best system. But other then platinum trophies, people can level up faster by ignore them.

[Satoru]

Chrisader の投稿を引用：

Satoru の投稿を引用：

You're conflating a few Things

Steam level has nothing to do with achievements

Xbox gamerscore also really doesn't say much other than "I play a lot of games". It doesn't really denote anything beyond that. You can have a high gamerscore with just trash achievements.

PSN is probably the only system currently that actually shows skill with regard to achivements

PSN replaces points, for an exp system. I do agree it's the best system. But other then platinum trophies, people can level up faster by ignore them.

At least with PSN it's obvious if your profile is filled with 10,000 bronze achievements vs 100 platinum ones even if the XP is identical. Thus while Xp itself says nothing, the delineation of Various achievement tiers is an indicator of skill

I wonder if someone could make a PSN game that had like 20 platinum achivements for doing nothing? I don't think that's part of the certification process? What if I sold DLC that had content but alsogave you 20 "free" platinum trophies

[happy]

Satoru の投稿を引用：

Chrisader の投稿を引用：

PSN replaces points, for an exp system. I do agree it's the best system. But other then platinum trophies, people can level up faster by ignore them.

At least with PSN it's obvious if your profile is filled with 10,000 bronze achievements vs 100 platinum ones even if the XP is identical. Thus while Xp itself says nothing, the delineation of Various achievement tiers is an indicator of skill

10k bronze cheevos wont do as much as 100 platinums.
My psn profile: https://psnprofiles.com/xXThE_PuRGeXx
In the end, if you only do the easy trophys, you wont get anywhere.

[Valfossa]

Univǝrse の投稿を引用：

Satoru の投稿を引用：

At least with PSN it's obvious if your profile is filled with 10,000 bronze achievements vs 100 platinum ones even if the XP is identical. Thus while Xp itself says nothing, the delineation of Various achievement tiers is an indicator of skill

10k bronze cheevos wont do as much as 100 platinums.
My psn profile: https://psnprofiles.com/xXThE_PuRGeXx
In the end, if you only do the easy trophys, you wont get anywhere.

I beg to differ. My brother is two levels higher then me, despite only having three platinums. I have sixteen.

[happy]

Chrisader の投稿を引用：

Univǝrse の投稿を引用：

10k bronze cheevos wont do as much as 100 platinums.
My psn profile: https://psnprofiles.com/xXThE_PuRGeXx
In the end, if you only do the easy trophys, you wont get anywhere.

I beg to differ. My brother is two levels higher then me, dispite only having three platinums. I have sixteen.

What level are we talking about? On the low level it is of course easy, but soon you wont get any higher with only easy trophies, or atleast you will progress very slow.

[Valfossa]

Univǝrse の投稿を引用：

Chrisader の投稿を引用：

I beg to differ. My brother is two levels higher then me, dispite only having three platinums. I have sixteen.

What level are we talking about? On the low level it is of course easy, but soon you wont get any higher with only easy trophies, or atleast you will progress very slow.

PSN levels, of what ever they are called. I'm 20, my bro is 22.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

Univǝrse の投稿を引用：

aiusepsi の投稿を引用：

It's really not possible to make achievements on PC ever entirely uncheatable. Heck, it's mostly been a futile effort to entirely stop piracy or multiplayer cheating, never mind protecting achievements from being tampered with.

I suspect they don't want to resort to the draconian methods that would be necessary to even try; they'd have to prevent modding, for one thing. And no doubt if they did do that, people would claim they were getting rid of mods to pave the way for paid mods, because all they care about is money.

The only way to really secure achievements is if the authoritative game-state is only ever on trusted developer-run servers, and those servers are the only things that have the right to grant achievements. So, for example, MMOs can have uncheatable achievements. Single-player games or games with peer-to-peer multiplayer or community servers cannot.

https://gyazo.com/a04e50886506aae012f49ac48331f5b4
It is, SAM and achievement servers are the only known ways of cheating achievements.
For SAM, look at the gif above, and achievement servers would be easy to hunt down and delete.

Or: make cheating a bannable offense, or reset steam accounts, microsoft does it, and it goes well.

Or just...not worry about it at all, since PC is an open platform so there's no way to actually prevent cheating, but just make it so that cheating achievements doesn't get you any useful rewards other than the achievements themselves? Which is basically what is being done now. And the rate of achievements being cheated is actually quite low -- only as much as a few percent, for the games I've looked at, because I can see usually 1% to 4% unlock rate on the rarest achievements and even if we assume that all of those are cheaters that's still at most 4% or so of players.

Why is it so low? Because you get nothing useful out of it. You get no trading cards, no badges, no Steam XP, no wallet money, no new games, etc. -- you get just the achievements themselves.

So, people have minimal incentive to cheat achievements, and what do they do? Most people actually stay honest. See, the problem with giving more rewards for achievements is that people are more encouraged to cheat -- so you gotta design these things carefully.

Chrisader の投稿を引用：

Honestly, it wouldn't be so bad, if Steam would get rid of that 15 day authentication rubbish.

What does this have to do with the topic?

[Albcatmastercat]

Quint the PSY Duck の投稿を引用：

Univǝrse の投稿を引用：

https://gyazo.com/a04e50886506aae012f49ac48331f5b4
It is, SAM and achievement servers are the only known ways of cheating achievements.
For SAM, look at the gif above, and achievement servers would be easy to hunt down and delete.

Or: make cheating a bannable offense, or reset steam accounts, microsoft does it, and it goes well.

Or just...not worry about it at all, since PC is an open platform so there's no way to actually prevent cheating, but just make it so that cheating achievements doesn't get you any useful rewards other than the achievements themselves? Which is basically what is being done now. And the rate of achievements being cheated is actually quite low -- only as much as a few percent, for the games I've looked at, because I can see usually 1% to 4% unlock rate on the rarest achievements and even if we assume that all of those are cheaters that's still at most 4% or so of players.

Why is it so low? Because you get nothing useful out of it. You get no trading cards, no badges, no Steam XP, no wallet money, no new games, etc. -- you get just the achievements themselves.

So, people have minimal incentive to cheat achievements, and what do they do? Most people actually stay honest. See, the problem with giving more rewards for achievements is that people are more encouraged to cheat -- so you gotta design these things carefully.

Chrisader の投稿を引用：

Honestly, it wouldn't be so bad, if Steam would get rid of that 15 day authentication rubbish.

What does this have to do with the topic?

It's sad that people -still- cheat for something that is meant to be achieved, though, isn't it?

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

Albcatmastercat の投稿を引用：

Quint the PSY Duck の投稿を引用：

Or just...not worry about it at all, since PC is an open platform so there's no way to actually prevent cheating, but just make it so that cheating achievements doesn't get you any useful rewards other than the achievements themselves? Which is basically what is being done now. And the rate of achievements being cheated is actually quite low -- only as much as a few percent, for the games I've looked at, because I can see usually 1% to 4% unlock rate on the rarest achievements and even if we assume that all of those are cheaters that's still at most 4% or so of players.

Why is it so low? Because you get nothing useful out of it. You get no trading cards, no badges, no Steam XP, no wallet money, no new games, etc. -- you get just the achievements themselves.

So, people have minimal incentive to cheat achievements, and what do they do? Most people actually stay honest. See, the problem with giving more rewards for achievements is that people are more encouraged to cheat -- so you gotta design these things carefully.




What does this have to do with the topic?

It's sad that people -still- cheat for something that is meant to be achieved, though, isn't it?

It is, but whatcha gonna do about it? Develop a totally new achievement system with new code and everything, and then force all devs with achievement-enabled games to redo their games to use the new system, or else?

[Albcatmastercat]

Quint the PSY Duck の投稿を引用：

Albcatmastercat の投稿を引用：

It's sad that people -still- cheat for something that is meant to be achieved, though, isn't it?

It is, but whatcha gonna do about it? Develop a totally new achievement system with new code and everything, and then force all devs with achievement-enabled games to redo their games to use the new system, or else?

There's no effective way to do so without affecting everyone else. It's just like Silicon Vampire, the moderator, says on VAC Discussions every now and then. The problem's root is the community, not the feature.