Oh, wow. The Summer Sale Playfire rewards all have a deadline of 24 hours. I'm anticipating a whole lot of pain in the coming days, considering it takes at least 24-48 hours for anything to track. Good luck to any of you who try, I'm gonna sit this one out. Five pence is not worth the headache.

Received an email to fill out a survey about Playfire. Make sure you let them know how you feel about the changes and how poorly the staff have handled communication. I doubt they'll listen to any feedback and just do whatever they feel is best, which is usually bad for us. Here's the link to the survey, not sure if it'll work if you didn't click through from your email: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Playfire2015

I was really hoping I wouldn't have to post yet another torrent of abuse on their blog this week, but alas... I especially like how they refuse to clarify who is eligible to enter the lotteries in the first place. I suspect that is because only people who get the 5p reward are eligible, but it's in GMG's interest for more users to add the games to their wishlist, despite not actually being eligible.

Does anyone have any ideas about what this business strategy is? Why piss everyone off by giving one person $1000 instead of splitting that up among the whole userbase? And what is with the obviously bullshit language they use for both this ("epic rewards") and those crappy staff picks? I would understand if they just posted an honest message about what they're doing and why, but this is just insulting.

If what people are saying is true the latest achievement is a really challenging one (Arkham Knight for 1 hour)

Sounds good to me, I'm hoping for more rewards at Claimony as the current system is kind of bland.

I hope it's okay to plug Claimony again, especially now that Playfire has managed to go even more limp. The folks over at Claimony are going to start testing out user submitted rewards soonish. Basically, it seems like the site is going to be something like AStats and SteamGifts mixed together.

Here's the group announcement: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/Claimony#announcements/detail/212014688136395540

Sign up to join the invite queue: http://www.claimony.com/
Or use my invite code for instant access: http://www.claimony.com/signup-beta/?r=4dd54376

P.S. Wanted to mention I'm an "ambassador" of Claimony but I'm not a staff member, I just help out with the site and mod the group (and catch cheaters).

Ah, yes. The old marketing scam of "put in effort for a slim chance to win, but not before we datamine you so we look good for our investors". It's really sad just how determined they are on forcing their users to join mailing lists and use website functions like wishlists rather than actually focusing on what made Playfire fun in the first place.

Oh well, maybe things will get better after this round of interns get fired or leave their job, like all the others before them. I guess they really were hemorrhaging credit, to the point where it's cheaper to give away £2500 every week.

All that time we spent early on, making suggestions and leaving feedback and every time someone like Broadfoot or Joncol would say "yeah, sounds good, we'll discuss that with the team" only for nothing to happen and then this is what Playfire ends up turning into.

LOL

Does tracking even take less than 48 hours yet?

lol

Is everyone ready to earn their fortune of 5p when the "new and improved" rewards come back?
This is totally what we asked for and it's great to see them actually listening to and incorporating feedback!!
/s

On topic of PF rewards, I really hope when(if?) they return they will be actually worth doing again and they fix the damned system they use to sync rewards. I pretty much gave up on doing a lot of them simply because my profile never tracked anything once someone from their tech support messed with my account. Having to submit a ticket every time just wasn't worth the time anymore.

@nyquist

I'm totally fine with claimony ref links. A while back people tried spamming amazon and similar ref links and that's when I added the disclaimer. Also iirc when mag first posted his ref link a couple months back (which I used) it was the only way to join. You had to use someone else's link. I may not post much anymore but I am always around and monitoring the group.

Yeah, made sure to do all the ones I could early in the week. Every reward took at least 48 hours.

Bastion didn't track for me the first '1 hour block' I played.
The next day I left it idle again and it seemed to have worked afterward, either that or Playfire was just doing it's standard thing of dragging its feet and taking up to 48hrs to recognise things.

@Baron Khazadson: I got Bastion 1 hour achievement but I didn't get Shadow of Mordor 1 hour achievement.

I've definitely re-played Bastion for longer than an hour but am not getting the achievement unlocked, anyone else having this issue?

Oh, they actually just announced today that Playfire Rewards are going on hiatus before making another set off changes. I wonder if this means they're coming out of beta?

Yeah, they are definitely better and easier now. I wonder what flavour the system will be changed to next? I guess it'll depend on whoever the new intern will be, hopefully they'll find someone that can fix the tracking issues one year.

Actually the current playfire system and rewards are arguably better now than what they have been for a while.

Idle some bundle fodder titles you may have sitting around on your account like Bastion or Luna's wandering stars currently and earn 0.40p, compared to spending hours to get some achievement in a game you don't even want to play for 0.10 or the achievement being already attained in the past.

Playfire has indeed been crap for about a year or so now, but I can appreciate this recent direction and change as of last week.

It is not relevant to Playfire rewards. Anyway, I think the admin are not active. They did warn us against referral links in the group's welcome note.

Because it's relevant and because it's better than Playfire, I figured some of you would be interested. Anyway, since there are currently ZERO rewards on Playfire maybe you'd like to check it out sometime. I can promise that it actually works most of the time. There's a Magicka 2 competition going where you can win some pretty cool hardware.

Why are you posting third party referral links on a Playfire group?

That Claimony site has started opening up some of the rewards that you can claim to international users. Sign up with my invite link to skip the queue and check it out: http://www.claimony.com/signup-beta/?r=4dd54376

Those are some nice deals today on GMG. The cynic inside me says they're using this method to distract customers from recent news and offload all their grey-market keys before other publishers start asking questions. /tinfoilhat

Heard GMG have caught out acting shady with grey-market keys... who'da thunk it? It's not like I've noticed a common trend ever since Playfire rewards started happening, it's just that no publisher publicly shamed them until now. Just want to humble brag about it a bit.

Those apps only show what the staff at Playfire have added to their JSON feed. Any problems you experience are caused by Playfire. Honestly, they've had so many staff changes in the past 12 months that I'm not surprised they still haven't fixed anything since the beta began in 2013. Oh, other than forcing people to sign up for their spamtastic newsletter.

Steamlessness Companion seems to show rewards too early. I did some Rochard achievements before they were announced officially so I didn't get rewards for them. Now Steamlessness Companion shows The Bureau: XCOM Declassified which is not announced yet.

I've been a member of another achievement tracking / rewards site called Claimony since last December. It's similar to Playfire and is based in Sweden. You earn points for every achievement unlocked after joining and then you can put those points towards claiming prizes. Since I live outside of Sweden I've just been building up points until they expand internationally. I wasn't going to share this until they had implemented an invite system as it's still in closed beta but today it looks like they've done just that. If you wanna bypass the queue and check the site out for yourself then just use my referral link below. There's a competition running right now to earn as many TF2 achievements as possible to win a number of prizes.

http://www.claimony.com/signup-beta/?r=4dd54376

Yeah, had that error since yesterday ;(

is http://steam.madjoki.com/ giving an error to the rest of you?

Part of me was expecting them to drop the ball on REV2 with those achievement because of it being episodic. But then another part of me is still surprised that they keep making this same mistake over and over and over and over again...

I swear they don't even read or pay any attention to the ones they add, which is kind of odd considering that's literally what the whole Playfire system is about -_-

We've been trolled again. This is never getting out of beta.

Seems like they have at the very least fixed the achievements being across all the unreleased episodes now.
Still quite odd that they would drag their feet and wait over a week after launch before listing rewards for this game at all though.

I got a few of them already, truth be told I was purposely holding back on exploration and doing somewhat of a straight 'non achievment' run when I played through it because I had a feeling Playfire would pull some crap like this. Time to go back and get the rest I suppose.

I thought we were joking but I guess we were right, this time for Life is Strange. I wonder if anyone at Playfire uses Steam as their main gaming platform... I mean, how can they continue to keep making the same mistakes, more than a year after this "beta" began?

Yeah, and the ones you can earn are part of future DLC that won't be released for months. Perfect!

No, no, you've got it all wrong Mag's.
They'll put rewards up for it about a week or so from now *AFTER* everyone has already earned most of them, obviously ;)

I noticed people complaining about there not being rewards for Gat out of Hell. It's probably got something to do with the fact that Deep Silver pulled all their games from GMG, so the Playfire staff must feel a bit bitter about that every time someone comments about it. They used to add rewards for games they didn't sell all the time, whatever happened to that "keeping the balance" catchphrase, huh? ;)

It took me 17 hours to do all but Pale Blue Dot on Civilization Beyond Earth. One more turn and I'm almost there... ;)

Looks like Resident Evil HD will be today's being that they are actually already up on on Steamlessness and Madjoki's.

I just really hope they are going to retroactively award them seeing as the game unlocked earlier today..

Wow, they really repeated the same rewards from less than a week ago. I can't believe how lazy that is, this Rich guy was doing alright up until now. It's an excuse to plug his friend's website, "jayisgames", they must have partnered with them after learning CVG is shutting down for good.

Yay RE:HD made a (very quiet) appearence on GmG.
Slowly chipping away at this small fortune and cashing out..

Glad I grabbed Saints Row 4 when I did then.

Damn.. Dead Island 2 was indeed one of the things I was planning to blow my load.. er.. 'cash out on' with my credit. How annoying.

Unless it's an error it looks like GMG has lost the distribution rights to another publisher, this time it's Deep Silver. They publish games like Saints Row and Dead Island. This is one of several publisher catalogues that GMG has lost over the past few months, others include Activision and Bandai Namco. Here's hoping they don't lose the rights to selling Rockstar games before GTAV is released. I wonder what's going on over at the GMG offices for them to lose so many high profile publishers? No idea if they will get those games back but it's gonna be too bad if you were looking to spend your hard earned credits on Gat out of Hell.

Continued: I've meet a lot of cool people here so I will be keeping the group open in hopes that Playfire gets it's foot out of its ass. If not, then well we have built up a nice community for players interested in hunting achievements and the like. I could even start posting gaming news/deals but I'm sure the majority of you are already in groups that specialize in that sort of stuff and don't want to be overburdened with the same copy/paste job that a lot of these groups seem to do. Anyway have a nice 2015 and keep on gaming!

Agreed, the client is next to useless. There are way better alternatives for what it does. They don't seem to care about anything suggested to improve the site and the client at all. They did have something nice going but I have lost interest. It's not only about the amount of rewards but the lack of communication that we once had, the slow as hell customer support. I actually didn't mind the reduction in the amount of rewards we got since at times it was a bit overwhelming. The prize for completing rewards is abysmal though, not even worth the time anymore.

They may as well scrap all of Playfire while they're at it. It's just a mess of half-baked and incomplete ideas, collected over the past several years, with the bare minimum amount of staff required to keep that place from collapsing. GMG isn't much better but at least it has direction and purpose and someone to answer your emails in less than two weeks. Playfire Rewards had so much potential and they let it go to waste, which I am obviously pretty bitter about.

Just a matter of time before they scrap the whole PF reward system.

Looks like radMonkey has left recently too, I don't know what that means for the future of Playfire and its rewards system. Both of those guys currently admin the official Playfire Steam group and would often host game nights, I guess that won't be happening unless someone else takes over. Usually they would announce staff changes like this on the blog.

Oh, I think I figured it out. Unless there's been a mistake it appears broadfoot88 isn't a staff member any more, I guess they must have deactivated or deleted his GMG blog account and now all the posts attached to that account have had their embedded images deleted.

Anyone else notice some blog posts on Playfire are messed up and missing images?