Why are so many people complaining about easy platinum games

[PalaceOfLove706]

19 hours ago, AJ_Radio said:

I don’t care if someone has a few Ratalalika games. If they enjoyed the games, that’s great. We shouldn’t mettle in games we thought were bad or good based on enjoyment.

 

What some people here are specifically trying to state is there’s a certain type of trophy hunter who deliberately hunts easy platinums to gain rankings on the leaderboards. Not because they’re fun, not because the games looked interesting to them, not even because they wanted to try them out. They bought them because those games automatically come with a free stack, and if you add up the numbers, a number of Ratalaika games have six stacks. Provided that you made accounts for different regions, which is a rule trophy hunters generally break because we provided false information to make a Hong Kong PSN account, a Japanese PSN account, or whatever. 
 

And I said this before in the recent past, but trophy rarities are generally inaccurate as for telling how hard or easy, how long or short a game is. I found Dark Souls far more difficult and tedious than Dust: An Elysian Tail. Yet Dark Souls on the PS3 has only a rare platinum, Dust: An Elysian Tail falls under 10 percent, yet I found that game far easier. The Soulsborne games have a massive fanbase that includes people who know every trick in the book, whereas Dust: An Elysian Tail has a very niche group of players. 
 

A number of indies I played, including 10 Second Ninja X, are niche enough to where the rarities are a far cry away from how difficult or short the games actually are.

 

I don’t respect people who deliberately chase the rankings through easy platinums, then get all offended and defensive whenever others try to explain the trophy system is a joke because there is no standard anymore. I couldn’t care less if I had over 300 platinums, what matters to me is how enjoyable the games were, and that I got my money’s worth out of them. The leaderboards in many respects doesn’t mean much.

I’ve never been into the regional stacking, I’ll play a game on vita and ps4 and that’s it.

 

As for the leaderboard, it’s fun to see the rank increase, part of the chase. That’s why I do it. 
 

To each their own.

[ScottishNub]

22 hours ago, AJ_Radio said:

provided false information to make a Hong Kong PSN account, a Japanese PSN account, or whatever. 

Is it against sony tos

[AJ_Radio]

Just now, ScottishNub said:

Is it against sony tos

Yes it technically is, but people have made regional accounts for over a decade. Even one of the higher ups at Sony admitted he had accounts for different regions. I don’t remember who said it.

[ladynadiad]

On 2/26/2021 at 9:35 PM, AJ_Radio said:

I don’t respect people who deliberately chase the rankings through easy platinums, then get all offended and defensive whenever others try to explain the trophy system is a joke because there is no standard anymore. I couldn’t care less if I had over 300 platinums, what matters to me is how enjoyable the games were, and that I got my money’s worth out of them. The leaderboards in many respects doesn’t mean much.

 

I always find it amusing when people say there are no standards anymore as if there were previously standards.  People seem to forget that previously there were difficult games that didn't even have a plat and easy games with plats.  Can't forget that people used to stack games like Sound Shapes and Steins;Gate or play a bunch of VNs and Telltale games for easy trophies.  I get that it is easier now and Ratalaika games can get people plats in a lot less time than previously, but there has never been a standard for trophies beyond the max number of trophies and trophy points a game can have.  There really cannot be such a standard because games are very different and an appropriate trophy list for a VN or a point and click will be different from an appropriate trophy list for a platformer, JRPG, or shooter.  Even within the same genres there will be a ton of variance in the trophy lists because games vary in amount of content and skill needed.

 

Actually I think a good comparison for this is metacritic scores for games and using those solely to determine how good or bad a game is without actually looking at the reviews.  If you only look at the score, you could easily miss out on some good games that ended up with lower scores due to personal bias in a few reviews (which happens a lot with niche games) or you could end up playing games you'd not even enjoy without looking at basic info on the game.  With a profile, if you just look at platinum count you could judge someone with less plats harshly because they have no interest in easy games.  What it comes down to is when people try to lump a bunch of scores together into a total or an average when there are no standards for how those scores are determined, you end up with something that doesn't reflect well on actual quality. Due to the lack of standards, there is no one stat in a profile we can use to determine quality any more than we can use just a metacritic score alone to determine if we should buy a game or not.  It comes down to the fact that people have to look at more than just the numbers.

[PalaceOfLove706]

59 minutes ago, ladynadiad said:

 

Can't forget that people used to stack games like Sound Shapes and Steins;Gate or play a bunch of VNs and Telltale games for easy trophies.

Don’t forget about Trine 2!

[ladynadiad]

12 minutes ago, PalaceOfLove706 said:

Don’t forget about Trine 2!

 

Is that one as stackable as Steins;Gate and Sound Shapes?  Those two were definitely the first where people got a bunch of regional stacks and Sound Shapes was pretty infamous for the fact that you could auto-pop additional stacks unlike most games with stacks where you actually do have to play the whole thing again for each stack and in some cases they aren't even cross-buy.

[Dr_Mayus]

1 hour ago, ladynadiad said:

 

Is that one as stackable as Steins;Gate and Sound Shapes?  Those two were definitely the first where people got a bunch of regional stacks and Sound Shapes was pretty infamous for the fact that you could auto-pop additional stacks unlike most games with stacks where you actually do have to play the whole thing again for each stack and in some cases they aren't even cross-buy.

I still find it funny comparing now to back in the day.

 

Before if someone saw Terminator Salvation on your account you were considered a "trophy whore" now people wouldn't even bat an eye at that game.

[ladynadiad]

5 minutes ago, Dr_Mayus said:

I still find it funny comparing now to back in the day.

 

Before if someone saw Terminator Salvation on your account you were considered a "trophy whore" now people wouldn't even bat an eye at that game.

 

Even Telltale games are somewhat respected now because you have to make the effort to actually complete the story and can't just skip it like you can with VNs.  But I admit I sometimes get frustrated with the lack of standard between games and how for some games I have to put in a ton of time and effort for the same amount of trophy XP, completion gain, etc. as a longer game.  At the same time, I know that doing anything but treating each game equally as far as the trophy XP they can provide goes would be an even worse problem.

 

About the best that could happen would be if players who get the plat could provide the dev feedback on the trophy list so devs can see what players liked and didn't like and trophy lists could be improved to better suit the game's playerbase.

[Dr_Mayus]

12 minutes ago, ladynadiad said:

 

Even Telltale games are somewhat respected now because you have to make the effort to actually complete the story and can't just skip it like you can with VNs.  But I admit I sometimes get frustrated with the lack of standard between games and how for some games I have to put in a ton of time and effort for the same amount of trophy XP, completion gain, etc. as a longer game.  At the same time, I know that doing anything but treating each game equally as far as the trophy XP they can provide goes would be an even worse problem.

 

About the best that could happen would be if players who get the plat could provide the dev feedback on the trophy list so devs can see what players liked and didn't like and trophy lists could be improved to better suit the game's playerbase.

Lol, i knew a guy who refused to play TT games as he found them to be cheap platinums (even on an alt account).

 

Honestly the biggest feedback i would give is stop padding out your game time with grind/collectibles. These dont increase the challenge they just annoy people

[PalaceOfLove706]

3 hours ago, ladynadiad said:

 

Is that one as stackable as Steins;Gate and Sound Shapes?  Those two were definitely the first where people got a bunch of regional stacks and Sound Shapes was pretty infamous for the fact that you could auto-pop additional stacks unlike most games with stacks where you actually do have to play the whole thing again for each stack and in some cases they aren't even cross-buy.

It wasn’t stackable but just an example of “easy” golds and a platinum without finishing the game, something many people here think is some kind of developer offence. 

 

2 hours ago, Dr_Mayus said:

Lol, i knew a guy who refused to play TT games as he found them to be cheap platinums (even on an alt account).

 

Honestly the biggest feedback i would give is stop padding out your game time with grind/collectibles. These dont increase the challenge they just annoy people

That’s the interesting paradox to me. We don’t want quick and easy trophy lists for what could otherwise be great Indie games, and then you’re saying stop the grind and collectibles. Then others are complaining about how we complain when a trophy list is too difficult, which led to a complaint that now AAA games aren’t challenging enough because of the said complainers.

 

Is trophy perfection something Devs should aspire to, and if so, what does that even mean in this highly paradoxical community? 

Or should we just accept it as is, and go after whatever games we like, and put to rest the judgment?

[Dr_Mayus]

53 minutes ago, PalaceOfLove706 said:

It wasn’t stackable but just an example of “easy” golds and a platinum without finishing the game, something many people here think is some kind of developer offence. 

 

That’s the interesting paradox to me. We don’t want quick and easy trophy lists for what could otherwise be great Indie games, and then you’re saying stop the grind and collectibles. Then others are complaining about how we complain when a trophy list is too difficult, which led to a complaint that now AAA games aren’t challenging enough because of the said complainers.

 

Is trophy perfection something Devs should aspire to, and if so, what does that even mean in this highly paradoxical community? 

Or should we just accept it as is, and go after whatever games we like, and put to rest the judgment?

my problem is, if I beat a game completely but then have to grind out steps or kills or whatever for 2 more hours that is a bad trophy design.

 

Saints Row (one of my favourite series) is bad for this because I beat the game 100% and then have to idle my playstation for 8 hours because they made the Time trophy WAY too high.

[PalaceOfLove706]

8 minutes ago, Dr_Mayus said:

my problem is, if I beat a game completely but then have to grind out steps or kills or whatever for 2 more hours that is a bad trophy design.

 

Saints Row (one of my favourite series) is bad for this because I beat the game 100% and then have to idle my playstation for 8 hours because they made the Time trophy WAY too high.

Rainbow Moon had a good design where the game would automatically pause if you idled and stop the counter for the hours played trophy. And it was a fair trophy because it pretty much took that long to 100% the game anyway, in my opinion. 
 

Yeah, I mean grind trophies can suck but the way I see it is if I’m end game, and I’ve put that much time into the game to platinum it, I might as well finish it off if it’s realistic. For example, the kill grinds in Gauntlet were a bit excessive, but having done every mission on hard and the tower trophy, it made it that much more sweet to grind it. And I used the tricks available and techniques offered by the gaming community. It’s the skill versus commitment debate.

 

Hotline Miami 2 is another example. I came that far in the game, why wouldn’t I do the insane kills trophy to finish it off? 
 

NBA Jam was another, if I’m gonna put in the time to beat the Beastie Boys, what’s a game grind in the end? 
 

If I don’t have the skill to do the other things in the game then I likely avoid the grind.

[Dr_Mayus]

2 minutes ago, PalaceOfLove706 said:

Rainbow Moon had a good design where the game would automatically pause if you idled and stop the counter for the hours played trophy. And it was a fair trophy because it pretty much took that long to 100% the game anyway, in my opinion. 

 

lol, when I played Rainbow moon I unlocked the 100 hours basically just as I was beating the game. It was near perfect timing for me.

[PalaceOfLove706]

4 minutes ago, Dr_Mayus said:

lol, when I played Rainbow moon I unlocked the 100 hours basically just as I was beating the game. It was near perfect timing for me.

You got a great profile man, and Canadian to boot. Keep going! 

[ladynadiad]

21 minutes ago, Dr_Mayus said:

Saints Row (one of my favourite series) is bad for this because I beat the game 100% and then have to idle my playstation for 8 hours because they made the Time trophy WAY too high.

 

I've seen worse for those.  Had a Trails game that I had to idle for 50 hours because they made the trophy way too high and playtime didn't carry over.  It's even more obnoxious on a Vita game because you can't just turn the TV off and leave the console running on a Vita and in most games the timer pauses when the screen goes off (and the ones that don't also lack trophies for time played).

 

1 hour ago, PalaceOfLove706 said:

It wasn’t stackable but just an example of “easy” golds and a platinum without finishing the game, something many people here think is some kind of developer offence. 

 

I honestly don't think every game needs to have trophies for beating the game.  I can see why most devs do include such trophies because it's a great way to track what percentage of people who played the game actually finished the story, but there are so many games where the most challenging boss is actually not the final boss and that would be a fine point to have the plat pop too.  It all depends on the game really as to what works best.

 

But on the topic of grindy trophies, I can actually give one game where the grind was actually pretty fun: Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes.  In that one for one trophy you had to beat the heroes' story with each of the characters 4 times and there are 16 characters, so that's 64 playthroughs.  However each playthrough was about 2-3 hours, less if you do a low difficulty with good equipment.  That grind wasn't bad at all because each of the heroes had multiple story routes so while doing this trophy you were discovering additional story and lore.  Each character also had a unique playstyle so it didn't get too tedious, though the levels did get repetitive after a time since there were only 38 in total.  That was one game where the grind didn't feel like a grind because there was plenty of content to discover.  It got a bit tedious towards the very end once I had to farm for max levels and weapons, but that part was maybe 10 hours out of 200+  That sort of grind I don't mind one bit because it enhanced the game by fleshing out the lore and characters more.  I'm very much of the opinion that any trophies that provide a worthwhile amount of additional content for the time spent are worth it.  By worthwhile I mean more than an extra scene that lasts a couple of minutes.  If a game is going to make me play it that many times for the plat, I want to get something enjoyable for my time.

[AJ_Radio]

14 hours ago, ladynadiad said:

I always find it amusing when people say there are no standards anymore as if there were previously standards.  People seem to forget that previously there were difficult games that didn't even have a plat and easy games with plats.  Can't forget that people used to stack games like Sound Shapes and Steins;Gate or play a bunch of VNs and Telltale games for easy trophies.  I get that it is easier now and Ratalaika games can get people plats in a lot less time than previously, but there has never been a standard for trophies beyond the max number of trophies and trophy points a game can have.  There really cannot be such a standard because games are very different and an appropriate trophy list for a VN or a point and click will be different from an appropriate trophy list for a platformer, JRPG, or shooter.  Even within the same genres there will be a ton of variance in the trophy lists because games vary in amount of content and skill needed.

There were standards up until around 2015 - 2016. Many games like the older TellTale games did not come with platinums. I just did Jurassic Park: The Game, not all that good of a game for a number of reasons. The length of the game was more or less standard with other TellTale games. 
 

A few Ratalalika games? I couldn’t care less, enough people have played them and tried them out. Now going by judging trophy numbers, if I were to judge someone who has over 75 percent of their games simply a bunch of Ratalalika games and VNs, their profile is trash to me. Quality over quantity always wins. I’m a little ashamed I went down the easy path for the first year or so, playing garbage like Albedo: Eyes From Outer Space and Orc Slayer that I would never play again.

 

Everyone forgets about the Sound Shapes Death Mode trophies, which I found infuriating as they are completely luck based. Everyone however talks about the stacks. Sound Shapes along with Sky Cooper: Thieves in Time were some of the first games to have autopopping trophies, once you transferred your save file via the cloud over to the other version which is a separate stack.

 

I have over 12,700 trophies with an average trophy rarity of around 42.81 percent. Nothing good or bad as that is generally the average most consistent trophy hunters fall. But it’s clear the kinds of numbers a few people like Hakoom are doing, who has been a trophy whore himself for several years now. A good majority of people above me in rank are much higher average trophy rarity, generally a sign that they are deliberately stacking easy games like the majority of Ratalalika Games with less than a hour platinums to chase the leaderboards. 
 

And yet despite ALL of this, these same people will whine and complain that stuff like Mein Leben in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and the Infallible trophy in Fall Guys is just far too difficult and time consuming. Brian of PS5Trophies fame on Youtube had the utter audacity to try to contact the developers on Fall Guys to change the Infallible trophy, an online only battle royale game that was on PS Plus last summer. Brian himself doesn’t even bother with interesting and niche games anymore. Like most everyone else he went the path that would get him money. Mostly AAA games that companies like Ubisoft ship early copies to guys like Brian and PowerPyx. Those countdown videos on YouTube regarding easiest platinums of 2019, 2020 etc are a joke at this point.

[scemopagliaccioh]

Sound Shapes alongside the stacks, also came bundled with both console versions, you buy the ps4, you get the ps3 version  too, of course, that doesn't mean you also get the other 4 regions too, at that point you're just going for the raw numbers, but if you don't spend any additional form of money, it's kinda a waste not to do, average rarity  is also 27%, from my EU set,  a far cry from the Ratalaika games.

Hell, I did the game, painstacking death mode and all, and I would gladly choose it over Miles Morales any day, if we're talking  about respectable plats.

Edit: you don't need cloud for the popping, as I said, no additional  costs required.

Edited March 1, 2021 by scemopagliaccioh

[kouen2010]

my take on this is - I trophy hunt for myself sometimes ill do a difficult one other times ill do easier ones. it's whatever I fancy at the time. I don't much care or worry about others and feeling the need to be some gatekeeping purist that only plays that take 50+ hours are worthy. Life is too short for that. Trophy hunting is a goal or competition against myself because I'm doing it for fun, not a job

 

TL;DR - I play and compete against myself so I don't worry about how others enjoy their time

[Exeshow678]

I'll play any easy game for a plat, and yes I have fallen to ratalaika games and have a few of their plats. But, I take pride in all 51 of my plats (currently) and yeah some of them i'm less then stellar about (Jack N' Jill DX, Road Bustle, Chickens on the Road, etc) but the one thing I will never do is stack them, I feel like you should plat a game once, yeah if it's 2 different versions on 2 different consoles, that I'm fine with, for example, if you platinumed My Name Is Mayo twice on PS4 & PS VITA, I feel like that's unnecessary, but say if it's a PS3 version & PS4 version of a game (Uncharted, GTA V, etc) That i'm fine with.

 

Idk, that's just my take on it, complain or not, I wouldn't care less

[Nelson_]

On 2/28/2021 at 1:10 PM, ladynadiad said:

 

Is that one as stackable as Steins;Gate and Sound Shapes?  Those two were definitely the first where people got a bunch of regional stacks and Sound Shapes was pretty infamous for the fact that you could auto-pop additional stacks unlike most games with stacks where you actually do have to play the whole thing again for each stack and in some cases they aren't even cross-buy.

 

At least Steins Gate is a VN with high quality that deserves lot respect lol to the opposite of raw games with nothing to offer other than trophies

2021 going to be the year with lot's of titles made in 1 day to 1 week range development.

[ladynadiad]

1 hour ago, Nelson_Otaku said:

 

At least Steins Gate is a VN with high quality that deserves lot respect lol to the opposite of raw games with nothing to offer other than trophies

2021 going to be the year with lot's of titles made in 1 day to 1 week range development.

 

I honestly think most VNs on PSN are good quality and deserving of respect but sadly many others don't agree since you can skip all the text and get an easy plat.  Why someone would do this is beyond me because VNs tend to be expensive and don't get good sales.

[DrBloodmoney]

20 hours ago, ladynadiad said:

 

I honestly think most VNs on PSN are good quality and deserving of respect but sadly many others don't agree since you can skip all the text and get an easy plat.  Why someone would do this is beyond me because VNs tend to be expensive and don't get good sales.

I’m not a big VN guy, but I can certainly understand this mentality.

 

People look down on those games because some people choose to break the game by speeding to the finish, buttoning as fast as they can through that pesky little... what do you call that bit? 
Oh yeah.

The game.

 

There’s a lot of parallels, in that regards, to Adventure Games. ( capital ‘A’ Adventure games, I mean - point-and-click Adventures)

They get a lack of respect for their platinums, because trophy hunters think they are ‘easy’...

...but only because some people break the games before they even begin.

 

I have lost track of how many times I’ve seen some variation of the quote:

“It’s a quick easy plat using a guide...”

 

???

 

yeah...

...No shit, Sherlock!

 

What cerebral test isn’t easy and quick if you have the answers on your lap?

 

 

I mean, don’t get me wrong - there’s no shame in consulting a guide if you are truly stuck at some part, but based on the ‘estimated time to Platinum’ on most of the guides I’ve seen, they seem to suggest that people should just load up the game with a step by step walkthrough, and finish the whole game that way.

 

That doesn’t make those bad games. Most Adventure games have a huge amount of their best content in the dialogue, and a lot of that is only viewable by trying the wrong thing 15 different ways, before you get to the right thing.

 

I often wonder - if some dev had the big brass balls to release a brilliant game - at a full £60 pricetag - but right at the start, before the game even loaded, it gave you an option to unlock all trophies, but doing so would render the game unplayable...

 

...how many 1 second platinum times would that game have recorded on the site?

 

?

Edited March 2, 2021 by DrBloodmoney

[ladynadiad]

50 minutes ago, DrBloodmoney said:

I’m not a big VN guy, but I can certainly understand this mentality.

 

People look down on those games because some people choose to break the game by speeding to the finish, buttoning as fast as they can through that pesky little... what do you call that bit? 
Oh yeah.

The game.

 

With VNs it's even worse because you can set it in the options to quickly skip through all the text so you don't even have to press any buttons outside of picking the correct choices and many guides have a time to plat listed as the time it would take with skipping which gives people no idea what the actual length of the story is.  I don't blame someone for doing that to skip later routes if they ended up not liking the story or if a particular route doesn't interest them, but so many don't try reading through even a chapter of the game.  On top of that, many guides list a time to plat for people who skip the text and give no estimate for actually reading which can be frustrating to someone trying to estimate how long it will be for them to actually read it.  A good number of VNs are easily over 40 hours to actually read.

[Nelson_]

On 3/1/2021 at 4:54 PM, ladynadiad said:

 

I honestly think most VNs on PSN are good quality and deserving of respect but sadly many others don't agree since you can skip all the text and get an easy plat.  Why someone would do this is beyond me because VNs tend to be expensive and don't get good sales.

 

The main problem right now is that we are getting more shovelware and less well developed titles,

cause i think people are buying more of these instead of good ones that could cost more.

Lately that's what im seeing in 2021 and quite a lot more than 2020 by now. (this is just my opinion ofc)

Edited March 2, 2021 by Nelson_Otaku

[ladynadiad]

1 minute ago, Nelson_Otaku said:

 

The main problem right now is that we are getting more shovelware and less well developed titles,

cause i think people are buying more of these instead of good ones that could cost more.

Lately that's what im seeing in 2021 and quite a lot more than 2020 by now. (this is just my opinion ofc)

 

That's a problem with gaming in general.  Consoles in general have far less issues with shovelware compared to Steam and mobile platforms that have less quality control.  Regarding VNs and cost, the main factor is actually voice acting.  The most expensive VNs have full voice acting and it's not even in English.  With the amount of dialog in a VN, that adds a ton to development costs and that is going to be passed along to the players via a larger pricetag.  It's annoying because it adds a lot to the pricetag compared to VNs of similar length with no voice acting and adds little overall value because it doesn't change the fact that you have to read the text since the voice acting is in Japanese.  I honestly wish VNs would just release with no voice acting or have an optional paid DLC for voice acting so people who don't want it don't have to pay extra because a few people insist on it.