Exactly !

Yeah I guess we could just let achievement being earned offline but without the timestamp and most people would be happy with that.

I'd actually like offline (and, ideally, client-independent*) achievs.
I didn't know about the cheat program, but it seems fine for single-player usage.

I can understand why it would be a problem for competitions of any kind tho (even bragging rights).
Maybe there could be an option to show them to the community only if they've been obtained online (or after some check).
But I doubt Gog will do anything about it, if even Steam ignored the problem so far.

*see FTL for example

Meh. On the one hand, I like achievements sometimes. On the other, I'm not so insecure of myself that others getting them illegitimately devalues my self worth. It's like a trophy case. Trophies aren't devalued because anyone can go to a trophy store and buy it. If you earned it, you know you did.

I used to feel this way about easy modes in games. I didn't want easy modes because "dammit, I'm good enough to play the harder content. It should be worked for. The devs wanted it to be this way!!! If any idiot can accomplish the ending of the game, then it's not worth anything." Then I woke up and realized I don't care how you play your games. I play mine my way, and my ego isn't damaged by the fact that if I earn that difficult accomplishment and others got it by using cheats or something.

It's too trivial. There are more important things to worry about.

Imagine competitions\tournaments without any control of rules or cheaters because it's just "insecurity".. it would be a waste of time and nobody would partecipate.

P.s: I don't care about showing off achievs or getting too difficult ones, but I can understand the OP's point of view.

I mostly play games on "normal" but I like when they have an option to choose difficulty.
To not devalue players efforts, however, the mode should be visibile somewhere (eg: UI, map\game ending).
So, anyone could complete the game as he likes, but bragging rights would be reserved only to the best players.

Like always. It doesn't mean there shouldn't be any discussion about trivial things (like videogames in general..)

How does it devalue anyone's efforts to have someone else complete something? IF you did it, you did it. How does what others do even remotely factor into that?

Years ago, there was a Europa Universalis4 player that managed to conquer the world as Ryukyu. As a reward?, Paradox made a conquer world as Ryuku achievement for everybody to attempt to get.

Read again the part about competitions\tournaments.
For personal satisfaction, it doesn't matter. For competition, it matters.

It's nothing "official", but various players compete for achievs, leaderboards, speedrunning, etc.
Even if you play football even among friends, you count (valid) goals and declare a winner. Otherwise there's no challenge and no point (there are exception, of course, but it's not the norm).

And many people play the same game by different rules. It doesn't make your game wherein there are no substitutions allowed with 4 players per side more or less legitimate if others play the game wherein goals are worth 3 points each. You've both won a football match.

Yeah, rules. Not cheaters.
It's not a "different way to play" to cheat in a competition.

See, and we're back to making everything a competition. I think we're done since it's going in circles at this point. This is like the person who tries to street race random people at a stoplight, then brags about smoking them in a race they weren't even trying to participate in.

And how did that make you feel? :o

It's more like some people just agreed to have a race then suddenly a random dude walks on the finish line and claims he already won.
If there are public achievs and leaderboards, the competition part exists, even if some people don't care about it.

Go back and reread the OP. He explicitly states that he's referring to *offline*. So this is someone that is obsessed with what other people are doing with *their personal property*. o.O