Game Tracking Programs

[Bass]

What game tracking program(s) do you use ?

I thought it might be useful to tell everyone what you use, the positive and negative things about it, as well as how to set it up - hopefully get some kind of standard going, or at least see what else there is to help other peepes to get to the right games quickly :)

I am using QTracker & know that Rainy uses XFire - will give all the info about it in my next post ...

Thanks

[rainy]

What is the advantage of Qtracker over XFire?

[Bass]

OK, so - on to QTracker ...

Download from www.qtracker.com (http://www.qtracker.com)

Has a nice "Initial Setup Wizard" that one needs to choose the following:
1. Games to track
2. Amount of bandwidth to use
3. Region (choose only Africa obviously)
4. Complete

One can then add a folder under your BattleField folder for all the SGS servers, and add the SGS servers to it (either manually, or by searching for all servers in Africa). Easiest way is to add the servers manually, so have the IP addresses written down somewhere..


Advantages:
1. Seems to be free :)
2. Reasonably nice clean interface
3. Player watch functionality - you can set the prog to watch for specific players/ player name starting with |WrG|, and pop up, or automatically connect when found.
4. Can ping and tracert to servers


Disadvantages:
1. Does not show players on server at-one-glance. The server must be opened to see players.
2. Cannot chat to players that are in a game.


Will add more comments as I find stuff out / use it ... :)

[rainy]

Hmm, I just tried out QTracker. There are some fundamental differences between it and XFire.

XFire is more of a community program, where you have a username and a buddylist, like in MSN or Skype. QTracker seems to be more of a pure server monitor. It tells you what's going on on the servers that you bookmarked. XFire also tells you what your buddies are up to. So if I log in to XFire, I can see that TG, fivel, useless etc. are online, and I can also see what they are currently playing (if they have their XFire running, that is). QTrackers Player Watch doesn't seem up to standard.

Drawback of QTracker: it doesn't support Guild Wars because of the way it is structured. However, it does seem to have advantages on the feature list, specifically the server watch options.