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Sample of Last & Most Played Info

Raptr is a service designed to track your gameplay habits  and trophies/achievements, and a few of my friends and I have been using it for a few months now. Taking a page from Google, it’s been in Beta since September of 2008. Unlike GMail, it doesn’t feel like a finished product. Personally, I’m tired of sites claiming themselves to be in indefinite beta. It seems like a poor excuse to not finish their work.

I love useless stats and charts, so to me the premise is a great one. Link it up with your game accounts and it tracks how much time you spend playing each game. I know that I’ve logged 17 hours of Castle Crashers. When my wife commented that it felt like I finished X-Men Origins: Wolverine really quickly, I could tell her that I had only logged 12 hours – so she was correct.

When you sign up, it asks you to input all of your account id’s and such to link to your accounts. Then just start playing your games and your hours and achievements will be tracked. I have not tried it, but you can apparently set it up to track your time on some Facebook games (do you really want to know how much time you’ve sunk into Farmville?). You can also set everything up to publish announcements to various social networks. Set it to publish to Twitter that you’re playing a game so your friends will see and maybe hop on with you. You can select what types of announcements are published – so you can publish achievement notices, but not that you’re playing a game.

Sounds great, right? That’s when reality sets in.

While they are not to blame, hours on the PS3 and Wii are not automatically tracked. While you can track your PS3 trophies online, Sony is rather closed about who can scrape their data – and even went so far as to specifically ask Raptr not to grab the data via official or unofficial channels. Nintendo has no trophies or achievement system, and while they track your gameplay for their own statistics, those numbers are not publicly accessible.  So what does this leave? As far as consoles go – the 360.

Comparing Chime Achievements in Raptr

The tracking on the 360 is pretty solid. It sometimes takes a while before Raptr will recognize that you are playing a game, so if you play a game for a short amount of time (under 30 minutes in my experience), you may not get tracked – but this glitch seems to be rare. Like gameplay tracking, achievement updates seem to lag a little sometimes. Often times, new achievements will register with Raptr as soon as I stop playing a game. In some cases, I’ve seen it take up to a day before the achievements have synced. One of the cool features is the ability to compare your achievements in a game against your friends. This is similar to Sony’s trophy comparison tool on their own site.  Unlike Sony’s comparison – it will only allow you to compare against those of your friends who also have Raptr accounts.

When you surpass your friends in achievements for a game (or are surpassed), a message is sent out alerting you so you can taunt your friends. This is a nice touch, but the ranking system isn’t exactly what I might call “accurate”.  Most of the times, it seems right. If I have more than my friends, I am ranked #1. Where it falls down is when there is a tie in numbers of achievements. In this case, there would be two valid ways of handling this.

1) Call it a draw. Both are ranked #1.

2) Compare the gamerscore. Whoever has the most points is ranked #1.

But no, Raptr doesn’t do either. They seem to think that an achievement further down the list should automatically count for more than one higher up. In my case my friend and I had the same number of achievements – but a different set. As a result, I had a higher gamerscore (by 5 points) – but he had an achievement from lower down the list than I did, so he was ranked #1. Is this a huge dealbreaker? Of course not – but it’s one of those little things that seems like it should have been fixed long ago.

As I mentioned earlier, Raptr can not automatically track PS3 or Wii info. That wasn’t 100% accurate as Raptr will display your PSN gamercard on your Raptr profile. The only problem with it is that it’s not necessarily up to date. Once again, this seems to be an issue stemming from Sony itself. In order to update your gamercard, you must go onto Sony’s site and manually refresh the card. Until you do, your trophy count will be stuck with outdated information.

Manually logging game play.

What about tracking game play? Raptr allows you to manually enter in how long you’ve spent playing a game. When you play a game on the 360, that game is automatically added to your library. To manually enter in time, you must first search for, and add the game to your library. Once added, you may manually log your time for games. Simple enough, but once again, Raptr falls down where things should be simple. Instead of allowing you to enter in a number of minutes, they give you a short drop down to select from: 30 minutes, one, two or three hours. That’s it. That’s all you get to choose from. Played an hour and a half? Too bad. Pick an hour or two hours. You can’t enter in 90 minutes. Played four hours? Too bad.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking. I had the same idea, “Well, just stack the times. Log 30 minutes and then an hour – simple!” Nope. Sure, it will let you enter in logs one after another no problem. It will even say, “you are playing Final Fantasy 13″ as many times as you enter in stacked time blocks. But it doesn’t work. Raptr admits in their forums that a time block must expire before you can add another. That means that if you manually enter in a block of 30 minutes, you cannot enter another block until those 30 minutes have expired. I don’t usually know how long I’m going to play a game, so I don’t want to just log a block of time before I start playing – and at the end of a gaming session, I may have an odd number – or more than three hours to log. If I have to log more than one game, I’m screwed. I suppose I could sit and log 30 minutes of time before I play, assuming that I will continue to play for the next 30 minutes. But then if you post to any of your linked sites that you are playing, you could flood that site with notifications that you’re playing a game.  Raptr says in the above post that they are “discussing” adding more time options – which would be a good start, but would still not fix the entire issue.

Speaking of things that need to be fixed – the downloadable client. I’ve got it installed on both my laptop (PC) and desktop (Mac). The Mac version starts automatically at boot. How convenient. Except I have specifically turned off that feature in the options. Regardless, the application still starts. When I check the settings, “automatically start Raptr client” is still unchecked. I don’t play games on my laptop, but I play a couple on my Mac. I’ve used the “Scan for games” tool, but it only finds Mac Chess. It doesn’t find Plants vs Zombies or SimCity. I tried to manually add Plants vs Zombies, but it always says that it can’t find the executable even if I point it directly to it. As such, I haven’t been able to test the game tracking via the client. I originally downloaded the client just before a recent massive overhaul, and I believe that it originally allowed you to enter in manual time logging directly. You can’t do that now. You can click through to the website, and do it there – but being able to click through the client to the website isn’t really all that much of a feature or particularly extra convenient. So what DOES the client do for sure? It acts as a multi-protocol chat client. To which I ask – “Do I really need another?”. I already run Adium/Pidgin. Why should I switch? The Raptr client does not offer chat logging or integration with iTunes or anything fancy as far as a chat program goes. If the client DOES track desktop games properly, that’s great – but let that run as a daemon or taskbar service – don’t make me run another chat client.

In the end, I really like what Raptr could be. Conceptually, it’s a great application. It really just needs some polish and for someone to man up and finish building it out.