March 2022 will be a massive month for TrueAchievements. Not only will we celebrate our 14th birthday, but within the first few days of the month, we should surpass 750,000 registered gamers on the site.To celebrate those milestones, and also as a humble addendum to our 20 moments that defined Xbox feature series, I thought it appropriate to pen a few words on how you came to be reading this article on this particular corner of the web.Please note: There’s a gallery of screenshots of the TrueAchievements homepage from launch date until today at the bottom of this article.Background: Why build TrueAchievements in the first place?It was spring 2008 and I was loving my Xbox 360, in particular its platform-spanning achievement system. A long work commute meant I had time to listen to all of the best gaming podcasts — Three Red Lights chief among them. The hosts would often start the show with a recap on the Gamerscore they’d each unlocked in the previous week, the person with the most taking the bragging rights. Listening to these, it became increasingly clear to me that all Gamerscore was not created equal. It seemed fundamentally wrong to me that this:Should be worth the same measly five Gamerscore as this:I thought an achievement should have a points value that related to how tricky it was to unlock, and spent a while trying to come up with a formula to re-evaluate the achievements based on their rarity within the pool of gamers that had played the game.In order to test the formula I needed some achievement unlock data, so I set to work writing a little app that would go to the public page on xbox.com for a Gamertag, pull in their played games from the list, and then ‘click’ on each of the games they’d played and grab the achievement unlock information. I built a simple database to store the game, achievement, and unlock data, scraped all my Xbox live friends’ data, and then tested a few different versions of what would become known as the TA Ratio to see which looked the best.TrueAchievement RatioTo come up with the TrueAchievement Ratio, I started with something simple — the number of people that had played the game divided by the number of people that had won the achievement. So if 100 people had played a game, and only 10 had won the achievement, we would divide 100 by 10 to get a TA Ratio of 10 for that particular achievement. This seemed like a reasonable place to start, but I found that as I added more gamers to the scan pool, the ratio quickly became too large.With a base of 1,000 gamers playing a game where only 10 had won a certain achievement, that would have had a ratio of 100. This seemed way too high for an achievement that 1% of gamers was able to unlock, so I decided to square root the ratio as well. This means for the first example, where 10 people out of 100 had won the achievement, we had a ratio of 3.2, and the second example where 10 out of 1,000 had won the achievement, we ended up with a ratio of 10 for that achievement. This seemed to work pretty well in a cross section of games that I tested it on, so I settled on it and launched the very first version of the TrueAchievements website.The TrueAchievements website2008 — TrueAchievements.com Version 1.0Now I had a formula, I wanted a way for people to find out what their own TrueAchievement score was, so I found a simple website template online and added a way to register. Once we had your Gamertag, the scanner would go off and scrape all your game and achievement data from xbox.com, and a couple of minutes later, you would be able to see your TrueAchievement score and where you ranked on the TrueAchievement leaderboard.trueachievements.com went live on April 1st, 2008.I spent pretty much every spare hour I had for the rest of 2008 working on site features and making the scanners faster and more reliable. At this stage, I was still working a full-time job in London, with an hour-long commute to and from work, so development time was fairly limited. In the first few months of the site’s existence, the only way to contact me was via email — I didn’t create the forums until 25th July! But due to the amazing feature ideas and endless encouragement from our small group of members, I poured my heart and soul into making the site the best it could be. You can see the huge number of features that were added in the first nine months by checking out the Site News stories from 2008.Total registered gamers at end of 2008: 5,4052009 — Rapid growthIn 2009, I was absolutely loving working on the site in my spare time. We had an awesome group of regular community members that were on the site almost daily, coming up with cool new ideas to make the site better, and to make their achievement-hunting easier.I’d do my best to get the feature requests coded and live as soon as I possibly could, often updating the site with features that only half-worked at launch, but would be fixed within hours (or sometimes minutes) when the error emails came rolling in! It was a super fun time for me, and you can see by looking at the Site News stories from 2009 just how much I got done.Our members were as keen to see the site grow as I was, and they created volunteer News and Game Info (aka Content) teams, as well as a private Investigations Team to help keep the leaderboards clear of cheaters. The site went from just over 5,000 members in the first year to almost 50,000 in year two, helped by features about the site in Official Xbox Magazine and on leading technology site, Joystiq.Total registered gamers at end of 2009: 45,2922010 — New features galore, but massive hardware troubleI changed career early in 2010, moving out of the travel sector and into software development. My new role had a shorter commute, which meant I was able to have a bit more time to work on the site.Thanks to the awesome TA community, site feature ideas came thick and fast, and I’d do my best to implement the most appealing ones as quickly as I could, regularly adding multiple new features at once. You can see from the comments on this new feature that adding code in one part of the site could break things in an unrelated part, but also how quickly I’d try to get those issues fixed thanks to the quick bug reporting of the community.Unfortunately, in September, we suffered a catastrophic hardware failure on the TA database server, which lost our database and the previous nine months of backups. For most websites, this would probably be the end. But our community pulled out all the stops to trawl Google caches and Wayback Machine, and combined with some sterling work by some data recovery experts, we were back up and running within eight days. The comments section on the “TrueAchievements is back!” news story still gives me the feels to this day.Total registered gamers at end of 2010: 83,5012011 — Constant xbox.com redesigns caused scanner issuesThe early version of the TA scanners that pulled the achievement unlock data for our gamers worked by parsing the html of xbox.com (a.k.a. “scraping”). We didn’t have access to the Xbox APIs at this stage, so we didn’t have any option if we wanted to include that data in the site. This meant that the scanners were quite slow, but it also meant that every time Microsoft changed the design of xbox.com, they would break. They must have had a new design team in 2011 as they seemed to update the site every couple of months, as you can tell from all the scanner issues posts in the Site News stories for that year!TrueAchievements has always been about the community, and in 2011, we announced Viral Month, our first ever Community Event. We also did some major work to our game genres system, as more games were released that didn’t fit into our neat categories.Total registered gamers at end of 2011: 123,1812012 — No spare time to work on the siteIn 2011, I had been promoted to the position of Technical Director at my software development company, and the extra responsibilities — coupled with a longer commute — left very little time for me to work on the site. Because of that, there were embarrassingly few site updates that year, and my main focus was on improving our gaming session functionality and implementing changes to our cheat policy to tackle the increasing problems of game-saving on the Xbox 360. We also increased our server capacity yet again! At the end of 2012, I made the incredibly scary decision to hand in my notice to my employer…Total registered gamers at end of 2012: 151,7432013 — Rich goes full-time on TAOn January 1st, 2013, I started working on TrueAchievements full-time. Now that I could dedicate all of my waking hours to the site, I was able to tackle some huge scanner, database and website developments that I’d not had the time to work on previously. Most notably, the site was given a complete redesign, and we finally came up with a TA Ratio for DLC achievements that the community were (reasonably) happy with.Towards the end of 2013, the Xbox One was launched and we were the first place on the planet to have Xbox One achievement and challenge tracking, managing to develop and launch it within a day of the console hitting the shelves. We even had it working before xbox.com managed to get it up and running!Total registered gamers at end of 2013: 176,7542014 — The TrueAchievements Xbox One app2014 saw us move into a new office, and add two extra developers to the team (rest in peace, Doomful). Things started ticking along very nicely, with new features being added to the site regularly and lots of performance work done in the background to handle what we knew was coming later in the year — the TrueAchievements Xbox One app.I’d like to give a big shout out at this point to the teams at Xbox and Microsoft that helped us to get the app off the ground. It was a massive challenge to adapt an app template that was originally designed more for streaming apps like YouTube and Twitch and make it work for us, but we got there in the end, and we were incredibly proud of the product we created. Unfortunately, the key feature of the app was that you could snap it to the side of the screen while reading guides and watch video solutions while playing your games, so when the snapping functionality was removed a few years later, the app lost a lot of regular users.Microsoft no longer supports the platform the app was built on, so if we wanted to update it, we’d have to start from scratch. Now that pretty much everyone has a decent mobile device with them at all times, and the TA website is optimised for mobile, a TA console app rewrite currently seems like an unnecessary use of development resource. My highlight of 2014: the moment I popped an achievement that I’d created myself.Total registered gamers at end of 2014: 238,0562015 — Game Collection and Xbox capture integrationIn 2015, we continued to get a flood of new registrations thanks to the TA Xbox app, and our main development focus this year was on giving all of our users better ways to manage their games and Xbox captures. With our new Game Collection functionality and Xbox screenshot and video clip integration, we pushed the boundaries on what users could expect from a gaming community website.Total registered gamers at end of 2015: 311,7902016 — The ultimate head-to-head contestLots of new members with lots of games in their backlogs gave us an idea for a new Community Event that would get them playing some of those barely-touched classics — the Ultimate Head-to-Head contest pitted gamers against one another with a common list of target achievements from the games they’d both played. Thanks to the Xbox One’s backwards compatibility programme, we were able to include Xbox 360 games in the target lists, and the knockout format went down a treat. The event was so successful that we ran an updated version later in the year that included a group stage.As you can see from 2016’s Site News stories , we ran several other Community Events that year to give our members as many cool gaming activities to take part in as we could. We also went heavy with content creation in 2016, publishing 32 episodes of the TrueAchievements podcast and partnering with the ID@Xbox programme to stream almost daily on our Mixer channel.Total registered gamers at end of 2016: 361,7802017 — More Community Events and the world’s most complicated leaderboard systemIt had been clear for a couple of years that our rigid two-tier genre system wasn’t adequate for many of the games being released on Xbox, so an entire overhaul of the genre system was needed. This was a huge undertaking both for the Game Info team and from a systems design perspective, thanks to our genre leaderboards. After months of work, we were finally able to launch the new multi-genre system, and then the new site leaderboards built on top of them.We also found time to run five Community Events (including the now legendary Twelve Days of Christmas), and launch TA Playlist, our monthly game club.Total registered gamers at end of 2017: 409,8072018 — 10th birthday celebrationsIn March 2018, we celebrated the site’s 10th birthday with an epic eight-hour livestream and gave away thousands of pounds’ worth of prizes.We spent a lot of 2018 working on the site redesign that would go live the following year, so the dev list was relatively light. We still managed to launch the most accurate measure of what Xbox gamers are playing with our Xbox Gameplay Chart, though.Total registered gamers at end of 2018: 441,6242019 — Responsive site launch and second TGN officeMonth and months of hard work finally came to fruition in 2019 when we launched the fully responsive TrueAchievements website. Not only did this make the browsing experience significantly better on mobile devices, but it also allowed us to start caching pages in local data centres around the world, resulting in a much faster site load time outside of the UK, where our servers are based.We also opened our second office — a dedicated news office on the south coast. Total registered gamers at end of 2019: 478,1622020 — Helping the community get through lockdownNot long after opening the new office, we were forced to close it as UK lockdown rules were implemented at the start of the year to try to slow the pandemic. We all know how difficult that time was, and we worked hard to try to give our community something to do when stuck at home. That saw us run the highest number of Community Events we’ve ever had in a single year, introducing Warboats, CRAB and TADPole.To celebrate the start of the new decade, we created a customised infographic for all of our users called MyDecadeOnXbox. This went viral when various gaming luminaries tweeted their own stats, including Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming.Total registered gamers at end of 2020: 660,9272021 — More lockdowns, more events, and more infographicsAfter the craziness of the previous year, we all hoped things would calm down a bit in 2021. Nope. More disruption meant we would run more events to keep people occupied, and we upgraded our server infrastructure to improve the performance of the scanners and the website. Both the development team and the news teams moved to larger offices to accommodate more staff as we looked to continue to expand the company.Total registered gamers at end of 2021: 734,7092022 — 750k registered users!TrueAchievements now has over 6 million monthly unique visitors and gets around 25 million pageviews every month. In March, we’ll celebrate TrueAchievements’ 14th birthday, and we’ll also surpass 750,000 registered users.Apart from xbox.com itself, we are the biggest Xbox website in the world – and that’s all thanks to your support throughout this incredible journey.We’ve already added two new developers to the team and we have big plans for the site this year. You’ll hear more about those in the coming days….
Source link
