Coffee Talk #382: Achievements, Trophies, and Gaming Habits

Achievements and trophies have added a new twist to gaming. These kinds of rewards are arguably the biggest change this console generation has introduced. For the most part, gamers seem to love them. It’s fun getting a…

Welcome to Coffee Talk! Let’s start off the day by discussing whatever is on your (nerd chic) mind. Every morning I’ll kick off a discussion and I’m counting on you to participate in it. If you’re not feelin’ my topic, feel free to start a chat with your fellow readers and see where it takes you. Whether you’re talking about videogames, Amazon’s HTML5 iPad Kindle site, traveling to Utah to break office windows, or the Wisconsin recall, Coffee Talk is the place to do it.

Achievements and trophies have added a new twist to gaming. These kinds of rewards are arguably the biggest change this console generation has introduced. For the most part, gamers seem to love them. It’s fun getting a virtual pat on the back during the game. It’s fun getting meaningless points for the sake of having them. Achievements and trophies add a layer of permanent fulfillment that complements the satisfaction of clearing a level or beating a game.

That said, they’ve also changed the way many of us play games. I’m not much of an achievement whore, but I have a lot of friends that are. Some of my friends will keep playing a game after they’ve beaten it just to get all the achievements or trophies. On one hand, they’re getting more value out of a game. On the other hand, they’re not particularly enjoying it; they’re just obsessed with the virtual rewards. A lot of my friend endure mediocre or crap games just to get some extra trophies.

Compared to previous console generations, I play more games well after I’ve beaten them thanks to achievements. I’ve also kept with mediocre games for longer than I should have because of trophies. Have these rewards changed your gaming habits? Do you play longer than you used to because of them? Have you beaten crappy games just to boost your gamerscore? Have any of you pulled a Ted Regulski (beat all those crappy Burger King Xbox 360 games just for achievements)?!?

Thanks to bsukenyan for inspiring today’s column with this comment!

Author: RPadTV

https://rpad.tv

21 thoughts on “Coffee Talk #382: Achievements, Trophies, and Gaming Habits”

  1. I play and enjoys games first. After I beat it I'll look at the trophy list to see if it's feasible to go for the platinum. If so I'll go for it. I've become a trophy whore myself. BUT, I only platinum games that I like. I have 21 platinum trophies all from games that I enjoyed. I refuse to play a bad game to boost my trophy count like many others. However, I hate online trophies. I think online trophies should not count towards the platinum trophy. Games nowadays tack on a bad multi player component and add online trophies that require an insane amount of grinding or boosting and they do this just to get people to play their bad multi player portion.

    Oh how I love that BLING sound when you unlock a trophy.

      1. Yeah I agree with that too, the games with bad online multiplayers aspects are annoying. Right now I hate how CoD: Black Ops has achievements for the zombie mode. I preferred Infinity Ward's method of beating the game on veteran and finding the intelligence reports for the full 1000G.

  2. I am an achievement whore to a certain degree. I will not play a crappy game just for some points, however I will play a game to get the achievements I know that I can get. I will not let myself go crazy over one like, lets say, the "Something to Prove" and "Still Something to Prove" achievements for L4D & L4D2. If your not familiar with the achievements you have to beat every campaign on expert and to me, that is NOT fun and not worth it.

    I also hate online achievements, I don't like playing most games online and would rather talk to you online, while I am working for an achievement for AC:BH.

    1. I agree that the "beat the game on the hardest level" trophy is more frustrating than fun but the difference in achievements and trophies is that you get a platinum trophy for completing all the trophies verses just more achievement points. When you are on "beat the game on the hardest level" trophy away from the platinum then I just can't help myself. The trophy system is a tiered system in which higher trophies have more weight than the lower level ones. For example, a lot of people on my friends list have more trophies than me but my trophy level is higher because I have 21 platinums verses their many more bronze trophies than me.

      1. Ohhhh I see, if I had a PS3 it would be a wrap for me lol. It almost seems like the trophy system is a "game" within itself .

      2. Yeah PS3 has an interesting trophy system, but I do prefer the gamerscore method. To each their own, I have a friend who can't stand gamerscore but loves getting trophies.

  3. I have a lot of trophies, but its just that I play LOTS of games. Actually I think I play just about every game.

    While playing a game I will stop once or twice to see what trophies are available, I won't go very far out of my way to get trophy. I get 90% of my trophies from a normal run through. The others are ones that sound interesting enough to get like 5 guys with one grenade or 3 guys with one bullet.

    I have 1 platinum trophy and that is from a Sega Collection just because I played every game on it. A lot of my games don't have many trophies because they didn't start the trophy system until after I had played through them like FALLOUT 3.

    I only have 1 friend on PSN that has a higher score than me, but for the life of me I can't recall his name……yep clueless. lol

    1. Here's a few clues:

      He's a PS3 only owner.
      He lives in Atlanta.
      He loves the Falcons.
      He loves pro wrestling.

  4. @ All

    I need 2 more people for fantasy football. We are using Yahoo and the SCORING SYSTEM this year is NORMAL. First come first serve, drop me an email @ bbjbbj12@gmail.com or leave a reply with your email.

  5. I am a participator on both ends of the spectrum when it comes getting achievements. I've played games most people wouldn't have and got gamerscore for it, and I've also gotten tired of games enough to stop caring about the gamerscore (or people have played games on my account and left 100/1000 gamerscore on a game I won't play). Also, I couldn't get into FarCry 2 as much as I wanted to, but I did get the initial 10G achievement which just sits there on my total.

    I have played Avatar: The Last Avatar: The Burning Earth. I loved watching the series on netflix and I actually played some of the game—but my original purpose for getting it was to get the 1000G in all of 2 minutes. Other games I get and try for some of the achievements but get bored with them, so I move on and the games are left with a low gamerscore total. Halo Wars is one of those games. The problem with games in this category is that I have a hard time selling them or trading them for a game I would probably play, even though it's getting close to a year since the last time I played Halo Wars or GTA4.

    Other games that I have completed and were fun have made me stay away from the sequels, for better or worse I'm not sure. I completed Dirt and had a lot of fun doing it. When Dirt 2 came out though I didn't touch it because I didn't want to play more levels on a similar game type that I had just finished playing repetitively because I couldn't stop at 940/1000G. I'm sure plenty of people have enjoyed Dirt 2 and 3 but I feel like I would want to complete both of those games too, but I know it wouldn't be as fun of an experience so I avoid them altogether.

    There are some games that are much more fun because of the gamerscore. I love L4D(2) and would love more DLC or L4D3, but the achievements (barring the ones @Big Blak mentioned above) are so much fun that they can keep the game exciting far after the 50th playthrough of No Mercy. I also appreciated how Infinity Ward handled the achievements on CoD (up until MW2, I didn't care for about 1/3 of those achievements). I think gamerscore, trophies, and achievements are a lot of fun; there is just a huge downside when the CDO (ocd in it's proper alphabetic order) inside of someone gets the better of them.

    I won't really bash gamerscore though, as some people might. Gamerscore and trophies is, in my eyes, the natural progression of the gaming industry from the days of arcades. There had to be an original point, which in the most basic games was the high score. My mom has no concept of why I would want to get an achievement, but she will retell stories of how her and my uncle would write their Space Invader score on a sheet of paper and post it on the other's bedroom door when they had beaten the family high score. It's all about bragging rights, that's always what it has been about. Story and graphics came later in the world of gaming, so to say achievements and trophies have ruined gaming would be speaking ill of the roots of gaming and high scores on arcade machines.

    1. There is more DLC on the way. I've been beta testing some of the maps on steam when I can. Hopefully console players get the L4D1 remakes for L4D2. No Mercy is still the best map ever :)

  6. Achievement/trophies make me feel a little better about game saves. I have this thing where I view my games saves as a record of my life and having achievements along with them helps give me a sense of self-gratification when looking back on games. Game saves are very sacred to me and I don't like losing any of them. Unfortunately life isn't that kind. (or my brothers growing up)

  7. I like the idea of putting game saves on "of site storage." If they take care of their hardware, I should never have to worry about losing my saves which is a big plus to me. I don't feel the need to hold onto things physically as long as I know it is safe. Like with digital copies of games, I'm happy as long as I don't have to worry about access to it. If it gets deleted, I can redownload it. If it gets stolen, I can get it back. Same goes with steam cloud and other cloud saves. It is always there when I need it, even if I'm playing on different hardware, and it can't get deleted by anyone but me, even accidentally.

    1. That seems about right considering it's been a while since he hit 500,000. I knew it was way too soon for 1,000,000. I always want to know what he does for a living that allows him to play for as long as he does. His closest competitor was always trailing by about 80,000 behind him.

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