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RetroAchievements tracking updates for May 2026 - Hardcore Leaderboard and Beaten Status

x3sphere

x3sphere

Administrator
Staff member
Enforcer Team
Game Info Editor
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We've enhanced our RetroAchievements tracking with a brand new Hardcore leaderboard and support for the site's "Beaten" status. For more details read on!

Hardcore/Softcore Leaderboard Split

With this update, the newly added Hardcore leaderboard is now the default view for our RA leaderboard. There is a separate Softcore leaderboard that ranks are calculated separately for. The total EXP available to each game is same across both modes, however the amount allocated is determined by the unlock rates in Hardcore. That means players earning an achievement in Softcore will not bring down the EXP value.

Ranks for the new Hardcore leaderboard are still in the process of being calculated, as our scanners are backfilling data for earned achievements in Hardcore mode. It could take a few more weeks to finish processing that data and you may not appear on the leaderboard until then. Currently, it's up to all users that have registered since early 2024.

Profile Option for Play Style Preference

If Hardcore is not your preferred play style, we've added a Prefer Softcore profile option that when toggled will include earned EXP from Softcore in your profile totals.

Setting this option to Softcore basically reverts to how the leaderboard behaved before - when there was no distinction between either mode.

For purposes of the cross platform leaderboard, however, only your Hardcore unlocks will be counted towards that. Softcore unlocks only count towards that specific RA leaderboard. This mimics how RA have split up their own leaderboards, since only Hardcore unlocks are counted towards the main site ranking over there as well.

Support for RA "Beaten" Status

You may have also noticed we've added support for RA's "Beaten" status in the last month. This adds new visual indicators to your profile page when a game is beaten, namely a grey border and gamepad icon similar to the yellow completion equivalents.

We plan on extending support of the beaten status to other platforms in the near future as well. Of course others do not natively support it like RA does, so it will have to be determined from other data points like earning all non-DLC achievements or the Platinum trophy for PSN. In addition to this, it will be possible to manually mark games as beaten, similar to how you can do for completions now.

Further down the line we are considering to allow community members to tag certain achievements as story complete which would also serve as a beaten marker, if there is interest in that let us know in the comments or on Discord!
 
What a great update, thank you as always for all the hard work here.

x3sphere said:
Further down the line we are considering to allow community members to tag certain achievements as story complete which would also serve as a beaten marker, if there is interest in that let us know in the comments or on Discord!
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This would be incredible! The beaten markers and progression achievements have been a real game-changer for me on RA and I'd love to see the concept replicated for other platforms.

I totally understand the hurdles around governance, (i.e do volunteers mark progressions, pigyback off an existing tagging system like Steam Hunters, simply alow individual individual users to mark their own progression achievements etc).

Definately happy to help if volunteer contributions is the way to go, but whatever the implementation ends up being it would be awesome.

Keep up the great work!
 
yandantasBR said:
I have 35 games beaten on RetroAchievements, but only 4 are shown on my profile. What could be the problem?
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I ran a full sync on your profile and looks like that picked up the missing beaten stats. The regular scans are incremental and only look at the most recent activity - doesn't go through everything.

It should have ran full syncs across all profiles since the update was pushed live but perhaps some were missed. There is not a user option to trigger these (since if used too much it would overload the RA API). If anyone is noticing similar then let us know.
 
This is such a fantastic change, Always considered Softcore Players kind of as cheaters in all honestly considering they can use Save States & Rewinds and such to easily cheese Achievements, Its why the leaderboards ended up being split back over on Retro a little while back ago.

Also very happy to hear that all registered players on here that were using Softcore don't count towards the overall leaderboards and can earn points on their profiles anymore, Makes the leaderboards around here a lot more clean and a lot more rewarding for the Players who never played in softcore and stuck with earning Achievements over on Retro legitimately.

That being said up above about Retro I would really love the whole "Game Beaten" thing to be on all other Platforms as well, Trueachievements already has that tied to all of its Achievements on Xbox so maybe it would be possible to incorporate all the "Progression" and "Story Beaten" flags from there to here just like how Retros did? Feel like that would be the best option for Xbox if that did end up happening in the near future, Otherwise Id be happy to help out putting in "Game Beaten" Flags as well as "Progression" Flags for a lot of Achievements over on here, That Beaten Flag is pretty handy for those who just wanna beat a Game and still have it show up on their profile as "Beaten" and not fully 100% or Platinum it, Or if a Game can no longer be 100%ed cause of the closure of some Games Servers being shut down.
 
Can I get more clarification on what the new "Prefer Softcore" profile option does? I have a mix of hardcore and softcore unlocks, and my profile used to take both into account - and I can't seem to get a way to display my leaderboard rank and calculated EXP based off both like how it used to be.

(Unless it only applies specifically to my RetroAchievements tab? Is there any way to have those numbers taken into account for my global profile, even if it doesn't affect the actual on-site leaderboards?)
 
Hexadigital said:
Can I get more clarification on what the new "Prefer Softcore" profile option does? I have a mix of hardcore and softcore unlocks, and my profile used to take both into account - and I can't seem to get a way to display my leaderboard rank and calculated EXP based off both like how it used to be.

(Unless it only applies specifically to my RetroAchievements tab? Is there any way to have those numbers taken into account for my global profile, even if it doesn't affect the actual on-site leaderboards?)
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It only applies to the RA tab. For the combined profile only Hardcore unlocks are added towards your EXP total there regardless of what setting is selected.

Also when you select Prefer Softcore it takes both into account like before, ie. if you unlock an achievement in Hardcore it doesn't take away from your Softcore rank or EXP. So that means everyone's EXP is higher in Softcore if they have a mix of unlocks from either mode.

I suppose I could have it add in the EXP from Softcore on your global profile if the aforementioned option is selected. Didn't know if this would be confusing though, since this would be for display purposes only and it won't match what the cross platform leaderboard shows.
 
No worries - I was tracking my global exp and leaderboard position weekly to see how things changed over time, but I can calculate the exp total and the unofficial global leaderboard rank manually.
 
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