Just watched the Foamy rant on this subject. I can agree on the retardedly easy ones as it fits with the real life trend of "everyone gets a trophy".

Showed up at your soccer game and left early to see this week's episode of Star Trek? You get the same trophy as those that played hard and broke bones at that very game.

One of the world cup-stacking finalists? A trophy is awarded for a skill with less freakin' practical use in society than blowing your nose.

Did bad on a test? No problem, we grade it in purple ink instead of red ink to reduce stress, and then design a group test so your grades come from the efforts of others.

Lost your job and to lazy to get another? Apply for welfare and get paid with money taken from people who actually work.

There needs to be a removal of all trohpymachievements except for those along the lines of (complete optional More Difficult Dungeon of Doom).

@Thad: Not being such a pussy, and just punching one to death?

Also: Achievements are kinda fun/interesting/neat, but I do get tired of the ones that are part of the story line. Like Phil said, it gets to be a bit much when I get one for watching the goddamn opening cinematic. "Congratulations on turning on the game!"

Woo.

However, they do add a good amount of replay value to games.

Take the annoyance of the Nerfnow dude: Chances are Mr. "I'm just rolling pistols for akimbo" would have just not been playing entirely if not for the achievements. If he wasn't bored with the bread and butter of the game (or getting bored of it) he probably wouldn't be trying to spice it up by taking on challenges. The achievements just provide friendly suggestions as to what challenges you should take on.

Of course in multiplayer games the line blurs a bit, as you're annoying other players in your quest to amuse yourself, which, I guess, just kind of makes you a jackass if you keep getting your team wiped in an attempt to earn an achievement.

Maybe multiplayer achievements shouldn't exist? In most PC games people will just load into a server designated for achievements, anyway, and cheese their way to it.

It's not so much that they are important to the functionality of a game, but it's a modern fad to have them now, so in another way yes they are important.

There's one group of people that don't care, but two groups of people that a) gain some minor enjoyment from them for whatever reason and b) gain a huge amount of enjoyment from them for whatever reason. From the marketing side it's almost silly not to have them now. I am confident in the latter because I sell armfuls of games to people that go out of their way to buy games with "big" achievements in them.

Assassin's Creed 2, "you've pressed 4 buttons when prompted, congratulations!"

Yeah, things get silly then. I tend to try and get most achievements in games I play, unless they require pvp (for essentially single player games, just don't like that in general), or are just incredible time sinks (example: FF13's "possessed all items", aka, go grind a lot)

Well, the other thing I was thinking of is.

Red Dead Redemption. It has all those Challenges to do in the game, completing them unlocks something usually. But then, you get an a trophy for doing that, it seems a bit overkill.

"Congrats, you just unlocked this new outfit." Bing "Trophy Unlock, You got Item for doing stuff!"

It really bugs me. Plus the story ones make sense in an effort to keep track, but it would be better if they gave em like 1 point only. Honestly, 90% of mine are just from doing stuff I do anyways.

I never thought of multiplayer ones causing issue, but now I can see why. I usually just play multiplayer with friends so we don't really care about them. But yeah, trying to beat a game then getting whipped because some guy tried to get some trophy would drive me nuts.

I dunno if we should argue this elsewhere or not, but I'll argue this one. Certainly there are people who abuse the system, yeah, but that can be true of anything. From government programs to video games to contests to whatever.

The idea behind the unemployment insurance is that when you're out of work - say someone doing seasonal work as their career, like a construction worker or a commercial fisherman, they receive a monetary supplement to last them through the Winter. I don't think that most of these people are laughing maniacally while they're actively trying to scam the system and stick it to he man, but that these people genuinely need a little bit of help because, say, they lost their job when the economy deflated, or they were fired because of factory automation, or a single parent leaving their job because they're looking after their children.

To re-iterate; yes, there are people who are probably getting EI because they're too lazy to find a job. But there are also people who are getting EI who need money in order to provide the basic necessities of life to themselves or to their families; and that's what it's there for.

@ Seil; Thank you Seil, I was just about to post a response to that comment but you've pretty much saved me the trouble, seeing as I am currently on benefits because I was kicked from my job some time ago and have been unable to find new employment because, oh yeah, THE MOTHERFUCKING ECONOMY COLLAPSED AND THERE HAS BEEN NO GODDAMN WORK AVAILABLE!, and Evils comment naturally irked me somewhat.

So thank you for that.

OT; Now, let me state for the record, I am a confessed trophy whore. First thing I do before loading up a new game is to check the trophies and see what's available, and see how hard they might be to get. If they look reasonable I'll usually think to myself, "Hmm, I reckon I could get all those, this might add an extra incentive to go out of my way to complete them and see everything the game has available." If they look like unreasonable grind fests or stupid "kill 100 enemies in 5 seconds with a tennis raquet", type things then I think, "No, I probably won't be doing that."

I won't go out and buy games purely for trophies, that would be stupid, but if they look reasonable/mildly challenging then yes, it's an extra objective to complete alongside the main game, and can be fun in it's own right. I probably wouldn't have done half the side quests in Fallout 3 if it hadn't looked like I could get my first Platinum trophy by wandering the wasteland for 20+ hours doing and seeing everything, and subsequently stumbling upon every random piece of loot/random encounter/easter egg in the process and having a good time doing so.

Likewise when today, me and my friend decided to finally go and fight Crawmerax the Invincible (the giant, final uber big boss) on Borderlands and fought a massive war of attrition for a good 15 minutes involving multiple deaths and thousands of spent bullets before acheiving victory, the fact that we both got a shiny silver trophy in addition to a crap ton of loot was a nice touch.

So yeah, for the most part, Trophies = Good. Though Bad Trophies = Not so much. But even then, if you don't care about trophies, you don't care about trophies, so why care about trophies?? They're doing no harm really, just adding some extra challenges for people to complete if they want to.

This is why I dont really care one way or another about achievements. When I was playing prototype, before I even beat the game, I'd hi-jack a helicopter, then jump out of it and attempt to grab another one in mid-air. Was their an achievement for it? Nope. Did I need one? No. I am a completist and a fan of doing crazy random crap. I was doing the stuff you get achievements for a decade before they even existed.

Admittedly I like seeing who else had done this crap, but I typically dont try to get achievements unless my completist side kicks in. But even then I normally just get them for doing what I normally do.

And the only story achievements you should get (excluding things insane difficulty, multiple playthroughs, ect) are one for starting the game, a booby-prize ultimately for atleast trying the game, and one for beating it. More flexible for games with things like alternate paths, but I think most of them should be not difficult, or grindy, but out there. Stuff your average games just wouldn't do. Atleast amusing, like the achievement on Crack Down where you drive around with bodies pinned to your car, or the aformentioned RDR achievement with the train.

In multiplayer, they should never be counter productive to gameplay. Someone posted an article about the ones in TF2 explaining it but I dont feel like looking

I'm sure mine could be higher.