If I asked you in the street, right now, what your gamerscore was, would you know? If I asked you whom in your friends list had a higher or lower score than you, would you know?
Tony recently asked me about a point in the past when our gamerscores were extremely close and we spent a while overtaking each other. He wanted to know whether we were still really close; we had to spin up his Xbox 360 and have a look. I was about 1,500 GS behind him but neither of us knew without looking.
It made me realise how much our attitude towards gamerscore had changed. It’s become less of a competition and more of a record of my progress. To be honest, though, it’s the achievements themselves that work as the record, not the number of points behind them. I consider my greatest game achievement so far was for completing the Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 Terrorist Hunt missions on Realistic but I have no idea how many points it was worth; I still remember the achievement itself though.
It makes me wonder if we could do without the points entirely and just have the achievements. I’m sure that many would miss the concept of points but I’m not one of them. I haven’t compared my achievements against anyone else in months so I’d be happy to know what ones only I don’t have yet. Outstanding achievements hint towards areas of a game I may not have explored by the time I’ve completed the campaign. I don’t know what points provide any more.
Anyone who is creating a GamerTag for the first time today is extremely unlikely to overtake someone like our very own Jake. They’re obviously disadvantaged by not being an early adopter but new games that Jake and our Jo Smith user buy tomorrow can still have the comparable achievements mean something.
I’m a big fan of the Why Was I Banned website, which highlights the most unbelievable reasons banned users pose on the Xbox Live forums for why their temporary or permanent suspensions were unfair. From the many I have read, very few are moaning about their loss of accumulated gamerscore, they’re moaning about DLC that was attached to their now dead account.
Gamerscore worked as an additional element of competition when the Xbox 360 first launched, however as time has moved on it’s become irrelevant as a measure of skill. What points are assigned to each achievement cannot be compared between games because they give little indication of the skill required to gain that achievement. To be fair, the vast difference between time and effort required for 1000 GS between King Kong and Perfect Dark Zero arguably made Gamerscore irrelevant on the day of launch.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.