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Lets talk: why is trophies so damn broken...

J

jax (old)

Banned
so PS3 owners now have access to trophies ... which in theory is sort of cool BUT the implementation has been horrible in places - I can think of 2 major gripes I have with them which really soured my desire to get them. As is, I don't really care about achievements myself. Maybe HOME will make trophies implementation work on another level.


ISSUES

A) no BC trophies (eg. Burnout P + Uncharted). Seriously, the system can't read your save and say: hey you got these trophies? very very WTF

B) broken slow ass trophies loading. I don't know what sort of internet server hoodoo they used but I tried to look at some of my friends trophies but the damn thing just was SO fucking slow. I mean ass slow. And trophies was implemented 2 months ago? and the speed issues still aren't resolved. I don't get it. How much data can be in the packet you need to retrieve?
 
Jax said:
A) no BC trophies (eg. Burnout P + Uncharted). Seriously, the system can't read your save and say: hey you got these trophies? very very WTF
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That's been explained so many times....
 
and one more thing. With my US account, for some reason, trophies was SO janky broken that PJE wouldn't give me trophies that I had to use my aussie account... and it worked. And I'd played up to garden 8 in PJE too so I had to restart from scratch.

Amazingly annoyed at that one. Good thing I love the game
 
Jax said:
A) no BC trophies (eg. Burnout P + Uncharted). Seriously, the system can't read your save and say: hey you got these trophies? very very WTF
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While this does in fact suck, it is kind of understandable. I would be more pissed about the lack of standardization or requirement for all games to have them. The biggest first party PS3 title to date does not have them and many new games don't have them. I would be more pissed about that
 
MidiSurf said:
Please explain it one more time :D

And the loading times are fucking ridiculous.
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They're not bc because they are not tied to your account. You can for example download save games from someone else who completed the game but the system doesn't know whether you did or did not complete the game. That's the reason why games like burnout or uncharted required a fresh start.

And trophies indeed load a lot faster in 2.50 than before. They definately should load faster, but I expect futur fw updates to improve it even more.

I am an achievement whore, and I could care less about trophies.
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So you do care? I keeed :D
 
MidiSurf said:
Please explain it one more time :D

And the loading times are fucking ridiculous.
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More or less, the pre-trophies, the game saves of most games weren't locked to an account. Therefore, after the implementation of trophies, you could just share the saves with other ppl for those ppl to get the trophies without actually doing anything.

I think that was the case for most games. I forgot how Burnout did it, since I don't have the game.
 
Oh, I thought this was going to be a legitimate discussion about why the whole trophy/achievement concept is fundamentally broken.

A) no BC trophies (eg. Burnout P + Uncharted). Seriously, the system can't read your save and say: hey you got these trophies? very very WTF
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First of all, if the trophy didn't exist before, how do you know the data tracking required for it would have existed before?

Second, devs don't want trophies to be meaningless (lost cause, but anyway) as a result of players downloading any old savefile for the game from the Internets, so they require ID locked save files. Games like BoP and Uncharted didn't have that, so they don't get retroactive trophies.
 
Steroyd said:
To prevent trophy whores using cheat saves.
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you might have a point but in burnout paradis, you can't use someone elses save. Bet you didn't know that. In fact, even with Uncharted, if you copied a save over to someone elses id, it won't load them.

so the 2 games it happens to... it won't work anyhow.


so another reason please.
 
A) Since you can download savegames from GameFaqs, retroactive trophies would be pointless.

B) No speed problems here, granted it takes them a bit to load, but it's far from being "ass slow".
 
Jax said:
A) no BC trophies (eg. Burnout P + Uncharted). Seriously, the system can't read your save and say: hey you got these trophies? very very WTF
Click to expand...

Some games do have some BC trophies. Namely Warhawk... because it was tied to a non shareable save that tracked your central stats.

Other trophies cannot be BC because the game may not track that event (for example in Warhawk: Kill a Hawk with binoculars... its awarded when it happens...).

They said to prevent trophy padding and cheating through sharing saves most trophies will not be retroactive. For Burnout, they said they were retroactive, then they changed their mind, we dont know if it was because of the devs, or Sony...

In Uncharted, you can just get a save game from someone and get an instant Platinum, devaluing everyone else's hard earned Platinum trophy. And in both Burnout and Uncharted about 2 dozen hours of gaming will get your Platinum if you have previously played them and are good enough.

The rumor is that the trophy level will tie in somehow to a rewards system in Home at some point (get a Platinum in Uncharted, get a cool something or other for your apartment). So in order to keep it fair from the beginning, they made it non retroactive for games where you can share saves.

Makes perfect sense to me.

As to speed, they are vastly faster in 2.5 and I suppose they will get faster still as we go on.
 
It USED to be "ass slow" but the newest firmware drastically improved the trophy loading on all fronts.
It takes me 5 seconds to view my trophies, and about the same amount of time to compare (as opposed to 15 or so before).
 
A) Prevent cheating.

B) Check gaf PSN/XBL port forwarding threads. Its faster now with new firmware but they will take a bit no matter what however it shouldnt be aweful unless the servers are stressed.
 
Dre said:
A) Since you can download savegames from GameFaqs, retroactive trophies would be pointless.

B) No speed problems here, granted it takes them a bit to load, but it's far from being "ass slow".
Click to expand...

its ass slow. That's to check 1 persons trophies. move on to someone else and I'm left sitting there thinking WTF.. this is ... horrible.


Jax said:
you might have a point but in burnout paradis, you can't use someone elses save. Bet you didn't know that. In fact, even with Uncharted, if you copied a save over to someone elses id, it won't load them.

so the 2 games it happens to... it won't work anyhow.


so another reason please.
Click to expand...

I copied over my uncharted save/id to another PSNid on the same machine when I wanted to navigate all my games to the id that could have PJE trophies and uncharted did not load them.
 
Jax said:
so another reason please.
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How about the simple fact that these devs are patching games that have been out for a while for a feature that did not exist anywhere close to when they released their game. They're already going above and beyond the call of duty by enabling the feature in their games. Each of these developers no doubt are in the midst of development for their next game while still trying to offer support for their previous games. There's a balance that needs to be struck on how much effort they put into this kind of post-release support (esp. when the support is at no additional charge) and maybe enabling retroactive trophies isn't always going to make the cut.
 
Lets talk: why ARE trophies so damn broken...

Well it's just trophies... from 2009 on, trophies not being retroactive will be less and less an issue. I did restart a game for Burnout Paradise but hey that game is so good!
 
Mistouze said:
Lets talk: why ARE trophies so damn broken...

Well it's just trophies... from 2009 on, trophies not being retroactive will be less and less an issue. I did restart a game for Burnout Paradise but hey that game is so good!
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Yeah, I restarted BP myself! Got all the trophies except for the Platinum because I'm not going to go out and buy a PS Eye or USB webcam just for a trophy! D:
 
My biggest issue with trophies is that the scoring appears to be so... arbitrary.

How the fuck does the levelling up work?
 
McBradders said:
My biggest issue with trophies is that the scoring appears to be so... arbitrary.

How the fuck does the levelling up work?
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Im questioning this as well. how long will it take to reach level 100? lol
 
Jax said:
its ass slow. That's to check 1 persons trophies. move on to someone else and I'm left sitting there thinking WTF.. this is ... horrible.

I copied over my uncharted save/id to another PSNid on the same machine when I wanted to navigate all my games to the id that could have PJE trophies and uncharted did not load them.
Click to expand...
It's certainly not that slow for me, do you have 2.5?

Uncharted save copies for me.

The reason trophies aren't retrospective is because the gamesaves can be copied, and weren't locked to PSN. Including Burnout Paradise.

Burnout Paradise can't be copied from the traditional save file, but the PS3 harddrive can be cloned and put on any PS3.

Now saves are locked to your PSN account, people can trade gamesaves but the trophies won't be given on that gamesave.
 
Biggest issue is that there's no equivalent to Mygamercard.net, so there's no way for me to show the world how many things I've done in a game via rotating signature graphic.
 
The biggest problem with trophies is how it handles synchronization. It doesn't sync your data until you either compare to a friend or look at your own stuff. You simply can't count on it being up to date which comparing progress in games pretty useless.

Dunno if they changed how that works in 2.5, as they seemed to have improved the loading of comparisons a bit... but it's still slow as molasses.
 
McBradders said:
My biggest issue with trophies is that the scoring appears to be so... arbitrary.

How the fuck does the levelling up work?
Click to expand...
I think the levels scale, much like an RPG.

I.E., higher levels require more "experience" to level.

I'm at level 5, have been for quite some time... and bronzes are only counting for 1% now.

I have a friend on my list who's level 7, and he's 100%'d about 5 games, whereas I've only 100%'d one (Uncharted). So yah... I'm fairly sure it scales but I can't say for certain.
 
Draft said:
Biggest issue is that there's no equivalent to Mygamercard.net, so there's no way for me to show the world how many things I've done in a game via rotating signature graphic.
Click to expand...
I would say the biggest issue about trophies is that it is left optional to the developer. If they don't have to do anything extra, why bother, right? What this does is leave an inconsistency about trophies. Why bother to care about trophies when only half the games you play makes use of them? But it's Sony's policy not to force things like this, so...
 
Dark Octave said:
I would say the biggest issue about trophies is that it is left optional to the developer. If they don't have to do anything extra, why bother, right? But it's Sony's policy not to force things like this, so...
Click to expand...
Yeah, I agree. Should be mandatory. Don't know why it wouldn't be, since aside from getting the super platinum trophy for getting all other trophies, they are practically identical to achievements. It's probably Sony's fault for making them different at all. They should have just copied the whole XXXX/1000 point scheme, then devs could use the same exact code, and every PS3 game would know the awesomeness that is achievements/trophies.
 
Brandon F said:
I am an achievement whore, and I could care less about trophies.
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If you actually meant that you couldn't care less, I'd really like to hear why. It's the same damn thing, so how can you be such a huge fan of one and not be of other - unless you're basically admitting you're just biased and don't care about gaming on PS3 (which is fine, but this would not only be a weird way to make such a confession, but also kind of irrelevant to discussion).
 
They will be mandatory from a set date, you could hardly have asked developers to get them into their already in development/almost complete game without any cost incurred?
 
Dark Octave said:
I would say the biggest issue about trophies is that it is left optional to the developer. If they don't have to do anything extra, why bother, right? What this does is leave an inconsistency about trophies. Why bother to care about trophies when only half the games you play makes use of them? But it's Sony's policy not to force things like this, so...
Click to expand...
You couldn't be more wrong. Trophies MUST be in every game released 2009 onwards.

I agree with Draft though -- the biggest problem is there being no way to check your (or other people's) trophies on the web, or outside PSN in any form.
 
I think they are mandatory for all games that started development after the trophies were put in place.
 
No45 said:
They will be mandatory from a set date, you could hardly have asked developers to get them into their already in development/almost complete game without any cost incurred?
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Yeah, it's kind of silly to ask a dev to go back and retro-fit triphies into already released titles. Those who are willing to spend the resources on it, good for them, but I wouldn't make that mandatory. Future titles, I would though and I'm glad to hear that they will be.
 
A) Has been explains so many times. If you don't understand by now then you should have all your trophies taken away.

B) Get a better internet connection.
 
PuppetMaster said:
B) Get a better internet connection.
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I have symmetrical 10 Mbps fiber (FASTWEB) which is pretty decent for downloads and uploads and displaying Trophy data is still quite slow.
 
Panajev2001a said:
I have symmetrical 10 Mbps fiber (FASTWEB) which is pretty decent for downloads and uploads and displaying Trophy data is still quite slow.
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psstt... don't let them hear you tell the truth. I can grab data on my ADSL2+ line at up to 100kb/sec and its still slow as fuck.

apologists. :lol
 
Jax said:
psstt... don't let them hear you tell the truth. I can grab data on my ADSL2+ line at up to 100kb/sec and its still slow as fuck.

apologists. :lol
Click to expand...

Here in Japan I DL at 3MB a second. That's megabytes. And that's on a bad day.
 
Jonnyram said:
I agree with Draft though -- the biggest problem is there being no way to check your (or other people's) trophies on the web, or outside PSN in any form.
Click to expand...
20060619.jpg
 
PuppetMaster said:
Here in Japan I DL at 3MB a second. That's megabytes. And that's on a bad day.
Click to expand...

I am happy for you, but if you say that 10 Mbps for both upload and download is not enough to get your Profile ID card + Trophy information displayed with a very short delay I think you are mistaken and/or SCE's UI implementation is still far from being efficient.

Another thing, since you HAVE to sync your trophies' info with SCE's servers manually, your internet connection should only have something to do about this if you had to download trophy data to your system (example: you are checking a friend of yours' Trophy data) as the Trophy data resides/is cached on your system.
 
Revolutionary said:
I think the levels scale, much like an RPG.

I.E., higher levels require more "experience" to level.

I'm at level 5, have been for quite some time... and bronzes are only counting for 1% now.

I have a friend on my list who's level 7, and he's 100%'d about 5 games, whereas I've only 100%'d one (Uncharted). So yah... I'm fairly sure it scales but I can't say for certain.
Click to expand...

Yup, that seems dumb as hell.

Score > weirdy scaling nonsense.
 
Jax said:
psstt... don't let them hear you tell the truth. I can grab data on my ADSL2+ line at up to 100kb/sec and its still slow as fuck.

apologists. :lol
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Try to be a little more gracious here - a couple of people say they think it got faster under 2.5, one person asked you the definition of "ass slow" but in general no one has claimed that trophies update quickly. Who are these apologists?

Sorry, ONE person said get a better internet connection. And you turned it into apologists. PLURAL.
 
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