Too short gamer tag?

Looks like my Gamertag is too short, I cannot sign up with latest Forza Motorsports tournament... apparently my GT has to be 4 characters or longer for whatever bizarre reason. :(

seen at: https://www.motorsgseries.gg/

Gears Pop, finally completed

Getting 1000 Gs in Gears pop was a long grind. The servers will be closed on 26th April 2021 and I was seriously under impression that the last achievements will be very tight or un/acheavable for me.

Luckily for me the game developer made things MUCH easier as game closure deadline is approaching. You got more pins from chest and battles, you spent way less on upgrading pins.

So finally on 10th April 2021 I managed to get the last achievement. Phew!

I do not about other players, but I actually ended up installing 2 instances of Android emulators on my desotop PC, and playing the game from 2 accounts side-by-side.

Having boosting session with "myself" was much more realistic to do than look for other people with similar interest from sites like TrueAchievements. For the "League Legend" my strategy was to play with 2 accounts and let one account win every second round... you get about 30 points per victory and negative 20 points if you lose. Slow Grow but it worked. Also sometimes either of the accounts ended up battling against a bot or random live player, so that made the grind even longer.

Glad I got it done before the game servers are permanently closed in end of April 2021.

Very rare achievement

I know some achievements are hard to come by ... and some games become unpopular over time so not too many people play them, but this achievement I got yesterday evening just blows my mind...

I got mine on 20th January 2021,

ONLY ONE person got this achievement in 2020, 

and then 4 people between June and November 2019

So in average one person getting it every 3 months. Mental!!!

https://www.trueachievements.com/a248806/porcelain-shop-3-achievement?gamerid=365872

Last day of December

Gamer as I am, I spent part of the last day of 2020 to grind out the last achievements in Farming Simulator 17, that was "supposed" to leave GamePass on 30th December.

It took some time, some planning, and checking some hints on TrueAchievements website, but I managed to complete the game before year ended and before the game was pulled from GamePass.

And apparently it was my 50th completed game (maximum GS per game) according to TA. Double woo-hoo!

My Decade On Xbox

If you have an account in the trueachievements website, they have created nice page for all their users about their gaming decade... 10 years of gaming displayed in one page.

I checked out my page and it is quite interesting stuff ...

my Fastest completion - Microsoft Mahjong - 16 minutes

How did that happen? I know that I have played this on Windows phone, Windows 8 and and Windows 10 at different times. All of them have different achievements, but somewhat centrally stored statistics about user profile. When checked their site, I see Win 8 had only 3 achievements worth 25 GS that were easy to obtain. Basically they were Play a game, play game in Hard difficulty and Change theme. No wonder it only took 16 minutes to complete.

my Rarest completion - Crossout, 300 days, completed by 248 people

This game only had 13 achievements, but it was hard to complete - the last one "complete 10 Leviathan raids" was tough for me as I was mostly solo player... when attempted the Leviathan raids - usually the matchmaking failed because there were not enough players in the queue, or I was teamed up with random low level players who had no idea what to do, and had very low level gear... so no chance of beating the Leviathan. Even with skilled players, the raids failed many times.

my Slowest completion - Sid Meier Civ Revolution - 2040 days... TWO THOUSAND and FORTY DAYS!!!!!

Looking at the stats, I see I started playing it in June 2008 when I got the first achievement. Then played it over period of time. Got "won as Mongolian civilization" achievement in November 2008. Then who-knows-what happened and the game was shelved and forgotten for years ... next achievement I got only in 17th January 2014 and then grinded through the whole game and all remaining achievements in just 2 days :)

Completed games - 45 - 31.57%

I can also clearly see that the time I was between two nine-2-five jobs. I was unemployed and did short roles and some months here and there contracting - I did much more gaming and got more GS than when I was employed full time.

My personal stats page can be seen at https://www.trueachievements.com/decade/365872

USB SSD with Xbox One

I did some testing today with external USB 3.0 IDE/SATA adapter and Crucial MX500 SSD.

The game loading time speed difference compared to Xbox internal HDD was surprising.

So.. next payday I am probably going to buy an external SSD for my console and move my more commonly used and bigger games on it. The HDD vs. SSD price difference is quite big and the speed gains with small "arcade" games does not matter so much... If game launches in 5 or 10 seconds - both acceptable, but 1 minute, versus 2 minutes and 11 seconds... that is a big difference.