It’s just so weird.
I’ve been with Xfire since 2004, when the service was first started, and since then, every game I’ve ever played has been with Xfire running. Hence I know exactly how much time I spent on each game.
Examples – Xfire told me that I only played COD4 for 5 or so hours. That’s how short the Single-Player campaign is. It’s all over in 5 hours. Even Half Life 2 took about 30 hours to complete.
Conversely, to run through Gothic 3 just once, took me almost 300 hours.
Plus, Xfire is a handy-dandy server browser, ie you don’t need to load up a multiplayer game like Battlefield to find a server which your friend is playing on. You can actually do a 1-click-join thing via Xfire.
Today when I tried to load up xfire (as is the normal practice), I got confronted with this:
It’s a totally new error message for me. After re-trying a couple of times more, I decided to check out the xfire website to see if there’s any announcements of downtime.
Ok I guess not then. Seems the the whole xfire service thing is completely down.
The website doesn’t even recognise my login. It tells me I don’t exist! Gawds I hope they don’t lose the database and then all my gaming hours will be lost!
Drat!
For those of you who are asking what Xfire is, it’s basically a gaming IM much like MSN or Yahoo messenger. The only difference is, you can chat with your friends even if they’re playing a different game from you, and they don’t have to alt-tab out of the game to do it. They can continue playing COD4 while you’re playing Battlefield, on different servers, and still chat.
Over the years, Xfire added more and more stuff. Now you can use voice chat via xfire (VOIP). Recently they added the ability to take screenshots, completely independent of the game. Even more recently, they added the ability to record videos of your game sessions.
The video recording part is still in beta though. It doesn’t work as well as FRAPS, and causes a framerate loss of about 30 fps on my system. If the game ran at 60 fps, after activating video recording, it’ll drop to about 30 fps. However, most modern games run at 25-45 fps on my current ancient 5-yr-old rig, so as soon as I activate the recording function, framerates plummet into the sub-10 range.
FRAPS only causes a minimal framerate loss in comparison. Usually I lose 5 to 7 fps with it running video capture. Having a 25 fps game drop to about 19 is acceptable to me. Response will be slightly sluggish, but I don’t mind, since if I’m doing video recording, everything’s going to be slow and deliberate anyway.
Update – As of 23:04 Singapore Time, Xfire is fully up and running. All gaming hours are intact. Thank you Xfire!
