I’m as rabid a Mac fan as any OS X user. I’ve camped out for their products far too many times to admit and sold my fair share of desktops to relatives. With that said, many of Apple’s recent decisions have boggled my mind. Their new line of iPods have taken a step in the wrong direction, AppleTV 2.0 still only plays proprietary media, and Game Center, their biggest misstep so far, is severely lacking in what it could and should be. Here are 3 reasons why Apple’s Game Center sucks.

1. Point values mean nothing. Every achievement has a corresponding point value. Theoretically the harder the task is to accomplish, the more points it will be worth. So for example, reading the tutorial in Flight Control unlocks an achievement worth 5 points while landing 100 aircraft unlocks the Centurion achievement worth 40 points. Great, this is exactly how it’s supposed to work. But then Apple goes and screws everything up by only calculating the total number of achievements on you player profile totally negating the points system. The emphasis is instead placed on having more achievements overall then all of your friends, instead of having the most points, which doesn’t make any sense. It gives players who casually play 20 games a higher ranking than a player who sits down and knocks out every achievement for 2-3 games.

2. No leveling up or overall ranking system. Achievements and trophies on Steam, Xbox 360, and PS3 work so well because gamers are a bunch of elitists. A mentality that should feel right at home with Mac users. Your gaming cred is built on the amount of achievements and/or trophies you have and the corresponding rank and/or level attached to your username. In its most primal purpose it serves as bragging rights, but it also gives a lot of gamers reason to play a single game longer in order to unlock every last achievement, adding tons of replay value. Because points don’t matter and the goal of “leveling up” is nonexistent, the incentive behind achievements is almost completely lost. Why would you play a game for an additional 5 hours to unlock a very challenging achievement worth 75 points if their is not an equally beneficial reward reflected on your account? You wouldn’t. You would skip it and go for an easy achievement on another game because in the end its worth just as much as the harder achievement with the way Apple’s Game Center tallies achievements.

3. OpenFeint and Crystal. As much as Apple enjoys banning apps, subscription services, and whatever else they feel like they are not eradicating 3rd party achievement services. This divides the community and puts even less meaning behind collecting Game Center achievements. It won’t matter how much you game or how hard you work at unlocking achievements when half of your achievement points are being added to whatever 3rd party service they are using. Can you imagine if Xbox Live allowed this? No, because it’s insane. Your ranking would be worth nothing on any of the services because none of them would give you an accurate look at your total gaming achievements and performance, which is what I thought Apple was trying to do with Game Center in the first place.

Game Center is currently the weakest achievement service on the App Store and needs to completely rethink the way it handles achievements to hold any real cred with gamers. Achievements may only be a minor thing for some gamers, but for others it’s what we live for. It gives us validity and a sense of accomplishment.