Covered at the sole discretion of clymax for sake of transparency on Retro Achievements, which was one of the aims of Moderator BahamutVoid in leaving his farewell letter not long after Administrator televandalist’s own resignation letter dropped. If you have any concerns with this mirror, please reach out to clymax directly.
Global Points Ranking Leaderboard
By RetroPoints – Current
By RetroPoints – Historical, Before Formula Change
By Points – Current
You can follow NeonHenchman on YouTube or RA.
August 31, 2026
No Warning or Recourse
[Editor’s note: it is believed that the mute is for the longest supported duration, amounting to a perma-mute.]
I’ve been muted until 2038, even though I really feel wronged, still to this day.
The Muting was just recent and there was no notification about it, but it all stems from a lot of bad faith months prior.
DM-ing a Mod & then on-site’s RAdmin, they never responded, it’s obvious what it’s about.
First Mute… Then Thread Locked
The timeline is that, I really loathed the Resident Evil 4 GameCube Set, not because of the creator, but because it’s badly designed, like one of the achievements about Regenerador was impossible to follow on Professional Difficulty, while a lot of others had you abuse the adaptive difficulty, it’s just cumbersome.
Then I was muted for a week, because when I made the argument that adding RPG-level of grinding to that game is inappropriate, they kept going in bad faith like saying “What do you think of Final Fantasy’s grinding achievements then?”, they wouldn’t understand context which ticked me off. I then made a Thread to vent my frustration, but while they did locked it, they hadn’t muted me again, that was on February/March.
[Editor’s note: the locked topic is here.]
Perma-Muted out of the Blue
Up until August, I was in good standing it seems, and I wasn’t using the service actively, only really responding to a few people, but then out of the blue in August, they did muted me until 2038. I believe I’ve had a doomspell put on me as I was about to say something about a crappy game that yet got a revision just recently. Basically, all my problems were about Quantity Vs. Quality.
They also seemed more pissed at me reusing my old memory cards, than they were my criticism, which was odd, their portugese channel made it seem I was just skipping across games to get Points, even though I used to be Top-40 in terms of RetroPoints.
September 14, 2026
The Full Scoop
[Editor’s note: subheadings added for publication.]
I. A Long Break
I first used the service in 2015, and RA did seemed like a decent enough idea and at first I really wanted to best the former (and now deleted) #1 player, but back then there were issues with games being mishandled and vitriol, and even after a 8 year long break due to the nonsense, those issues persist. I deliberately went after highly difficult sets, and in just a year and a half with broken PCs to boot, I managed to more than quadruple my Hardcore Points and becoming Top-900, but a more personal pride was getting into the Top-25 in the RetroPoints Leaderboards up until they changed the formula.
I had nothing to hide, I had a lot to lose though, but even knowing of Clovergate, I wasn’t shy of expressing my qualms because I still wanted the service to be even slightly better, yet I was silenced, months after I’ve given up on the service as they’ve failed to gaslight me, and without even as much as a notification or responding to my inquiry, at least YouTube tells lies when they ban people.
II. Community-Created Challenges
Thing is I do enjoy going after achievements, and I’ve been doing 13 years of challenge run videos that got me world records, but I know to differentiate bad and good; if maybe 90% of the website is safe and inoffensive, with progression-based and completition achievements, it’s the remainder that grinds my gears with its community-created challenges that repeatedly fail to understand their respective games and players, that and nothing stops them from taking away a dev’s and hunter’s work. Yet, all the community’s got were bad faith trick questions and tripling down on objectively bad takes, they’re incapable of understanding abstract or deep concepts and my complaints were often reduced to a “skill issue”, lol, there has been no compromises and it’s so tiring.
Firstmost, those classic games were simply never made with achievement hunting in mind, plus you’d have to get out of your way to add it to your experience. It being an hobbyist-driven project doesn’t make it bad, but then RA can only lean on the strengths of those games as it’s only about achievement hunting, which makes it very unlike Steam, Microsoft’s Gamerscore, or Sony’s Trophies, as it’s a supplement to different services;
A Nintendo don’t have achievements, but it’s got good games.
If Steam only has bad achievements, it’s still got good games.
If RetroAchievements only has bad achievements, then it’s just a bad service.
Not everything needs to have a deep meaning, and I wouldn’t have such an issue with dealing a couple bad or buggy achievements every now and then, but the RA community refuses to understand that the quality of their achievements will forever be challenged and that context and nuance matter for just about every single one of them, as it is the only point of the website is to get them all. It’s hard not to go on every individual failing or into specifics, I’m no longer feeling like finding silver linings so simply put that these RA Devs are not good game designers and don’t understand the medium on a deeper level, they should’ve just left Main Sets as progression-only.
There are crippling issues notably with “Intrinsic Vs. Extrinsic values”, in that they don’t know how to leave things alone and sincerely believe they must add achievements for autistically everything, which often amounts to busywork like “Kill 255 respawning enemies”, “Don’t touch grass”, or getting an overly luck-based event, these types of achievements hardly stick to a theme and feel very amateurish due to how conceptually lame they are. Heck, adding points-incentives may change the story; easter eggs become much less cool when told to go after them, jumpscares you missed on the first time end up being spoiled anyway, but also to have one for every story path, which mean you could have an NPC friend die in your hands but get a “Ping!” sound right after or during the scene, is in extremely poor taste and ruins immersion, knowing some players do cry at those scenes. I don’t believe these could benefit 1st-time playthroughs as any emotional moment could be lost, but also these devs are deathly allergic to simple sets, I very much loathe the loss of Simplicity in this modern age.
III. Time Wasters
Saying the above, people kept reducting me being against bloat in actuality, to having issues with Masteries being longer to get, when it obviously makes me sound worse and it just proves they’re incapable of arguing about anything deeper than surface-level. I get wanting to see every bit of content and requiring a time investment, but again it’s about CONTEXT; getting all endings in a life simulation game makes sense because the genre alone allows its set to be maybe grindy, but you can’t just expect the same everytime, like what the hell do I do in Pikmin after I beat it in 11 days? Oh, “Go To Sunset” 19 times, shuffling through menus for a good while, just to see the two worse endings! Such riveting gameplay! It’s one of many such cases where being too good punishes you, and again some things are better left hidden.
The more notorious cases of wastes of time are the Damageless achievements as they’re so prevalent site-wide, these retro games were already infamously stingy with lives, continues, and you’d be lucky if they had passwords, so the actual challenge is almost never about dodging some freak for a hot minute, but instead how much you’re willing to grind the same handful of levels prior as you’ve only got 3 tries at best per playthrough, or in the case of Contra, you only get 1 chance for levels that has you enter them with a specific weapon. Damageless-es are not the only type suffering from this, and the “They’re short games” excuse will always fall flat by using base-level mathematics; if one game wastes 30 minutes of your time grinding levels unrelated to the achievement, then 10 games are now wasting 5 hours of your life and so on, and that’s being lenient without accounting every games’ context. RA devs can’t exactly meddle with the original logic of these “stupid games”, but they should stop testing their achievements on Softcore Mode so as to taste their own ear medicine.
As Beaten Medals aren’t a proper substitute either, as they can’t be used in profile customizations, you can only say “You don’t have to get the Mastery” so little times as the over-reliance on community-created challenges to pad out sets has only made them truly insufferable and you’re bound to encounter “One of Those Sets”. The question when making achievements should’ve been “Should we?”, rather than “Why shouldn’t we?”, the latter was an honest answer I’m afraid…
To put it in another perspective, are these sets fun to redo? As I mention wastes of time, the ones debating kept asking “Should sets be possible in a single playthrough then?”, it may not seem like much, but it’s yet another trick question as they’re actually asking about “FIRST playthroughs”. They kept believing on their own I’m picking new games with a guide open, rather than me having issues with putting arbitrary roadblocks because reasons. It don’t take a genius that using a guide in this way is shitty, but they always ignore context; the likelihood that someone already knew these games prior to RA is way higher than other services, where buying games on Steam likely means you’ve never played them before, and even if not, so what?? It’s as if they believe retro gaming is only about RA, the whole excuse of “You should know the game before tackling achievements” is even more stupid here as I likely knew the games before most of the devs were born.
IV. Needlessly Requiring Multiple Playthroughs
For reference, my favorite FPS, Serious Sam 3 on Steam, does have “busywork” technically, but it’s mostly slight like having to do every melee finisher at most 10 times, not 255, finding all hieroglyphs and secrets, and there are weird achievements for sure like “No sprinting & manual reloading” and beating the Par Time for every level. Point being, I didn’t do it all on my first run, but theorically, now I could do every Solo achievements in one Deathless playthrough, because no achievements are mutually-exclusive, it never cares how you go about them as long as you do the action itself. What makes a good set is when the game respects its players regardless if they were noobs or pros, and both skillsets can coexist.
This is the parallel where the RA mods kept slipping on bananas, because as I knew Ratatouille PS2 already, why the hell am I forced to do 2 playthroughs even if I were a gaming god? They made 100% and Hardmore (in-game) cheats mutually exclusive, because “We should play the game how the devs intended it first”, bro the OG devs put these cheats to begin with, they intend you to use them! This was the very thing I have in mind when I answer “Yes sets should be possible to clear within one playthrough if they’d rather give me headaches”, and when speaking of games idiots never played, they think they know better and that I’m talking of GameShark cheats by responding “But RA doesn’t allow cheats into sets”, while also ignoring their descriptions. I’m retarded and even I think they’re more retarded than me, so conversation is impossible with these people.
Heck, it’s one thing I might have to do another playthrough for a few other achievements, and it’s another I have to learn a custom achievement set as I go, but again with making achievements for autistically everything… You may have to replay not-so-short games just for something arbitrary and feels more like attempts to fuck with the player, for example forcing a 2nd playthrough on a Collectathon for not picking up a collectable exactly the way RA wanted, or even forcing a 3rd playthrough at worst on a Survival Shooter because you made achievements rely on a mechanic non-existent in the unlockable difficulty, it’s maddening.
The “Missables” were also something that could’ve been a powerful tool for games that just had bad game design, for example GTA3 as it can infamously bar you from 100%, but what I see instead are clear misuses of such a feature in order to include random bloat like “Get 4/5 Wanted Stars before story-critical missions”, instead of sufficing with 6-Stars or with less. Some of these sets may have half of their achievements be marked Missable and, to extend an olive branch, don’t even follow a consistent theme like the Damageless Bosses to make it easier to predict, it’s just overwhelming being unable to just re-experience parts of my childhood as I’ve got to check the achievement page every level or so, and these people have the gall to claim “You have to prepare!” as they keep spamming sets with garbage like “Oh you didn’t pick up the Blue Coin like I wanted!”
We’re not talking about Mega Man X with Low% and 100% runs being mutually exclusive, the whole issue here is disrespecting people’s time by constantly producing more and more bloat that doesn’t even enhance the games or our future playthroughs. It will never matter how “They’re short games” as the majority of sets do the same stunts, just in different flavors. Again, it’s not hard to list every failing more explicitly, but even when I do they keep asking for more evidence, they’re incapable of seeing the core of the problems.
V. Impact
It should be no wonder then I don’t give a crap when I reuse my old saves & memory cards, not to “cheat” like starting with a 120-Star file as it’d indeed be a bit shitty, but mostly for modes and difficulties I’ve unlocked on my own time to be available for a new file, yet the mods kept flipping out even though I’ve always been perfectly transparent about when I do it, and the portuguese RA channel was talking behind my back and were actually more mad at the stupid saves thing than my criticism after 20 ganged up on me. I get they can’t babysit or ask every user how they got their saves, but they’re not YouTube either and it does create issues where we keep butting heads over something casual, especially for me when I’ve got no reasons to cheat and a lot of my harder Masteries don’t even have a saving system nor unlockables to speak of. They’ve never asked me to show them anything, and just assume they can compare any game that happen to have unlockables with Super Smash Bros.
It also creates yet more problems in regards to High-Scoring, as in spite of the semi-popular “Score don’t matter”, there are people like me who do take it very seriously, so if I’d beat a racing cup in under 5 minutes, I don’t want my record to be on some burner file I’m about to delete after being done with RA. In the case of Pikmin, its ONLY unlockable is Challenge Mode and it’s highly competitive, so I kept my old scores in to best myself! Yet, I got scolded over a freaking nothing because I cleared Challenge Mode achievements first, and it’s even more petty here as both modes are independant from each other, so their only “good” excuse “You’re getting the Mastery faster than others!” isn’t relevant here, had I (re)started with the Story instead it’d take me the same amount of time! It proved to me they never look at games on a case-by-case basis, and the rules are way too rigid even though accommodating High-Scoring and Time Trial nuts is very much possible, it just makes me not want to respect them to a T when the mods are this priggish.
VI. Exploiting Emulator Pause
This further ties into the “competitive” aspect of RA, because they keep crying over alleged cheating, but they will always turn a blind eye on the issue of being able to pause emulators. Several games require almost constant attention in order to beat, let alone master them, either (in-game) pause-scumming is not ideal due to a delay, or puzzle games notably either put a black screen on top or hide sprites when the player pauses, because this forces him/her to actually learn the game. However, due to the “Pause On Focus Loss” feature several emulators have, it can trivialize anything even including Duck Hunt and RPGs with ATB, where perfect frames inputs are easily possible with the simple press of the Alt Key. The issue also transfers to RA’s leaderboards, I wasn’t even shy of using myself as the bad guy to showcase nobody could ever beat me on two boards on Where’s Waldo NES, due to inhuman reflexes if it were on console. This type of play ruins any competition, and I know it from becoming #2 worldwide in Aimlabs in the span of just two hours, so no matter the genre, anyone will find a way to cheese with pause-scumming, and as a result there are no reasons to take any of RA’s leaderboards seriously.
When I kept bringing this up, these people excuse all of it with “People have families and they may cannot pause!”, but how many games even have such an issue? No retro games that I know of at least prevent you from any form of pausing, and even in the case of real-time cutscenes, what is even the likelihood of events? They insist I make dozens of playthroughs and blank memory cards, but THEY can’t just reload a save? Is it even an issue we can’t “pause” in a turn-based battle or text-based cutscene when we can just stall them? They also claimed “But we need to see the achievement page and can’t let the game run!”, that’s not an excuse either because you could pause in-game then open the RA interface, voilà, simple!
It’s not even a retro issue, you couldn’t pause your Call of Duty match when mom called you upstairs, and I couldn’t pause my Dark Souls Kalameet Boss Fight when an Amber Alert was ringing at max volume during a Let’s Play, tough shit and we had to deal with it! If Speedrunners such as for Super Monkey Ball forbid (in-game) pause-scumming, then why is RA perfectly fine with it when it affects EVERY single video game? Why should I be the only one following your stiff rules then, when you show no initiative to upheld the real retro circumstances and a “fair and even competition”? The truth isn’t about an accessibility issue, it’s a responsibility issue, you’d rather bring down any exciting competition to be had, because you refuse to adapt and instead believe the world has to cater around poor, poor you.
“FromSoftware, how dare you not cater the game to ME, I couldn’t pause the boss fight to answer the phone, how inconsiderate of other people’s responsibilities, you don’t respect your players!” See how ridiculous it sounds? Yet RA does the same to developers from 20 years ago.
There was even an ideal compromise; the Dolphin emulator prevents repeated pausing on Hardcore Mode by adding a delay between pauses, this idea could’ve been applied to other emulators such as RANes, but never had the debate gotten to the point where they’d be interested in hearing it, let alone I don’t think they’re capable of coming up with it themselves. So, “Cheating is forbidden”, but only when it’s inconvenient to them personally ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Maybe there’d be less cheating if these achievements were actually worth going for, food for thought, and as far as I’m concerned, you can still get that Dr. Mario Mastery everybody covets so much without having to learn it for real.
VII. Pointlessness
There are yet more issues with how unfulfilling everything else is, for instance I had mastered Street Fucker, a bad Genesis homebrew that I did just for the lulz, and I even thought the set was more fun than most due to how straightforward it was, but it was among the first of many sets, and thus earned badges, to be deleted, so why even earn anything if they can just Thanos Snap them?
Hardcore Points Leaderboards really are just the Biggest Simp Competition as it only amounts to who’s sunk the most hours into the service, rather than showing off what we’re actually made of. RetroPoints though were a very appealing counterpart due to being pre-dominantly skill-based, getting those in the tens of thousands meant you were above mortal men, and it was my routine to go on the “Hardest Sets” section of the site and doing what I knew best within those, it’s why I even became Top-25 in a year. RA however mostly puts this system as an after-thought as it heavily prioritizes the Hardcore Points instead, and even the Hardest Sets page no longer lets you sort by RetroPoints by the time of writing.
Another appeal of targeting especially obscure Sets was to be the first or few of those who’s mastered them, as on paper, you’d be immortalized at the top of the “Mastery Leaderboard” for each game. Several users kept eyeing over the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, Zero Isle South Runs Subset for years as it used to sit at the top of the “Hardest Sets”, and the first guy who’s mastered it keeps getting praise over it months later, so it is also a form of respect, or bragging rights if you will. However, any revision can completely override that very appeal, said Subset had received numerous adjustements starting in october 15, 2025 to make numerous, if not all Pokémons, easier by cutting off dozens of floors (and in term reducing the points they gave), and for me there had been a handful sets I’ve struggled on only to learn next week that they’d be getting a revision removing & replacing several of the achievements, like Mega Man X Subset, thus cases where you get the short end due to being there slightly too early.
It’s the same issue for Main Sets, but regardless if an achievement is absurdly difficult or just a skill issue, when setting anything in stone, the problem is you either keep it as is and let future gamers suffer still, or change it and trivialize the hardship of past achievers. If enough gamers complain about something you’ve spent an afternoon doing, changing it gives even less incentive for anyone to show off! It’s mentally draining when you know there’s always this looming threat that your efforts can be taken away at any moment, why even put in our all?
Furthermore, if your goal is to snipe the 1st Master spot upon any set release, if said revisions add random bullshit, it would reset your ranking and they can take the spot for themselves, so once again giving less incentives of being the 1st Achiever. I used to be the either 1st or 2nd for Mega Man 1 NES, as I was there for a revision adding a Deathless Run into the mix, but during my abscence, it got yet more, and I’ve lost my position due to… having to get 9 Lives. Wow, how riveting and not arbitrary at all, I’m glad I lost my spot.
VIII. Unwelcome Achievements
It goes to say that several achievements in Main Sets should infringe on their own “Unwelcome Concepts” rules, but reports are conveniently ignored including in the comment sections, and it’s not about being based and ignoring bad faith reports. RPG-level of mob grinding in platformers and horror shooters? That’s against your “Pointless Excessive Grinding” & “Collecting an arbitrary number of [enemy drops] […]” rules, especially when reloading checkpoints doesn’t reset the counter. Reports ignored, and the simps then asked me in bad faith “What do you think of Final Fantasy’s grinding?”, as if they were all of the same genres…
ABSURDLY difficult challenges, and I mean like “2 Years On A Stone” for Crash 4 on GCN, where it says “Kill 25 enemies under the Platinum Time”, but only the enemies they arbitrarily decided you can kill, as the ninjas you can easily kick in the teeth don’t count, plus the stupid fish that are required are in featureless water that makes it impossible to gauge their position and they jump at completely random timings that still need to be perfect to get under Platinum, so “Overly Cumbersome Requirements” & “Overly RNG Reliant Without Purpose”. My very detailed report gets ignored even when I proposed they make those ninjas killable, and the users excuse the insane time constraints as “Well Crash games have Time Trials!”, sure but does that mean they all need to be by the skin of our teeth and absolutely miserable then? They’ve also based their defense on the dozens of unlocks the achievements got already, even though everybody aside from one joker verbally loathes it, something being possible is not mutually-exclusive from begrudgingly putting up with it.
The “Requires Glitches” rule also gets infringed through the cracks, but they excused it for Metroid Prime’s Space Jump Early because “The series is known to let you sequence break!”, while also talking of the same series that infamously bars you from doing it in Fusion, and Prime itself had several revisions even in the USA alone, nerfing its exploits that the Main Set relies on, so here’s their “Developers’ intent” like they harped for Ratatouille! I might go on a tangent, but there is an ever increasing group of people who wants to play these sets as legit as possible, even if it means dumping their physical copies, so if your achievements are near impossible to do on any one of the “supported hashes”, and it’s made more difficult solely because the guy you bought his american disc from had no idea what you meant by “DOL-GM8E-0-00 USA”, then leave it for the Subset!!
IX. Glitches and Subsets
Speaking of which, I had thought Subsets, using a different logic than for any normal playthrough, were a step in the right direction to clearly separate trivia and especially demanding challenges to their own, and for the record I like those that stick to consistent themes across the whole game, but Main Sets are still not any more cohesive and feel like throwing anything on the wall and keeping whatever sticks even if they don’t complement the game. They used to be 400 Points Maximum for the record, but were increased to be virtually limitless, which may be warranted for longer games like RPGs, but I believe the debate should’ve kept going as it now incentivizes padding out some of the shorter games. Look at the many ongoing revisions, without a hard limit they’ll never be satisfied, as they keep giving unplayable bootlegs speedrun achievements and even comprehensive sets are still not “Complete” enough like Mega Man 7 just recently. As I’ve said, I mourn the loss of Simplicity.
It’s almost time to conclude, the last set I was doing on the site was Resident Evil 4 GCN on february 2026, and with everything said until now, this set was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, because it represented everything wrong with achievements and the site, and I called the set for what it truly was. The worst that came out of it, well after the stupid torches and impossible Regenerador, was banning Ditman, same for PS2, the glitch is extremely famous as is, so not only forbidding it is instantly noticeable, but the way they would AGGRESSIVELY defend their awful takes was clearly bullshit, gaslighting, and maybe even a hint of delusion and ignorance. Not a single person in the comments regarding the Ditman Bans were even in favor of it, and anybody with good knowledge of the game and understanding of the glitch could prove they were talking out of their asses, but because all of the devs & simps were peeing in the pool, it was easy then to point and laugh at the one who wouldn’t, they’ll always be cowards.
The simps kept harping that the bug made the game too easy and “turns the set into an uneven playing field”, but it was hardly about the faster movement that made Ditman so iconic, rather they constantly lied that the bug allowed anyone to go through walls and “Skip the whole game”. RE4 does let you do some wild stuff regardless of versions, but Ditman alone can’t just clip you out-of-bounds, it’s used in other tricks though, but they’re so overly specific, like having to prompt-jump on a single pixel to fly or have Ashley push the door so hard Leon clips through a wall, and for a single area before loading the next, that you’re not even saving time due to how long it’d take just to pull them off! Certain tricks like the Island Start Skip don’t even need Ditman yet they’re allowed anyway, and more importantly the Striker is only available very late in 4-1, so what the hell does the ban even help with when you can’t “go through walls” for most of the game?
What made it worse for me was I think the dev responding to my ticket wasn’t even aware of the console-exclusive TMP Glitch, I wanted to try it for the first time because it seemed cool and fun, yet the Anti-Ditman checks got in my path way before the Striker was available, and he told me I had to redo a chunk of the game for the achievements that wouldn’t trigger because of my Chapter ##, in other words wasting my time. Seriously, you were just taking the piss on me, you really couldn’t see the actual issue here were your rules?
I was the only one in that one-sided debate who’s extended the olive branch, I WANTED them to prove me wrong, I kept asking “What walls can we go through then?”, they never told me because they don’t exist the way they describe it!! And then it further devolved into conflating glitches with cheats, so they instantly win the argument in bad faith if I’m in favor of one! I was so hellbent over this that I personally watched the then-current WR Speedruns across multiple consoles, including New Game Plus with the Striker from the start, and none of them were going OOB all that much, they went through the entire story regardless, so if Ditman really did let us skip the whole game, they would’ve done the same, yet these same clowns would say “But RA is not a speedrunning site!”, yeah right tell that to the speedrunning achievements. Mind you that skipping content like the Salazar Boss Fight meant missing out on their achievements as well, thus it wouldn’t even help for the Mastery, so they’ve got unconventional checks anyway that they’re too stupid to notice! I legit think they’re embarassed that they don’t know shit better than a diagnosed retard (me), they’re deathly afraid of tricks only 1-5% of players at most may know about, and even those numbers were too much for poor them, they sincerely believe that even if only one guy knows a trick that’s it’s worth banning…
This isn’t just about Resident Evil 4 or allowing a trick that would make the game easier, I’ve had personal issues with it due of everything it represents, and they were too shallow in spirit to comprehend what their own bullshit entails.
The “uneven playing field” excuse is Abyss-Tier talk, there are no logical defenses in favor of it, it would insinuate at outside interferences like the equivalent of drugs and equipment tampering in sports, but I’m not using GameShark, you’re playing the exact same game I did, so you could also learn these tricks if you want! Nothing’s forcing you to, and that’s OK! I’ve gotten tons of RetroPoints in only a year and a half, is it unfair to the Low-50% that I’ve climbed the ranks so fast then? No!! I’m just built different, I Deathless Ninja Gaiden at 150% Speed and 2 Serious Sam games, I’ve got everything on camera for 13 years, but while we’re of wholy different skillsets, we’ve all started from the same level regardless, and that’s what we should take out from my tangent. Gaming is amazing for how you can tackle any problem in your own way! This is what I meant with Serious Sam 3 respecting both noobs and pros, if both skillsets can coexist, we’ve got happy gamers.
But no, you believe I’m climbing the ranks too fast and you’d rather punish me for the curse of knowledge, which is something I arguably cannot control, because if I’ve put the effort to learn a cheese, then I’ve EARNED that cheese and will apply it every chance I’ve got, why would I deliberately make myself stupid for the sake of a “even playing field” for a bunch of whiny losers? You purposely muddle the line between cheating and tricks to make debate difficult, and if you’re gonna restrict glitches, when are you stopping? Ban Napsack in Pikmin 2? Ban Bomb Hovering in Ocarina of Time? Ban Poison River Skip in Mario Sunshine? Had I said nothing, nobody would’ve complained, so how does my use of cheese even truly affect anyone else on the site?? This sets an extremely bad precedent if they are totally earnest with it.
X. Handicapping Everyone
RA is exactly the type that would claim ableism for separating the Special Olympics from the Olympics, but rather than giving the handicapped a direct advantage or tampering with scores, they have to lower the bar so insanely low so that wheelchairs can do the high jump event, making it unfulfilling for anyone as they can’t show their true potential. You’re not actually helping towards an healthy competition by letting the Low-50% bully you into crippling the Top-1%, putting restrictions with contradicting reasonings against a specific (and niche) group of players will only create animosity, it gives even less reasons for anyone to over-achieve. This is nothing more than Anti-Elitism, if you’re gonna complain about an uneven competition and keep changing the rules, might as well not have any competition then! Remove the Points and Leaderboards, then we would all be on the same level no matter what!
…oh but that would mean having to rid of RetroAchievements of the very identity it strived to be. Well that’s a pickle, ain’t it?
XI. Quantity, Not Quality
What was really telling for me as I was doing the above set, was one of its devs, responding to other comments, self-admitted they may be bullying other RA devs into making trash;
[I]t’s literally in the dev Code of Conduct that we can’t make “basic progression only” sets if it can be avoided.
From the start of the Jr. Dev program, it’s frowned upon to do this.
We’re encouraged to add challenging and varied achievements to sets, because that’s where most of the point values come from.
This helped give everything sense for me, and I can’t fathom how “frowned upon” in this context could be given a positive twist, after everything I went over already but also what came from Clovergate. It was literally “Quantity over Quality” all along, and they excuse all of the bloat I’ve loathed for years as being more points & JPGs with golden frames to earn while getting to grab you by the balls for even longer. Am I really to assume that they’d be of equal quality, or not stretched thin, when you have to force them into making more? Even sets that were removed for “correction” are still not fixed 2 years after, which include Serious Sam that wasn’t removed from the then-ongoing GC Launch Event, maybe these devs had enough of toxic culture and never came back. I may not have the absolute truth, but it’s undeniably easy to assume these things.
XII. No Recourse
RA relying on user-made content, it isn’t a service where you’re spoiled for choices as it only has a single Main Set to choose, that was made by one or a handful of people, but as I’ve demonstrated they clearly don’t have decent understanding of game design, so if you don’t agree in the slightest with their mentality on achievement-making, you’re shit out of luck. Using RE4 and YT again as the example, if you want to watch a Let’s Play of it, then you’ve got dozens of channels on YouTube playing in their own style, and “If you don’t like the person, don’t watch them”. On RA though, both RE4 sets were terrible not just for Ditman Ban, so what the hell’s the excuse then? “Play a different game?” Bro, you’re the ones who’s hijacked my childhood and mishandling it! And then these people dare say in bad faith “Make some achievements then!”, but I can’t do that as you’ve already bloated all the games I know!
You inadvertently funnel every user on the site with interest for the game onto the devs, putting their usernames under the spotlight, so that any criticism can be easily reduced as an attack on the devs’ character and harassment, thus nothing happens everytime. There’s always going to be complaining regardless, but there’s also accommodating those with constructive and objective feedback, which I have yet to see happen. It also really didn’t helped that a lot of games I’ve loved as kids, but have sets I’ve had issues with including RE4, were made by the same guy, so like what are we supposed to do?
XIII. Closing Thoughts
They’re my ideas, but if there were multiple Main Sets coexisting and competiting with each other, there’d be less risks for there being bias like it does now and there’d finally be a choice. But also, if you’re gonna put on the spotlight the devs you keep bullying so much to make garbage they may’ve not been confident into making, then we must include the names of those greenlighting every slight as well, as we’d know for certain who to publicly shame.
After being bullied including behind my back when I’d say nothing in months, and then permanently silenced without notice mid-august 2026 as more users were commenting on my profile that I was based, they’ve never said “Sorry” for how much they’ve wronged me, nor had a single mod in my entire time on the site acknowledged my ranking (or Account Age) as they were threatening to untrack me to boot, self-admitting rankings don’t matter on RA afterall.
It’s easy to say they’re evil, but harder to say if the website is genuinely retarded, they would aggressively argue an apple is an orange and that gasoline in a diesel engine will work as they’re both fuels, and then argue how you can make such metaphors when you’ve never personally owned a car to know these things. Even from the other side mind you, they’d constantly get angry because I didn’t used the exact words they wanted me to use, it never mattered just how differently I could word it, and having a language impairment, there was something deeply wrong and a repulsive aura filled the air due to how consistent it all was, seriously I didn’t needed this miasma in my life.
So I’m done, I’m just done and so tired. I can’t take away their Mega Man X and Ninja Gaiden sets made me better at those games, heck I even complimented on the RE4 dev’s MMX3 ROMhack that they conveniently ignore, it’s not worth being a good or even a smart person anymore.
It’s also easy to shit on moderation issues, but I really have to wonder why the vitriol when the achievements themselves were hardly ever good in more than 10 years. They’ve got Dev Training Programs, allegedly Quality Assurance and Moderation, and a Patreon, and THIS was seriously the best they could do in two decades? For real? It’s no wonder that Don’t Starve & Undertale among others love taking the piss on game achievements. So be like Walani, stop playing into their stupid games, these RetroAchievements in particular consistently strip away enjoyment from already excellent games.
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