Giant Bomb: Now With Full PlayStation Network Trophy Support

Mark it down--October 5. That's the day that we rolled out full support for the PlayStation Network's trophy system onto Giant Bomb. This means that, after you've given us your PSN account name, we can help facilitate your PlayStation 3 trophy acquisition addiction.

For those of you familiar with the system we put in place earlier this year for Xbox Live, Steam, and World of Warcraft, you already know what to expect. Give us your account names and we'll keep a robotic eye peeled for your gaming accomplishments of the achievement and trophy variety.

Once we've done that, you'll be able to compare your trophy progress to the Giant Bomb community. We'll assign a letter grade based on your level of achievement versus the site average for every game you've played... well, every game you've played that has achievements for trophies, that is. But you probably already assumed that.

If you want a look at an honest-to-goodness trophy page, might I direct you to our page for inFamous?

You'll see that we're listing the type of trophy, which is something that we had to build specifically for PS3 support. You'll also notice that we're assigning point values for trophies. Here's how that breaks down...

• Bronze = 10 points
• Silver = 40 points
• Gold = 75 points
• Platinum = 100 points

 ...sharp-eyed trophy aficionados will undoubtedly notice that this doesn't quite line up with the secret math that Sony uses on the back end of the trophy system. We're doing this because we're trying to get the relative total points scores at least in the same ballpark when you look at them across platforms. In this case, inFamous has a total of 925 points across its 50 trophies. That's pretty close to the thousand that most of the games in our system have. Some games will go over 1,000 points, but like I said, we're aiming for the same ballpark. We may adjust these point totals in the weeks to come to try and get all of these different gaming platforms to line up. Our eventual goal is that you should be able to look at a person's point total in their Giant Bomb profile and directly compare it to yours, regardless of which platforms you play on.

Unreal Tournament 3's main achievement page will serve as a pretty good example for my next point. When you first click on the achievements tab on the left side of a game page, the page you see is sorted to show the most popular version of a game first. In UT3's case, that's the PC version, which interfaces with Steam. Then there's the US 360 version, the PlayStation 3 version, and some foreign 360 version from some other region... Germany, maybe? Heck, I don't know. Point being, you're going to always see the Steam version first on that page, unless, say, you were to get all of your PS3-playing, UT3-loving friends together and get them all to sign up for accounts.

I, of course, highly recommend this course of action. Seriously, tell your posse.

Lastly, there are some quirks with the way that Sony presents its trophy data online. First, you may need to occasionally sync your trophy data manually. You do this on a PlayStation 3, by going to the trophy icon, hitting triangle, and selecting the "sync with server" option. But this only updates things on Sony's side of the equation. We run regular daily updates, so all you need to do is make sure you're up to date before our robot sweeps across your profile and scoops up your info. But we're also seeing an issue where trophies aren't showing up, even after this process. We're continuing to monitor it, but so far, it looks like there's some sort of disconnect between the public trophy page that other users see and the page that you see when you're logged into Sony's site and viewing your own profile. In these cases, we'll probably just have to wait it out and hope for the best. But like I said, we're continuing to monitor the situation and if there's something we can do to increase the speed and accuracy of the system, we'll do it.

OK, I think that should address most of the major points with our system, so go ahead and go to your profile, then hit the achievements tab to sync yourself up. Hope you have a good time with it, and thanks for using the site.