My friend and I just finished the Saints Row reboot, and while the game isn’t on the level of 2 or 4, it certainly isn’t a horrible game. There were a few glitches and the sound design was absolutely awful, but the dialogue was fine, the characters were unique enough. The gameplay, while not as polished as a GTA, is a lot more chaotic and fun to me. Where GTA moved toward realism, which I find boring(though it has it’s time), Saints Row(even since the original) has always felt more of a parody of the crime sandbox than a serious attempt at it, and that’s why I gravitated toward it.
The series has always taken a turn toward Arcade-y mechanics, and I much prefer that. In San Andreas, you did a mission where you stole a tub of green goo from a moving train, and your reward was a dang Jetpack to fly around using, as well as Dildo bats and Planes! GTA IV removed all of that stuff, turning toward (IMO) a boring “real” adventure in a city.
Saints Row had you playing Insurance Fraud, covering buildings with shit. Running around using a version of Mjolnir from the LARP Missions to wreck the Final Boss, a gun that fires a weight that can launch you into the air where you can use your wingsuit? These are enjoyable gameplay twists, exactly what I want from games.
I know I’m getting old and am no longer the target for games, but the amount of people who hate(d) this game boggles my mind.
Update
I haven’t been gaming much for myself lately. Most of my time has been spent doing Walkthroughs. I still have a long Walkthrough I was working on for a now-delisted game which isn’t much of a priority. I also have my Danganronpa 2 Walkthrough in progress, but I’ve been doing a lot of smaller Walkthroughs and outlines.
I’ve been renting some games from GameFly to save me money, most of the 3-4 hour movie tie-ins or kids games, such as the Grinch Christmas Adventure and Gigantosaurus Dino Kart, and those titles don’t compel me to make full Videos, so I haven’t.
However, I have recently been going back and finishing TUs for some games that I hadn’t played, and getting those to 5000G means I’m going to make Walkthroughs for them.
The idea behind it is that EVERYONE is making Walkthroughs for the individual TUs as they come out, but there are tons of people getting into hunting that are going to be looking to get through the game from a fresh start, and the millions of TU Walkthroughs can be really confusing to piece together. That’s where I’ve started making 5000G Walkthrough videos. I won’t be doing all of them, as some of them aren’t worth it.
Escape First 3
My friend and I love Escape titles. We’ve played a ton of them, the We Were Here games being our favorites, but we also enjoyed Escape Academy.
We played one of these Escape First titles, and the logic never added up for us, so we stopped. Now, I play them specifically for the Achievements, but they’re not as well put together in my view.
The achievements for these aren’t any different from the others, so I’m not going to bother with them, but I wish the solutions were a little more logic based. A lot of them feel like assets thrown together with puzzles trying to code them together, whereas the other puzzle games feel like the puzzles were created first. That may not be true, but that’s what I’ve felt playing them.
Trenches
Not a whole lot to say about this one. Its hard not to look at a game with Achievements like these and wonder if it isn’t trivializing things a bit too much. If it wasn’t for the disclaimer at the beginning of the game, I wouldn’t even know what the game was just by going through for the Achievements, and those are the type of lists I don’t enjoy. At least make me play through the entire game to get the Achievements.
It’s a serious story with silly jump-scares and models. The scariest thing is the blinding spotlight that shines in your face if you look up. Achievements took less than 30 minutes.
My 2000th Xbox Game
I’ve been keeping an eye on those nice, round Milestones using TA, and having played through both versions of FOXES NEED TO EAT, I realized I had hit 1,999 games played in the MS ecosystem. That includes Windows, Windows phone, Xbox 360/One/Series and the other platforms MineCraft went to, like Gear VR, Switch, Fire Tablet, etc.
My first thought was to start something cool, but I when I went through some of the TA competitions over the holidays, I ended up starting a lot of the games I had intended to play but never had. Tunic, Starfield, Wrestlequest, Cassette Beasts, etc. Obviously there are more, but I then had to figure out what game would be my 2000th.
Final Fantasy VIII Remastered
I was a Nintendo child growing up. I actually hated the OG Xbox because the controller sucked(IMO), and never owned a Sony console until late in the PS2 life cycle because I was too young to afford my own stuff then. While Super Mario RPG was a Square title and is one of my Top 5 games of all-time, when Square left to Sony, I was left out. I believe the GBA/DS had iterations of the first 5 or 6 FF games, and that’s where I began to play them, but I had never touched FF as a series, and it made me feel left behind(side note: I’m excited for the Tomb Raider Remastered collection because I never played the originals).
A few years ago I went through FF VII using the remastered version, and using my 2000th game on VIII seemed like as good a choice as any.
Here’s to another 2000!
Mystic Fate
This…had an interesting idea, but I’m not sure the physics engine is capable of handling it. The game gives you a coin that you attack things with and sticks to walls, and if the coin gets behind a wall and you try to pull it back, it brings you forward like a hookshot. The problems I had with it were that the aiming was too inconsistent(making a few frenetic spots more difficult) and sometimes the coins/swords you get just ignore the walls and get stuck somewhere else or disappear. To counter this, the game does give you these items back if you return near a checkpoint, which are fairly common, but there are plenty of spot where the collision not working will likely get you killed.
I’m not creating a Walkthrough for it, but I did want to share my thoughts. It has an interesting premise at its core, but that’s about it. Will likely take less than 2 hours to complete if you follow a guide, and there are quite a few miscellaneous Achievements, so best to look for a Guide somewhere for those. The final level unlocks a light that exposes secrets, and that hides quite a few things that you’d likely never see otherwise.
Pets No More
Quick thoughts. Basically pong or air hockey, but there’s no challenge to it except for the opponents to have more players than you. The fish level and the final level are the only difficult ones, because in these two levels, each round you win adds another opponent with your win(after one win, they now have two enemies, after two wins, they’ll have 3, with one usually guarding their goal, the other levels don’t do this). Inputs are choppy, the dash seemed useless, and if you press the punch button and get hit before you can punch, you will then punch after the second you are stunned, which is a HORRIBLE idea. If you’re wondering why your character isn’t moving, it’s likely because of that ‘feature’.
The Achievements unlock for playing through game, for winning a round that goes into sudden death(0-0 when time hits 0), for winning a round 3-0 and for winning an entire match winning 3-0 in the all 3 rounds, and for scoring a goal with a Special Move(which is programmed stupidly and sucks).
Sudden Death is self-explanatory, but for the 3-0 ones, use the fourth level(the Cat enemy). This level has a bottleneck in the middle that leads to two goals on either side. I won 3-0 all 3 rounds I played on my first try just by guarding the bottleneck. If you let in a goal or only score twice in a round, don’t fret, as you can replay levels after you beat them, so if you want to go back to it, you can. The other level this would be easiest on is the first, if the fourth isn’t working for you.
For the Special Move goal, the special move only hits the puck if you’re near it(similar to punching it with B), and it seemingly doesn’t count for the Achievement if it hits anything, but it also might count? I did it a few times where it hit the enemy and didn’t count, but I recorded the time the Achievement popped and it did hit my opponent before going in, so I honestly don’t know. Which means it can take a LONG time for this to work in your favor. It took me around 6 or 7 extra matches(not rounds, entire matches) to get this to unlock. Its a pain, but there isn’t an easy solution. What I did is play the first level. I’d start each round punching at the enemy until my Special filled, then I’d work on destroying 5 or 6(all) of the blocks guarding my enemy’s goal(if I left one, it’d be one of the edges). Once I got rid of the blocks, I tried to use my Special Move quickly to give myself a chance, at least.
It’s meh. An official reviewer term.
Those are my thoughts.
500 subs! I’m back!
Hello folks! With my Corpse Party video, and text walkthrough, going up last week, I wanted to give an update on what my plans are going forward for the gaming stuff.
First, my workweek runs 4 10-hour days, and I get 3 days off. However, because I took last year off for Scoring, I also want to make sure I can score as much as possible. With that in mind, I’m going to try to balance one large-scale project with many smaller ones, after I reach a certain GS threshold each month.
With that in mind, Danganronpa 2 is going to be my next project, as I was already 30-40% through a Walkthrough for that.
I do want to touch on a few things, though. I’m not planning to become one of the accounts that constantly covers easy games, especially not the ones that get constant TUs. If I do cover those, it will be the entire 5000G in one go. While I’d like to be able to do those, I don’t currently have the ability to commit to having to redo the Guides every 6 months, and on that same note, I don’t plan to update past Walkthroughs anymore unless drastic changes are made. I had a few folks get quite upset that games like Calico and Lawn Mowing Sim were updated and my Guides were outdated, and while I understand the frustration, I’m not making any money off of this. This is a passion project and I need to balance my personal life with my work life.
I did deign to do every Ratalaika title, though, including the harder ones like Klang 2 and Remote Life, so I may end up attempting to try that again.
I just wanted to get my thoughts on here, in case any of you are still following along with me. I plan on catching everything back up here, including the website and links and all that fun stuff, but progress will likely be slow.
Thanks for your support!
The Problem with TA Ratio
We recently covered the nonsensical arguments of the “I hate Baby Gamers” crowd, and having seen their Ratio arguments, I thought I might expound on one of the biggest misconceptions on TA.
That Ratio has any modicum of relevance to a gamer’s skill.
A lot of people have been running around saying “Ratio>TA/GS/whatever”, which is true in their minds. Ratio is a BETTER indicator of skill than straight GS and TA Score, but just like everything else, we’ve been misrepresenting words to get our points across. The question turns in to:
How MUCH better at revealing skill is Ratio over GS and TA Score?
Answer: Not a whole lot.
There seems to be this idea that Ratio accurately represents a game’s difficulty, but to delve into that, we have to ask ourselves:
What exactly IS Ratio?
At the time of writing this, I wasn’t able to look into the formula, but the exact formula isn’t as important as the statistics we can see just by comparing games.
And the problem with Ratio is, well, that its quite complex. That’s why the “I’m better than you” crowd loves it. Even if they’re wrong, there ARE aspects of Ratio that reflect a game’s difficulty, and they can simply point those examples out as reasons why Ratio reflects skill. Frankly, its the perfect tool of the trolls.
So, what is Ratio?
In our heads, Ratio is a reflection of how many people “start” a game compared to how many complete it. However, on TA, Ratio means how many people have gotten ANY SINGLE Achievement in a game compared to how many have completed it. What that means is, TA doesn’t recognize anyone as having played a game until they get an Achievement. This is important to note for later.
There are a number of things that affect Ratio:
- Time needed to play the game
- Skill needed to play the game
- The variety of Achievements(story-focused, side quest, grindy)
- The genre of the game and the game/series/genre’s fanbase
But the two biggest are below:
- Has the game been in any Free-to-Play events or Gaming Services such as Game Pass or Games With Gold
- When does the first Achievement Unlock
There are also some other things we can infer but not point to as patterns, such as:
- With games that have console/PC stacks, the version that has more people play it tends to have a higher ratio
- This can also combine with the fact that a smaller group of people playing a game will likely have a higher level of “experts” playing it, so the Ratio will be lower(i.e. in the above example of stacks, the majority of people playing the PC version are likely people playing both versions, or I’ve also noticed this phenomenon with Shmups(and other genres/series/etc), where there is a hardcore fanbase who loves/is good at them but the casual public avoids them)
-Games that don’t have Console Commands or Cheats and then get them discovered later
Again, there are a million different reasons for Ratio to change, and skill is just a single one of those.
I want to talk at more length about the two large effects, though, and how they interact. Note that its impossible to separate the individual effect each noted item has on Ratio because they are always active. Games that have been in Game Pass likely also have the first Achievement popping at different times, etc.
So let’s take a closer look, shall we? ‘m going to touch on the quick points, and then delve into the two I feel are the most important.
Time and Skill are fairly self-explanatory. The variety of the Achievement list plays a fairly large role in Ratio, though, especially in tandem with where the first Achievement unlocks, though we’ll get into that later. Games that require a lot of side-content, collectibles or multiple playthroughs, in general, are going to have less people completing it than a list that is entirely story-based. The extreme of the variety has an effect on Ratio.
Which brings us to the first major point. Has it been in a subscription service or Free-To-Play at any point?
Unfortunately, I don’t have a good reference for HOW MUCH Game Pass boosts a game’s popularity. The closest I can get is this:
The first two games in the Zero Escape trilogy are in The Nonary Games collection and it was in Game Pass. The THIRD game in the Trilogy, Zero Time Dilemma, was NOT in Game Pass.
Nonary Games: 4,283 players on TA, 1.51 Ratio
ZTD: 416 players on TA, 1.25 Ratio
That’s basically 10 times the players, in the same series, with the difference being one was in Game Pass and the other wasn’t. Not only is the player count higher, but the Ratio in the Game Pass game is higher, too, despite both titles being the same type of game. Go through the story, make choices, no missables, you can replay everything to finish off the completion. And the first Achievement in both is(likely) for getting your first Ending.
Now, the Ratio is also skewed by the fact that I, myself, made an Achievement Walkthrough for The Nonary Games that was quite popular before it left Game Pass. I, again, can’t quantify how much of a difference to Ratio it made, but more than likely it led to a number of people starting and completing it, meaning the Ratio would have dropped slightly before it left GP.
Visual Novels, in themselves, tend to have a smaller player base and in both games here, the first Achievement likely unlocks for finishing an ending. Which means that the “try it and stop” crowd isn’t represented well in the Ratio, either, but that’s something we’ll cover in the other item on the list.
When the first Achievement unlocks.
I’m going into detail on this one, because this one is ALWAYS overlooked by people when talking about Ratio, especially those who want to use Ratio as a difficulty metric. The Game Pass/GWG/FTP/Sub boost is well-known. I didn’t want to spend too much time on that one because of it.
But the first Achievement has a MASSIVE effect on Ratio, and no one ever talks about this. TA DOESN’T measure how many people play a game. It measures how many people have gotten an Achievement, and that distinction is vital to how Ratio is calculated. This is also where the “try it and stop” crowd massively changes the Ratios of games.
I have a few games to compare below that should highlight the discrepancies, the first three of which(to my knowledge) have never been in a subscription service.
They are the Dark Souls Series(specifically 3 and its 1.91 Ratio), Elden Ring(1.53) and The Simpsons Game from the 360(2.25) and finally, we’ll compare them to skateBIRD, which was in Game Pass for a bit.
The Dark Souls series, in 2020, had amassed 27 million total copies sold across platforms. Between February of 2022 and 23, Elden Ring itself sold 20 million total copies across platforms in a year.
So how does Elden Ring have the same amount of players as Dark Souls III on TrueAchievements (around 165k) despite the massive increase in sales for Elden Ring?
Because TA doesn’t measure actual people who have played a game.
Dark Souls III has an Achievement early on, literally for lighting your first bonfire. Its not 100%, but for 99% of gamers, it is impossible to go through the game without unlocking this Achievement. It probably unlocks within 30 minutes of anyone starting the game, even if you watch and read everything.
This means that the “try it and stop” crowd doesn’t escape without getting an Achievement, which adds them to the ‘Ratio’ pool. For Ratio to be a legitimate measure of skill, it has to have a consistent measuring point, and it currently doesn’t.
By contrast, Elden Ring’s first Achievement can take 5-10 hours, if not more. The first Achievement for most will be for reaching the Roundtable Hold. If you try to speedrun it, you can get to it within 30 minutes. But for most gamers, that will take hours to reach, especially if you explore instead of following the recommended path. This means that, despite the massive uptick in sales for Elden Ring(as of writing this) ONLY 9,000 more people have “played” Elden Ring than Dark Souls 3.
It’s comical to base a statistic off such a wildly inconsistent stat, and then argue that it represents “skill” in ANY regard.
And to put the nail in that specific coffin, let’s switch over to The Simpsons Game for the 360.
The Simpson’s Game is one of the truest Ratios on TrueAchievements, as an Achievement unlocks the second you start the game. There are 170 people out of the 70,000 that have played that don’t have the Achievement. Not my place to argue how or why, likely glitches, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a more accurate representation of how many people have ACTUALLY played the game than The Simpsons Game.
And guess what? As you already saw, it has a 2.25 Ratio! Not because it’s hard. It has some time trials and collectibles, and some troublesome bits, sure, but compared to a Souls game? There’s nothing that’s overly difficult. The Ratio is higher than any Souls game, other than the original Dark Souls on the 360, because it has an Achievement for literally starting it. That’s it. Everyone who pops the game in gets included in the Ratio.
But let’s take it a step further. Above, I mentioned the game skateBIRD. Why? It’s a Game Pass game that has an Achievement like The Simpsons Game, for essentially starting the game and beginning to create your bird(only 300 of the 82000 gamers haven’t unlocked it, which again, glitches probably).
A 5.2 Ratio! 5.2! That’s all it takes. skateBIRD is easier than any of the Tony Hawk titles, though its not as polished. I had fun with it but it was hardly a difficult game. Certainly not 3.5 times more difficult than Elden Ring.
I’m not judging you for playing what you want. If you want to play Gal Gun and squirt Teenage Girls to orgasm, go for it and its 1.7 ratio. If you want to be a skateBIRD and get its 5.2 ratio, have at it!
Once again, all I’ve done here is point out the flaws in another of the big “arguments” around Achievement hunting.
And with how many insults have been hurled my way since my other blog, despite not throwing any myself, its a pretty clear indicator how willing the other side is to even consider they could be wrong.
Why hate Baby Gamers?
We’ve all seen the drama surrounding the recent wave of hate toward Baby Games and the people who play them. Its been the only thing the Achievement Hunting Community has talked about for the past week, ranging from the console warriors to even the creator of the biggest Achievement website on the Internet in TrueAchievements chiming in.
I’ve made my position well-known on my Twitter account, but I wanted to try and collect all of my thoughts here.
As far as I’m aware, the protagonist in this story has created an alt(BabyGamersSuck) and is attempting to break the record of how quickly they can reach 1 million GS, as the previous record holder may have had multiple people playing, etc. The onus behind this plan is to bring attention to how “easy”(quotes are important here) it is to reach a million GS in the age of what they call Baby Games. As far as I can tell, they started at the beginning of April and have almost made it halfway at the time of writing this, on the 10th.
The entire premise seems to be that they believe the GamerScore economy is being threatened by the influx of “easy” titles, and this is where my first major counterpoint pops up.
What exactly is being ruined?
Gamerscore, on its own, has absolutely no meaning or value. It has never been an indicator of skill or ability. The true meaning of Gamerscore has always been “Has this person dedicated their gaming to the Xbox ecosystem since its inception or not”. The majority of the people topping the leaderboards are there because they’ve been gaming on the Xbox almost exclusively since the 360’s launch.
I, myself, loved the idea of GamerScore but wanted to play everything so I didn’t commit to the Xbox entirely. That’s why I’m hanging around the 50-100 mark on the leaderboards. Even then, I’m not sure where I’d actually be. We’d all like to assume that given the same conditions as everyone else, we’d be equal, but that’s simply not true.
Which brings me to the next counter-point. This idea that getting to a million using Baby Games is “easy”. This has so many layers of silliness that it’s difficult to even choose one to start.
There are just over 1000 people on TrueAchievements that have reached a million gamerscore. Out of 930,000. That means that even with the influx of easy games, 1 in every 930 serious Achievement Hunters have even reached a million. Even if we assume another 1000 OUTSIDE of TA have reached a million, that’s only 2000 out of nearly 8 billion people on the planet who have gotten a million GamerScore. Or, .00000025% of the population(1 in every 4 million). Is there anything on the planet with that level of rarity that is considered easy?
***For the purposes of calling something “easy”, it shouldn’t need planning or forethought. You shouldn’t need to cut corners or get help. For that reason, I assume neutrality in all these scenarios. No sales, no game-sharing, no discounted codes or free games for content creators.***
Let’s assume that you want to get to a million on a fresh account. No owned games, no game-sharing, etc. You need to buy enough games to reach 1 million, which, at a minimum, is going to run you around 900 games with the TUs. Assuming you’re doing this all legit and not taking “trips” to other countries, buying them at full price is going to average you about $8 per title, or about $7200. For me, working full-time, that’s about half of the entirety of extra income I have after paying rent and bills in a year. Considering my income level was the median income level in the USA as of 2019, I’m about the average, which means FAR more are in worse shape than I am, and my rent is significantly cheaper than most. These are ALL financial roadblocks to any gamer looking to reach a million. This is already a massive strike against the idea that its “easy” to reach a million.
Next, let’s talk about skill, i.e. where the term Baby Game comes from. Because the games can supposedly be completed by babies. That’s how easy they are. There’s a discussion to be had here. Admittedly, some of the games are legitimately easy. Achievement lists only for jumping, dying, etc. Many lists don’t even ask the gamer to complete the whole game(which I don’t enjoy) or use the TUs to finish the game(which I also don’t enjoy). There are conversations to be had about these topics. Of the points made, this is the only one where calling it “easy” has any amount of credibility.
HOWEVER
Getting to a million using these games is NOT as easy as everyone says. The people that are arguing these points are lifelong gamers, who have every controller layout memorized and can immediately master most controllers and schemes. Achievement Hunters tend to be a “Jack of all trades, master of none” type because of the variety we play. There are exceptions, of course, but because we spend so much time in so many different genres, we rarely get the time to build up mastery of any specific one.
I liken it to being a car mechanic for 20 years driving down the road and seeing someone changing a tire on the side of the road. The current “Hate Baby Gamers” movement is akin to the mechanic shouting how easy it is to change a tire and how they can change one in 8 minutes. The mechanic, however, has the power tools that make it significantly easier. They likely do it every day and have the experience and knowledge to help things go faster. Someone by the side of the road may take 30-40 minutes to change one tire because its not a part of their daily routine. Its not “easy” to them because they don’t know how everything on the car works. They may not know the best place for the jack, how to use the wrench, or have the physical strength to remove tool-tightened lugnuts. If you take family members or friends who aren’t gamers and watch them try to play, it isn’t hard to see the difference. We, as hunters, can call baby games “easy” because for our skillsets, they are. But for the general population, we vastly underestimate how our experience makes these games easier, and how that lack of experience can make a 10 minute completion double/triple/+++ in time.
Which is where our next counterpoint comes in. Time. On the days I work(working full time) I have an hour of free time available to me. On my days off, around 13 if I do nothing. If I have absolutely no social, familial, cooking or cleanliness obligations, that gives me about 40 hours a week to play games. I’m not the typical human being. I’m anti-social, have no friends and do my cleaning in bunches. I’d much rather cook a frozen dinner so I can spend the 50 minutes gaming than cook a real meal. In MY life, I can sit here and say “Oh, its easy to set aside the time to game”. This “BabyGamertag” is averaging 4+ hours per day to hunt so far this month, and that’s assuming the “Time played” stat is accurate. That’s literally impossible for most people. One, most people won’t take vacation from work simply to pursue GamerScore, and two, most people have real life obligations that interfere with down time not relating to vacation. That they’ve made an exception to show how “easy” it is basically proves how much it isn’t. This is the case where the exception proves the rule. This person has the drive to see it through where others don’t….or do they?
Another massive hurdle in getting to a million is burnout, related to the drive to get Achievements. Burnout happens to everyone doing anything. I usually get burnout in a game series by the 3rd or 4th installment. Its why I still haven’t completed Assassin’s Creed 3 and why I usually alternate between periods of easier games and longer ones. Mixing up what I play allows me to refresh and never burnout, though I’ve never found burnout on easy games to be a problem. Already, we’ve seen the above account throw in a few “actual” games though. Because doing what they are doing isn’t something everyone can do. And, just that simple sentiment negates another facet of “easy”.
The final counterpoint to an “easy” million is one of the most important. All of the people claiming “baby games” are too easy have used a Walkthrough/Achievement World/CC list to make the Achievements easier multiple times.
Every.
Single.
One.
This has always been a point of contention I’ve made. Some of the recent 20 minute Visual Novels are only 20 minutes because someone in the community went through it and told you exactly what option to pick and when to make saves. Doing that yourself could take hours in some of them, but because someone else did the work, you get to capitalize on it, then turn around and call it easy. Starting Minecraft from scratch and making everything yourself would take 10s of hours in each version, but we use the Achievement Worlds and then call them too “easy”. CCs, especially, take games that can take 10s of hours down to mere minutes. Hell, my Danganronpa Walkthrough takes whats a 40+ hour completion down to 15ish. My Zero Escape The Nonary Games drops a 40+ hour completion down to 8! Does that mean they are easy titles now? I put nearly 100 hours into each figuring out the best paths to get through the completion quickly so gamers wouldn’t have to. The level of disrespect to content creators or simple Guide writers, that all of the Baby Haters have used before, to say the games are easy after using Walkthroughs is a level of contradiction similar to sitting in an ice bath and wondering why its so cold.
What really upsets me is that this tag we’ve been talking about, that hates Baby Gamers and games and thinks they’re too easy, is using the Walkthroughs and hard work of so many others and simultaneously spitting on it.
You want us to believe that getting to a Million is so easy? Get everything legit! Stop using the CCs, Achievement Worlds, the Walkthroughs and Guides and individual solutions. Figure everything out yourself or your ideology is nonsense. Donating money to a charity doesn’t untangle the sheer contradictions in what you are doing.
In all of my interactions with this group of people, they have repeatedly told me that they aren’t “bullies” and that getting to a million is “easy”. To be frank, they have mostly just misused words, or twisted the definitions so that they don’t have to feel bad.
Getting a million GamerScore is, no doubt, EASIER than it has been in the past. It should be fairly obvious from the preceding paragraphs how self-absorbed you have to be, however, to talk about it being easy.
And as for bullying. Here’s the definition from Webster’s:
***a blustering, browbeating person
esp. one who is habitually cruel, insulting, or threatening to others who are weaker, smaller, or in some way vulnerable***
For those unfamiliar, blustering = speaking loudly and aggressively
browbeating = to intimidate or disconcert by a stern manner or arrogant speech
These “BabyGamersSuck” leaders and followers do just that. Run around telling YOU what’s best for your gaming habits, seeking you out and telling you how wrong you are. Telling you that they’re right, masquerading it as “we’re doing it for the good of the community”. The literal alt tag is a form of bullying itself, targeting a specific group of people with their frustration.
Which brings me back to my original counterpoint. What exactly is being ruined by OTHER people playing easy games?
There are two things affected by people playing easy games.
1. More easier titles means more people with higher GS. This means it can be harder for your gamertag to stick out if you’ve played “harder” titles. However, this doesn’t affect your own enjoyment of your completions. You know the personal effort you put in to your gaming, which means the only reason you can be upset is that you won’t get the recognition from OTHERS you think you deserve. This is absolute gatekeeping nonsense. If your enjoyment of games requires external validation, then its not the difficulty level of your completions that you are enjoying.
2. The saturation of “easy” titles CAN have an effect on some of the GS competitions TA runs and that point I can understand. Again, I do think a conversation about Achievement lists can happen. I’d be fine with requiring a story completion achievement or stricter TU lists.
But what it comes down to is that they don’t care. They just want to have control over the Achievement landscape. Hell, the creator of TrueAchievements was on twitter complaining about and using the derogatory term Baby Gamers. One minute there are so many BabyGamers that we need to bring attention to how they are destroying Achievements and the next they’re quoting that “Its only .2% of the site population, so pissing them off isn’t a big deal”. They can’t even be consistent with their anger, flip-flopping around to whatever sounds good.
I’ve spent the last week talking with a few of them, and its all been the same nonsense. There’s no collaboration or thought-out position. And when it comes down to it, it sure sounds like a bunch of people who are just upset they aren’t getting the recognition they want. Call them out and they just start insulting you or saying “lol stay mad bro” because they can’t support their position.
Its really stupid, because they could’ve turned this into something most of the community could’ve gotten behind. Most hunters I’ve interacted with have problems with the recent content in TUs and the base Achievement lists, but instead they’ve chosen to go to war with no platform to stand on.
We’ll just have to see how it turns out.
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