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Sony's outdated Trophy policies are affecting achievement parity with other platforms
- Thread starter Andrefpvs
- Start date
Rain City Gamer
Member
This is outrageous! I am never playing another Playstation game again until this is rectified.
Sarcasm
Andrefpvs
Member
You're a charmer.
It's already been explained that my assumption was based on FuturLab's posts about Velocity, and that according to Chubigans it has changed recently.
Or 15 seconds. Someone should look up the actual statistics though. The real PSN server trophy rarity is usually a lot lower because PSNProfiles is already for people who are collecting trophies.
Lumines is older than Velocity 2X/Ultra.
StrongBlackVine
Banned
Very much so.
Robot Pants
Member
I will say it is EXTREMELY dumb to not have a Platinum trophy for small digital games like journey and flow.
Essentially a platinum is just a trophy saying you've gotten all the trophies. So what's the big deal with adding that to the small games?
I think that's pretty stupid. The rest I don't care about.
Essentially a platinum is just a trophy saying you've gotten all the trophies. So what's the big deal with adding that to the small games?
I think that's pretty stupid. The rest I don't care about.
Andrefpvs
Member
I didn't know about the Lumines case. How do you explain FuturLab's post, then?
i just think the authoritative tone of your op and the immediate correction of your assumptions is pretty funny
Andrefpvs
Member
lol, it kinda is. But as long as I'm presented with evidence, I have no problem rectifying my stance on things. Especially since my previous stance was based on evidence as well, not something I made up.
Agreed - the OP needs to make the edits clear and at the top of his post as its a long one and I doubt most will read the corrections...
ps3ud0 8)
Andrefpvs
Member
Good suggestion, will do that.
After reading the edit in OP, this seems to be the case.
They were Sony-funded for some games, it might have an impact. It is probably why it was Sony people making the case instead of them, those guys are actually their producers. Just like for instance Digital Eclipse can't say they want a Platinum if Capcom doesn't want to pay for testing those trophies. If you want the most correct answer, ask them.
They were possibly thanking the Cert team for not failing the game on a trophy check.
It's not up to Sony.
chronic_archaic
Member
I was sorta pissed to see Touch My Katamari and Lumines Electronic Symphony on PS Vita have 12 achievements each and no platinum. Particular the later, I would probably try for the plat if it fucking had one. Both retail Vita releases.
SatelliteOfLove
Member
Still can't render their generation non-existant, sadly so they're equal to everyone else.
Trogdor1123
Gold Member
Exactly, they really are not something to get worked up over. Not that you guys are, im just saying I wouldnt worry about stuff like that considering the other issues happening with Sony.
I guess for me the sense of accomplishment comes from the actual task rather than the gold star that comes with it. I can see how people would feel that way though.
That being said, I do not like the way platinums are only on certain games... that really bugs me for some silly reason lol. Yes, im a hypocrite.
Love the pic btw lol.
EchoChamber
Member
I thought people didn't like parity?
You join a session that is up to level 11/12 or something like that. Join them which will unlock all skill points you would have gathered until that point/unlocks all earlier levels. All Trophies involve specific levels and specific skills like stacking five boxes. There is nothing like a finish the game trophy.
drotahorror
Member
If you're talking about the PS4 version...Goodluck doing it less than 20 hours. It's actually a really hard platinum.
I didn't realize there was an internal policy to begin with.
So it is up to the devs after all?
Anyway, I rather have less trophies(bronze/silver), and add more value to gold, or less of everything but 2-3 platinum instead.
I don't know, it is annoying to see so many useless number.
800 bronze...hurray?
The worse part is when some game fricken automatically saves your achievement/trophy in the gallery so you can share and never miss the moment when you got it.
Probably a share option I bet...I need to look more into it but wow, it is eating away my HD space.
So it is up to the devs after all?
Anyway, I rather have less trophies(bronze/silver), and add more value to gold, or less of everything but 2-3 platinum instead.
I don't know, it is annoying to see so many useless number.
800 bronze...hurray?
The worse part is when some game fricken automatically saves your achievement/trophy in the gallery so you can share and never miss the moment when you got it.
Probably a share option I bet...I need to look more into it but wow, it is eating away my HD space.
Kagoshima_Luke
Gold Member
It's crazy that you can't disable auto trophy screenshots.
drotahorror
Member
Arent screenshots like 200KB? Maybe 500 at the most. Doubt they're using that much space. You can delete them.
Brah, just think about it.
The next Tales of series and Persona game will have 300 trophies together. JRPG loves their stupid trophy for every one skill you leveled up metric.
Now, you have to browse through 300 pictures to find one picture that you actually did save to upload it for actual sharing with your friends.
And the more games you play, thousands of pictures will be added, eating away HD space and your time to find/delete.
Mr. Giggles
Member
Achievement parity???
I wasn't aware that people compare this stuff across platforms. what's the gamer score (XB) conversion rate to gamer level (PS)
I get a bit of where you're coming from though OP, It felt weird to me how they assigned trophies
I wasn't aware that people compare this stuff across platforms. what's the gamer score (XB) conversion rate to gamer level (PS)
I get a bit of where you're coming from though OP, It felt weird to me how they assigned trophies
I always thought you needed around 40-50 trophies or a certain amount of trophy points to merit a platinum. I do believe that it is in the best interest of the developers to have enough points for a platinum, as it will attract more people to buy the game. The trophyguide scene is pretty huge.
Look for example what the developers did with the game Spare Parts to get their platinum. It was a very short game with only 12 trophies, but they were 10 gold trophies and 2 silver and somehow that gave them enough points for platinum. Pretty smart, but I've never seen something similar done with later games so maybe Sony made some rules against it.
The Walking Dead season 1 (PS3) had a platinum, because they added all the trophies for every episode when the first episode was released, but for The Walking Dead season 2 (PS3) they only had trophies for the first episode and then released new trophies each time the next episode was out. Since it's impossible to update the trophy list for the main game after release, all the next episodes got categorized as DLC, thus omitting the platinum for that game despite it being the same length as season 1. With only 1 episode you have around 8 trophies (not enough for platinum), but with all five combined you get 40 (enough for platinum).
I believe it's up to the developer to fill the game with enough content to meet the criteria for platinum. Probably trophies have to meet a certain requirement before they get approved or else they would be completely exploited by bullshit trophies just so developers could cheese the system to get an easy platinum for their game. What's needed is just some effort and inventiveness from the developers themselves if they want a platinum for their short game. Many are finding clever ways to meet the criteria, I've already seen several short games you can platinum in mere hours.
It's like Coke and Pepsi, man.
Gordon Shumway
Banned
PeakPointMatrix
Member
Someone should tweet this thread to Boyes and Yosh.
Who gives a shit about your drive by post? How about you click on threads that actually interest you?
Thanks for further confirmation.
Tweet them what?
To have them force devs to put Plats in their games?
-Pyromaniac-
Member
I agree that it's a weird problem but I still think trophies are the best points/achievement system by far.
get2sammyb
Member
Here's what I've been told about this: the rule, as I understand it, used to be that your game had to have some kind of story in order to be eligible for a Platinum Trophy. I'm sure there are examples where this is not true, but that's what I was told.
The people I've spoken to, however, stressed that this is no longer the case, and any game can have a Platinum Trophy.
I do generally agree with the OP, though. I think some developers aren't even aware they can have a Platinum Trophy in their game. I know Sony wants to maintain the sanctity of the system, and that's fine - but they really should just enforce every game to have a Platinum from now on.
Also, developers should be allowed to add Trophies whenever they release DLC. I read that The Pinball Arcade was prevented from adding more Trophies for subsequent tables, while DriveClub has like 122 Trophies. If you're buying extra content -- or even if it's free -- the developer should be allowed to add Trophies regardless.
While I'm sure there are some sort of guidelines in place, I do generally agree with the sentiment that it feels like things are being made up on the spot.
The people I've spoken to, however, stressed that this is no longer the case, and any game can have a Platinum Trophy.
I do generally agree with the OP, though. I think some developers aren't even aware they can have a Platinum Trophy in their game. I know Sony wants to maintain the sanctity of the system, and that's fine - but they really should just enforce every game to have a Platinum from now on.
Also, developers should be allowed to add Trophies whenever they release DLC. I read that The Pinball Arcade was prevented from adding more Trophies for subsequent tables, while DriveClub has like 122 Trophies. If you're buying extra content -- or even if it's free -- the developer should be allowed to add Trophies regardless.
While I'm sure there are some sort of guidelines in place, I do generally agree with the sentiment that it feels like things are being made up on the spot.
Andrefpvs
Member
Thanks for the input!
If devs really don't know then I hope Sony make this information more widely accessible within the DevNet. It's kind of a shame that some games end up shipping with 21 bronze trophies, when they could have easily had the Platinum.
Can you just learn to read, damn this is beyond obnoxious.
Moosehole
Member
For me it's less about "parity with Xbox" and more about disliking the smaller trophy lists with no platinums since trophies were first introduced.
I enjoy getting trophies so for me it is always a good thing to have more to go after in any given game.
Sword Of Doom
Member
Yeah this confuses me. I'm hearing from small developers that Somy doesn't allow platinum trophies for their games but then there are lots of "smaller" $15-20 games that do have platinum trophies. I don't understand what's going on
Seems to be the case. Lots of small games have platinums. N++, bastion, resogun, hotline Miami, shovel knight, axiom verge, and transistor come to mind
Megatron
Member
Yep, you don't even have to beat the game.you get the last trophy well before the last level.
Megatron
Member
Eh, if it's really a dev ignorance issue,that will work itself out. Gamers will make them aware. Sony doesn't need to get involved.
Me too. I like that they have around 50 trophies max for each game and a set of rules in place to make it orderly and consistent. On Steam it's absolutely ridiculous. You have games with hundreds of achievements where the developers are free to add new ones or delete achievements at their leisure. They can even put in achievements only achievable by people who supported their kickstarter or pre-ordered the game thus making it unwinnable for anyone else... which is really annoying for completionist seeing that one missing achievement lost forever just because they didn't buy the game pre-ordered. There is hardly any QA involved, too, so a lot of games will have broken achievement impossible to obtain unless the developers go in and personally fix it, which is something they never will in most cases. Some achievements are just absurd like play that game for 1 year. I've literally had people on my friend list having a game alt-tabbed for over 8000 hours just to complete such an achievement. It's pure anarchy and a nightmare for completionists
I wasn't unaware of that. That's unfortunate, Sony should make that a standard feature.
Gold, silver and bronze trophies all have different values. For a game to have a platinum, it usually requires 1230 "points" - though as Joni mentioned earlier, some games get away with as low as 1100 points. Each trophy has a different weight assigned to it; off the top of my head bronze are worth 15 points, silver are worth 30, gold are worth 90 and platinum is worth 180. Spare Parts trophies are worth enough points, because it's mostly comprised of gold and silver. Other games that do this include Terminator Salvation and Scourge: Outbreak. Small lists, but heavy on gold trophies.
As has been mentioned in this thread, there's more to actually adding a platinum trophy to your game, but that's the reason why Spare Parts has a platinum despite the small trophy list.
sui generis
Banned
I think achievements and trophies need to mean more. Like how xbox one gives you wallpaper. But more. Discounts and whatnot.
chrominance
Member
To be honest, I don't really care very much about th--nowaitWAIT I have an actual reason to be in this thread!
Platinum trophies in themselves are odd to me. On the one hand, I like how you can use them as easy ways of saying you've achieved all there is to achieve in a game (setting aside for the moment that often this isn't technically true). You can look at your Platinum trophy count and know exactly what that means. On the other hand, it's not like you couldn't also point to the number of 1000/1000 games you have on Xbox Live, or the number of 100% games on Steam. You can even have the number of Perfect Games show up on your profile.
The OP spends a lot of time on how the number of achievements and their individual worth is not up to par with Xbox Live. I understand the criticism, but to me it doesn't really matter because we're talking about an arbitrary number of slices of an arbitrarily sized pie of "gamer points" or what have you. The problem is that by giving people an artificial aggregate of their total achievements or trophies (Xbox has its gamerscore, PSN has its leveling system), both services require that achievement standards be maintained to an extent across all its games. Thus a small game can't be seen as "equal" to a large game, but the split between "small" and "large" is too simplistic.
So while on some level I think I actually agree with the OP, in that the way the Xbox One handles achievements is better, on the other hand my solution would be more drastic and in the opposite direction. Instead of trying to make sure every game meets some arbitrary level of "achievement points," just throw away the concept altogether like Steam has. All there is is the number of achievements you have. No one achievement is "worth" any more than the others, and no game has to have a minimum or maximum number of them.
Yes, it means you can't have an Xbox gamerscore anymore, but honestly, who cares? The single biggest innovation to achievements I've seen in the last few years is showing the relative rarity of an achievement. That's the only achievement metric I care about and it's the only real metric Steam highlights besides # of achievements and # of perfect games. PSN moving to show trophy rarity is fantastic, and I'd much rather have that sort of thing rolled out across all platforms than hand-wringing over more games getting platinum trophies.
Platinum trophies in themselves are odd to me. On the one hand, I like how you can use them as easy ways of saying you've achieved all there is to achieve in a game (setting aside for the moment that often this isn't technically true). You can look at your Platinum trophy count and know exactly what that means. On the other hand, it's not like you couldn't also point to the number of 1000/1000 games you have on Xbox Live, or the number of 100% games on Steam. You can even have the number of Perfect Games show up on your profile.
The OP spends a lot of time on how the number of achievements and their individual worth is not up to par with Xbox Live. I understand the criticism, but to me it doesn't really matter because we're talking about an arbitrary number of slices of an arbitrarily sized pie of "gamer points" or what have you. The problem is that by giving people an artificial aggregate of their total achievements or trophies (Xbox has its gamerscore, PSN has its leveling system), both services require that achievement standards be maintained to an extent across all its games. Thus a small game can't be seen as "equal" to a large game, but the split between "small" and "large" is too simplistic.
So while on some level I think I actually agree with the OP, in that the way the Xbox One handles achievements is better, on the other hand my solution would be more drastic and in the opposite direction. Instead of trying to make sure every game meets some arbitrary level of "achievement points," just throw away the concept altogether like Steam has. All there is is the number of achievements you have. No one achievement is "worth" any more than the others, and no game has to have a minimum or maximum number of them.
Yes, it means you can't have an Xbox gamerscore anymore, but honestly, who cares? The single biggest innovation to achievements I've seen in the last few years is showing the relative rarity of an achievement. That's the only achievement metric I care about and it's the only real metric Steam highlights besides # of achievements and # of perfect games. PSN moving to show trophy rarity is fantastic, and I'd much rather have that sort of thing rolled out across all platforms than hand-wringing over more games getting platinum trophies.
Thanks for the post OP, I was always confused about what games got a platinum and which ones didn't. A game like Fez which is a ridiculously hard challenge doesn't have a platinum but a game like Game of Thrones does and all you have to do is click a few buttons and commit 10 hours.
And for the people that still don't get it, trophies/achievements when done well can provide an extra challenge to a game. If I enjoy a game enough I'm more than happy to replay it and while I'm doing that it's fun to try and complete some of the challenges. See Destiny "Flawless Raider" trophy which is incredibly difficult to get and adds a whole extra challenge to the game. Or games that put skill tree limits, time limits, etc as trophies. It's stuff we were doing long before trophies and now the developers can challenge us further than the normal crowd.
And for the people that still don't get it, trophies/achievements when done well can provide an extra challenge to a game. If I enjoy a game enough I'm more than happy to replay it and while I'm doing that it's fun to try and complete some of the challenges. See Destiny "Flawless Raider" trophy which is incredibly difficult to get and adds a whole extra challenge to the game. Or games that put skill tree limits, time limits, etc as trophies. It's stuff we were doing long before trophies and now the developers can challenge us further than the normal crowd.
orthodoxy1095
Banned
I don't think discounts necessarily are feasible or worthwhile to implement. But adding things like themes or such might be an interesting way to give an actual reward to Plats. But that's a different discussion