Achievement Whore: A Guide to True Achievements.
Rich
It’s been a while since I’ve written an Achievements Whore article. The reason is that since the last one, a site specialising in that kind of caper has come along and blown away all the competition. True Achievements is a rather clever site which pretty much encompasses every aspect of achievement hunting, making it my favourite one-stop shop for all things whorey. The site works on a clever premise. Instead of worrying about the gamerscore value of each achievement, True Achievements works out a ratio between the number of people playing the game and the number of people who have that achievement. This gives a value with the easiest achievements resulting in a 1:1 ratio. That is to say that 100% of people who have the game, and have registered on True Achievements, have that achievement.
The ratio gives a multiplier which then is multiplied by the original gamerscore to give an adjusted score (in TA rather than GS if you will). Having the original gamerscore in the calculation does skew things a little (achievements for Avatar are individually higher than achievements for Dead Rising) but with a little practice you’ll soon be mining enough information from the site to keep Naomi Campbell in whorish rocks for a lifetime.
99% of True Achievers have this achievement giving it a very low ratio. But at 302TA it scores higher than anything in CoD or Dead Rising.
Basic principles.
One unavoidably easy achievement is the Press Start achievement in The Simpsons. You get this achievement for simply starting the game. As True Achievements only start counting you as a player when you unlock your first achievement, this achievement has been nabbed by 100% of the people who on TA that have played it. That gives a 1:1 ratio. The achievement is worth 5GS which is multiplied by 1 (the TA multiplier) to give a score of 5TA.
One of the most difficult achievements out there is XXL on the game Fight Night Round 4. This achievement is one of those ‘be the best in the world’ ones where you have to be the number one player online in ranked matches. Out of 10,073 players on TA, only nine have this achievement giving it a ratio of 33.45 and a TA score of 2509 from an original 75GS. Pretty frightening but not as frightening as EA being stupid enough to pit their horrendous online community against each other like that. To put that all in perspective, that one achievement is worth more TA points than you’d get for maxing out EDF, Dead Rising or any of the Call of Duty games.
Getting this achievement involves being the very best in the world at GRAW. Being the very best in the world at GRAW involves being a terrifying twat.
Incurable whores will even check out TA before buying a game in order to ascertain the level of chore involved in maxing it (or in extreme cases, checking that the game’s achievements end in fives or zeroes), but there is much more that the site can do for you. Here’s PEOWW’s guide to getting the most out of TA.
Getting your whore on.
If you’re looking for cheap achievements, a good place to start is by clicking on ‘Games’ and then ordering the list by ratio or TA score by clicking on ratio, click the ordering button again to order it low to high. Scroll down to get past the games that have just one or two players on them (those are usually developers) until you get to the likes of Avatar and whatever filth Disney-Pixar have released recently.
Any game in the lower reaches of that list are perfect for crack-addict whoring with most of them being maxable (getting the initial 1000GS) within a day’s play. Any game that tops out at under 1200TA is ripe for a super easy max. Over that and you’ll be looking at a little effort for your max, usually a collectathon achievement or some rudimentary online bollocks.
Each game on TA includes a list of achievements, with most of them having a guide attached. These are submitted by members of the site and vary from idiots telling you what the achievement description says to classic works of whorish art like THIS. With a little effort, and a membership to a rental company, you can easily increase your gamerscore by 10,000GS
Getting stronger!
When games start hitting over 1300TA, you’re looking at some decent effort for your max. Horrible tricks include making you play a game twice (Wolverine which tops out at 1300TA exactly), winning more online matches than you’d care to or some kind of relentless grind-o-achievement.
If you’re happy to be a filthy, crackwhore about it all, then stay away from these games or just rinse the easy achievements. To find them, go into the game on TA and click the list button (see below) to list the achievements. Then order them by ratio. Anything under 2:1 is going to be a gimme.
The 'list' button (bottom right).
Those of you who like a little classiness on your gamercard will look to get games like this maxed. Again, check the achievement guides on each achievement and also the comments within. These often give extra hints. Also check the voting on each achievement guide but be aware that some people vote negatively just for fun because, you know, they are cunts.
The 2K Club.
If you want to really put a shine on your TA profile, you need to get serious and nab a few 2000+TA maxes. These always involve a mixture of skill and chore and are not easy to put down. Anything from Marvel: Ultimate Alliance to Ninja Blade can be in here. If you want to see what the main fly in the oitment is, order the achievements by ratio and look at the hardest ones. Here you’ll find the ‘complete the game on Bastard mode’ or ‘kill everyone ever’ type achievements. At this point you can expect the number of people who haven’t got the achievement to out-number those who have.
These are doable though. It’ll take persistence and maybe a few long days of online boost-o-chore, but you’ll get there eventually and you’ll have a nice little something for your trophy cabinet – more on that later.
Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
From 2500TA upwards, you’re looking at something bleak blocking your max attempts. From ranked match achievements that can’t be boosted to difficulty curves that resemble a typical Stoke pass, games with this kind of TA score often devolve into joyless experiences. They are doable but they are going to require the sort of dedication that makes playing other games more or less impossible for a while.
A favourite here is what I like to call the ‘stupid fucking achievement where a developer thinks that their piece of shit game will actually be played by anyone online’ achievement. These are pretty common in the mid 2K range on TA.
Ain’t nothing up there but dead folk.
Eventually the TA scores get high enough to suggest that something has gone horribly wrong. An unachievable achievement will score 0 on the site so that’s not the problem. These really high scores either indicate that the achievement was once gettable (like old EA games that no longer have online servers) or that it’s just really, really fucking difficult. If you pick up a game with a TA score over 3500, the odds are you won’t be maxing it.
The piss on your chips.
The ‘all achievements’ list on TA is only available if you register on the site (you should do that anyway) but it allows you to see all the hardest achievements. These vary from getting thousands of online wins on Armoured Core For Answer, perfect runs through the harmless-sounding Hail To The Chimp, being the best player in the world at Fight Night Round 4, Kane and Lynch and GRAW and a host of secret achievements on Lost Planet 2 which sound like you need autistic super powers to get.
The hardest full-retail maxes on True Achievements. These games are effectively broken (I still want Deathsmiles to get a proper release in the UK though). Spiderman's high ratios are due to it being a new game. Expect it to drop super quickly.
Screw you, Clyde.
Aside from nabbing maxes and avoiding high TA titles, the site also is very useful if you’ve got any ghosts pestering you. A ghost occurs when you pick up a game, for example Call of Duty 3, and realise you hate its fucking guts. If you’re lucky, you won’t have scored any achievements and you can delete your game history but if you accidently snagged 10GS before binning that piece of shit, then you’ve got 10/1000 cluttering up your card. That right there is a gamercard ghost.
TA can help you identify the easiest achievements (list them by clicking the button as shown previously and then click ‘ratio’ at the top of the list to order by ratio) and then you can polish these off in a few hours, turning a ten point ghost into three hundred points of respectability. I’ve used this technique a few times to quickly exorcise a ghost but I’m not ever going back to Wartech or Lego Bionicle no matter how easy the achievements are because they are irredeemably awful.
The easiest achievements in Prototype. If I ever decide to de-ghost this fucking shoddy Crackdown rip-off, this will guide me.
He did not kill you because you weren’t armed.
One nifty feature of True Achievements is the Trophy Cabinet. Here you can put in your hardest-earned achievements in order to show off like the whore you are. But did you know that you can also include entire maxed games as well? Go to your game list, click on the game you want to show off and there’s a button in the top-left to add the whole game to your trophy cabinet.
Whores will have their trinkets.
Statistical quirk-oh list.
Scouring the huge archive of data that makes up True Achievements reveals some fairly odd quirks and anomalies. Here’s some of my favourites;
2134 number of people have 5 Day Survivor on Dead Rising but only 1856 have 7 Day Survivor. That’s quite a few really pissed off people.
301 people fell just short of maxing out Avatar (despite there being absolutely no difficulty involved).
Despite being a fairly innocuous family horror title, Monster Madness has never been maxed thanks to a combination of fucking horrible achievements and some glitched ones.
Stallion83, the legendary reigning champ of True Achievements, has maxed out Blood In The Sand. Twice.
The Wave 100 achievement on Robotron: 2084 is the hardest XBLA achievement out there. Only 28 people have ever achieved it. Start building bunkers before the rest of their species arrives.
So there you have it, everything you need to get your Paris Hilton on. Get onto TA, register yourself and bookmark your profile page. If you really like it then you might want to donate which will give you faster achievement scanners, meaning your conquests will appear on the site a lot faster. Bonus. Add to this nifty little automated announcements when you hit GS and TA milestones – as well as a running total of your maxed games – and you can’t really go wrong.