50% of players use achievement cheats?

[mattBLiTZ]

Why/how is this game so commonly cheated? I swear, I've never seen a game on Steam anywhere near the numbers I've seen for this one. ~20% of global players have completed one level (~80% being people who purchased the game on sale and haven't gotten around to it, of course) and then ~10% have 100% in the game (gold medals on solo+coop survival, 1000 deathmatch wins, etc).

So HALF of the active players have 100%'d the game. Honestly...I would guess it's more like 1%, wouldn't you? How many people out of the loads who own the game have really taken the time to farm 1000 deathmatch wins, and have practiced enough for all gold medals? Seems very fishy to me.

A site with a cheat-free community with heavy moderation for Steam achievement rankings (astats) has 16 players 100% out of 10,574 players in the database with minimum of 1 achievement. So 0.1%, rather than the 50% on the Steam stats.

Anyways, my point is - is there an explanation for this unprecedented situation? Was there some event that encouraged people to cheat their scores? Is there some kind of cheesy method like enable console command cheats -> start a level with them on -> disable them right at the end of a level so you can now earn achievements again?

I totally understand the desire to mess around with wacky settings, but those in-game cheats DO disable achievements as far as I know...so this is clearly some other situation right. Hoping someone can shed some light on it! Thanks!

[Discy]

Hey there and welcome to the forums.

I didn't know the stats were so skewed compared to other Steam games. Are we only talking about Sam HD, or Sam 3 too? And can you name a few games with proportionate achievement unlock percentages? I'm interested in seeing this for myself.

Also, disproportionate achievement stats doesn't necessarily mean people cheat in the game itself. Since achievements are client-side unlocked, there's a program that can (un)lock achievements and change stats of games that have such Steamworks integration. I know it works, since I've used it on occasion to unlock achievements that stayed locked thanks to bugs.

[Scratch]

It's likely due to pirates abusing the fact that the AppID can be freely used on Steamworks because of the free demo. Very common for demos on Steam. I guess they're also re-mapping achievement IDs? Clever trick from cracking teams, but fucks with the statistics a lot. The leaderboards are also very cluttered as a result of this.

[Buzzy]

I also hate it how some people (not only this) but on other games have 9999999 on their score on something or some other high number like they hacked it.

[Scratch]

"Like" they hacked it?

[Louva-Deus]

What dude is going to take the time to reach a score of 532098357982?

[Buzzy]

I'm not sure how someone would hack the total score. I know some games their data is stored on their side (which means, from my knowledge very difficult to hack). If it's on your side then yes it might be easy to hack.

[tim.doherty]

If it pops up as HACKED, but then disappears off its fine.

Marking as hacked and staying sucks if you put in a lot of work to get up there but have someone above you who went into one level and hacked.

[Captain_Russia]

just more people pointlessly cheating

[Louva-Deus]

Hey tim, welcome back!