Lilith

Couldn’t find any relevant info neither on SG nor on Steam.

There is something fishy with how BLAEO crawls Steam playing data recently, specifically time played. I have noticed that in current month a couple of games I definitely didn’t play are listed as played for some time (a couple of minutes each).

I noticed errors also in January. That sync was completely broken. I haven’t been using BLAEO for some time before I tried to sync in January, at first sync was marked as “scheduled” for a long time, then it ended up in all the games I played both in December and January listed as played in January (and nothing in December) plus there are some games listed which I played long ago, e.g. missed messages (played in July).

Could be a bug. Anyone else encountered such discrepancies? I can’t know is it a problem on Steam API side or BLAEO crawler. But at least these few-minutes games listed for March are not listed in “recently played” on my Steam profile. There are only games I played after Frostpunk, which was in the middle of February.

EDIT: Apparently “missed messages” is “Profile Features Limited”, this corresponds to such games reappearing in January for more BLAEO users. This doesn’t explain other oddities though.
EDIT2: All mysteries solved.

Cece09

I’ve actually got Trick & Treat that pops up in february as played for 2 hours when it was done over a year ago. Normally I get it when I add a new game to my account through installing and stuff steam will keep saying I’ve played the game

Month before I got sky full of stars for 1 minute and like trick and trick I got repentant at 1 hour despite playing that a year ago and definitely no touching of that

aonrao

Only one I saw was when BLAEO added ‘Profile Features Limited’ games to our libraries. Those showed up in January. But other than that, I haven’t noticed anything like that.

Jaded

My recently played this month seems fine at the moment.
January I did have some profile limited games turn up like aonrao said - was it some of these ones?

Cece09

That will most likely explain repentant, especially being a win pop up. I really dont look at that part my self since I only just learnt about it this month

Jaded

haha yeah I had some weird games pop up January, which is why I’d check if they were profile limited.

Lilith

Checked some of the games recognised as Played in March by BLAEO for a few minutes, by looking from my Steam library:

Death Skid Marks played last on January, 1, 2020
Valkyria Chronicles 4 on November, 29, 2019
The Deer on January, 4, 2020
Might & Magic VI: March 15, 2015 (apparently all 9 minutes of it)

Anywhere on Steam I check, looks correct.

YQMaoski

I got a few as well that showed up in my March logs:
Seen: last played October 2019
Angelo and Deemon: last played Sept 2019
Macrotis: Last played June 2019

MouseWithBeer

then it ended up in all the games I played both in December and January listed as played in January (and nothing in December)

This makes 100% sense if you just think about it. Steam doesn’t keep track when a game was played (except the playtime in the last 2 weeks). So there is no way for BLAEO to know that something was played in December or January if you don’t sync in December and only in do it in January so it will just automatically put all the new playtime it didn’t know about from before into the current month as this is the month it noticed a difference.

Lilith

I didn’t know that Steam doesn’t keep track when a game was played.
And it does keep track of when a game was played last.
(Nowadays it also has these info logs of when a game was played first by the user and all their friends. So it wouldn’t be surprising to me if all of this would have been logged somewhere also before.)

mandrill

Yes, the Steam client does list some more playtime info; sadly, the “last time you played this game” thing is completely private. It’s not listed in the API, and not even on your profile for others to see. :(

mandrill

The “recently played” list has some limitations, but none of these are really bugs but rather just how it works.

  • The sync doesn’t know when you played something, just that you did. This is what Mouse wrote. If the sync didn’t see you in December, but only in January, then it has to assume the “added playtime” happened in January.
  • For this very reason, the sync tries to avoid “losing track” of your playtimes even if you don’t visit for some weeks; but after a while, it will get bored and stop.
  • If your library or playtimes are private, the same thing can happen.
  • And of course: If the sync sees a game in your library that it didn’t see last month, it has to assume all the playtime happened this month. That’s why all the profile limited games messed up January pretty badly; but you already figured that out.

The root cause for these issues is nothing new; but it became worse when Steam invented “private libraries”, and even more when I rewrote the sync. I will probably improve the whole thing at some point – something like “it’s better to ignore playtimes than book them for the wrong month”. But tbh, I don’t see this as particularly high priority: It all works well as long as your stuff is public and you visit at least once in a while (right now, “a while” is “two months”, but that may change). The extra confusion by profile limited games was a one time thing and won’t happen again.

Oh, there is one more thing. Those extra minutes you saw in March. That’s because playtime tracking for profile limited games is a little flakey. I improved that last week, this shouldn’t happen anymore except for one rare situation.

Lilith

Thanks for interesting details. These “minutes” were the most confusing thing of all these. Still weird since the games listed are mostly not applicable for being profile-limited, pretty long time on Steam, part are not indie. Maybe I am still not informed well about how “limited” status works and these are not excluding factors.

mandrill

Hmm. Well the minutes thing would apply to anything the sync old sync didn’t see. That should be mainly profile limited games, but there may be other reasons the sync didn’t see the games before; maybe they are not listed in all the APIs, Steam is pretty incosistent in that regard. But well, as long as it doesn’t happen again, it shouldn’t matter, right? :)

Lilith

Right. Curiosity.

Thanks for programming this stuff by the way.

Lilith

Hi, I see you have implemented separately slower library sync and faster last-2-weeks-played sync.
Great idea. But I have found one inconvenient effect of how it works now.

As before, when a game has been played a bit and then removed from Steam library, BLAEO library sync understands this and game can be removed from listing on BLAEO too.
However, when playtime sync happens, it sees time and achievements for the removed game and for some reason adds it back to game library on BLAEO as a regular game, with no option to remove. Until next library sync.
Also games from shared library which were played are added to user game list here.

Not a huge deal - users can remove these games from BLAEO after 2 weeks pass so these stop to reappear. I just noticed some stuff I have removed 2 times before. Figured out that it is not a bug but how it works now :c

mandrill

Yeah, I noticed that behaviour too, and it’s a little annoying. Didn’t give enough thought to the removing workflow when I rewrote the sync. Oh well … easy enough to fix once I find time.