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Comment by JamesBaxter | Hacker News Reader

I think you could use Steam Achivements and playtime to recommend games to people.

If I've played a game to completion on the highest difficulty presumably I like it. Find me other games that people with the achievement also play and have the equivalent achievement on and you've got something basic.

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Wouldn't that just motivate developers to hand out lots of achievements early and often (lets say with 4 levels, 75% in the first level, 15% in the second, 5% in the last two each), so that the people who play the game even just a few hours "recommend" the game by the high number of achievements?

Yeah I thought about that, you could use the achievement rarity as I noted below.

Whatever system you use developers will try and game it but I think there are ways of cutting out obviously bad achievements

Max or close-to-max achievements for a game also is an indicator of skill, could be used to weight a games scores more towards "recommended by skilled players" vs. "recommended by casual players" ?

Yep, you could use achievement rarity too. If 100% of all players get an achievement don't use it for recommending or 1% have it increase the weighting?

I would have a hard time equating achievement coimpletionism as skill, to me they are more of a measure of time spent in a game. Yes, some achievements in some games do require a mediocrum of skill, but most of them do not; they're used primarily as a form of feedback for the developer on how people play their game, and secondarily as a lure for completionists who want the points on their profile.

I agree. See for example achievement 'Astronomically Low Odds' from Faster Than Light: http://ftl.wikia.com/wiki/Achievements

"Fail to evade 5 shots in a row with a full powered and upgraded engine."

It's almost pure luck. Wiki mentions ways that you can increase odds for you but still it's mainly luck.

It only dawned on me today that achievements aren't really for the players, they're the gaming equivalent of Mixpanel, allowing developers to see which parts of the game players are actually experiencing.

Yeah, that's the real weirdness here -- that Steam/Valve can't come up with some way to leverage the absolutely staggering amount of data they must have on how people play the games in their Steam library to filter the wheat from the chaff.

Well, they could. They could have the slickest UI and the best search experience. But Steam brings in staggering profits as-is. Valve doesn't need to do much of anything, unless a serious competitor arises. This is the problem with "benevolent monopolies" like Valve and Google. All is well when they're making users happy. But when they aren't, there's no accountability, incentive, or alternative.

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