Gaming meta goals and slightly different approach to backlog assassination
I enjoy playing games. A lot. When I’m alone and I have some spare time, it’s my main source of entertainment.
Having a pretty nice backlog of games is something I consider being a source of joy, not a horrible task to get through, as some people (mostly those who don’t play a lot of games) seem to look at it.
Since joining BLAEO, I have done a pretty good job at finishing games. In 2016, I finished 84 games, and so far in 2017, I’m at 37. Not quite the same speed this year (which is a lot due to my 2-3 month break from playing games earlier this year, when I was going through some tough times). Playing and finishing games been a lot of fun, and I’ve focused mainly on finishing games won on Steamgifts. That itself has become sort of a meta-game, getting a higher “finished won game” percentage. Since I like achievements, another “meta-game” I’ve been playing is the AStats one. Trying to get some harder achievements in games I find fun to play, to increase the AStats score and try to climb in the ranks a bit.
…and right now, I’m pretty happy with my stats in both those “meta-games”.
Steamgifts played win percentage: According to my stats here at BLAEO, I have played 79% of my won games, that’s a pretty good chunk of them. 69% of them are finished as well, also a number I’m quite happy with! Using the Do You Even Play, Bro? script on Steamgifts, it says that I have achievements in 81.7% of my won games, with 77.1% of my won achievement games having 25% or more achievements gained. I’ve spent 1700 hours playing won games (I don’t idle, all time is real time spent in games). Also some stats I’m very happy with.
AStats rank: Almost a year ago, I decided it would be fun if I managed to get among the top 50 AStats users in my country, and that’s a goal I thought I would reach in 2018, but it seems I’m already there, currently at place 47.
With those two goals reached, I don’t feel that I have to focus my gaming on either finishing Steamgifts wins, or playing games with less common/harder achievements for more AStats points - I feel like I can choose which games to play more freely, just focusing on entertainment (even though I was playing won games and getting achievements for the entertainment too, but sometimes I would choose a Steamgifts win over some other game I actually wanted to play a bit more, just because I wanted to focus on SG wins… even if both of the games were entertaining, I chose what would have been my second choice between those two - still having fun… but still my second choice - hope you get what I mean).
Just playing what I feel like playing instead of focusing on certain categories sounds like a really good plan for right now, and I’ve already started. Since earlier this year I have had a BLAEO category called “Selection”, where I have selected 25 games (non SG-wins) that I either want to play or replay (replaying games already played on Steam as well as games played on console but now owned on Steam). The plan was that when I was done with 5 of those games, I would remove them from the category and add five new ones from my backlog, and that way always having a choice of 21-25 interesting games to play, instead of having to go through the entire backlog each time I was looking for something new.
Since I focused a lot on other games, it took me until now to finish a fifth game from that category, but it will be great to continue playing games from that category.
Here are the first five game finished. Both GTA V and Dying Light are two of the best games I played this year. Add Dishonored 2 and Borderlands 2 to that list and they are probably four of my upcoming “Best 5 of 2017” :) Dead Rising 3 was an already finished SG win that I had a lot of fun with and wanted to play the DLC and hunt for 100% achievements.
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Grand Theft Auto V
65 hours playtime
31 of 69 achievements
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Dying Light
40 hours playtime
46 of 68 achievements
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The Room
2 hours playtime
5 of 5 achievements
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Dead Rising 3
61 hours playtime
88 of 88 achievements
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Mother Russia Bleeds
6 hours playtime
24 of 33 achievements
So, that was quite much text. Let’s finish up this way for the ones who don’t have time to read it all:
tl;dr
Played a lot of SG wins and got a lot of achievements. Happy with that. Had fun. Focusing on other games now, still having fun, still playing some SG wins and getting achievements, just not focusing mainly on that :)
That sounds like real nice progress. Also a real nice attitude to playing games!
I’m also more of a fan of having a backlog. Imagining to beat all of those games, seems rather… annoying, since I wouldn’t have games to look forward to playing. So I’m rather fond and happy with having a backlog. Yay, to buying new games, every now and then! :D
Congrats on getting 5 games of the list done!
Have fun with the next games! :)
Happy games killing :)
Late reply (forgot to check BLAEO for a while, and then was away on a trip), but thanks! :)
Nice congrats. Impressive work on both your SG wins and AStats profile.
I thought about reaching better SG played wins numbers myself, but I have crossed the point where this is possible with a single life I guess. The downside of being part of multiple closed giveaway groups.
Pretty satisfied to be in the Top150 (#122) in my country. Actually surprised about that ranking, never checked before. I like to get 100% in a game, but I don’t enforce it and if I do not want to continue a game just because of some achievements I just drop it and install a new one ;) So there are not so many high value achievements.
You should definitive focus on games you want to play, not what you have to play.
Edit: Oh, just compared the actually numbers. With my current AStats score I would be #32 in Sweden, guess I just live in a country that has much more members on Astats ;)
Yeah, I understand, for me - I’m getting closer to 100% finished SG wins every month, since I finish them at a much higher rate than I’m winning them right now.
Top 150 in Germany is quite good, since there are so many more of you :) You seem to have about the same view on them as I have :)
I don’t feel I “have” to play any games, I want to play them all, so it’s just figuring out the order, and some ways of figuring that out makes it more fun.
That’s a pretty huge progress you’ve made during your backlog-slaying career! Congrats on all those “achievements” :)
Don’t sleep on your laurels though, the evil backlog won’t give up! :D
Haha, thanks!
I just came to think of my years as a console gamer, I’m not sure if I even finished a single game for several years then, so things have definitely changed :)
I’ve also been focusing a lot on SG wins lately. By lately, I mean since January. Before that, I joined every giveaway I could. And then one day, someone told me that she played a game she won from me, and reaooy enjoyed it - and I guess that made me so happy that I wanted to change my mentality, too. I had a whopping 3% of my SG games beaten back then xD.
So I decided to grind. Lots. I’ve been keeping monthly SG win completion % updates on my blaeo profile. I’ve been playing wins and sometimes going back to thank the GA creator if I particularly enjoyed one. I’ve been joining a lot less GAs, now that I worry about my %. And it just feels better now. I think it’d be neat to reach 50%. It might take a while, I started 8 months ago, and went from 3% to 24%, which may not seem like a lot, but for someone with 416 games won, that is 87 SG wins beaten during those 8 months xD. Some of them were great surprises, some of them were quite terrible - but if I see it as some kind of repentance for having joined so much stuff I did not want, it makes it interesting in its own masochistic way. Oh, I rambled.
Congrats - keep having fun:) It’s cool to see Recettear on your list. It was my first real Steam game - as I joined Steam just to play it, back in the days^^.
Sounds good! With many fun games to play, it’s actually quite nice to focus more on playing games, and less on winning them. Even though I “only” have a bit over 100 wins, and I’m done with almost 70% of them, I probably have at least one more year of gaming before I’m done with all of them, so I’m in no real hurry to win more games.
I’m betting a lot of people on SG spend way more time trying to win games than they spend playing them :D Nice to see when people break away from that and start enjoying the actual games.
Recettear will be a lot of fun, I know I enjoy that kind of game :D
Nice work, tso. I wish I could vacate some of my old SG wins from a long time ago– back when I was entering for games more readily, and wasn’t as obsessed with finishing my won games. There are only a handful left that I have any real interest in playing…and playing games should be fun and not a “job”….especially with limited (non-kid) gametime. Oh well.
Nice to see your name among the updates.
I understand, but at least the important thing is that now you’re only winning games you do play :)
Hm, never noticed that there was a country specific ranking. O.o I just checked and I’m only rank 52 T_T And with my slow progress it is unlikely to rise to fast. Also since I play several niche games which apparently only cater to maoschist they don’t give much points since the people playing them are usually completionists :P Although those games are quite hard. Somehow paradox. But it is good that you play for entertainment. Everything else would just be wrong.
52 in Germany is pretty good :D I think you’re in the top 3 on my friends list when it comes to AStats points.
Yep, some games have loads of points compared to the time it takes to get them, while others are exactly the opposite. One of the games I’ve spent the most time in (and went for 100% achievements) is Borderlands 2, but one other game I only spent 10% of the time and got twice the amount of points (didn’t even 100% that particular game).
Well, I fell behind on the leaderboard due to not getting much achivements in the last month :P But I can live with that. I play for my own fun anyway and I did manage some cool achievements recently.
Yea, 100 % Borderlands 2 takes a lot of time. There is probably no perfect system to give every achievement a “fair” amount of points. Either it is subjective or you use a system which punished less popular games over …. DLC’s of popular games.
Excellent games tend to give less points than mediocre ones. People are more likely to go for 100% achievements in games they really enjoy playing, that’s one of the reasons why Borderlands 2 doesn’t give more points. I once suggested that there should be some kind of factor in the point system related to the average time to get to 100%, perhaps 1 point per hour. I think that would even it out a bit.
I don’t think that is particularly true. Also it is quite subjective what is mediocre or not. I liked Borderlands and it is good fun in co-op. But from gameplay I would say it is mediocre at best.
Other than that, I don’t think it is possible to make a system which is fair to everyone. For example taking into account the completion time has the problem that the average time can differ quite largely. I think I needed 20-40 hours longer for Tales of Zestiria than the average. Then you have games where not many people even have completed it so that no average time really exists. And then there are games where it depends on your approach. Someone doing a puzzle game the way it is intended can take over 10 hours. A second player uses boring guide method and is done with the game in 1 hour. No fun but he has the achievements. And yet both get the same score.
I would prefer taking into account difficulty as I played several difficult indie games. But since they are niche most people playing them are completing them to so the scores are quite low. Also every difficulty rating could only be subjective. But it is a problem. One of the best examples is probably Dustforce.
Congrats on the “milestones” as well as the games from your selection that you beat, there’s so much good stuff in that list, you’re up for a great time :) Happy gaming!
Late reply, but I forgot to check BLAEO for a while, and then was away on a trip, but thanks! I’m having lots of fun playing games again, and I do feel I’m up for a good time :)