Battleangel | Personal

I’ve been using Xfire for some time now and I am still thrilled about the concept of tracking what and when I play. I guess I get off on that sort of thing, statistics, lists and all.  Unfortunately things have turned very sour over the last couple of months and I am now left with a dilemma.

Xfire: Xfire turned out ok despite its massive limitations. And the botched takeover last summer. They’re back to running smoothly now except for one worrying trend – a startling lack of openness that has emerged over the last couple of months as Xfire faces real competition.

Generally speaking, the upside of Xfire is still that there are open source libraries and thus plugins for a number of programs, including Miranda IM. Said plugin not only saves you from running the official client but also has more options. Especially when it comes to manually adding games. A very important feature these days not only for pirates such as myself but also a lot of legitimate users who just happened to buy their games from stores other than Steam.

Xfire have gone completely off the reservation lately though. And it has everything to do with Raptr. Fearful of a mass exodus from Xfire, the devs have done everything in their power to lock the collected data down. Including lying about their competitor and the way Raptr supposedly fetches Xfire’s XML feed. Xfire started out by removed plain text output on profiles in favour of IMAGES so the data couldn’t be harvested. Then they locked down the XML feeds previously used by Raptr to import your "gamehours". It now requires user/pass and can only be accessed from a single IP address. You have to email them to get it set up. It takes days or weeks to get a response so you got to figure they are pretty bogged down but also that they are dead serious about preventing users from easily migrating. As it stands, despite assurances, I’m still unable to access my own data. Outrageous!

Raptr: After the technical difficulties and delays that followed the change of ownership last year a pointer from the Xfire forum suggested switching to Raptr. Probably right before said user got censored and banned by the Xfire dictatorship. Many Bothans died to bring us this information and all that. I didn’t switch then but it has been simmering for six months now and I have become more and more convinced that Raptr has the right idea.

For starters, Raptr is a lot more fun than Xfire. Here you can actually use and visualize the data you collect. They have all sorts of feeds and widgets that unlike Xfire look like they have been designed in this century. The whole feel of the Raptr community is generally nicer as well compared to the fascists and bullies over at Xfire. Ever try suggesting something on the Xfire forum? Prepare to be shouted down and insulted. It’s kind of like suggesting to the Mac / Iphone Taliban that Apple isn’t flawless. Good luck and hope you brought your flak jacket. Game updates are also generally faster on Raptr. Right now Xfire has weekly updates while Raptr has more or less 0-day support for major releases.

There is however one glaring flaw. The lack of an API or protocol library. Xfire has it but it doesn’t seem to be officially supported, rather some sort of reverse engineered 3rd party library that developers have later continued to build on. Regardless of why and how, there are alternatives to the official client. The Raptr client is sucking 100 MB of RAM or so even when idling in the background. Miranda IM consumes a tenth of that. It should however be noted that the Raptr folks have repeatedly stated that they are indeed working on a public API … for the past two years or so.

The other major gripe that I only just discovered is the dodgy or non-functional manual game detection. They probably meant for it to be easy to use but in reality it is a failure. Instead of pointing to a directory, you should be able to point to a game .exe of course. Yet Raptr hasn’t fixed this and so I fear the worst. Could it be an anti-piracy measure? It would of course also fix itself if we had an API and 3rd party clients.

Wakoopa: I also recently  discovered Wakoopa. Unlike Xfire and Raptr it tracks everything on your computer in a very Orwellian sense. Even some web-based services (like Facebook, Reddit etc). The client takes a mere 1.7 MB of RAM and there is a limited but powerful API for pulling (not inserting) data. The application database is user populated and because it registers everything it will track your applications (and games) right off the bat. No censorship or waiting on slow database updates.

For the time being I will keep all three applications updated. But I remain hopeful of an open Raptr API that establish the platform as the de facto industry standard. Oh, and I also added the new feeds to my lifestream.