punish achievement cheaters more harshly

[trenbolone]

It drives me up a ♥♥♥♥ing wall when I see someone that blatantly used a cheating program to get achievements. Like I saw a guy with 20 hours in ys origin who unlocked everything which is LITERALLY impossible. In cave story there's an achievement which is bugged/impossible to get despite filling the criteria and like 1% of players have it. I've seen many profiles with like 100+ perfect games.

PSN and XBL both have repercussions for cheaters, why does valve do nothing? This is rampant. I know you care more about selling useless cosmetic items than you do about having a good community and have for years, but these script kiddies are rampant and it devalues the work that goes into genuinely hard achievements to obtain (especially the ones in 2d shoot em ups, ys games, etc).

I find it hard to believe that with the programming talent and capital valve has that they can't find a way to prevent these illicit programs from being run. Perhaps creating more pointless cosmetic items in CSGO and dota is of more priority?

edit: removed all mention of the program the dumb♥♥♥♥ script kiddies use to get hacked achievements because I don't want to inspire even more cancer. If you use this ♥♥♥♥ to make your internet ♥♥♥♥ look bigger then you should throw yourself off a bridge

[~Ren~]

It's been mentioned before and you don't have to name the program, thankfully the link has been removed. Why you'd link it knowing people use it is beyond me.

[Narcoleptic Marshmallow]

FULL EXTENT OF THE JAM님이 먼저 게시:

I've seen many profiles with like 100+ perfect games.

Does that mean if I complete another 20 something games I'll become an achievement cheater?

[FFL2and3rocks]

How do you punish these people without also affecting other people? For example I have a few games that I bought elsewhere before getting them on Steam, and loading my save from the non-Steam version caused all of the achievements to unlock at once.

[~Ren~]

Nice to see you've edited the post, don't give them free advertising :)

This has been mentioned before OP and I'm in full agreement, cheating is cheating, however it's candy coated but as pointed out above, it needs to be done right to avoid punishing someone that is innocent.

[trenbolone]

~Ren~님이 먼저 게시:

It's been mentioned before and you don't have to name the program, thankfully the link has been removed. Why you'd link it knowing people use it is beyond me.

Deleted all mention. I forgot that it might just inspire more cheaters.

Narcoleptic Marshmallow님이 먼저 게시:

FULL EXTENT OF THE JAM님이 먼저 게시:

I've seen many profiles with like 100+ perfect games.

Does that mean if I complete another 20 something games I'll become an achievement cheater?

No? I'm not talking about you or people that obtained things legitimately. When you see people that have all the most abstruse achievements in a bunch of difficult games (like crimzon clover/dustforce/ys/any shoot em up in general) with under 10 hours of playtime in each it's clear they used hacks to obtain them.

Keep in mind that even the most genetically talented players of shoot em ups can't beat the true final boss of any hard game like crimzon/dodonpachi/mushihimesama/etc in under 10 hours on the hardest difficulty setting. But I'm expected to believe that Ivan Ivanovich Ivanovski has achieved that in 3 hours... AND has every single achievement in 200 other games across every single genre you can name! Yeah. Right. Ok.

[Narcoleptic Marshmallow]

FULL EXTENT OF THE JAM님이 먼저 게시:

No? I'm not talking about you or people that obtained things legitimately. When you see people that have all the most abstruse achievements in a bunch of difficult games (like crimzon clover/dustforce/ys/any shoot em up in general) with under 10 hours of playtime in each it's clear they used hacks to obtain them.

I recently played some pretty difficult bullet hell game. The low number of hours I spent in it doesn't do my sanity justice. But I'm mentioning it because this game has a flash version on kongregate and other such websites, and the data is transferable between these versions and Steam's, which unlocks every achievement obtained prior once done. Most / All achievements will be unlocked with 0.1 hours played. It's going to look like a cheat despite not being one.

Achievements are very low on Valve's priority list. And they would need to change the entire system in order to prevent a legit player who simply transfered data being mistaken by an actual cheater.

[trenbolone]

Narcoleptic Marshmallow님이 먼저 게시:

FULL EXTENT OF THE JAM님이 먼저 게시:

No? I'm not talking about you or people that obtained things legitimately. When you see people that have all the most abstruse achievements in a bunch of difficult games (like crimzon clover/dustforce/ys/any shoot em up in general) with under 10 hours of playtime in each it's clear they used hacks to obtain them.

I recently played some pretty difficult bullet hell game. The low number of hours I spent in it doesn't do my sanity justice. But I'm mentioning it because this game has a flash version on kongregate and other such websites, and the data is transferable between these versions and Steam's, which unlocks every achievement obtained prior once done. Most / All achievements will be unlocked with 0.1 hours played. It's going to look like a cheat despite not being one.

Achievements are very low on Valve's priority list. And they would need to change the entire system in order to prevent a legit player who simply transfered data being mistaken by an actual cheater.

Well, regarding that, I could probably get all the achievements in any metal slug in under 2 hours since I can play those games on one credit blindfolded since I was a child. And that would be legitimate of course. Yes, I understand if you already mastered the game or imported some kind of save data. But that doesn't apply for the sheer number of 'perfect' games these cheaters have amassed. And most games lack that sort of functionality anyway, or even if you have acquired mastery do require a fair chunk of time to unlock everything. It's really blatantly obvious who the cheaters are- it's laughable. Even the most trivial amount of policing could get rid of them.

[~Ren~]

I believe, I don't know how true this is, that Valve can tell if an achievement has been unlocked ingame or unlocked using something else, if that's true then surely it's easy to pinpoint them but as Narcoleptic Marshmallow has pointed out, they are low on Valve's list.

[76561198001062896]

i dont think achivement chesting is such an issue

not everything needs to be an eepen competition, yet again

[~Ren~]

Zetikla님이 먼저 게시:

i dont think achivement chesting is such an issue

not everything needs to be an eepen competition, yet again

Personally I disagree, according to Valve they have a zero tolerance policy on cheating yet allow achievement cheating, that to me is wrong.

You can argue that achievements affect nobody but that doesn't make it right.

[cinedine]

~Ren~님이 먼저 게시:

I believe, I don't know how true this is, that Valve can tell if an achievement has been unlocked ingame or unlocked using something else, if that's true then surely it's easy to pinpoint them but as Narcoleptic Marshmallow has pointed out, they are low on Valve's list.

Achievements are stored server side. The server is agnostic to which program issues the call. You could get around with having unique tokenss for each game, but since PC is an open system, it's rather easy to copy the functionality. Even more so since the API is open to every developer who wants to include achievements.

Achievement cheaters exist on every system. Sony hold a an auction were you could bid your gold trophies for real life memorabilia. First winner was a blatant cheater. Sony was blatantly oblivious to this until some major trophy tracking sites called him out. At least one of the later items was given to a blatant cheater while they also blocked a legit trophy hunter on it. So basically they don't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ care.
Microsoft removes the Gamerscore and marks the account as "cheater" on first offence and on second just makes Gamerscore unobtainable.

Achievements/trophies are literally an afterthought for everyone besides Microsoft and only exist to also have this feature.

[~Ren~]

cinedine님이 먼저 게시:

~Ren~님이 먼저 게시:

I believe, I don't know how true this is, that Valve can tell if an achievement has been unlocked ingame or unlocked using something else, if that's true then surely it's easy to pinpoint them but as Narcoleptic Marshmallow has pointed out, they are low on Valve's list.

Achievements are stored server side. The server is agnostic to which program issues the call. You could get around with having unique tokenss for each game, but since PC is an open system, it's rather easy to copy the functionality. Even more so since the API is open to every developer who wants to include achievements.

Achievement cheaters exist on every system. Sony hold a an auction were you could bid your gold trophies for real life memorabilia. First winner was a blatant cheater. Sony was blatantly oblivious to this until some major trophy tracking sites called him out. At least one of the later items was given to a blatant cheater while they also blocked a legit trophy hunter on it. So basically they don't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ care.
Microsoft removes the Gamerscore and marks the account as "cheater" on first offence and on second just makes Gamerscore unobtainable.

Achievements/trophies are literally an afterthought for everyone besides Microsoft and only exist to also have this feature.

Thanks for the explanation, I remember reading somewhere on Steam that Valve were able to tell if an achievement is legit or been unlocked with a naughty program, I thought at the time if that's true then why don't they deal with them :S

With regards to Sony/Microsoft, I don't use consoles so I have no idea how they operate on those with regards to achievement cheating.

[FFL2and3rocks]

FULL EXTENT OF THE JAM님이 먼저 게시:

Anyway, I don't really care about the input of a gay furry. The opinions of someone that wants to ♥♥♥♥ a man-dog are worth less than trash lol

Was that really necessary?

[Caligo Clarus]

The real achievements community is here: http://astats.astats.nl/astats/
(or similar sites)

Don't bother looking at people's profiles.

[The End]

FULL EXTENT OF THE JAM님이 먼저 게시:

It drives me up a ♥♥♥♥ing wall when I see someone that blatantly used a cheating program to get achievements.

Here is an idea, quit comparing your "skills" to other people, don't look at other peoples achivements, problem solved.

Achivement on PC is mostly for own pleasure, enjoy your own achivements and pat yourself on the shoulder that you did not cheat to get them.

Cheating in multiplayergames is far worse, it ruins the experience for the legit players, achivements do not do that.

FFL2and3rocks님이 먼저 게시:

FULL EXTENT OF THE JAM님이 먼저 게시:

Anyway, I don't really care about the input of a gay furry. The opinions of someone that wants to ♥♥♥♥ a man-dog are worth less than trash lol

Was that really necessary? :disapprove:

Wow, no that was no necessary, personal attacks like that, is just to low.