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Introducing points system (EXP) and cross platform leaderboards

BigHatPaul

New Member
Agreed on XP boosters. Any spam game really should be completely worthless. This new formula looks much better.
 

Skumblex

Member
I really like the idea. However, I have a question.
How do you deal with games that have one or more 0% archievements. In this case you would end up with infinite amount of exp. Do you use the rarest archievements that does not have 0%?

EDIT: just realized that this should never happen, as it's based on the rarest archievement a player has earned, right? So UNLOCK_PERCENTAGE is different for "every" player?
 
Last edited:

NoahG59

Member
I have been experimenting with making some changes to the way EXP is calculated, to better deal with games that have a large amount of achievements. None of this is live yet, just have ran some tests to see how it would impact the totals.

This method is actually borrowed from SteamHunters, so thanks to them for coming up with this. Rather than counting the amount of EXP individually per achievement, the total EXP for each game is calculated from the rarest achievement using its unlock percentage - and then that value is distributed accordingly across all of the game's achievements (the rarest achievement will get the most points)

Spider-Man on PS4 as an example -

The rarest trophy has been earned by 8.96% of players on the site. We use the calculation below to get a total EXP value of 2,391.

(sqrt(100 / UNLOCK_PERCENTAGE) - 1) * 1000 + 50

To break it down, 100 / UNLOCK_PERCENTAGE calculates the worth of the rarest achievement, then the square root of that number is taken to avoid getting inflated values. 1 is subtracted from the result here to avoid very easy games from being worth 1000+ EXP. The final result is multiplied by 1000 + the base EXP value, which is 50.

As another example, Viki Spotter: The Farm on Steam - this game has a large amount of achievements (298) and all can be unlocked very quickly (under an hour).

With the new calculation, it only gets 68 EXP, versus the 2,980 it has now. Given that it can be completed so quickly this more accurately represents the worth of these achievements.

Third example, LOGistICAL on Steam - this game has a very large amount of achievements (9821).

With the new calculation, it only gets 2937 EXP, versus the 252,215 (!) it has now.

So I think this handles with the games that have a large amount of achievements much better, while not taking away from the potential EXP in games that have a more typical list. I think we won't have to devalue specific games with this approach either, aside from some isolated cases - I think the XP boosters on the Google Play should still be completely removed, since the base value of 50 EXP is still too much for those.

Any thoughts on this?

Does this mean that games with over 1,000 achievements will now be counted? Either way, this sounds like a nice change and will definitely help keep the leaderboards more competitive.

If a game only has 1 achievement and it has 1% players have it, would the score be ~100,000? Or am I doing something wrong in the calculation?
 

x3sphere

Administrator
Staff member
Enforcer Team
Game Info Editor
I really like the idea. However, I have a question.
How do you deal with games that have one or more 0% archievements. In this case you would end up with infinite amount of exp. Do you use the rarest archievements that does not have 0%?

EDIT: just realized that this should never happen, as it's based on the rarest archievement a player has earned, right? So UNLOCK_PERCENTAGE is different for "every" player?

UNLOCK_PERCENTAGE represents the site wide percentage (same value that's under the Rarity column on the list pages, ie. https://www.exophase.com/game/marvels-spider-man-psn/trophies/)

Any achievements that have not been earned are not factored into the calculation. So, at least one user has to earn the achievement before it will have any EXP.

Also, I should point that SteamHunters use the unlock percentages from Steam itself rather than their own, so that's one difference with the way we are doing it. I don't have access to the unlock percentages on every platform we track, so seems it is best to use ours for consistency.

Does this mean that games with over 1,000 achievements will now be counted? Either way, this sounds like a nice change and will definitely help keep the leaderboards more competitive.

If a game only has 1 achievement and it has 1% players have it, would the score be ~100,000? Or am I doing something wrong in the calculation?

I think you mean 0.01% -- that would make the score worth 99050 (1% would be around 9000). However, there are only 11 achievements in the entire DB with that low of an unlock percentage. We can cap the score at 50k like SH does, since I think almost 100k is too much for any one game.
 

Gamer Steve

Well-Known Member
I have been experimenting with making some changes to the way EXP is calculated, to better deal with games that have a large amount of achievements. None of this is live yet, just have ran some tests to see how it would impact the totals.

This method is actually borrowed from SteamHunters, so thanks to them for coming up with this. Rather than counting the amount of EXP individually per achievement, the total EXP for each game is calculated from the rarest achievement using its unlock percentage - and then that value is distributed accordingly across all of the game's achievements (the rarest achievement will get the most points)

Spider-Man on PS4 as an example -

The rarest trophy has been earned by 8.96% of players on the site. We use the calculation below to get a total EXP value of 2,391.

(sqrt(100 / UNLOCK_PERCENTAGE) - 1) * 1000 + 50

To break it down, 100 / UNLOCK_PERCENTAGE calculates the worth of the rarest achievement, then the square root of that number is taken to avoid getting inflated values. 1 is subtracted from the result here to avoid very easy games from being worth 1000+ EXP. The final result is multiplied by 1000 + the base EXP value, which is 50.

As another example, Viki Spotter: The Farm on Steam - this game has a large amount of achievements (298) and all can be unlocked very quickly (under an hour).

With the new calculation, it only gets 68 EXP, versus the 2,980 it has now. Given that it can be completed so quickly this more accurately represents the worth of these achievements.

Third example, LOGistICAL on Steam - this game has a very large amount of achievements (9821).

With the new calculation, it only gets 2937 EXP, versus the 252,215 (!) it has now.

So I think this handles with the games that have a large amount of achievements much better, while not taking away from the potential EXP in games that have a more typical list. I think we won't have to devalue specific games with this approach either, aside from some isolated cases - I think the XP boosters on the Google Play should still be completely removed, since the base value of 50 EXP is still too much for those.

Any thoughts on this?
I think this is a great idea...as for those clicker games i have played them and gotten many achievements from them (shane on me) so yes i dont think thise games should give xp but i think the achievement count should still be represented on the profiles
 

x3sphere

Administrator
Staff member
Enforcer Team
Game Info Editor
I think this is a great idea...as for those clicker games i have played them and gotten many achievements from them (shane on me) so yes i dont think thise games should give xp but i think the achievement count should still be represented on the profiles

Yeah, they will still count for the rest of the stats.
 

BigHatPaul

New Member
In addition to this point system change, what about adding something that allows for achievements/trophies to be flagged as unachievable or broken? Should these have no points allocated to them or should it be left as is?
 

YouGotHitByGunner

Enforcer
Staff member
Enforcer Team
Game Info Editor
If a system for broken achievements ever gets added, I volunteer to moderate them (I pretty much hunt on all platforms, so I'm perfect for this type of thing). Same thing for suspected achievement hunters/guides.
 
J

JSoup

Guest
In addition to this point system change, what about adding something that allows for achievements/trophies to be flagged as unachievable or broken? Should these have no points allocated to them or should it be left as is?

It would depend on why a given achievement is broken/unachievable. If it formally was, it should retain it's point value.
 

x3sphere

Administrator
Staff member
Enforcer Team
Game Info Editor
The point system changes I mentioned in this post have been pushed live today.

The EXP totals haven't changed yet, they will update tomorrow, so we'll see how it affects the leaderboards then. Most of the Steam games with a lot of achievements are worth significantly less under the new algorithm.
 

Somfing

Active Member
The point system changes I mentioned in this post have been pushed live today.

The EXP totals haven't changed yet, they will update tomorrow, so we'll see how it affects the leaderboards then. Most of the Steam games with a lot of achievements are worth significantly less under the new algorithm.
I like the new point system except for one thing. If only one person plays the game he gets very few points. I think you need to give 10 points for an achievement as before. Is there any game in Steam that no one plays with easily obtained achievements?
IMG_20200518_225331.jpg
IMG_20200518_225136.jpg
 

danteo

New Member
Civ 6 has essentially become worthless. I like the general idea of the new points system, but still feels a bit unbalanced.

1589841396783.png
 

x3sphere

Administrator
Staff member
Enforcer Team
Game Info Editor
Civ 6 has essentially become worthless. I like the general idea of the new points system, but still feels a bit unbalanced.

View attachment 10537

I made some tweaks so all the achievements should still get points. However the problem here is that there's a huge amount of rare achievements so they end up taking most of the points.

For games that have a large amount of rare achievements, I thought about dividing up the point allocation across all the rare achievements. It helps the distribution but doesn't seem to work too well, since then the rare achievements have too low of a worth compared to the common ones.

I noticed this game in particular has a higher worth on SteamHunters although they are using Steam's unlock percentages, while we are using the unlock rates based on the registered users here only. Using the Steam unlock percentages for calculating EXP might be better, I'm not sure yet.
 

YouGotHitByGunner

Enforcer
Staff member
Enforcer Team
Game Info Editor
The idea of the new points system was to balance the playfield between platforms. Steam is no longer the unbeatable platform with the highest available EXP (most of the top 100 hunters on the cross-platform leaderboard used to be Steam players ~because the old system was based on achievement count rather than rarity). Now you can basically be a full-time Android achievement hunter and still realistically compete against a Steam or PS4 player. Before the update, Android players were standing at 100k points, now some of them are all the way up to 500k points. There are some inconsistencies at the moment, but we can surely work something out. You also have to bear in mind that the system just went live earlier today, and is likely to have a few bugs here and there.
 

xPETEZx

Member
In general, I think the new system sounds fairer.
However, some games seem to have taken a real hit, like Star Craft 2. This game has like 2500+ achievements apparently, but the vast majority of those will be "feats of strength" so ones that dont give points in the game, and often cant be earned after a certain point.
My guess is that those will get the lion's share of available score.

I like that on the PSN games you can now see both the % of players that have the achievement on this site, and on PSN.
People that link to a site like this are always going to be trophy hunters, so it's nice to see the difference.
Wonder if this will be possible for steam going forward?
 

x3sphere

Administrator
Staff member
Enforcer Team
Game Info Editor
In general, I think the new system sounds fairer.
However, some games seem to have taken a real hit, like Star Craft 2. This game has like 2500+ achievements apparently, but the vast majority of those will be "feats of strength" so ones that dont give points in the game, and often cant be earned after a certain point.
My guess is that those will get the lion's share of available score.

I like that on the PSN games you can now see both the % of players that have the achievement on this site, and on PSN.
People that link to a site like this are always going to be trophy hunters, so it's nice to see the difference.
Wonder if this will be possible for steam going forward?

Yes, it's possible to add the global unlock percentage for Steam. I think we could add it for Xbox and Google Play as well. And I just realized this stat isn't showing in the beta style yet (only on the old style), I'll get it added soon.

I'll see about adjusting the point allocation for the Blizzard games, since they are an exception. Could avoid giving EXP to achievements that don't give any points in the game, if that would be better?
 
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