Microsoft Gamerscore vs Sony Trophies

[Aslanna]

My vote goes to Trophies. I think Sony implemented their achievement system better than Microsoft. A Gamerscore of 10,000 doesn't really tell you much but if someone says they have 8 platinum trophies you know exactly what that means. The web interface for viewing them is also nicer for the PS3.

Next!

[Fairweather Pure]

Achievements all the way for me. I really like the unique icons that most games have for every achievement. For example, each one for Bayonetta is a stained glass window icon that is a tiny picture with information about the actual acheivement. When I pull up my achievement list, it's a huge variety of icons for all my different games. Not to mention I don't have to manually update my accomplishments on the PS3. That's pretty lame IMO.

Trophies are just... there. Didn't Sony say something about a trophy room a couple of years ago? That sounds like it would be kind of cool. Did they just drop that or something? Too far out now, I'd imagine. Trying to get companies to make older games compatible seems impossible. Just look at the the trophy support from older games.

[miir]

I really like the unique icons that most games have for every achievement. For example, each one for Bayonetta is a stained glass window icon that is a tiny picture with information about the actual acheivement. When I pull up my achievement list, it's a huge variety of icons for all my different games

You just exactly described trophies in those 3 sentences.

[Animalor]

They're identical in the consoles so no real contest there. I'm going to say Microsoft's for their implementation across the internet and websites.

The gamertag graphic lists your current games being played, gamerscore etc and is constantly up to date. Sony's portable ID's only lists the level and the number of trophies you have, and the only number that isn't meaningless are platinums. Yes you can click on them if you've put in the entire HTML block they give you and see all that stuff but I don't want to leave my current page for that. You also have to manually launch the update for portable ID's to be refreshed and even when you do that, they still don't update on other sites. (Mine here on VV is linked to the Sony site and lists info that's 3 months old.)

[Aslanna]

Not sure what you mean by that. Mine is updated on the Playstation site in nearly realtime although I do 'synch' regularly. I guess I'm not really understanding what you mean by "portable IDs". Looking up your trophies one ends up at this page: http://profiles.us.playstation.com/play ... es/Anirask. Look how everything is all easy to read and progress is clearly shown and seems fairly up to date with trophies dated as recently as yesterday! Click on the game name and you can see specific trophies and when gained. Although 0 platinum? Someone needs to work on that!

Also, how isn't a Gamerscore meaningless? If you have 3000 does that mean one had completed 3 games or got 10 points on 300 different games?

[Kwonryu DragonFist]

Nice one Anirask, but ive never really understood what they're for.

This is me, what can i do with being Level 7 compared to let's say level 1 or level 10? Any benefits?
http://profiles.us.playstation.com/play ... es/Kwonryu

[Animalor]

ROFL.. the site just made a liar out of me. All of a sudden my PortableID updates today. For weeks it was at L5 with 123 bronze trophies.

Anyhow. Syncing trophies and updating portable id's is a pita =)

[Animalor]

Not sure what you mean by that. Mine is updated on the Playstation site in nearly realtime although I do 'synch' regularly. I guess I'm not really understanding what you mean by "portable IDs". Looking up your trophies one ends up at this page: http://profiles.us.playstation.com/play ... es/Anirask. Look how everything is all easy to read and progress is clearly shown and seems fairly up to date with trophies dated as recently as yesterday! Click on the game name and you can see specific trophies and when gained. Although 0 platinum? Someone needs to work on that!

Also, how isn't a Gamerscore meaningless? If you have 3000 does that mean one had completed 3 games or got 10 points on 300 different games?

States clearly here that I've played 99 games for a total of over 30k gamerscore. If you don't like the way that xbox.com shows the information, there's always someone else out there that can mine it and re-display. mygamercard.net makes great use of the stuff.
http://profile.mygamercard.net/Anirask

One can argue that amount of golds, silvers and (especially) bronze trophies are pretty much useless as well. Personally I rarely grind through a full game to get all the cheevos/trophies (expecially the ones that force MP to finish them). I'm just not that anal retentive.

[Kwonryu DragonFist]

Are there any benefits with being lets say Level 10+ and having lots of Platinum Trophies?

Do i get a discount at PSNetwork or something?

[Funkmasterr]

Achievements all the way for me. Each individual achievement is given a number of points based off of how difficult they are to get. This allows for much more accuracy and variety in the score given for the achievement other than "easy" "a little tougher", "hard" and "you finished the whole game". And still with a lot of games, if you get all of the achievements, it will unlock something like a gamer pic, which I guess then is kinda your "platinum trophy".

I also have about 50x the variety of gamer pics to choose from on xbox, which is nice cause I like to change it up from time to time, but there are only about 4 I like on the PS3 and they are the ones everyone uses.

[Fairweather Pure]

http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/fairweather/games/

Check out my GiantBomb profile. It details everything and grades you against everyone else registered on the site (about 10k last I knew). It ranks acheivements from common to rare. It's a great site. You can click on any achievement and others will post comments on how they got them and what-not. Since Steam and Worlds of Warcraft virtually copy the MS scoring method, everything can be used together, which is great. They also issue a grade on each game compared to everyone else on the site that has played it. All in all, it's super useful and another fun way to compare games and check progress at a glance.

There is no trophy support because trophies do not use a numerical value

[Aslanna]

You guys are all insane. And I was only talking about base support from Microsoft and Sony not some other third party site shenanigans. Especially ones you have to register with.

Check out my GiantBomb profile. It details everything and grades you against everyone else registered on the site (about 10k last I knew).

But only if they are registered on the site. That disqualifies it!

There is no trophy support because trophies do not use a numerical value

Not officially but appears they mostly do as shown here.

[Animalor]

You guys are all insane. And I was only talking about base support from Microsoft and Sony not some other third party site shenanigans. Especially ones you have to register with.

Microsoft's Base support for achievements is pretty good imo. If you sign in to xbox.com you get access to your full list of your friends, you can compare your achievements to theirs or view a complete list of your own achievements.

You can also compare your achievements to complete strangers if you so choose. The 1st party web implementation may not be as slick as Sony's, but the overall package and 3rd party implementations that you can find as well as how well their system is integrated in the platform and the experience make it the clear winner in my books.

[Fairweather Pure]

GiantBomb tried to add trophy support via numerical conversions and they got a call from Sony informing them that was a no no. Having a numerical score just makes more sense to me. I really don't care about trophies, but I also haven't had my PS3 that long either. Maybe that will change in time. /shrug

I'm always racing a friend of mine for gamer score. He's ahead by about 1500 atm, but he'll be slammed at work until the end of Feb. I have Darksiders and Bayonetta to beat and hopefully catch up to him. Maybe Dante's Inferno will put me ahead!

[miir]

Microsoft's Base support for achievements is pretty good imo. If you sign in to xbox.com you get access to your full list of your friends, you can compare your achievements to theirs or view a complete list of your own achievements.

Sony's Base support for trophies is pretty good imo. If you sign in to playstation.com you get access to your full list of your friends, you can compare your trophies to theirs or view a complete list of your own trophies.

[Winnow]

Giant Bomb and the ComicVine both use Django (Python web framework). Both sites are developed by Whiskey Media who freaking rock as web designers.

What's cool about Giant Bomb, and more so The ComicVine, is that Whisky Media offers API's (Application Programming Interfaces) for their wiki based sites.

Love their attitude:

Why we're doing this

Put simply, user submitted data should not be locked up in one site. As a core philosophy Whiskey Media feels that the hard work of our individual sites' communities should be usable (within reason) by that same community. We also generally believe in karma, and though we are admittedly pretty scared about giving away all this data, we think at the end of the day it's the right thing to do. All we ask in return is that you link back to us and help us build bigger sites

This is so useful, especially for comic nerds as the amount of data on the Comic Vine website; character, artist, inker, etc cross referencing is so well done. As an example, the best Comic Book reader, The ComicRack has a plug in that uses data from the ComicVine for your collection. It's easy to see that The ComicRack also uses Django. They have such a clean look to them.

Go to the ComicVine and do a search for Ben Grimm. It will display The Thing. Head over to the Thing's page and see how much cross referenced data there is:

* Overview
* Comics by Cover
* Image Galleries
* Friends and Family
* Enemies
* Team Affiliations
* Key Story Arcs
* Key Creators
* News & Blogs
* User Lists
* Battle Stats
* Movies
* Forum

Click on an actual comic: Fantastic Four #3 and you're got access to so much data yet it's all clearly presented and cross referenced.

Click on an artist: Jack Kirby and you get a breakdown of everything he's worked on with comic covers, sortable by Most Appearances, Release Date, Title Name. Publisher

Artists all have image galleries.\ which have BBC/HTML code already prepared for you if you want to link the images.



The more you dig around the site, the more impressive it gets. It's the best front end ever to a wiki based site.

The Comic Vine has my favorite Ajax based Active Search. I wish I had the skills to making something similar for my art site. The live drop down results with images is so fast and clean. The only cooler Ajax search out there with image results is the Suicide Girls website.

Anyway, I'm not a big fan of Giant Bomb (especially their podcast) but they have a very nice site due to Whiskey Media.

[Animalor]

The Giant Bomb stuff is fantastic. I just entered my account information and it got it all up to date within 5 minutes. I don't have any steam games with achievements got it still worked out to an extra 27 cheevos with The Orange Box.

http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/anirask/games/

Too bad Sony won't let the trophy information be used by the site.

[Animalor]

Oh.. And the Red Faction icon you see on my gamercard below. Games for Windows Live. 2 platforms, 1 service. Same for Tinker you see in my list. (Tinker is a free game that you can download from the Game for Windows Live client)

[Fairweather Pure]

Animalor, your graphs and score look much better than mine, lol. Overall, your grades are much higher than mine too. Glad to share the greatness that is GiantBomb.

I encourage people to check out thier podcast too. They also have a great iphone app that costs 2$. It's worth it just for quick looks IMO.

[Funkmasterr]

http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/topshotta47/games

[Winnow]

I encourage people to check out thier podcast too. They also have a great iphone app that costs 2$. It's worth it just for quick looks IMO.

I'm holding out for a metacritic iphone app:

http://www.metacritic.com/wireless/

not available yet.

As for their podcast. I can't get over how annoying the guy is that came from Gamespot. He thinks screaming everything gets his point across more. My biggest issue with the podcast is that it offers very little insight. I'll take RebelFM podcast over Giant Bomb if you want more actual info about the game play and less about someone reading off what games are being released for the week.

All of these 1-2 hour weekly gamer podcasts have bullshit you have to listen to about the podcasters who feel the need to talk about their lives which no one cares about but once they actually settle down and start actually talking about games and the industry, RebelFM offers a lot more substance and insight than Giant Bomb's crew and are, on average, much less annoying.

There is still no successor to 1UP's podcast.

If you're into HD TV's and technology, HD Nation is a great video podcast to watch:

http://revision3.com/hdnation/ces

A lot of Revision3's video content is watchable and all available via iTunes, Boxee or direct from their website.

COOP is from the creators of 1UP:

http://revision3.com/coop

Here's a list of Revision3's shows (all easily accessed form the great new beta version of Boxee (better than XBMC!)

http://revision3.com/shows

There's some crap in there too but they all can't be winners!

[miir]

Games for Windows Live. 2 platforms, 1 service. Same for Tinker you see in my list. (Tinker is a free game that you can download from the Game for Windows Live client)

From a developer standpoint, Xbox and Windows Live are the same platform.