Development update for October 2022

Hello once more! Over the past month we've been rebuilding Steam achievement sync, fixing bugs, and making some big moves behind the scenes.

Recent changes

• The system that syncs achievements for Steam games has been rewritten to be much faster.
• Steam achievements now have rarity.
• Steam achievement details (name, description) are now occasionally updated.
• Steam achievements sync capacity has been doubled (aka. new achievements will sync twice as fast).
• Steam games recently played by active users will now be re-synced automatically every few days to correct any errors.
• All Steam games will be re-synced every few weeks to correct any errors.
• Fixed a bunch of Quest bugs.
• Added ZICER logo to bottom of the footer.

New Steam sync

One of the most common complaints we've gotten from power users with huge Steam libraries have been syncing issues that cause incorrect totals and mess with Quest challenge completion.

We have rewritten our entire Steam sync script, making it more efficient and fixing many issues, allowing it to run at twice the capacity (meaning twice the sync speed). We've also added an "audit" system to it that is going through synced games and re-syncing them - a shorter cycle of this process applies to games recently played by active users, and a longer cycle applies to all Steam games by all users. All in all, we expect that as this new system takes over and fixes things, many issues with Quest will be resolved by the time the next monthly challenge begins, and user totals should stabilize over the next month.

The new system also syncs achievement rarity and updates achievement details when necessary - an important new functionality that will fix many issues with achievement that developers have changed after launch.

These changes rolled out yesterday and will slowly roll out over all users and games over the coming week. Naturally this system will not be perfect so we will continue to listen to feedback and fix bugs as they are discovered.

Leveling up PlayTracker with the help of the City of Zagreb

Eagle-eyed users may have noticed a new logo in our footer. 

The city of Zagreb, Croatia is home of the PlayTracker team, and their official innovation center (ZICER - a government office dedicated to helping young businesses) is now supporting us as we have entered their startup bootcamp. This will help us tackle bureaucratic challenges now that PlayTracker is no longer losing money, as well as establish connections within the gaming industry to get valuable feedback from professionals. While this doesn't mean much to users right now, we're very excited about this and hope to share good news as a result of this partnership soon.

Quest for October

As we do every October, we've adorned the PlayTracker Quest page in haunted attire, and our monthly theme - Shadow of the Moon - follows the same vibe. Join now and get your dose of spook.

What we're working on

We are in the final stages of Lens - testing how our infrastructure handles its' intensive database processing needs. We also had to push back an update for Quest Alliance, originally planned for end of September, due to unexpected technical issues that we are now working out. We plan to launch both of these things by the end of this month.

Thank you for your patience and continued support. As always, stay tuned for more.