Topic: Backloggery Master Runs

So, i recently joined the Backloggery and its quest against Bak'Laag. And although it will probably take another century untill i uploaded my entire collection and iron it out nice and shiny and another aeon or two to even come close to finishing all that, my page is colored in 8bit MegaMan colors In my opinion a big step towards everlasting peace already

But it baffles me what some people call a Master Run on the site.
Some people mark their games as mastered, just because theyve beaten it content wise (100% saves, achievments and whatnot). Isnt that "just" completed ?
So for me, a Master Run is the following:
Take a MegaMan game for instance. With enough patience, everyone can beat them and collect everything the game has to offer, even if it costs many virtual lives, sweat and tears.
But would you call that mastered ? A Master Run would be something like a No hit, pacifist or a speed run...or even everything combined. THAT is what i call mastering a game.

Whats your opinion on the matter ? Do you consider yourself a "master" at a certain game, just because you got all its achievments ?

I do agree that people's definition of Completed and Mastered are far too loose.

According to Backloggery, a Master Run is a play through made more difficult by the player, not the game. You must go beyond the scope of difficulty ingame in order for it to be considered a Master Run.

Knowing the game like the back of your hand or playing through X amount of times does not constitute a Master Run.

In my opinion.

I don't see why it matters if a person defines a game "mastered" more loosely. Doesn't affect anyone else, it's not a contest, it's just for one's own self satisfaction. If someone feels they "mastered" a game by beating it with no hits or in under an hour, great. If someone feels they "mastered" it by exhausting every mode and difficulty the game has to offer, that's just as great. Whatever gives people a sense of accomplishment. I mean, you can "complete" a game (100% it) at a lower difficulty and consider that "completed", I can see how one would consider that completion and consider the highest difficulties "mastering". Either way, I don't see why anyone should really care how others might define it, not like there's a prize for "mastering" the most games or anything.

There is only one game I think I have Mastered really recently.

The original Metal Slug - MVS Difficulty - 1 credit for the whole game.

Even then MVS is only the second hardest difficulty. (But it is the default Arcade one and one level higher than the AES one).

I could try to do it but why bother when I still cannot do the Final Mission in Metal Slug 3 using less than 4 credits (MVS difficulty again).

The guys behind Backloggery have been planning to tweak the way master runs work so that Mastery isn't "above" Completed, but rather a different category entirely. I haven't written any game as mastered, but I would totally do so if I achieved anything worth bragging about.

Some games have such hard Completion tasks that doing so is worth the Mastery gem imo

Yeah. I'm a perfectionist when it comes to the BL, so I have very strict guidelines for Mastery/Completion. For completion, I must get literally everything in the game, whether it's beating all levels with every character, getting every achievement, or whatnot. For Mastery, I usually have to make it very hard for myself or do a speedrun, or if applicable, making in innovative Mastery goal. For example, 3D Classics: Kid Icarus is the only game I've Mastered, and for that I did a Minimal Items run (I wasn't allowed to buy anything, upgrade my arrows, and I had to get few points to prevent getting health boosts).

And it annoys me when people don't follow my guidelines, especially when it's a game like Kid Icarus: Uprising, a game I refuse to mark as Completed until I beat Boss Battle Mode on Hard (I have every single other achievement the game offers). But I see plenty of people marking it as Completed, Mastered even, just for pretty much beating the game. They don't even have all the chapters beaten on the hardest intensity. So yeah.

/end rant

You beat every chapter on 9.0? You've completed the three achievement panels? And the Power Portrait? All you're missing is Boss Battle on Hard?

Wow....

@ShadJV I never said it was a contest or anything. But what is the point of of seperate master and complete states, if both get treated pretty much the same.
Im with @AddADashOfSalt on this one. Backloggery cateres heavily towards perfectionists, so i dont see the point of people marking games as mastered when they just finished it. The descrption even says that it is meant to signify a playthrough beyond the games "rules", and just finishing up its contents is a clear "completed" for me.
Dont get me wrong, it doesnt urk me or even annoys me. I just wonder how some people define "mastered" in this day and age of gaming

Maybe i should mark MegaMan 2 as mastered as well. I DID complete a level of it with my feet back in the day

I mark howerver I feel it's right for me.
Pokémon(main series) I instantly mark completed when I get the newest version(that's just the way I go, don't care about catching them all just want to train and battle it's only really over when I move on to the next)
some games have really loose notion of completing like having no collectible stuff at all or not having anything to be done besides beating, those I mark completed as soon as I beat
and all the games I'm unsure of what to mark I leave as null.
of course games with achievements, checklists and stuff to be done or collected have no way around(pokémon is my special exception)
as for mastering..... in some games it's doing a monstruous crazy glitch, a super speedrun , doing those no heart container runs in Zelda, beating the game times enough to be able to beat only barely looking at the screen or making your own type of hadicap to make the game even harder.

I think some people just mark stuff on there according to their preference rather than what it's supposed to mean. Like I've seen people mark stuff as completed as just meaning they were not going to play the game anymore regardless of whether they had beaten it. I really wouldn't get too upset about it if people want to use the site differently to track the games they still need to play.

Mastered is far too strong a word to unlocking everything normal in a game. For example, I have all the stars, stamps and parts from Mario Kart 8 but I am many seconds behind even an averagely good player.

I've only mastered one competitive game to my knowledge and that was Goldeneye on the N64. I only claim to have mastered it because to play multiplayer, I had to be handicapped -10 vs people with +10 or else they wouldn't kill me. I also got a high score on Link's Crossbow Training that was about 10x the amount of someone claiming to have the world record on youtube but that was only on the level with all the Keese and the person on youtube was probably just stupid.

It is amazing how much more of a master you felt beating NES, SNES and N64 games compared to modern ones. The main achievement in 100%ing an Assassin's Creed game is not getting so bored that you turn the console off.