Achievements, there are things that are great, there are things that are bad, but I also just found the horribly ugly reasons why they are terrible.

When I first heard of achievements back in 2005, I confused it with Microsoft Points. I first thought you could use your Gamerscore and redeem it to buy items. Then realizing Microsoft Points and Gamerscore are totally separate things, I'm disappointed.

The Good
---
1. It encourages players to do certain events specifically, to add fun, add difficulty, or give recognition that a feature exists, and an "achievement" award players for it.
2. Games are limited to about 1000 gamerscore.
3. For people who are completionists.
4. Cooperation with other players.

The Bad
---
1. You can't do anything with gamerscore, other than getting a bigger number. It's useless.
2. Bragging rights.
3. DLC Achievements awards players more gamerscore than retail achievements. (For example, a retail achievement gives about 5 to 20 gamerscore, while a DLC can give 30 to 50 just because the developers are lazy to develop them)
4. Achievements can be too hard, and can only give 5.
5. Teammates online can ruin your achievement, or ruin your experience as they get their own.
6. Games like Avatar: The Burning Earth giving free 1000 gamerscore. Games like these gets increased sales and rentals. Easy achievements means easy money for developers.
7. DLC achievements are always priced.

The Ugly
---
5. Broken achievements. There are games with achievements, and there are times you can't get them regardless of playing legitimately or totally focusing on them. Crash Course was a DLC in both Xbox 360 and PC for Left 4 Dead. In PC, it's probably fixed. In Xbox 360, there are achievements that are completely broken. Why? Dedicated servers for Crash Course will not allow certain achievements to be unlocked. So not only achievements are still broken on the Xbox 360 version, but also costs with real money. So you bought a DLC with broken achievements, nice. The only way to get these achievements is: 1) Play Single Player, or 2) Play tricks with your connection to allow a Local Server. On PC, players can host a local server, but the feature was not added in the Xbox 360 version and only allowed a matchmaking system to find dedicated servers. Left 4 Dead 2 on Xbox 360 allows local server, how nice. But the totally outdated Left 4 Dead 1 on Xbox 360 pisses me off. Yes, it's outdated due to: certain glitches not fixed compared to PC counterpart, the main menu background is outdated, and the infected icon in the lobby is right hand, not left hand. Aside from that, it's outdated because it doesn't allow the freedom for players to host a local server. Local servers of which must require tricking your connection, can allow players get the Crash Course achievements, where Dedicated Server (Where the game supports) can not allow you. Damn it!

4. People who ruin the experience. I like assisting people for achievements, but it's not fun if everyone, including the enemy team, assists a few people to get the achievement. Known as "boosting" in Xbox Live, or "farming" in Steam (Team Fortress 2). I just want to play a match, and there are people getting free achievements in the process. I'm not complaining too much about this, but there is this one reaction from the developers to punish all players. Valve made additional achievements for their upcoming class updates. Okay nice. Now Valve punished us all by having a new class update with much harder, or longer achievements. There's one achievement to get a hundred kills underwater. Back then, 2Fort and Well were the only official maps with underwater. Who would try and get about a hundred underwater kills in only those maps? Underwater was pretty exclusive for Valve maps, unless it's a player map that allows players to get it easily. First, getting new weapons came from earning a number of achievements, then Valve brought random drops in Team Fortress 2. The random drops resulted idle servers. Now servers are very boring. Though it's good Valve is finding a way for players get new equipment, but I hate the punishments.

3. Developers takes the length of achievements too far. For example, as much as I like Ninja Gaiden 2, there are RIDICULOUS achievements! There is about 8 specific achievements, each one of them asks the player to use only one specific weapon to finish the entire game. Now this eliminates the player's freedom of choosing her or his weapons if that person is eager for achievements. Not only that, but each only awards a worthless 5 gamerscore. So basically, you'd have to beat the game 8 times or more if you want to get them all.

2. People who gets mad at you just because they didn't get an achievement. Usually I assist players to earn their achievements, but I also don't have to. I don't mind assisting people for achievements, but there are times where people go too far. At a coop game of World at War, one is trying hard to get the most points in a competitive mode, but my kill multiplier skyrocketed and the guy was pissed. Not much, but here's what's really ugly: I joined a random coop lobby in Left 4 Dead on expert, and we reach to the end of a campaign. They are establishing a glitch to skip the zombie fighting and tank destroying and onto the rescue vehicle. I'm the only one who reached the rescue vehicle as my teammates have died, which results two people trying to kick me, but one defending me. Not only these people are being pathetic, but what I did: I assisted them throughout the whole campaign, I had protected others the most, I healed others the most, I died the least, I had the most zombie kills, they leave me to die, then they tried cheating in a finale (I even assisted them where one location is an alternative spot), and they died but not me. They get really angry at me, and one threatened to have my 5 year old gamertag banned from Xbox Live. Wow, total douchebags! If they can't survive expert, then they don't fucking deserve the achievement, especially if they cheat. Achievements have successfully get the ability to change a person's attitude in 5 minutes! Back then, players will get angry at the game for being unfair. With "difficult" achievements, they can hate other people for pathetic reasons!

1. Collectibles is a thing of the past such as Sonic as Mario. I remember doing so many collecting in Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 (And their tradition is going on and on) But with the help of achievements, the developers will annoy the hell out of players with collectibles. Collectibles comes in all shapes or forms (Devs can get creative by allowing to shoot them): Cassette Tapes, Newspaper, Dogtags, Skulls, Crystal Skulls, Pigeons, Dragon Statue, Audiotapes, Diamonds, Flags (Assassin's Creed's infamous 425 flags), Templars, Feathers, Statuettes, Subject 16's videos (Though I like the puzzles), Viewpoints, Treasures, Enemy Intel (Laptops), Death cards, lost research, Gargoyles (These bastards mocks you), Bound Serpents, Viewing Vistas, Viewing Legends, Unlocking Songs, Summoning Motor Forges, Sparkles (Holy shit 1001 total!), Gas Cans, Claptraps, Treasures and Jewels, BSAA Emblems, Smashing Billboards, Smashing Smashes, Successfully land all superjumps, set a showtime road rule on every road, finding drive thrus and car parks, and it goes on and on. Shit, how many more do I have to collect, find, and/or destroy these things?
Reasons why I hate being a completionist (Which I am one), developers will punish me with incredible tediousness. Grand Theft Auto have done this for ages, and with the swimming feature in San Andreas, they added clams for people to collect while underwater! Thankfull GTA IV doesn't feature that due to "no underwater". Developers are careless, and the awards are either nothing, few gamerscore, or a bad award. Collecting gets harder and harder as there are a few left, and there are times the player can forget the locations where she or he already collected. Some can be totally impossible to find without a walkthrough. What really pisses me off the most is that the developers gets creative with them, one example is running over a laptop in Modern Warfare 2 with a snowmobile. You can't get off the vehicle, there's a helicopter chasing you, and the laptop is hidden between trees. Nice. Another example is how the developers are placing hundreds and hundreds of them instead of less than 30. Oh the torment!

Yes now, but they were not always priced. You can still download the the extras for Bioshock which comes with a nice little 100 point achievement for free.

Ghostbusters for me. I love the game, and I have met the requirements for the two glitched online achievements, but no one will ever get them.

Do not stop there, though. Many sports games actually shut down their online servers after a year because their next game is out. So, to "save server space", they close them preventing new or even old players from ever obtaining any online achievements that the game may have included. WHAT A LOAD OF FUCK! Excuse me, but really now. The developers state that they see the achievement as more of a reward for players that were able to get them while they could. It upsets players every year as the developers do not seem to stop it.

I honestly did not have any problems unlocking the Crash Course achievements. Not to brag but to totally brag, I got them in the first week of the release. Though, this information scares me for the next downloads. I hope I will not encounter this problem with the new Left 4 Dead downloadable content in the next couple of months.

I hear Dragon Age: Origins has some bugged downloaded achievements that require you to delete your gamertag from your hard-drive, and then recover it to solve the problem. Scary stuff in my opinion. Also, I have recently started playing Blue Dragon (You want to talk about long achievements, ha!), and if you download the downloads some of the in-game achievements will not pop when they should. I am steering away from that currently.

I am currently boosting Saints Row's online achievements. We tend to stay clear of "randoms" as my group calls other players not in the group. A lot of games do not need boosting, but games like Saints Row does as everyone seems to team kill. F.Y.I. you can not turn off friendly-fire.

I have wasted so many hours on my Xbox 360. I question why the teams behind the games hate us players as much as they do. It can only lead to future developers being more pissed off making even more ridiculous achievements in a never-ending landslide of hate.

Guitar Hero III, how I hate you so.

I have yet to be mad at directly, but seeing people on my team go off on their rants to others is just something else.

When I hop in a random expert campaign, if the other players are willing, I try to get them to win. Even if that means dying for the team. It is just a courtesy I deal with for other players that need it. If one who needs the achievement falls before they reach the vehicle, I take a fall as well.

My favorites. Not even kidding. I usually save them for the end too, but you need to be careful when searching later not to pick one up early as you might confuse yourself some ten hours of game-play later. Yes, I use internet guides.

--

All in all, I like achievements regardless of all the hate or frustration they may cause.
Someday, however, I will wake up, and say, "This is just fucking stupid!" - Greatest Achievement of All.

With that said, that made Microsoft a hypocrite. Survival DLC was meant to be free, and added achievements like from the PC. But there were no achievements on the Xbox 360 version. And Crash Course is paid, and has achievements. If downloading free "extras" for BioShock with 100 gamerscore, then that's nice but what hell Microsoft?
I never really bothered to play sports games, but knowing this angers me. I remember on Xbox 1, EA had to turn off their servers for their new games. Sometimes, or usually the servers are offline. I still remember playing Burnout 3 Takedown and Burnout Revenge, especially at times where servers were shutdown for a period of time.

Hopefully we won't encounter the problems at all.

And to think I'm actually interested to play Dragon Age. Sure I don't mind of about achievements and all (Since I can disregard them), but really? Delete you gamertag?

I know, right?


It's really pathetic to see people get angry at others simply because they didn't earn a dumb achievement. It's also called "achievement" for a reason. You achieve them.

It's good to be generous though. But the problem with the players who were mad at me, they also didn't suggest me to commit suicide. Second, this very well reminds me of the "Endure" achievement from Halo 3 ODST. An achievement that is very capable of allowing players to grief others. This achievement asks players to finish hours of wave by wave of oncoming attacks that gets harder and harder on the "Heroic" difficulty. At one time, there is this one video where a griefer is recording a game, then quits at the last second before anyone was able to unlock the achievement. This intensely pissed people off. Another time, my team and I had about over a million points, but two people went idle at the last few rounds. Being idle, it costs our lives to drop down greatly. It was only one enemy left to get the achievement, but we all died. Which therefore brought one person being angry at the other two for being idle, and I've heard threats from him willing to "beat them up" in real life. It's really dumb on Bungie's move is that if one person leaves, the game ends. It's also a pretty harsh achievement.



Generally I don't like walkthrough. If developers were adding these things, they should at allow some assisting. In Far Cry 2, the GPS beeps a greenlight (And faster when closer) when near a diamond's or audio log's proximity (Green light is turned off when out of proximity). And also on the map, it marks areas where the player has already gotten. If the player gets a guide, they don't have to worry about remembering where they picked up. What's cool is that diamonds is the game's currency, which allows players to purchase weapons and such. Some games awards collectibles such as cheats enabled in games such as Call of Duty 4, World at War, and Modern Warfare 2. But there are times where it doesn't award players as much.

That's exactly what I thought. It disappointed me even further when I learned that microsoft points don't come with gold subscriptions. Microsoft sucks. >_>

KrayZee if you dont mine me saying, you obsess over the XBox too much. Give it a break will ya ;o

I'm a PC gamer. Which reminds me, Half Life 2 Episode 2's grubs... ugh. There's web cache, but nothing's worse than grubs in Half Life 2.

I missed like 20 in my last playtrough But I got the Little Rocket Man achievement(PAIN!).

A developer must be keenly aware that if you're going to reward an action, the action itself must be something you want to encourage. Underwater kills and random drops for TF2 sound like they have encouraged behavior that is counter to gameplay flow, and this is poor foresight on behalf of Valve.

It took me three attempts to crush all 333 little grubs. The first two times, I kept missing only three worms.
[BRAGBRAGBRAG]I have the full 1,000 completed for The Orange Box.[/] It is a really great set of games.

By the way, here is a list of games EA has shutdown.

Oh the memories. I even have screenshots in my travel with the little gnome. I remember when the barnacle tried to eat him! And also, damn you Valve for not allowing the car, or even Alyx to even hold him!