A new social network just for gamers
A reader recently suggested that I do a review of Playfire, social community for gamers. Like Raptr (which I’ve already reviewed), they’re still in Beta (*edit, see note at the end*) – which, to me, just means they’re just asking for leeway while they polish up the site. While there is a lot of overlap with Raptr, their focus seems to be very different. With so much overlap, it’s only fair that I make a few comparisons as we discuss my reactions after a day or so of playing with Playfire. Being that I’ve only played with the service for a little over a day, I concede that I may have just not found everything yet – but what’s to keep me coming back if I don’t like it enough right off the bat?
Visiting the site for the first time, one of the first things I noticed was the bit “Trophycard” heading in the menu. Looking at it quickly, they claimed to have a way to pull and display PS3 trophies semi-automatically or manually. Raptr has similar functionality, but it doesn’t work well as the PSN ID card just doesn’t update enough. The Trophycard page has links to get started creating your cards, but I figured I’d just wait until after I signed up.
Signing up
Signing up seems like a very simple and straightforward process. Right on the front page, is a big box asking you for the most basic account information: username, password and email. Next, they ask you which gaming platforms you own followed by which games you’ve played – and finally some basic info about yourself. Once you’re all done, they dump you into your activity feed.
Viewing it for the first time, the activity feed is pre-populated with posts about some of the games you marked as having played. At first blush, this sounds like an interesting idea. Sure, I might like to read posts about Final Fantasy 13, as I’m currently playing through it – but do I really want to read posts about Final Fantasy 7? I haven’t played it in 12 years, and I have no intentions of picking it up again any time soon. Yet, Playfire has decided that since I’ve played it, I must want to read everyone’s posts about it. Sure, you can “unfollow” any game that you’ve followed (whether or not you followed it yourself), but I’d rather have to turn this sort of setting on than off.
Trophycards
So, now that I’m all set up, I want to look at setting up that Trophycard that I had read about on the front page. That’s when I noticed that the main menu is now drastically different from before. Sure, this is generally to be expected – but with the Trophycard being so prominently featured on the front page, I’d expect it to be pretty easy to find once I’ve signed up. Digging through the menus up top, there is no sign of it. After digging around for a few minutes, I ended up just signing out and going through the creator linked on the front page of the site hoping that I could link it to my account at the end (I could).
Top: Logged Out. Bottom: Logged In. Where is the Trophycard menu item?
I was really curious how they would get around the issues that Raptr faced. It turns out, that they just do it the way that Raptr had been asked not to: by scraping Sony Europe’s data. This requires you to have an account on Sony Europe’s page. To create an account there, you just basically sign in using your PSN login info, and you’re all set to return back to the Playfire Trophycard creator and link the data. I’m curious as to why Raptr had been asked not to use this method, but Playfire has not.
Once I had created my Trophycard and logged in, I went looking for it. I finally found it halfway down the profile page. Before you’ve created your Trophycard, the box is so small that I kept scrolling right past it. The profile page is incredibly busy. There’s lots of images and text all over the page. It’s very hard to find anything you’re looking for if you don’t already know where it is.
Small gripe: I hate, hate, hate their term “Trophycard” which is how they label it on the un-logged-in side of the site. Maybe it’s just the programmer in me, but the poor capitalization annoys the hell out of me. I see no reason why they can’t either capitalize the “c” or just add a space.
No wonder I couldn't find it, the empty box is incredibly small.
Complete your profile
Up at the top of every page is a big box telling you how to get started using the site. This includes a percentage meter for completing your profile. This is good – I like knowing how much I have left to do – and I like seeing a nice round 100% everywhere I can. So, I click the little “how to complete your profile” link to find out what I should do next. I get… nothing. So, what else do I have to do, huh?
So... how do I complete my profile?
Gaming Networks
Next up was linking my other gaming id’s and codes. After some digging, I found where to do this. There are actually two routes to this: from the actual profile page, you can click “edit” next to any of the network id’s or you can click “edit profile” from the main menu. It’s interesting to note that the “edit profile” page does not allow you to edit everything on the profile page. From here, I can edit my networks, my personal info and upload photos of my gaming rig or for my gallery. I can not, however, change anything dealing with my PS Trophycard or any preferences dealing with my game library display. I went ahead and entered my id’s and my Wii friend code and went back to my profile to see how it all looked.
This is a small gripe, but I think an important one. Phone numbers and other long numeric strings are broken up into chunks to facilitate ease of reading and memorization. Nintendo breaks friend codes into four blocks of four digits. Playfire requires you to enter your friend code in without spaces or hyphens. It also displays them without any breaks or demarcation. This makes it difficult to read easily.
Quick, what's the second block of my friend code?
Game library
The 800lb gorilla on the profile page, of course, is the giant game library. There are a few options, but the layout and default background seems to be based off of Delicious Library – which was also the inspiration behind iPad bookshelves interface. Again, nothing wrong with it, I guess – but for some reason I always feel a little cheated when things like this are so similar.
On the left: Playfire. On the right: Delicious Library
Charting your games
Looking up and down the profile screen, I spotted the game genre chart. This pie chart breaks games down to far more specific genres than Raptr does. The problem is that it maybe it’s too specific. Where is the line drawn between “Third person shooter” and “Action – Third Person”? With such specific categories, I’m left wondering what falls into this mysterious “Misc” category. This pie chart is labeled “Games I Play”, but is generated based on the games in your library. To illustrate the difference, I must compare this to Raptr.
Playfire is focused on games you own, or have played. Raptr is focused on what games you play and how much you play them. I may own a lot of games of one particular genre, but that does not mean I play them. What I like about Raptr’s graph is that it fluctuates based on my specific play time. If I log a lot of hours into RPG’s, the RPG portion of the Raptr chart will reflect that (well, it’s supposed to – it seems to be buggy).
This is not completely unexpected. Raptr’s tagline is “What are you playing?”, while Playfire’s focus is being a social network. There’s obviously nothing wrong with that – but I think I’m personally more interested in the statistics than finding other gamers.
I apparently really like Action games... or do I?
How do you rank?
As I’ve already mentioned, Playfire is more focused on what games you own than what you’re playing – or how you stack up against your friends. While your profile page does display your recent (relatively speaking) XBox achievements, you can’t compare yourself against your friends the way you can with Raptr. Sure, there’s a tiny little link at the bottom of your achievements to “the leaderboard” to compare yourself against your friends or the other users of Playfire, but it only compares total gamerscore. There’s no breakdown of games or anything.
Compare yourself
Chat it up
Playfire has its own internal chat client. Like Raptr, it’s a multi-protocol chat client. Unlike Raptr, it’s browser based. It’s powered by Meebo, which I’ve heard of but never played with before – so I don’t know if it’s any different from the normal service. The chat client allows you to connect to Facebook chat, AIM, MySpace IM, Google Talk and Twitter. I went ahead and connected it to Twitter and Facebook. I saw my Facebook friends pop up in the contact list. I imagine the other chat protocols work normally. The one I’m curious about is Twitter. Twitter is not a chat client, so no contacts pop up in the contact list. I tried updating my status in the client, but it didn’t propagate anywhere – much less Twitter. I really don’t see much use in this client as I’m unlikely to sit there with the site open while I play a game. At least with the Raptr client, I could leave it running in the background while I play.
Since when is Twitter a chat app?
Pop quiz, hotshot
Having spent an inordinate amount of time playing the Endless Quiz on Flixter, I like the concept of the quiz game. Users can submit trivia questions based on games and you are asked questions about games you have played. Where this falls down is that it asks you questions about any game you have played – at all. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t played it in 12 years, or if you’ve only just started. Yes, you can just skip the question, but where’s the fun in that?
Oh I know this one... it was on Final Jeopardy just last night!
Being social
There are a couple of highlight areas for being social. The primary one, of course, is the message boards. This is where I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of a lot of gaming forums. Too often, they devolve into elitist camps where noobs or anyone not deemed a “hardcore gamer” just aren’t welcome. I’m happy to say that I don’t get that feeling from these forums at all. In fact, I actually lean towards it being a little on the “too general” topic with topics like, “What are you listening to right now” and “How was your day?”. I can’t fault it for this though – after all, the best way to grow a social community is to welcome everyone and make sure no one feels rejected.
I have not yet participated in any of the discussions – only browsing a number of interesting sounding topics, but I have not seen any flame wars or anyone being put down for any reason. I don’t know if this is thanks to great moderators or everyone just being mature adults about everything.
The other major part of the social aspect is Clans. Personally, I don’t really play multi-player games enough to have any real interest in clans, but I created one for a couple of my friends and I just for the hell of it and to see how it all works. One of the optional settings is a Clan Header Graphic. Since our clan is for Pownce refugees, I just grabbed the old Pownce logo and uploaded that. The instructions say that the banner should be 923×213 pixels. For most sites, that would be a maximum size – not a “must be” size. I will concede that they did not specify either way, and I only assumed that it meant a maximum size. When I checked the clan profile, I found that it was meant as a “must be” size – and that they would be stretching the graphic to fit.
The features on the clan page are simple: a small conversation thread (think Facebook wall), a private message forum and a list of members. I’d like to see integration with the Events system for scheduling meetup times for games. You can invite your entire clan from the event creation screen, but I feel like you should be able to make it a clan event and have it show up on the clan page.
Stand back, this thing gets pretty big
Connection should be part of being social
Two of my friends signed up for Playfire with me. One of the big sticking points for us is that aside from the chat client, there is no integration with any other website or service. Raptr can update Plurk, Facebook or Twitter automatically. Playfire has no such function. I suppose this comes back to the differences between the fundamental concepts of the two services. But where Raptr succeeds in letting your friends know what you’re playing, Playfire provides opportunity to make new friends. I guess it all comes down to a matter of which one is more important to you. Of course, I suppose you could use both services – as they are rather fundamentally different despite targeting essentially the same demographic.
Go away kid, you’re botherin’ me
By default, Playfire will notify you about everything – everywhere. Anytime anything happens, you’re notified on the site, and receive an email. For some actions, you can apparently even get notifications sent to your XBox (I have not tested this yet). Yes, you can turn all of the emails off, but this is another area where I’d much rather default everything to be off and let me enable things as I see fit.
For the love of god, just stop emailing me!
I do not think it means what you think it means
Microblogs, by definition, are small – short blog entries. They should be a sentence or two. At most, a short paragraph. This is why they’re called microblogs. As such, I’m confused as to why you can repeatedly expand the microblog window – and why there seems to be no actual size limit. There’s nothing wrong with blogs, or microblogs – but the improper labeling annoys me. Maybe it’s just me.
Aren't microblogs supposed to be short?
Beta = Buggy, right? (*edit, see note at the end*)
Because a site is in beta, we’re supposed to forgive all the little bugs and half expect things to glitch. Well, things definitely glitch. The best was when I clicked on the feedback button and the feedback window only half opened and was empty. I closed it, and tried again – it worked that time. Today, I received a friend request – from someone I had already added yesterday. I checked with him, and he says he hadn’t re-requested to be added. He didn’t show up twice in my friend list either. To be fair, these things are small almost non-issues. What Playfire needs to focus on is getting feedback about layout and organization.
Well?
Like Raptr, Playfire has a lot of potential. Will it ever become a juggernaut social network like Facebook? Of course not. Will it become a Facebook for gamers? Eh.. I wouldn’t hold my breath. There’s a lot to like about Playfire, but first you have to figure out where the hell everything is and how to do it. There is a web design rule that no major function should ever be more than three clicks away. As it stands right now, I have to check at least three pages before I can find what it is I’m looking for. With time and experience, I could get used to and learn the system – but shouldn’t the design, layout and organization make that a non-issue?
My friends said they would switch from Raptr to Playfire if Playfire had the integration with other services. Me? I’m not sold yet. For me, Playfire offers a lot of things I’m looking for (as well as things I’m not) – but not enough of the things I really want.
*edit*
Regarding them still being in “Beta”… Looking around the site, the earliest content I could find was from 2009 which indicated this being a newer service. I should have dug deeper, as I’ve just found posts on Kotaku from July 2008 mentioning the site having just recently opening to public beta. Look, at this point, no site should still be considered in “beta”. You can still make improvements and update the functionality of a site without being in beta.
