Development update for July 2022

Hello everyone and welcome to the PlayTracker development update for July 2022.

What is this?

We'd like to try a new way of keeping the community up to speed with how development on PlayTracker is going: monthly development updates like this one.

There would usually be a post about each new monthly Quest challenge, but most of our Quest audience is on social media rather than Patreon so that felt weird. We'd also post when there is a big feature launch, but we've recently been spending most development time on smaller fixes and QOL improvements, none of which warrant their own post, but are very meaningful nonetheless.

We felt it would be nice to switch to a central monthly development update, to be posted early in the month, that goes over what we've shipped, what we're going to be working on next, and mentioning the ongoing Quest (which will still roll over on the 1st of a month as usual). There will still be separate posts for feature updates that deserve them. Let's get started.

Recent changes

• fixed a bug where some newer PlayStation game trophies had no information
• added missing metadata (genre, release date, publisher) to newer PlayStation games
• updated PlayStation achievement rarity to update a lot more frequently
• tweaked Steam owner estimate algorithm to make the bias machine learning system  more influential (tweak also applies to API partners like SteamDB)
• vastly improved load times on Insight game pages and homepage
• vastly improved load times on the Insight homepage, Insight game pages, Social user profiles, Social user stats pages, and Social user community pages
• made the "profiles" element on Social user profile pages, which features usernames across various platforms, only visible to people you follow/are friends with

Quest for July

The theme for July's PlayTracker Quest monthly challenge is "Bargain Hunting", featuring global challenges from Cuphead, Raft, and Kill it With Fire - which is also the free game for June.

What we're working on

We are continuing our recent streak of fixes and performance improvements. One of the focus points for this undertaking over the next month will be the Steam sync system which has long had issues with missing achievements, particularly for users with lots of games.

We are also nearing completion for two major features - Lens for Insight, and the library revamp. Both of these suffered immense feature creep and have been delayed for a long time, but we hope to launch them soon.

Thank you for your continued support - it is what makes this project possible. And as always, stay tuned for more.