Five Years of Raptr Tracking

I hit my five year anniversary with Raptr this week.  It is today actually.

Raptr, for those who do not know, is a gamer social network, an instant messenger client, a streaming platform, an advertising venture, a producer of gaming statistics, and a client that will track your video game play time.  Founded by Dennis “Thresh” Fong, it is essentially the second coming of Xfire, which was also founded by Dennis “Thresh” Fong and later sold Viacom.  Thresh is a matter of legend in some gaming circles, as the Wikipedia bio I linked will attest.  I used to be an avid reader of his old site, Firing Squad.

I also used to use Xfire back in the day and picked up Raptr five years back to track my game play time to see what I was really doing on that front.

I rarely use any of the other Raptr features.  Occasionally Potshot will send me an IM via the Raptr client, since we both use it, and I will occasionally log into a game when Raptr announces that a friend has just logged in.  I also used to be quite fond of the individual stats and summaries they used to offer.  Their individual yearly review was quite nice, but they stopped doing that a couple of years back.

Which means that I mostly leave it installed to track my game time.  To mark this five year anniversary I thought I would lay out the top 20 games that Raptr has tracked me playing.

So here we have the list, with the top 20 presented in order to the percentage of the total hours tracked.  So it is Rank, Percentage, Game, and (Raptr ranking/rep), the last being how I stack up in hours played versus the community. (details here)  Basically, Elite puts me in the top 10% of the community for hours played (plus achievements earned in some cases) for that game.

The ranking/rep chart

The list:

1. 26.50% – World of Warcraft (Elite)
2. 18.12% – EVE Online (Elite)
3. 8.60% – Rift (Elite)
4. 7.28% – EverQuest II (Elite*)
5. 6.86% – Minecraft (Elite)
6. 6.24% – Lord of the Rings Online (Elite)
7. 5.10% – World of Tanks (Elite)
8. 4.86% – Civilization V (Elite)
9. 2.99% – EverQuest (Hardcore)
10. 1.65% – Need for Speed: World (Elite)
11. 1.46% – Diablo III (Hardcore)
12. 1.07% – Defense Grid (Elite)
13. 0.82% – War Thunder (Hardcore)
14. 0.76% – Guild Wars 2 (Dedicated)
15. 0.53% – Empires & Allies (Hardcore)
16. 0.44% – Age of Empires II Age of Kings (Elite)
17. 0.33% – Path of Exile (Dedicated)
18. 0.29% – Neverwinter (Dedicated)
19. 0.29% – Total War: Rome II (Dedicated)
20. 0.21% – Torchlight II (Dedicated)

I suppose the top two are no surprise.  Or maybe they are to some readers.  To me they are not.  Years of playing WoW with a regular group bears out this number, even through the Cataclysm expansion.  And if anything, the EVE Online percentage is probably low.  Raptr has problems tracking it some days, so it should probably be much closer to the WoW number.

Then we get into the strange zone.

That Rift is number three ought to strike you as odd.  It benefits from Raptr tracking it accurately and all of my play time with the game, including when the instance group went to Telara, being within the five year tracking window.  So despite the fact that I didn’t start playing until nearly nine months after it launched and stopped not too long after the first expansion, it still represents a pretty good chunk of the last five years of play time.

Likewise, the ranking of EverQuest II is largely determined by the time frame measured.  If it had been a 12 year window, it probably would have been the top title.  A three year window would have seen it far down the list.  But within this five year time frame came EverQuest II Extended and a revival of my interest in the game for a bit.  And, just a side not, EQII and EQIIE are tracked as different games on Raptr, so that is the combined hours for both games. (I would be “Elite” if they were lumped together, hence the asterisk.  Otherwise I am “Hardcore” for EQII and “Elite” for EQIIE.)

And then there is Minecraft, which I started playing in June of this year and yet is in the number five spot for five years of game play.  Clearly that hooked me.  It even beat out Lord of the Rings Online, which I have played “seriously” a couple of times in the last five years.  Had I guessed at the ranking, I would have put LOTRO further up the list.

There was a time when I played a lot of World of Tanks and when Civilization V was a regular thing for me.  Then we are finally out of the all elite category.

EverQuest is a game from a bygone age. I spend more time posting about it than playing it I am sure.  I played all I could play of Need for Speed: World, and then it was closed down.

Diablo III and Defense Grid aren’t bad numbers for essentially single player games.  I feel like I have played more Diablo III than that.  Meanwhile, I am elite for Defense Grid because it only had so much content and I didn’t feel like chasing every single achievement. (Just most of them.)

War Thunder I ebb and flow on.  I reinstalled it last month and played it a bit.

The numbers reported for Guild Wars 2 though are completely bogus.  Raptr counts time spent in the launcher patching as game time.  It does that with EverQuest sometimes too, so that percentage is inflated as well.  But the GW2 number is mostly installing and patching the game.

Empires & Allies, a Zynga Facebook game, and the most embarrassing item on the list.  At least it wasn’t FarmVille.

And then we’re down below one half of one percent.  You can see which of the heirs to Diablo II I ended up playing the most along with a couple other titles, including a single MMORPG.

So there it is, five years of video game play time summed up.

Now the question is, what to do with Raptr.  Even a year back I was pondering if keeping it around was worth the CPU cycles.  It hasn’t given me a personal statistics report since my 2013 play time summary.  I suppose adding data to the Raptr pool helps generate their monthly stats for their own blog, though their relevance to the broader gaming world is pretty tenuous.  League of Legends, which tops the Raptr list, is not being played twelve times as much as Minecraft, as their October stats might lead you to believe.  Raptr represents a self-selected group of gamers that trend to the more hard core and much more to PvP, just like its predecessor, Xfire.

And the gamer social network aspect… well, I am still not sure if there is any real value in such a thing, given all of the other avenues for gamers to connect.

So does Raptr have any value?