I've just registered but my score and gamerpic haven't shown up?

Don't panic - the TrueAchievement Scanner takes a little time to grab your achievements the first time (especially if you have lots of them).

We suggest that after registering you wait a while (up to half an hour) before checking your page.

Unless of course you get excited by watching your TA gradually increase as it grabs your achievement list - in that case just F5 away, but please note it will fluctuate during this initial calculation period. And, for the love of God, get a grip of yourself. It's a number, increasing. The same effect can be enjoyed by pressing 1++ on a calculator and repeatedly pressing =.

My gamerpic and GamerScore have appeared but I have no Achievements or TA score shown?

You are probably blocking our scanner in your xbox live settings.

Please log in to your xbox live profile and click on the Privacy Settings option. Your Played Games setting must be set to Everyone for us to be able to track you.

There's a game in my list that I haven't played

Occasionally the scanners throw a little wobbly and grab achievements from someone else's profile.

If this happens, you can clear the details for that game from your account by using the Clear this game and it's achievements button below the game image on the game page.

Note: This will only clear the achievements for the game you click on. They will be rescanned the next time your GamerScore changes.

How do you post achievements in the forums so the pictures appear?

Simply paste the full URL of the achievement page in your post.

I've changed my GamerTag on Xbox Live - what should I do?

You can update it by going to the Customize->My GamerTag menu.

I don't think the way you've calculated the scores are fair

The score for an achievement is calculated based on a set formula - there is no decision by any of the TrueAchievement team about which game gets more or less points than any other. That would be silly.

The formula itself is based on a number of factors...

The first thing that the TrueAchievement takes into account is the normal GamerScore for that achievement - we could have abandoned this completely but we felt that the games programmers had chosen how to distribute their 1000 (or 200 for XBLA) games with good reason (OK, maybe not with Avatar) so we would use that as our base.

We then look at how many people own the game (we decided this by saying anyone that has at least one achievement owns the game - this clears people playing demos out of the stats).

Finally we look at how many people have the achievement compared to how many people own the game - this gives us a difficulty factor which we multiply the original achievement gamerscore by. We call this maths.

Obviously there are a hundred different ways we could have decided on how to calculate the score but we felt that this was the fairest way. If 100 people own a game and only one person has a certain achievement in that game then that achievement is obviously very tough to get, so the TA score for that achievement is marked up considerably. Or the game is extremely dull.

My TrueAchievement score has gone down dramatically since yesterday

The factor used to calculate the score is related to the proportion of people that have the achievement compared to the proportion that own the game. So the score remains the same if, for example:

2 people own the game and 1 person has the achievement

10 people own the game and 5 people have the achievement

1,000,000 people own the game and 500,000 have the achievement

We think that this is a fair way to calculate things.

The reason your score has gone down overnight is due to the relative number of achievement winners compared to game owners for your achievements going up. This could be due to an existing user gaining the achievement, or a new user registering that has won the achievement. Or it could be something to do with the position of the stars. Or maybe you've been bad this week. But it's most likely something to do with proportionality.

But conversely, if a new user registers that has the game but not the achievement, or an existing user buys the game, the score for that achievement, and your score in turn, will go up as your achievement becomes more rare. So think about that and do a little dance.

My verification email hasn't come through

We are occasionally experiencing problems with the emails getting through, although we have fixed this for 99% of our subscribers.

If this happens to you, please contact us here, let us know your GamerTag and we will verify you manually.

Please note: We are working hard to resolve this problem and should have it fixed shortly.

WTF? I don't want anything to do with this madness!

That's fine, if you want to be excluded from TrueAchievements please contact us here, let us know your GamerTag and we will remove you and prevent others from adding you. But you'll be missing out. We're all the rage you know. Bill Gates signed up last week.

(That last bit may have been a lie).