Augury

Unbeliever over at MMODIG has posted a bit on a new gaming utility called Playxpert. He gives some really cool examples of what this program may be able to do, which sound quite impressive. At the same time, he calls it an “XFire killer” which has me a bit worried. I started using XFire a few months ago and it’s troubled me from day one — And now something even better, or worse?

Maybe it’s just because I’m not from the generation that XFire is aimed at, but I have a big suspicion about the program. I mean, look at it. It even looks like Real Player.

I mean, it seems to allow for some nice things. The good:

• Keep in contact with your friends
• Connect with friends-of-friends to expand your in-game social network
• Know when your friends are playing at a glance so you can spontaneously jump in or out
• In game communication
• Find new servers / games
• Get generally interesting statistics (like the featured XFire top games of today, which lists 17,000,000 minutes of World of Warcraft played today amongst all XFire users)

And while some of these things are nice, I’m not sure the benefits really outweigh the negatives for me. Those being:

• A bad interface designed with form over function
• Scans your computer (ostensibly to detect games, but who really knows?)
• Regularly updates itself with crap you probably don’t need nor want
• Friend-of-friend social networking features means people who you may not even know are keeping tabs on you
• General XFire statistics gathering means a loss of privacy with an increase in the amount of information publicly available

Of course the examples that Unbeliever lists for this new Playxpert program seem even worse — I could do without having the stats of my character in a game datamined so that someone can look up my build and make a counter, thanks very much. By far the majority of the little widgets and doodads for games seem to be for World of Warcraft, though, so as long as I steer clear of that…