Tag Archive: PS3

Oct
28
2011

Delving into PS3 trophies

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October 28, 2011

You know how it is, you start digging into something and before you know it you have far more information than you could ever need. Well my digging into PS3 Trophies means that I think I understand them now and so I thought I would take a look at what they are for, what they are worth and how they compare. This is not the post to read if you think that achievements/trophies/etc are a waste of time.

For the uninitiated there are four levels of trophies on PS3: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. According to this they are weighted as follows:

  • Bronze: 15
  • Silver: 30
  • Gold: 90
  • Platinum: 180

Games can only have one Platinum, and it has to be for getting all of the rest of the trophies in the game, not including DLC.

So if we take a small game, one of the Sam&Max ones will do, we get a total of 1g (90) 3s (90) and 9b(135) for a total of 315. These small games are not allowed to have a Platinum trophy.

ICO, on the other hand as a medium sized game, has 1p, 9g, 4s and 2b for a total of (180+9*90+4*30+2*15) 690 points. A bit more digging and we have GT5(1p1g4s53b) at 1185 points and an awful long time to that platinum because they’ve been weighted with lots of small ones. Burnout Paradise has a massive 2255 points and Arkham Asylum has 1230. In fact if you dig for a while you find that ~1230 is the normal value for games if you don’t count DLC.

This is all well and good, but what do those levels mean? Well stealing a table from the original post I started with you get:

  • Level 1 – 0 pts
  • Level 2 – 200 pts
  • Level 3 – 600 pts
  • Level 4 – 1200 pts
  • Level 5 – 2400 pts
  • Level 6 – 4000 pts
  • Level 7 – 6000 pts
  • Level 8 – 8000 pts
  • Level 9 – 10000 pts
  • Level 10 – 12000 pts
  • Level 11 – 14000 pts
  • Level 12 – 16000 pts
  • Level 13 – 24000 pts
  • Level 14 – 32000 pts
  • Level 15 – 40000 pts
  • Level 16 – 48000 pts
  • Level 17 – 56000 pts
  • Level 18 – 64000 pts
  • Level 19 – 72000 pts
  • Level 20 – 80000 pts
  • It takes 8,000 points between levels after 20 also.

This tells us that Just playing burnout and completing it all will get you nearly to level 5.

Putting this on a graph we see the following scores for levels 1 through 20:

PS3Levels

Well that’s depressing to look at. At level 5 it slows down a bit, and at level 12 you hit a bit of a cliff where it then takes 8000 points to get a single level instead of the 2000 it was taking for the last few levels. I guess that explains why I think I’ve been noticing so many level 12s then!

So why is it designed like this? To start with it’s a very clear run up to level 5 and you will grab a few levels just finishing the single player side of the games you grabbed when you got the console. Things then slow down until you bog down towards the level 12 point, and that is where I think most normal players are going to hit before really slowing down.  In fact my first thought when seeing that is to just discard the levels completely, the time between milestones is too great.

The level system for PS3 seems pretty well thought out, it’s just not for average people. To start it gives people the sense of progress and at the end it gives a hardcore grind that makes your level really actually mean an achievement. Now I’ve seen the numbers the thought of bouncing off level 12 and maybe 13 for at least a year that makes it all a bit useless as no progress means it becomes meaningless unless you are a really heavy player.

A quick look at a leaderboard should be enough to scare you. Level 50? 275 platinum? That’s a lot of playing.

Since we know that a PS3 game will be around 1230 points we can take the standard 360 value, 1000, for the exact game in some cases and so some very quick and dirty maths to give a very misleading normalised total for the two. I’m not kidding there, this is at best a bad generalisation and at worse a total fabrication.

  1. Level 1 – 0 pts 0 gs
  2. Level 2 – 200 pts 163 gs
  3. Level 3 – 600 pts 488 gs
  4. Level 4 – 1,200 pts 976 gs
  5. Level 5 – 2,400 pts 1,952 gs
  6. Level 6 – 4,000 pts 3,252 gs
  7. Level 7 – 6,000 pts 1,878 gs
  8. Level 8 – 8,000 pts 6,504 gs
  9. Level 9 – 10,000 pts 8,130 gs
  10. Level 10 – 12,000 pts 9,756 gs
  11. Level 11 – 14,000 pts 11,382 gs
  12. Level 12 – 16,000 pts 13,008 gs
  13. Level 13 – 24,000 pts 19,512 gs
  14. Level 14 – 32,000 pts 26,016 gs
  15. Level 15 – 40,000 pts 32,520 gs
  16. Level 16 – 48,000 pts 39,024 gs
  17. Level 17 – 56,000 pts 45,528 gs
  18. Level 18 – 64,000 pts 52,032 gs
  19. Level 19 – 72,000 pts 58,536 gs
  20. Level 20 – 80,000 pts 65,040 gs
  21. Level 21 – 88,000 pts 71,544 gs
  22. Level 22 – 96,000 pts 78,048 gs
  23. Level 23 – 104,000 pts 84,552 gs

Looking at my gamerscore for 360 I would be level 21, which is higher than my first guess was. I think that might be a bit telling.

At this point it might be good to consider what achievement/trophies are for. Primarily they are a mechanism to make us play more games, with a secondary use of getting us to play individual titles longer than we might otherwise do so.

They make us play more games by letting us see where our friends are and hoping that we get all excited about rivalry. The Sony system doesn’t really make that as easy as the Microsoft one as it’s really not clear how far behind somebody you are until you get bored one weekend and do so much research that you blog about it just to make it seem worthwhile. On the other hand the Microsoft system can really make it clear that somebody is so far ahead of you that you will never catch them. Another problem that I also hit with my Gamerscore is that after I passed 60k or so it just started reminding me that I play way too many games. I would be less likely to consider Level 21 to be overkill than I am to think that 75,000gs is, but that comes at a cost of me not caring about the level because the progression is just too slow.

From this I conclude that past a certain point your gamerscore or trophy level become meaningless, and it would be interesting to see if it’s at the same point in both systems or if one keeps players interested longer. My gut feeling would be that slower levels would burn it out fastest, but I just can’t tell.

The more useful use of trophies and achievements are for our benefit and neither Microsoft or Sony really go out of their way to make this easy. In fact Sony have gone out of their way to make this hard in the past. I maintain that the best use of them is to tell us what our friends have been playing so we can be reminded of games we may have on our shelves that we haven’t played in a while, or that we might wish to play online. Neither platform supports this without third party sites, but something like Raptr or one of the myriad of other web sites step into the gap. These sites are all hampered by Sony’s attitude to letting you get the information as you need to give them your PSN account details (BAD SECURITY, SONY!) whereas sites have been getting the Microsoft data for years over the web without needing that information, admittedly with many issues along the way. In fact the Sony logging in situation came about from their hacking scandal, so it could be argued that they have made their security weaker instead of improving it by requiring passwords. Maybe an Eve Online style API key system would be better for their needs if they wish to restrict casual browsing/scraping of usernames.

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Apr
27
2011

It’s better to be safe than Sony

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April 27, 2011

I stole that headline from Michael French on Twitter, so blame MCV if you didn’t like it.

The worse PR disaster for the industry up until this point has probably been the Xbox red ring of death debacle. Years of silence from Microsoft and then the admission that odds are your 360 was going to break so warranties were extended to cover those machines for a bit longer, a large amount of cash was mentioned to cover the costs, and Microsoft turned a corner. It’s taken them years but they’ve gone from saying nothing to having a pretty good relationship with their users. They have a twitter account that pounces on anybody mentioning a support issue and have several quite publically visible staff members who blog, tweet and podcast. Interestingly this includes their Director of Policy and Enforcement (more on him later).

Microsoft learnt this lesson the hard way when the publicity of not being more open threatened to devastate their business and although they’ve still got a long way to go, now when the service goes down there’s a tweet and blog post from somebody very quickly saying what’s going on, or at least we don’t know what’s going on. More importantly they reply to people who ask as well so give an impression of being open.

Compare this to Sony as the new biggest ever PR disaster for the industry unfolds. On the 19th of April Sony discovered that there had been an intrusion into the PlayStation Network from an unauthorised 3rd party, which is a nice way of saying they got hacked. They took the PSN down on the 20th and a week of small updates that said nothing of any weight beyond admitting that they thought it was hacked on Friday and that they were rebuilding their service. These were basically daily “no comment” posts that were the total output of the Sony PR machine for that week. Finally we got an update confirming one of the worse possible outcomes: Your user data has been stolen and maybe your credit card data too, but they can’t tell.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but it’s front page headlines here with some of the papers. The data they have definitely got is valuable enough for identity theft, including what amazingly seems like the plain text version of your password that Sony REALLY shouldn’t have stored. The data they can’t tell if they got is even worse as it’s credit card information. It’s being called the biggest hack of identity information ever and I’m struggling to think of any larger ones. Do you use the same password as the PSN between multiple sites? Consider that public knowledge now and the email address that you’ve got on file with Sony is most likely the first port of call for anyone trying that password. For an example of what this means at just one end of the possibilities I mention Microsoft again as their top enforcement guy had his Xbox account hijacked earlier this month. They just needed access to his email account to reset the password on his account and gain control. They achieved this through social engineering of an ISP after he mentioned that he had changed the email associated with it from Hotmail to his own hosted domain. How many sites/services do people have registered to the same email address as their PSN account and share a password between the two? Even if the password is different for everything else a bit of digging and they are able to change the passwords on these other sites with ease after dealing with the insanely insecure “mothers maiden name” type questions that can usually be gotten around anyway.

There has been a lot of talk over the last few months over the security of the PlayStation and the PS3 has been physically hacked and it’s tempting to link the two. The communications between your PS3 and the PSN have been well documented as the hackers tried to regain communications with the server after each time that Sony shut them out and so there is a lot of chatter on the dodgier sites talking about the issue that the security was pretty dismal to start with. Did you know that every time you connect to the PSN it sends your credit card details (including the 3 digit security code) protected behind an HTTPS connection, even if you don’t buy anything that session? That’s what these sites are saying. I’ll not link to them because of their less than reputable nature, but a quick search should take you there. However, I don’t believe that this is behind the hack and it was most likely achieved through getting the username and password of somebody who did have legitimate access through social engineering or a Trojan. Most likely this is totally unconnected to the hacking PR nightmare that Sony has already had this year, and Anonymous probably aren’t behind this either.

Hopefully this will be a positive moment for Sony in the long run, just as the red ring of death turned out to be for Microsoft as they wake up to the fact that they are in the internet age now and need better communications and community management. They desperately need it at the moment as their main points of contact on Twitter, for example, are the accounts for the blogs where they released the status updates for the downtime (fair enough) and comedy marketing character Kevin Butler. They need real people with real faces and a real dialogue, and they needed them last Tuesday. Or March 31st last year when the PSN crashed because of a bad leap year calculation and most games were unplayable for a whole day. Or when they were fighting the hackers trying to break into the PS3. Or… Well, you get the drift.

It’s sad to see the PlayStation name dragged through the press with such negative publicity but, like Microsoft before them, they just haven’t moved on with the times. I’ve been pretty critical of Sony over the last few years over their attitude and this isn’t helping as they keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Being hacked is the small part of this issue, the reputation problems are going to persist for a long time. Sony need to do something to help restore trust, but they are stuck in the old ways and aren’t going to realise that (probably) just giving us all a free game isn’t going to cut it. It probably won’t even occur to them that better communications is what they really need in the long term, not token financial compensation.

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