vSully said:There are a lot of contributing factors here.
The first is that ratio can never adequately reflect difficulty, only rarity.
Torchlight 3 is barely over a year old and, if it wasn't for Game Pass, would have substantially fewer tracked gamers. The game has bloated ratios because so many people tried it and had no interest in sticking with it to completion. Without the Game Pass effect and assuming only 8k tracked gamers, the Woodsbeast Garb ratio would drop to 6.9 (assuming that the same number of players would have gotten this achievement since the reduction in total players removed people who only played the game briefly).
I'd argue that the "difficult" GH ratios (a 360 game) feel too low and many of the Torchlight ratios (a Game Pass Xbox One game) "feel" too high, but I doubt any formula could rectify this. Game Pass creates a huge rarity effect with achievements in games that take any amount of effort, skill, and/or time since so many people have access to games and can try them briefly.
True, I forgot that Torchlight is a gamepass title lol, but that would just further emphasis a need to establish some weight against GWG/Game Pass title wouldn't it? If ratio is going to be intended to reflect rarity as the supreme factor for value then I think many of the complaints would be moot as the current system does provide exactly that, despite it having its shortcomings.
I'd also argue that direct ratio comparison is not really reasonable, especially across generations. If I tell you one achievement has a 16 ratio and another has a 10 ratio, you can't possibly conclude that the 16 is "harder" than the 10, let alone conclude that it's harder by some quantifiable magnitude.
And truly difficult 360 achievements rarely have high ratios akin to Xbox One ratios. Master of the Custodial Arts is incredibly difficult but it has a paltry 5.91 ratio:
I would agree with that, to me these direct comparisons work solely as ballpark estimates of difficulty (i.e something in the 6+ range will nearly always require some form of skill/effort higher than a <3.0 achievement).
If Dustforce went on Game Pass/GwG and had 8k tracked gamers (a reasonable amount) and there were 50% more unlocks (unlikely), the ratio would be 22.3. But again, no formula can overcome this sort of situation where games have either barely any tracked gamers or a metric fuckton due to Game Pass or GwG.
But a better formula could reign in overvalued shovelware to try to better do what the formula was supposed to do to begin with. If a game takes 10 minutes to complete, it should give a fractional amount of TA (like 50, perhaps), not a minimum of 1000. This is the biggest issue with the way the formula works today.
After some thinking over the past few months, I do agree that shovelware should see some form of nerfing in score, but the more I think about it the more I feel like TA would also have to boost longer completions that fall on the opposite end of the spectrum too as those are incredibly disincentivized in the current format. As GrimaceTheGrey mentioned: Dark Souls is an estimate of 80-100 hours to complete it for a paltry ~2500. Titles like Steredenn offer nearly double the TA score for basically a quarter of the time spent.
I would consider Steredenn a much more difficult game so i'm not suggesting for Dark Souls to get a 2x boost to account for the time investment but some sort of bell curve that offers fractional increases (and decreases) would help prevent a change like nerfing shovelware becoming just a meta switch from ratalaika grinding to obscure sales and gamepass grinding which in my opinion wouldn't do much to help solve the underlying issue of bringing equity to the system.