jullebarge

Any plan to support other stores ?

With all the stores that are out now, and new ones coming like Epic store, I wonder if its’ possible to add them to the website in order to manage your whole backlog in one place.
It would be really nice to be able to track Uplay, Origin and GoG games at least.

I imagine it’s a lot of work to fully integrate other stores, but perhaps you could add a way to manually add games with their store links, and they would appear on your games list with a particular icon ?

Waht do you think about that idea ?

Garcias

I’d love to have that option tbh.

LastM

+1
I’d love to add the games I have from uplay, origins, gog, etc. I’d love console games as well, tbh! xD

tsupertsundere

Agreed. Even just a general template option where the users have to do the heavy lifting would be just fine with me.

JaffaCaffa

I too would love that option. Currently write down the titles of games I played elsewhere so I won’t forget, but seeing it in one place is nice. :)

EvilBlackSheep

Love the idea, linked this post to mandrill, hopefully he’ll have time to look at it and let us know if it’s possible :3

mandrill

Well, since the last time I checked:

  • GoG has added user profiles and with those a way to get a user’s library, so … actually feasible for GoG. Yay!
  • Uplay and Origin still don’t offer any public API :/
  • Visibility for libraries in Uplay still seems to be friends-only. No library import possible with that.
  • Situation in Origin always was worst, I don’t expect much now, so I’m too lazy to dig out that account I didn’t use in ages.

I’d really love to implement the “full package”, that is, library import and sync. And yes, manually adding games would go some way I have 0 games on GoG, 1 non-Steam game on Uplay and 1 or 2 non-Steam games on Origin, so adding those manually wouldn’t bother me at all . But for any of that, I have to change stuff deep down, and I wouldn’t want to implement one without at least preparing the other. Also, I’d want to think about identifying games across systems (well ok I have thought about that but am too lazy to elaborate right now). So …

tl;dr: There will likely be manual adding and GoG import/sync some day and if so, I’ll likely add both in the same update. There will most probably never be import/sync for Uplay and Origin.

mandrill

Actually I just remembered there is one related change deep down that I kind of have to do before the end of January. That would be a first step of preparation anyway. … just to take some edge off that “some day” 😬

Mskotor

I think all sites that allow you to track backlog progress (like backloggery) give people ability to manually add games from Origin or Uplay. As how you said - there is no API for those services.

But people have so small libraries there that it’s not a problem. So it’d either need to allow adding corresponding appID with flag that game is on Origin (I don’t need to be redirected to origin profile, no one use those sites for community aspect, as there is not community there whatsoever). That way BLAEO would get information from Steam shop (name, thumbnail etc), but don’t redirect to it. Or add game image with certain resolution and fill all data manually. For games that are not both on Steam and Origin / Uplay. Like Fe.

jullebarge

Thanks for your answer, if you can add GoG is would be a good step ;)

Lengray

Thank for your answer. And to be able to (manually) track my entire backlog and progress, I finally created an account on HTLB a few days ago.

mandrill

I’d be interested what you think of HLTB … because it was one of the things I tried before BLAEO, too, and I didn’t like it very much. But I don’t want to spoil/bias, so I won’t go into details right now :|

Lengray

I only use its basic functions like listing my backlog in and out of steam and getting playing time estimations to decide which game to play next. However, I find I usually spend 1/3 more time playing through a game than what their “beating” time says. I don’t use its social functions at all. I also don’t like the fact that it doesn’t automatically track Steam playing time the way BLAEO does. However, I think it complements BLAEO pretty nicely but if you ever decide to implement custom lists for games outside of Steam, I won’t probably need HLTB anymore.

Narayan

I started using HLTB in June this year (I mean I created an account then, cause to check up on the time estimates to beat the games I’ve been using it for few years now). And it’s not particularly useful overall. I only use the one functionality that BLAEO doesn’t have - as a data holder of sorts. When you input how long it took you to beat the game, and the date when you finished the game, you end up with really nice concise list of all the games beaten by you ever, which you can sort by all sorts of things like name or date finished being just the most basic ones.

Via BLAEO I can achieve similar affect by writing times it took me to beat in posts (and the posts themselves have a date that corresponds roughly to when I finished them), but then I have to scroll down for ages to check up on the older completions. So I also have lists for beaten games by year, but despite that I keep them in order of when I beaten them, they still don’t have exact times (neither of when nor how long it took). So HLTB is just more convenient in that aspect. You input more data into the database there, and then you can do a bit more with it, presentation wise. Also it’s nice that the profile there is showing recently beaten games, as well as what I’m currently playing. Here I would need to create 2 separate lists for that, keep them updated manually, and someone still would need to check it out by themselves by going through already long listing of custom lists. I sure do like all the custom lists on BLAEO though, as well as the description box on the profile. HLTB has only one, which I had to rename to “Unfinished” cause they didn’t have that one by default, so since I had to convert a custom list into an essential list, you could say they don’t really have any custom. The default ones are Retired (equivalent to Won’t Play here), Completed (I do prefer BLAEO’s distinction via 2 categories of Completed & Beaten), Backlog (Never Played I guess), Playing (there is nice toggle play button to press and a game lands automatically in this category), Replays (eeeh, I don’t use it much there, I have similar separate list here for games to return to, but it’s short) and Custom (in my cases renamed to Unfinished, you can’t rename others).

Other than that HLTB is really barren. For daily/monthly usage BLAEO all the way, there I just go for half a minute each time I beat something to tick it off. And while HLTB allows games from other platforms, they still don’t have everything. If it’s not in the database you’re probably sol. To this day I still own some games that are missing from there (even some steam ones). Here at least I can write a post that I’ve beaten something, so it doesn’t escape my memory. There I requested them added via support, but since nothing changed for months, I stopped requesting at some point. They also have an issue with games named the same (usually you can find one of two), and with games with similar names (like you’ll be able find entry for Something Something VR, but not for Something Something that came out later and at least on steam has a different ID). So I guess they are doing it by names not IDs, which is kind of terrible (it prevented me from adding one or two games, cause I own not the one they provide entry for).

Sorry for late (and long) reply. I only got to browsing the activity feed for this month today ^^>

mandrill

Thanks for the comprehensive answer!

Good point about showing recently beaten / currently playing on the profile. I think there was a request for a sort of “list showcase” at some point, but I had totally forgotton about it.

I deliberately decided against recording playthrough start/end times when I started working on BLAEO. I think that places too much of a burden on users; always remember to record your stuff (although that play button is nice) … and when you forget, you either try to retrofit or just give up on the stupid recording. Never really worked for me (well obviously, because here we are).

I still question that decision from time to time … for example when people want leaderboards, those really don’t work without recorded end times. Let me show you a secret … there’s your list of games beaten/completed in a month! … but that never worked reliably – apparently I beat Witcher 2 in October and then again in December? … anyway, there’s no real point here. I have some half-baked ideas, but nothing really worth discussing.

In other news: I might have scraped a bunch of “Steam appid to HLTB id” mappings from somewhere. So there’ll probably be links to HLTB for games sometime … well, but I’ll have to improve on that list a little more (something like 23% now) and whip something up to crowdsource the rest. I might also just scrape the playtimes and display them directly. But they probably won’t like that, so … ssshh. Well and taking them from AStats is easier anyway?

Narayan

Oh, I’ve been using the “secret” Recently Played functionality of BLAEO for a long time now, super useful (which is not so secret ever since it was added to drop down menu ;). And I’m aware I can go far far back with it. I especially like that it lists precise times in hours and minutes on mouseover, as opposed to steam’s truncated version to just hours with a decimal point. It’s awesome for total time played (and in specific months too), but can’t be used as when I finished the game, cause it updates every single time you run a game. So if I finished something last month, but would launch it this month, it will also show this month. Granted as “5 mins played this month” or something, so it would be easy to distinguish, but it still creates clutter, which I don’t mind because I don’t use it to determine when I finished games (no day stamp, just month indicator), and I do like it collects all the data actually. Like I mentioned, all that data CAN be pulled off BLAEO, it’s just spread out in several different places. So this one giant HLTB sortable table I use for convenience of having all of it in one place.

I deliberately decided against recording playthrough start/end times when I started working on BLAEO.

Oh HLBT doesn’t record it either by default (I mean there is this functionality to press a button I guess, but like you mentioned, it’s troublesome, so I don’t think many people use it, I don’t). HLTB either pulls data off steam (total time played at the point of importing it), or you need to input it manually, which in most cases I do just that - I input time it took to beat the game, and the date when I did it the moment I finish the game. And it stays there, as nothing automatically overrides that. HLTB has separate input boxes for “time to beat” and “total time played”, so if you return to game after beating it to just goof around or replay, it won’t override the time it took you to beat the game first time around. The Recently Played functionality doesn’t distinguish between playthroughs. If something is played in one month for lots of hours, and then another month for lots of hours, then after a year a user can forget if the total time was one playthrough, or if they did several. Not to mention all the people that idle for cards generate even more incorrect data. But of course, how could the site distinguish that on its own? It couldn’t. You would need some sort of manual user input, like HLBT.

edit:
Oh, I’ve just noticed you’re using some sort of leaderboards variant, to Recently Played in the dropdown menu that I’ve been using, but apart from rejecting the orange unfinished games, those seem to be identical. And yeah, in cases like Secret World Legends, where I’ve exhausted content, and I’m long done with the game (so it’s marked as completed), but still compulsively log in for daily rewards for some reason (and sometimes forget to turn off the bloody launcher, and steam thinks I’m still playing it, even though client is long closed, so it keeps recording time), it will show up every month in those summaries.

mandrill

Yes, they seem to be identical. I think it broke at some point. Originally the .../score/... thing listed games only once for the month they were first marked “beaten” and never1 for later months. But the whole thing had its problems from the start (technical as well as usability), so … it never made “announced feature”, it never had automated tests, and apparently at some point it stopped working altogether. Meh :)

1 if marked “completed” in a later month, it would appear for that month too, but then that would be it, never again … details.

rafaelgomesxyz

Yeah, I just noticed that as well. The .../score/... page was used a lot in the old days when I used to do theme rankings, and it worked fine back then. But recently I think it started including any beaten / completed games played in the month, regardless of whether or not they were actually marked as such in that month.

Traqie

+1