My best effort . . . and my worst

I found a site a couple of months ago when I was looking for a way to put my Xbox Live profile graphic on this blog. I still haven't made up my mind about that because I do play other systems besides the Xbox 360. No, really I do.

The site is MyGamerCard.net and it has a really cool feature that I use often. After you sign up you can view a list of all the games you've played. It will show a progress bar for the gamerscore and number of achievements you've earned in that game. It lists your games by "last played" by default (although it might be slow to update some times) but you can switch that to alphabetical A-Z or Z-A. It also has a sorting option to display your games in order of the effort you've put in to them compared to the rest of the registered users of the site. You can sort by Best to Worst or Worst to Best effort.

For instance, if you look at my profile my 'best effort' game is Chromehounds. My gamerscore of 580 out of 1,000 is a 349.06% overachievement above the sites average score of 129.16. Considering how hard this game is to get some of the achievements I can believe that. A score of 720 in Chromehounds is the equivalent of 1,000 in any other game.

Now, let's look at my score in Uno. I've finished the game so I have 200/200 points. But that score is only a 54.97% overachievement above the average (129.06). When they released this option on the site they explained that "finishing" Avatar: Burning Earth and getting those 1,000 gamer points will only give you a 3.75% overachievement score. Why is that? Because everyone is playing that game and getting those easy achievements. Not much effort there.

Hopefully you'll have more games listed with a positive or overachievement rating than games with a negative or underachievement rating. But if you're like me you've dabbled a little bit in a lot of games. I've played a lot of Puzzle Quest recently but my gamerscore of 70 in that game is below the 81.34 average so I have an underachievement rating of 13.94%. And then there's Yaris. A game I've only played 2 or 3 times (hey, it was free) and my gamerscore of 10 points is only just short of the 19.79 average (a 49.47% underachievement).

I do have a lot of games with an underachievement rating of 100% because I haven't scored any achievements in them yet. I've played Bejeweled 2 many times, for long hours, but I still haven't heard that little bleep and seen an achievement pop up. But while my gamerscore of 0 has an underachievement rating of 100% it's not that far below the average score of 25.38.

And then there's Tempest. Based on the fact that no one on the leaderboards has received all the achievements for this game so you can bet this is one game that's hard to get achievements in (whether through gameplay or tough achievements). If you couple the leaderboards with the fact that the average gamerscore for this game from people on the site is only 3.73 points any achievement earned in this game is going to be an overachievement. My score is currently 0 so even if I get just one little 5 point achievement in this game I'll go from 100% underachiever to a 1.34% overachiever. It's not much but my number will go from in the red (underachievement) to green (overachievement).

It's really cool to see what games I'm underachieving in but within an achievement or two or the site's average and then try to play that game in order to get those achievements. I'm only a 1.56% underachiever in Luxor 2 by only .95 gamerpoints. Any achievement there will turn things around. Some of my other marginally underachieving games are Gauntlet, Boom Boom Rocket, Zuma, Joust, Word Puzzle, Tetris Splash, Poker Smash, Ikaruga, and Gears of War. An achievement or two in any of those games would put me on the plus side.

There's a leaderboard where you can look at the leaders overall, by a specific game or by gamerzone (i.e. Pro, recreation, etc.) or other options. You can also check out other people's scores and progress and see what games they've underachieved in and then point that out to them when they start bragging about their game prowess. There's a forum (the only video game forum I can access while at work) and a LiveTracker that lets you see which games registered site users are in at that time. Right now there's 27 in Call of Duty 4, 13 in Gears of War, and 198 in Grand Theft Auto 4 (that's down from the near 400 usually) and a lot of other games.

I picked up 15 points in Solitaire last night and that jumped my overachievement rating from 120.89% to 159.07%. Now you might think I'm crazy and obsessed with achievements or gamerscores . . . okay maybe I am just a little . . . but it's nice to know how my game playing stacks up with everyone else. It use to be the mark of your game playing skills and effort was getting to put three letters in next to your high score at the arcade. Now, it's achievements and gamerscores. And if I'm hoping to break the 10,000 gamerscore point barrier this year knowing where my best efforts are being made is nice. Besides all those negative ratings just make me want to take a day off and turn those negatives into positives. Oh wait, I'm already taking Monday off to play games. Too bad my job can't get me this motivated and productive. Maybe if my job had achievements too.

Beep.

Achievement Unlocked.
Arrived to work on time 5 points