Xbox CTO Explains What Caused ‘Phantom Achievements’ To Appear

Last week, Achievement Hunters and casuals alike were caught out by odd ‘phantom achievement’ bugs that affected their 100% completion percentages. Multiple Xbox users reported that previously completed games were now displaying 98% despite having unlocked all available achievements for certain games.

Xbox CTO and all-round Lord of Transparency, Scott Van Vliet, once again returned to socials to explain what caused these phantom achievements to appear and how his team of engineers managed the situation.

“A service change accidentally included legacy challenges in the total achievement count for some older games, which also affected the calculation of displayed completion percentages (fun fact/explanation: challenges were tracked as 0 gamerscore cheevos under-the-hood). It’s a display issue and no underlying player data was affected.”

Whilst it gives me the warm fuzzies to see an Xbox exec call them cheevos, it’s also nice to understand that these phantom cheevos occurred during a service change that accidentally implemented a whole host of ‘legacy challenges’.

Van Vliet even shared a fun factoid about these legacy challenges, explaining that they were considered a tracked “under-the-hood” version of achievements for some older games. The CTO goes on to discuss fixes to prevent these fun little disruptors from showing up again in the future.

“We’ve already rolled out a fix to the way completion percentages are displayed, and displayed total achievement counts will be fixed within the next few days. No need to update your clients to get them. Appreciate the patience!”

Whilst we wouldn’t consider the phantom achievement bug a big enough issue to warrant a response from the Xbox CTO, this level of openness from Van Vliet on the everyday console experience has become a bit of a trend of late – something we’re big fans of.

Did you encounter any phantom achievements? Talk to us about it in the comments below!