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Forums -> Site related -> Suggestions -> Getting rid of / fixing spam achievements?
Topic: Getting rid of / fixing spam achievements?
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| +1 |
Any chance the games with the dumb achievements for doing nothing will get limited? They completely defeat the point of having a leaderboard in the first place since you get millions for doing nothing.
| +2 |
Yes, I am working on it.
| 0 |
i dont like this do
| 0 |

'primal_r' says

Yes, I am working on it.



Thank you so much! I'm so glad to already see some positive changes that brought down the values of some 5k+ achievement games to absolute 0. And in some cases 1 point per achievement. To be honest I think they should be all 0 though, because if they're worth anything, the developers will just start adding millions of them in their games. That's how they make money, selling totally unplayable crap in order to make people buy them anyway just for the points.
| 0 |
Jim Sterling finally addressed this issue too. Just look how ridiculous these achievement spam games are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1UR_vU2IxE

And tell me now how you can possibly award even 1 point for achievements like that? We need to fight this stupid trend.
| 0 |
hmm, seems Primal is on top of this, but I'd like to add something.

while giving 1 point each to achievements from games like this, crappy games with 10k achievements (like that Zen vs Zombies game) still net like 10k points. Astats has set a limit to the entire achievement set of 10 points in order to prevent netting large scores like that. Maybe a suggestion to do something similar here?
| 0 |
Another game currently awarding way too much:

https://metagamerscore.com/game/37790

Over half a million points for nothing. This stuff really annoys me, especially one guy on my country's list that keeps moving several millions of points up every time he finds an opportunity to rack up points easily. He buys all these shitty games, just looking for ones that will make it easy for him.

Just check how far it has gone by viewing the first moments of this video and tell me honestly: there's a pretty good reason to award 0 points for these achievements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI8WVkQnxPY
| 0 |
As for https://metagamerscore.com/game/37790, the algorithm has now started penalizing the game.

Since the algorithm is based on detecting that the game is very easy with at least some statistical significance, there will be some delay until the values starts to get capped.

As for awarding 0 points for some achievements - while I'm not totally against it, I do have two things:

a) I don't think it's very urgent to fix any more, now that they are no longer worth hundreds of thousands/millions.
b) I have yet to think of a straightforward implementation-method for capping the whole of a game to a certain amount. Everything is updated asynchronously so i's hard to select certain achievements to carry a specific score.
- One method could be to create a parallel pipeline that just doesn't scan the games at all, and just awards a token "5 score nab" for the whole game, even if you haven't played the game. That would save on pointless database bloat. It's a bit of a bigger job, but could be worth it since I have to pay a monthly cost for all the gigabytes of memory those achievements take. The big drawback would be that peoples achievement-counts would become incorrect, and for some people it seems to be a big deal to have it correct.
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'primal_r' says

a) I don't think it's very urgent to fix any more, now that they are no longer worth hundreds of thousands/millions.




We may have to rethink that statement if one day some developer puts 1 million achievements in their game. :P

And you're generally right. It's just that I still see people doing this. And I really don't want to be forced to buy/play this crap just to stay competitive for example on my country's top chart. I refuse to play it and give any money to whoever started this. It's bugging me so much.

Anyway I would personally recommend having some way implemented allowing you to mark games that were made for the sole purpose of just racking up achievements (when it's clear it's one of them: I guess if there's doubt, it can stay the way it is now). And then the formula awarding points for the achievements would always return 0 for all of them in such game.
| 0 |

'primal_r' says


- One method could be to create a parallel pipeline that just doesn't scan the games at all, and just awards a token "5 score nab" for the whole game, even if you haven't played the game.




This is what I was thinking about too. Hardcapping without scan, so exclude the game fully from scanning.
| 0 |
https://metagamerscore.com/game/37874

Every achievement in this game is this:

Another second in the game
Spend one second in the game

Seriously, where is gaming going? And I find these, because I keep an eye on one guy here who no longer plays normal games anymore, just finds these achievement farmers.
| 0 |
MetaScore V5.2:

I have now deployed a change that allows achievements to have 0 score, if the algorithm analyzes them to be skill-less enough.

If anyone finds any "false positives", let me know and I'll see if I can tweak the algorithm.

... note : I'm considering allowing -1 as lowest score for achievements. If such is the case, it will only be in effect for achievements created after a specific date.


| 0 |
Very good change! I'll admit, I had played a number of these to boost my score and remain competitive. Stoked that I won't have to bother with them anymore!
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'Rosey' says


'primal_r' says

a) I don't think it's very urgent to fix any more, now that they are no longer worth hundreds of thousands/millions.




We may have to rethink that statement if one day some developer puts 1 million achievements in their game. :P




Steam has limited the number of achievements per game to 5000 for now, so this should not be a problem.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/6ok40v/there_is_now_a_limit_of_5000_steam_achievements/
| 0 |
5,000 is still a large amount, and most of these spam games have under that already unfortunately.
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'Twistor' says


'Rosey' says


'primal_r' says

a) I don't think it's very urgent to fix any more, now that they are no longer worth hundreds of thousands/millions.




We may have to rethink that statement if one day some developer puts 1 million achievements in their game. :P




Steam has limited the number of achievements per game to 5000 for now, so this should not be a problem.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/6ok40v/there_is_now_a_limit_of_5000_steam_achievements/




Valve actually did something to combat this problem? Wow, I am shocked! This of course won't help a lot and they'd have to do a lot more than that and I normally wouldn't be impressed, but it's still more than I expected from Valve. These days my expectations of them are really low.
| 0 |
This "studio" is exceptionally busy. They already have a release scheduled for the next month with more of their "lauch to farm achievements" nonsense. They release another one about every week.
| 0 |
okey i understand now this game skuld not have eney points
| 0 |
Is it possible to cap each of these games at a certain amount of points, rather than having points per achievement? Say 100, or 1000 (tops), for the whole game? I think the ~20kish they're worth is still too high.
| +1 |
https://metagamerscore.com/game/43739 and https://metagamerscore.com/game/46113 needs this.
| 0 |
The problem returned with renewed strength. Most likely the reason is the insane uncontrolled amount of achievement spam games released on Steam. Bad devs found a way to make quick money and people actually pay for their awful games made every week. I can imagine their office, probably taking just one week to make some crap and next week already starting to work on a new "game". Will nothing stop this cancer?

Some users have lately made millions of points exclusively on this kind of games just within a week. They don't even play normal games anymore. They probably just launch these achievement farmers and leave it over night for it to do the work. In addition to being unfairly rewarding this is simply anti-environmental, because leaving games running to perform such a pointless task as farming achievements is just a waste of electricity.

Look at this dude for example:

https://metagamerscore.com/game?utf8=%E2%9C%93&user=9802&sort=mygame_score#

It's all making me start to lose interest in achievement hunting.
| +1 |

'Rosey' says

The problem returned with renewed strength. Most likely the reason is the insane uncontrolled amount of achievement spam games released on Steam. Bad devs found a way to make quick money and people actually pay for their awful games made every week. I can imagine their office, probably taking just one week to make some crap and next week already starting to work on a new "game". Will nothing stop this cancer?

Some users have lately made millions of points exclusively on this kind of games just within a week. They don't even play normal games anymore. They probably just launch these achievement farmers and leave it over night for it to do the work. In addition to being unfairly rewarding this is simply anti-environmental, because leaving games running to perform such a pointless task as farming achievements is just a waste of electricity.

Look at this dude for example:

https://metagamerscore.com/game?utf8=%E2%9C%93&user=9802&sort=mygame_score#

It's all making me start to lose interest in achievement hunting.



all of these should get excluded from scanning.
Normal games have 200+ achievements max and even that is already an insane amount, looking at you TF2!
so yes, imo exclude anything with an achievement numer of let's say 500. Or give them a set number of poiuint for the entire achievement list, astats is doing 10 points total, regardless of how many achievements those shitty games have.
| 0 |
I agree with capping the amount of points these games can be worth. Some PS3/4 games that take a fair amount of time are only worth a few thousand!
| 0 |

'NocturnalNL' says


'Rosey' says

The problem returned with renewed strength. Most likely the reason is the insane uncontrolled amount of achievement spam games released on Steam. Bad devs found a way to make quick money and people actually pay for their awful games made every week. I can imagine their office, probably taking just one week to make some crap and next week already starting to work on a new "game". Will nothing stop this cancer?

Some users have lately made millions of points exclusively on this kind of games just within a week. They don't even play normal games anymore. They probably just launch these achievement farmers and leave it over night for it to do the work. In addition to being unfairly rewarding this is simply anti-environmental, because leaving games running to perform such a pointless task as farming achievements is just a waste of electricity.

Look at this dude for example:

https://metagamerscore.com/game?utf8=%E2%9C%93&user=9802&sort=mygame_score#

It's all making me start to lose interest in achievement hunting.



all of these should get excluded from scanning.
Normal games have 200+ achievements max and even that is already an insane amount, looking at you TF2!
so yes, imo exclude anything with an achievement numer of let's say 500. Or give them a set number of poiuint for the entire achievement list, astats is doing 10 points total, regardless of how many achievements those shitty games have.




There are occasionally some games where the number of achievements is high, but they still require a lot of work to get. I don't think we should exclude any of them automatically completely. For example Pixel Puzzles Ultimate is a game I play every now and then and it's actually a game very generously giving out achievements for every little thing. There's a separate achievement for every single puzzle, separate one for every different thing you can buy from the kiosk etc... But despite that you still need to invest plenty of time in actually solving these puzzles and earning the in-game currency to buy everything from the kiosk. Maybe the number of achievements is too high, but I only have a small number of them so far and it took plenty of time so it would suck if all this wasn't even worth anything. There's a big difference between a game so stuffed with achievements but still requiring effort and a game that only needs to be launched and then you can go to bed and let them flow. I've seen these games and I know they don't even require doing anything usually. Or you just do something very simple and fast like clicking, which can be easily automated too.

I also think giving all games the same value isn't ideal because they really differ in their amount of content. In PAYDAY 2 they keep adding stuff. It's like you even completed the game and suddenly there's more to do. It's like a whole new game or addon and you should be rewarded again for the extra content you complete later. Meanwhile some short quick games having the same value would make it pointless to keep going for all the new content in larger games. Better spend this time for a bunch of quick ones instead then.

So I don't think any of these solutions is ideal. To me the only perfect way to do it unfortunately is adding a real human check. We'd have to manually mark these games. Maybe users would have to "report" them and some admins verify if they should be removed.
| +1 |

'Rosey' says


'NocturnalNL' says


'Rosey' says

The problem returned with renewed strength. Most likely the reason is the insane uncontrolled amount of achievement spam games released on Steam. Bad devs found a way to make quick money and people actually pay for their awful games made every week. I can imagine their office, probably taking just one week to make some crap and next week already starting to work on a new "game". Will nothing stop this cancer?

Some users have lately made millions of points exclusively on this kind of games just within a week. They don't even play normal games anymore. They probably just launch these achievement farmers and leave it over night for it to do the work. In addition to being unfairly rewarding this is simply anti-environmental, because leaving games running to perform such a pointless task as farming achievements is just a waste of electricity.

Look at this dude for example:

https://metagamerscore.com/game?utf8=%E2%9C%93&user=9802&sort=mygame_score#

It's all making me start to lose interest in achievement hunting.



all of these should get excluded from scanning.
Normal games have 200+ achievements max and even that is already an insane amount, looking at you TF2!
so yes, imo exclude anything with an achievement numer of let's say 500. Or give them a set number of poiuint for the entire achievement list, astats is doing 10 points total, regardless of how many achievements those shitty games have.




There are occasionally some games where the number of achievements is high, but they still require a lot of work to get. I don't think we should exclude any of them automatically completely. For example Pixel Puzzles Ultimate is a game I play every now and then and it's actually a game very generously giving out achievements for every little thing. There's a separate achievement for every single puzzle, separate one for every different thing you can buy from the kiosk etc... But despite that you still need to invest plenty of time in actually solving these puzzles and earning the in-game currency to buy everything from the kiosk. Maybe the number of achievements is too high, but I only have a small number of them so far and it took plenty of time so it would suck if all this wasn't even worth anything. There's a big difference between a game so stuffed with achievements but still requiring effort and a game that only needs to be launched and then you can go to bed and let them flow. I've seen these games and I know they don't even require doing anything usually. Or you just do something very simple and fast like clicking, which can be easily automated too.

I also think giving all games the same value isn't ideal because they really differ in their amount of content. In PAYDAY 2 they keep adding stuff. It's like you even completed the game and suddenly there's more to do. It's like a whole new game or addon and you should be rewarded again for the extra content you complete later. Meanwhile some short quick games having the same value would make it pointless to keep going for all the new content in larger games. Better spend this time for a bunch of quick ones instead then.

So I don't think any of these solutions is ideal. To me the only perfect way to do it unfortunately is adding a real human check. We'd have to manually mark these games. Maybe users would have to "report" them and some admins verify if they should be removed.



obviously I was talking about the 5k achievement spam games with zero gameplay. ;) Those need to be excluded. "Real" games with a large amount should be counted like other games and generally they're all under 1k achievements, exceptions here and there of course ;)
| 0 |
TSA (TrueSteamAchievements) has a nice list of the spammy games: https://truesteamachievements.com/forum/viewboard.aspx?messageboardid=8244
| 0 |
Another achievement spam game https://steamcommunity.com/app/656180#scrollTop=0. According to thre comments it originally only had 1 achievement but a recent update turned it into a spam game.

source: https://steamcommunity.com/id/Csontzuzo/recommended/656180/
| +4 |
I did write a beautiful piece of code that auto-detected the spam-games and marked them and made them worth very low.

But, the pattern changed. I didn't foresee this thing with "1 achievement now and 4999 after 6 months" .. that makes my algorithm not detect them properly, so I have to cook up something new.

| +1 |
Keep up the great work! Spam games worth 0 points total I'm for.
| 0 |

'BioGyver' says

Keep up the great work! Spam games worth 0 points total I'm for.



you and me both lol
| 0 |
All of the current list under 'heavily grinded' are presumably of this kind, first one has 114982.
| +2 |
As there's no separate discussion board for the recent news post, I just wanted to say that the decision to cap games with >2500 achievements automatically to 100 (and separately uncap them if they're legit) is an excellent one.
| +1 |

'Twistor' says

As there's no separate discussion board for the recent news post, I just wanted to say that the decision to cap games with >2500 achievements automatically to 100 (and separately uncap them if they're legit) is an excellent one.






This is am awesome change! GG primal_r :)
| 0 |
More:
https://metagamerscore.com/game/37632
https://metagamerscore.com/game/38282
https://metagamerscore.com/game/39090
https://metagamerscore.com/game/38371

All by:
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Virtual%20Top
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Red%20Dolphin%20Games
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=G.%20Malta
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Ripknot%20Systems
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=ASCII%20Games

Also, those Crankies and others may be 15 each, but multiplied by 5000 is 75 000 which is still too much for automation.
| 0 |
More: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/33100271 - worth 100 each here.
| 0 |
Hi,

I was wondering what the current status of automatic detection of spam games is.
I thought it was in place as I had noticed a lot of spam games without tracked achievements, worth only 100 pts in total.

But now I can see more and more of them that haven't got through the filter:

MiMiMiShKa
HentaiNYA
Hentai Cuties

They all have 30 achievements in total, are completed within 2-3 mins and each awards over 4000 points here on MGS.
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