Ok, I was with my friend the other day and we were playing Forza 2. I showed him my extensive garage, and he asked why I had so many damn cars. I said "because I want the acheivments for owning all cars from all regions". He said that that's stupid and a waste of time, and it kind of dawned on me: acheivments need to really be worth something. We both mutually agreed that that would be truly awesome. We came up with 2 ideas:
1. Every 1000 gamerpoints, you get 100 MS points free. This wouldn't exactly add incentive to play more, because... cmon... 100 points isn't that much. What it would do however is provide a little bit of a bonus to your MS points 'wallet'. Let's face it - we all usually have 50-100 MS points just sitting there, not being used. So say you've got 60 points laying around after your last set of purchases on XBL. Your gamerscore is 2985. You get another acheivment and BOOM you've just gotten over 3000 gamerpoints and now have 150-200 MS points in your account. Bingo. 'Free' wallpaper for your dashboard. 100 points is just small enough to stop people from using it as an alternative to paying for big downloads, and just big enough to be able to make small transactions on XBL.
2. The other idea is to make it so when you get the full 1000 gamerpoints on a certain game, you get to spend 1000 free gamerpoints on that particular game. Say Halo 3 comes out. It's fun as hell, and you're getting acheivements at a decent rate. Bungie releases info on upcoming DLC, and you realize that if you buckled down and got your hands dirty for few days, you could get all 1000 acheivment pointsand get thatDLC for free. If you cannot play though, you'll just have to do it like you've always done and just pay with your credit card (it's only about $12 anyway). The brilliance with this is that it doesn't let people like Jeff Gertsmann who just want to get a really high gamerscore get rewarded for playing easy sports games or King Kong. You can't use those points you earned easily in Hello Kitty Island Adventures to buy that new map pack in Gears Of War. For MS, it provides one great, great thing: Statistics. People know that new DLC for Halo 3 is coming out, they then play then twice as much as before to earn those Gamerpoints. MS then flaunts that statistic at their next conference.Flawless.
Discuss either idea and vote.
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