Yesterday, I reported the curiosity that is the Good Mojo Achievement in Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen. I extrapolated all sorts of dark things about the game's sales and Live performance. Activision has explained what I was missing.
Never assume, people say, right?
Revenge of the Fallen's Good Mojo Achievement, according to its official description, is awarded to players who "Make it into the Top 10000 on SP Leaderboards - Either Campaign."
An Activision rep informed me via e-mail that the Achievement is awarded to anyone who achieves a score that is among the 10,000 best scores currently listed. If multiple people have the same score, that score counts as just one of the 10,000 tracked for the Achievement. Therefore, more than 10,000 people can be eligible for this Achievement at any given time.
I had won the Achievement after completing a single level of the game's Autobot campaign a full 10 days after the game was released. That lead me to surmise that I earned the Achievement for barely doing more than having turned the game on. I believed that the fact that I could earn it without having played much of the game meant I was one of the first 10,000 people to connect the 360 version of the game to Xbox Live. So... it must be a sign of meager uptake of the game by consumers, right?
I was wrong.
A check of the Revenge of the Fallen leaderboards this morning — a check I regret not having made yesterday — shows that I am ranked 82,628th in the world. So a lot of us must be sharing the same scores.
Gone is any impression that the game is selling slowly or not being commonly connected to Xbox Live. In its place I have a new understanding about what making it into the Top 10,000 really means. It's not the trophy of high-level performance that I read it to be. Good Mojo may be a more easily achievable accolade than I originally thought, but it is no sign of a flop.
In my story yesterday, I said that my winning of Good Mojo was a sign of "slow sales, low online adoption or some other peculiarity." That third choice was correct.