Explaining your TrueAchievement score

If you're new to TrueAchievements or still getting to grips with the TA scoring system, take a look through this site help article for our explanation!

Heidi Nicholas

Published 02 Jan 2025

For this site help story, we're going to explain how the TrueAchievement scoring system works. If you've been here for a while and this already makes complete sense to you, feel free to talk amongst yourselves for a bit.

If, however, you're a newer member who's come to the site only to find all of these different numbers listed on your profile, achievements, and games, read on for an explanation of what on earth is happening there.

Below, we'll explain why and how the TrueAchievement score was invented, how it works, what the TA Ratio is, and how to spot it and understand it around the site.

We thought we'd take the time, while everyone's at home, to go through and republish some of our site help articles. If you're new to TrueAchievements or would like a refresher; this article goes through an explanation of the TrueAchievement scoring system, with examples, to help you understand and recognize one of our most important features.

What is TrueAchievement Score

When comparing Gamerscore with some friends near the release of the Xbox 360, we came to the conclusion that, as great as the achievement system is, the way that points are awarded isn't always fair. For example, the 5 Gamerscore awarded for pressing the start button in The Simpsons Game is worth the same as the 5 Gamerscore given for completing the game using only the Lunar Staff in Ninja Gaiden S2.

With the base Gamerscore for each game capped at 1,000 points (and we realize that there are exceptions, with XBLA titles capped at 200 and 400 in the past), the problem becomes even more apparent. For example, the 1,000GS earned for pressing the B button 50 times in Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Burning Earth is worth exactly the same as the 1,000GS unlocked for completing a game like Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, which will take some skill and dedication to master.

That didn't seem right, so we decided to see if we could come up with a better system — a system that still respects the Gamerscore value that developers have chosen to award for each achievement, but more accurately displays the achievement's rarity.

Introducing the TrueAchievements Scoring system

At TrueAchievements, we believe that the harder an achievement is to earn, the more points and kudos you should be handed when you unlock it. To that end, we’ve come up with a formula that adjusts these achievement scores by their rarity.

The scarcity of any given achievement is determined by comparing the number of people who have unlocked the achievement to the number of people who have played the game in question.

The smaller the percentage of people that have the achievement, the bigger the multiplier for that achievement (this multiplier is known as the TrueAchievement Ratio).

The formula above is used to calculate the TA ratio for a game's base achievement list. We do use different formulas to calculate TA ratios for achievements in DLC packs and title updates which we'll cover in a future site help story.

An example of the TrueAchievement Score

In this example from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, we can see that 78,068 TA gamers have unlocked the Mile High Club achievement out of 418,153 that have played the game. That's quite a low percentage (18%), which suggests it's reasonably hard to unlock and it, therefore, has quite a high TA Ratio (2.31).

We then take the base Gamerscore value for the achievement (20) and multiply it by the TA ratio (2.31) to give us a TrueAchievement score of 46, which seems much fairer.

Because the TrueAchievement score is based on the number of people who have currently unlocked an achievement compared to the number of people who have played the game (we count unlocking at least one achievement in a game as playing it), the TA score for an achievement can increase or decrease over time, as more people are tracked as having the game, or more people who have the game unlock the achievement.

And it's as simple as that!

TrueAchievement Scores

Adding up all of the TA scores for each of the achievements in a game gives you that game's total TrueAchievement score. Using Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare as an example again, you can see that it has a total TrueAchievement score of 1,488.

Add up all the TrueAchievement scores for the achievements a gamer has unlocked and you get their TrueAchievement score. In the example below, you can see that smrnov had a TrueAchievement score of 6,308,506 at the time of writing.

If you have a suggestion for any site features that you'd like us to cover, please let us know by posting in the comments below.

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Written by Heidi Nicholas

Heidi tends to lean towards indie games, RPGs, and open-world games on Xbox, and when not playing Disney Dreamlight Valley, happily installs every new wholesome game that appears on Xbox Game Pass, before diving back into favorites like The Witcher 3. She's looking forward to Age of Mythology Retold, Everwild, Fable, and Avowed on the Xbox horizon. Heidi graduated with an MA in English Literature before joining the TrueAchievements team.