Development update for July 2020

Hello everyone! 

Thank you so much for helping break 100$ monthly pledges! It means a lot to me and shows that PlayTracker has a bright future ahead!

Let's talk development - primarily what's going on with the Spring update and how we are going to improve PlayTracker Quest.

What's going on with the Spring update?

As you are probably aware, it is now no longer Spring, and the Spring update (reshaping game pages) is not yet here. I'm very sorry for the delay - it turned out that Spring was a ridiculously busy time for me personally and since I am the only developer actively working on PlayTracker all the time (others assist occasionally), that meant stuff that should have gotten done did not get done. I've also failed to notice some problems I should have caught - for example that some people are still being affected by PSN sync issues which I didn't notice and which was only recently brought to my attention by a user.

I hope to make it up to you guys during the Summer, specifically:

• Insight update featuring owner estimate improvements and fixes, as well as our estimate adjustment AI solution this month
• "Spring" update later in July or in early August
• Quest update in late August or early September

So, this Quest update...

After the "Spring" update launches, we want to revamp the PlayTracker Quest experience to give people more stuff to do if they want without pressuring people who don't have the time or motivation. 

The monthly challenge setup and the free mystery game will remain the same, however we will expand Quest to also include the long ago announced Backlog Dungeon which will reward you for working through your backlog.
In addition to the monthly challenges we will also add some permanently available challenges to complete. These won't contribute to the mystery gift, but will give other rewards.  We are considering including old monthly challenges in this system.
We will also introduce more methods to earn rewards on PlayTracker by playing service games like Destiny 2 and Dota 2 that users play a lot, but don't earn much XP for.

We also want to further tie together Quest with Social by providing new cosmetic options for customizing your profile which will be available through a shop on Quest which will have weekly rotating inventory and accept coins: a new currency which you can earn by completing challenges and activities via Quest or through a weekly "allowance" which grows with your PlayTracker level. We intend to have some fancier cosmetic options (for example, animated profile backgrounds are being considered) available as a Patreon supporter benefit.

However, these are just some current ideas that we are playing with. If you have comments on them or your own suggestions for how to improve Quest, we'd love to hear them!
An example of a cool suggestion we've already gotten is to improve quality of life by changing the Create-A-Quest search to look for games and then just let users pick the precise achievement from the game's achievement list instead of having to know the exact achievement name.

We hope these plans excite you as much as they excite us and look forward to hearing what you'd like to see added to PlayTracker. Thank you for reading!