Remove achievement timestamps as a feature

[Reuben]

Achievement timestamps have been broken ever since they were added and serve no purpose because most of the time they don't accurately record when the achievement was actually earned and as such is bad at its function as a memento and a method of sussing out real cheaters because it's very easy to run into chronological ambiguities.

Examples:

• Some games like the original Darksiders refuse to unlock achievements during a session if at anytime you were taken offline whilst playing.
  
• Some games like Halo: MCC are buggy and will unlock certain achievements at random or not at all.
  
• Some games like the ones EA brought over to Steam after years of Origin exclusivity will unlock all the achievements you earned on Origin when you launch them on Steam for the first time without importing timestamps and instead all your achievements will have the exact same timestamp as when you first launched the game.
  
• When achievements were first added to games like the ones included in The Orange Box they originally didn't record timestamps, so users who unlocked achievements prior to the achievement timestamp update don't have any recorded timestamps (as it should be).
  
• Many games tell Steam to unlock achievements only after closing the game, causing all unlocked achievements (sometimes after many hours of playing) to have the same timestamp.
  
• When playing some games offline, the same timestamp will be applied to any achievement earned upon contacting the servers again.

Achievement timestamps is a failed experiment and at this point a feature for the sake of it and should be removed for the same reason Steam Greenlight was. Perhaps Valve should focus more on quality of life updates rather than the gamification of the platform if they want to stay relevant in the face of its competitors.

[Sazzouu]

They serve a purpose. Most of the time you can track down cheaters.

And the timestamps work perfectly fine. Its the developer messing up the system.

[Reuben]

Originally posted by Sazzouu:

They serve a purpose. Most of the time you can track down cheaters.

And the timestamps work perfectly fine. Its the developer messing up the system.

It's not just development code[i.imgur.com] left by lazy developers if they were to reset all stats after a game version update, resulting in new achievement timestamps when you relaunch the game and your cloud saves add the stats back. Read the OP again.

I guarantee a good portion of your games have misreported achievement timestamps for at least one of the reasons I listed above, which is a negative for you if you were to ever be accused of cheating and then subsequently game banned or have your game stats be reset by a developer in the future.

[Apathetic]

Originally posted by Sazzouu:

They serve a purpose. Most of the time you can track down cheaters.

And the timestamps work perfectly fine. Its the developer messing up the system.

its very easy to know what games do and dont do this. and when you look at someone playing a game like cs go or tf2 and they have every achievement unlocked the second you know they cheated.

its fine the way it is imo.

[Reuben]

At least make it an option to hide or delete timestamps if you're not the type to have something like a AStats account, because, timestamps are just too messy, of course none of this would be a problem if local system time was used or no timestamp was given to achievements unlocked offline.

What's even the point in server-side timestamps when achievements give you nothing but a second of gratification and the Steamworks API is publically exposed enough (in this instance, but not in others like a couple of years ago when Valve restricted accurate sales data) to allow SAM & SIM to still remain a thing. Valve should lock down the API even further and automatically whitelist programs allowed to use it to really combat people cheating achievements.

There are too many developers who bury their heads in the sand when they make games that have buggy achievements which unlock out of order, at the same time, at random or never at all for some people. Some developers have even taken action against accounts because of their own ineptitude in the past.

[Radene]

People need to chill.

[[?]legit]

Originally posted by Apathetic:

Originally posted by Sazzouu:

They serve a purpose. Most of the time you can track down cheaters.

And the timestamps work perfectly fine. Its the developer messing up the system.

its very easy to know what games do and dont do this. and when you look at someone playing a game like cs go or tf2 and they have every achievement unlocked the second you know they cheated.

its fine the way it is imo.

Not really tbh. How do you want to distinguish between sam users and people who really cheat with wallhax and aimbots?

[Zukabazuka]

Originally posted by legit:

Originally posted by Apathetic:

its very easy to know what games do and dont do this. and when you look at someone playing a game like cs go or tf2 and they have every achievement unlocked the second you know they cheated.

its fine the way it is imo.

Not really tbh. How do you want to distinguish between sam users and people who really cheat with wallhax and aimbots?

When it comes to cheaters it often those hard to get achievements that are gotten within a day in a span of few hours. It is very easy see when someone started cheating with achievements. Unless he used SAM.

[Edifier]

Originally posted by legit:

Originally posted by Apathetic:

its very easy to know what games do and dont do this. and when you look at someone playing a game like cs go or tf2 and they have every achievement unlocked the second you know they cheated.

its fine the way it is imo.

Not really tbh. How do you want to distinguish between sam users and people who really cheat with wallhax and aimbots?

SAM = All achievements are unlocked at once on the same time.

Cheaters = They get high skilled achievements in a single day. Generally the headshot, domination, killing the entire enemy team and so on.

Wallhax are harder to detect but blatant aimbotters are easy to spot on achievements.

[Apathetic]

Originally posted by Edifier:

Originally posted by legit:

Not really tbh. How do you want to distinguish between sam users and people who really cheat with wallhax and aimbots?

SAM = All achievements are unlocked at once on the same time.

Cheaters = They get high skilled achievements in a single day. Generally the headshot, domination, killing the entire enemy team and so on.

Wallhax are harder to detect but blatant aimbotters are easy to spot on achievements.

you say that but i know people that use sam to only unlock some achievements "hard ones"

[bizare]

Originally posted by Apathetic:

Originally posted by Edifier:

SAM = All achievements are unlocked at once on the same time.

Cheaters = They get high skilled achievements in a single day. Generally the headshot, domination, killing the entire enemy team and so on.

Wallhax are harder to detect but blatant aimbotters are easy to spot on achievements.

you say that but i know people that use sam to only unlock some achievements "hard ones"

guess we found your friend matty 1 vac ban and cheated achievements what an idiot

[Radene]

Originally posted by bizare:

Originally posted by Apathetic:

you say that but i know people that use sam to only unlock some achievements "hard ones"

hahah hard ones its called an achievement for a reason means you achieved it legit, hacking an achievement is not achieving it its not the same feeling..... people that do that because they suck so hard should be shot

Calling not only for people you don't like to be killed, but also saying someone else should kill them to appease you?

Wow. Just wow.

Between cheating at videogames and advocating murder, I know which one is worse.

PS: If you "didn't mean it that way", maybe next time don't say it that way.

[Reuben]

Originally posted by Edifier:

SAM = All achievements are unlocked at once on the same time.

Cheaters = They get high skilled achievements in a single day. Generally the headshot, domination, killing the entire enemy team and so on.

Wallhax are harder to detect but blatant aimbotters are easy to spot on achievements.

SAM doesn't just unlock all achievements at the same time, it can unlock any individual achievement at any time. The one thing it can't do is backdate achievements.

So, unless someone is stupid enough to unlock an achievement way after it was possible to unlock (I really hate those achievements, Valve should have really had guidelines from the start like they sort of do now and other platforms have had since their inception), or unlock all achievements at once, then you can't use timestamps as a reliable method of sussing out cheaters.

If a developer has to look at achievement timestamps to know if someone was cheating in-game then their anticheat software isn't good enough and they should focus on that instead of banning someone who either encountered an achievement bug or pathetically used SAM.

When timestamps do work, you can display legitimately getting a hard achievement before anyone else, but nobody cares about that (and rightly so) beyond a couple of dozen competing achievement hunters, so why bother maintaining a broken feature that is pointless when you can't accurately display when you got some of your hard-earned achievements because of bugs or how timestamps get recorded sometimes?

[Edifier]

Originally posted by ReubenUKGB:

SAM doesn't just unlock all achievements at the same time, it can unlock any individual achievement at any time. The one thing it can't do is backdate achievements.

So, unless someone is stupid enough to unlock an achievement way after it was possible to unlock (I really hate those achievements), or unlock all achievents at once, then you can't use timestamps as a reliable method of sussing out cheaters.

If a developer has to look at achievement timestamps to know if someone was cheating in-game then they're anticheat software isn't good enough and they should focus on that instead of banning someone who either encountered an achievement bug or pathetically used SAM.

People that use SAM to unlock all achievements do not care what others think and the same goes for almost everyone else. Valve doesn't care if you use SAM to unlock all achievements.

There are only a few Developers that care about achievement to the point where they'll ban you until you reset your achievements. Which is Payday 2.

Cheaters that use aimbot will often get the high skilled achievements within the last few days before being banned.


If someone uses SAM to just unlock one or two achievements it will be impossible to detect. But at the same time, who cares? They mean nothing.

[Reuben]

Originally posted by Edifier:

People that use SAM to unlock all achievements do not care what others think and the same goes for almost everyone else. Valve doesn't care if you use SAM to unlock all achievements.

There are only a few Developers that care about achievement to the point where they'll ban you until you reset your achievements. Which is Payday 2.

Cheaters that use aimbot will often get the high skilled achievements within the last few days before being banned.


If someone uses SAM to just unlock one or two achievements it will be impossible to detect. But at the same time, who cares? They mean nothing.

Yes, achievements mean nothing because Valve never locked down the part of the API that let's it get abused and it was never tied to trading cards like it should have been, the latter of which instead uses time played (which SIM also abuses via the same part of the API and you can get in-store credit for). Valve haven't cared about people cheating to unlock achievements for more than a decade when some games or sale events gave inventory items for unlocking achievements (some still do).

So why then are timestamps still around? It can't be for policing profiles since they haven't done that in a while and it can't be for vanity purposes because of the way some of these achievements are bugged or recorded, producing inaccurate timestamps or none at all.

[Tito Shivan]

Originally posted by ReubenUKGB:

Yes, achievements mean nothing because Valve never locked down the part of the API that let's it get abused

That's up to the developers. Note that server-sided games cannot get their achievements cheated.
As long as the game runs locally in the user's machine achievements could be cheated as the user can tamper with the machine.

Originally posted by ReubenUKGB:

and it was never tied to trading cards like it should have been,

There's not just the issue of cheating regards tying card drops to achievements.
https://steamcommunity.com/tradingcards/faq/

Many games have achievements that are grindy or un-fun to get, and we want the act of getting game cards to be fun for all users in games.

People would love doing that 'Kill a bazillion enemies with a spoon' achievement to earn their cards. Tying card drops to playtime is more fair as it means everyone gets to earn their drops regardless of how they play the game (I personally despise achievements, for example)

Originally posted by ReubenUKGB:

So why then are timestamps still around? It can't be for policing profiles since they haven't done that in a while and it can't be for vanity purposes because of the way some of these achievements are bugged or recorded, producing inaccurate timestamps.

Just because they're bugged in some cases doesn't mean these timestamps can't be of importance to people. Note there's achievements out there for which the timestamp IS of importance.

We can do a reduction to absurdity to that argument and ask ourselves 'Why are achievements still around?' It can't be for profile showing as they can be cheated and can't be for reward purposes either because you cannot get cards or stuff with them.

It doesn't need to matter or work for everyone to have a value.