So since we're on the topic of RetroAchievements and calculating points and such, it's worth pointing out that there are technically two separate versions of each achievement. They have "softcore" and "hardcore" versions of each. When playing in softcore mode, save states, slow-motion and rewind features in the emulators are enabled for use, making the achievements in general considerably easier to earn. To make up for this difference, if you unlock an achievement in hardcore mode you also earn the same achievement in softcore, making the hardcore achievement in effect worth double the points. This site seems to only track each achievement once, which I assume means it's either only tracking the softcore unlocks, the hardcore unlocks, or whichever comes first. Regardless it means the difficulty/rarity isn't being calculated properly, right? A softcore player would be indistinguishable from a hardcore player, or if only hardcore unlocks are tracked then softcore-only players aren't being tracked at all.
Is it possible to track the softcore and hardcore unlocks separately? If it is, that would at least solve the difficulty/rarity issue. The problem is it would double the achievement count in the progress bar and someone playing only on softcore could only ever get 50% even if they completed the game. Unless of course you split the softcore and hardcore achievements into separate sets, I guess. The way they do it over there is by having two progress bars on top of each other - blue for softcore and gold for hardcore, so you can still fill the bar up with blue if you only play softcore. The progress percentage goes up to 100% for softcore and 200% for hardcore. I don't know if something similar could be done here though, it's a bit complicated.
To perhaps further complicate this issue they've recently announced they're changing the way softcore is going to work in the near future. While softcore achievements will still be worth the same points as before, they will no longer be counted by their leaderboards in an effort to make the leaderboards more competitive and fair. Since softcore isn't going to be considered competitive going forward, they're also no longer going to moderate softcore play so cheating will be allowed. I suppose the best way to deal with that would be to make the softcore achievements worth 0 EXP here, so that like on their site, softcore achievements just won't contribute to rankings. Although there may actually end up being less cheating on the softcore side since it no longer contributes to their leaderboards anyway, so perhaps there will end up being less cheating rather than more, who knows.
Here's the announcement for softcore changes if you want to read it.
Phew, sorry for the wall of text but that required some explaining! What do you think? Are you able to track softcore and hardcore unlocks separately at all or are we stuck being unable to distinguish them?