People called in sick to work, and parents let their kids skip school in order to play Halo 3 when it was first released. Like many other Xbox game, Halo 3 was given "achievements" in order to raise ones gamer score. The thought is that the higher a players gamescore is, the more games they have played, and over all how experienced they are at playing games.
Halo 3 was meant to be yet another game utilizing this. The achievements were found by playing. There was only one problem, for many of the achievement a player would have to have Xbox live, a luxury some people do not have. The game it self even offered a benefit for getting all the achievements. When you got them all, you unlocked a sword that you could put on your characters back.
After a few weeks, as I played Halo 3 online, I started to come across a lot of people wearing this sword. This status was suppose to mean that they were gods at the game. As I played them, this statement became false. Most of them were newbie players that didn't fully know all the controls yet. Even further I tried to get all the achievements and found them pretty difficult to get. This left me puzzled, so I did some investigating.
First I looked at what the different achievements were. Some were interesting, some very boring, and some were down right horrible. I mean “Mongoose Mowdown” ? come on! Another achievement is to kill someone with a needler, which is commonly known as a newbie weapon!
As another experiment I went into a ranked Free For All match on Xbox live which is the main game type where you have to get online achievements. I was quickly presented by a bunch of ten year olds screaming “want to get achievements??” So the case was finally solved. Everyone was not getting their achievements legally live the developers intended. They were cheating.
So what are the developers going to do to counteract this? Only time will tell.
