Track Hours Played

[Shadiochao]

I've just seen that Exophase is now able to show the amount of time we've played most PS4 games. Can this be displayed on this site, too?

 

Spoiler

 

[StacFace92]

If this is added, can there be an option to not display it? If it works the same way as Steam, it'll count time paused which means the stats will be widly inaccurate (in my case at least).

[Alex_Hedgehog]

6 minutes ago, StacFace92 said:

If this is added, can there be an option to not display it? If it works the same way as Steam, it'll count time paused which means the stats will be widly inaccurate (in my case at least).

it works 100% the same as steam but why do you think it's inaccurate? Time on the pause screen or in the main menu is still the time you spent in a game.

[StacFace92]

Just now, Alex_Hedgehog said:

it works 100% the same as steam but why do you think it's inaccurate? Time on the pause screen or in the main menu is still the time you spent in a game.

 

A couple of weeks ago I paused a game, drove 30 minutes to pick up my flatmate, went through McDonald's drive-thru on the way back, watched some Netflix whilst eating my McDonald's, then returned to my game. That's at least 1.5 hours of time that would be counted as me being in-game, when I wasn't actually spending any time on the game at all. If it was just the time I spent in the main menu or pausing to look up how to do something, then sure, but I think labelling time I spent driving or eating with Netflix on as me being 'in game' is widly inaccurate.

 

If I know I'm going to be gone a while I'll normally turn off the console, but sometimes I'm not near a save point, or I pause it for what I think will be 5-10 minutes to answer the door and then I get a call from my mum that tends to last at least half an hour, by which time my cat needs feeding, then I cook my food and so on.

[KondeBra]

Well... that is some interesting info. Spent too much time in some games lol.

[Forrest_01]

On 11/1/2020 at 0:54 AM, StacFace92 said:

 

A couple of weeks ago I paused a game, drove 30 minutes to pick up my flatmate, went through McDonald's drive-thru on the way back, watched some Netflix whilst eating my McDonald's, then returned to my game. That's at least 1.5 hours of time that would be counted as me being in-game, when I wasn't actually spending any time on the game at all. If it was just the time I spent in the main menu or pausing to look up how to do something, then sure, but I think labelling time I spent driving or eating with Netflix on as me being 'in game' is widly inaccurate.

 

If I know I'm going to be gone a while I'll normally turn off the console, but sometimes I'm not near a save point, or I pause it for what I think will be 5-10 minutes to answer the door and then I get a call from my mum that tends to last at least half an hour, by which time my cat needs feeding, then I cook my food and so on.

 

Not to be picky or anything, but how the hell would it know what you were doing outside of the game? Surely, it's just based on your console seeing you are 'in' a game & logging time accordingly, no? At least I think that's how those end of year stats worked anyway.
 

This is not me arguing for whether it's an 'accurate' reflection or not, it's just unless it's you logging a timesheet of time served, it'll never be all that accurate.

 

Where another level of complexity is introduced though is rest mode - Sometimes I'll be in one of those "ok, i'll just do this" situations you described (not exactly the same, but similar) & when I come back the console has popped itself into rest mode. I'm ok with that - It's no biggie. But, would it still be counting that time in that circumstance? My guess is no, but who knows? 

[Shadiochao]

18 minutes ago, Forrest_01 said:

Where another level of complexity is introduced though is rest mode - Sometimes I'll be in one of those "ok, i'll just do this" situations you described (not exactly the same, but similar) & when I come back the console has popped itself into rest mode. I'm ok with that - It's no biggie. But, would it still be counting that time in that circumstance? My guess is no, but who knows? 

 

It doesn't count time in rest mode. Whenever I'm not using my PS4 it's in rest mode, but none of my times seem to be inflated because of it.

[seblegamer]

On 01/11/2020 at 1:08 AM, Shadiochao said:

I've just seen that Exophase is now able to show the amount of time we've played most PS4 games. Can this be displayed on this site, too?

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

Thx for the info, would love to see this update on PSNP ! 

 

I'm having fun checking my page and seing how much time i spent on each games, it looks pretty accurate to me !

(for some reason looks like it works great for PS4 games only ... except for VR games Ôô)

[Aodir]

This would be huge, make it happen!

[Riszcky]

The hours tracked on exophase is massively wrong though. Not sure if that's on exophase's end or on Sony. A lot of my games arent accurate. I feel that'd need to be smoothed out first 

[Lordidude]

On ‎01‎.‎11‎.‎2020 at 1:54 AM, StacFace92 said:

 

A couple of weeks ago I paused a game, drove 30 minutes to pick up my flatmate, went through McDonald's drive-thru on the way back, watched some Netflix whilst eating my McDonald's, then returned to my game. That's at least 1.5 hours of time that would be counted as me being in-game, when I wasn't actually spending any time on the game at all. If it was just the time I spent in the main menu or pausing to look up how to do something, then sure, but I think labelling time I spent driving or eating with Netflix on as me being 'in game' is widly inaccurate.

 

If I know I'm going to be gone a while I'll normally turn off the console, but sometimes I'm not near a save point, or I pause it for what I think will be 5-10 minutes to answer the door and then I get a call from my mum that tends to last at least half an hour, by which time my cat needs feeding, then I cook my food and so on.

 

You can put the console in rest mode.

[DrEvilGuapo]

I just registered for the Exophase site to check out the number and compare it against one that I track on my own which uses my trophy progress on all the games I own and the average hours to complete per the associated guides to compute a total hours played metric.  The two numbers are within 6.7% of one another, so this metric is certainly reasonable.

[Dark-Doomblade]

Where do exophase get the number of hours played from? Do you have to add someone to your friendlist or do they track it based on your trophy times?

[xZoneHunter]

This is really cool. Finally PSN added support for this. Hopefully we can see this added to PSNP in the future as well.

 

4 minutes ago, Dark-Doomblade said:

Where do exophase get the number of hours played from? Do you have to add someone to your friendlist or do they track it based on your trophy times?

 

https://forums.exophase.com/threads/psn-playtime-tracking-now-supported.48075/#post-258043 All data is gathered from PSN's API. 

[sepheroithisgod]

Some of these numbers are clearly off for me.

 

One example I found was RDR2, it only says I played for 55 hrs. My guess is that it's because I took a long break after completing the single-player, so there might be some tracking issues.

[DrEvilGuapo]

43 minutes ago, DrEvilGuapo said:

I just registered for the Exophase site to check out the number and compare it against one that I track on my own which uses my trophy progress on all the games I own and the average hours to complete per the associated guides to compute a total hours played metric.  The two numbers are within 6.7% of one another, so this metric is certainly reasonable.

With a closer look, it appears that only PS4 game times are tallied.  Moreover, looking at the individual titles I can see that many of the numbers are absurd.  For example, Fire Pro Wrestling has just 0.04 hours but I've just about completed that game (it's notable that I did most of it using remote play from my Surface, which I'm sure affected the counts).  Meanwhile, games I know I left sitting idle for long periods of time have insanely high hours counts.  As such, my faith in the metric has plummeted considerably.  I love metrics ... but I hate them when they are so poorly collected that they yield little if any real value.

Edited November 4, 2020 by DrEvilGuapo

[Cleggworth]

+1 to this suggestion 

 

The more stats the better, this site is lacking in that area tbh. More stats needed!

[StacFace92]

2 hours ago, Forrest_01 said:

 

Not to be picky or anything, but how the hell would it know what you were doing outside of the game? Surely, it's just based on your console seeing you are 'in' a game & logging time accordingly, no? At least I think that's how those end of year stats worked anyway.
 

This is not me arguing for whether it's an 'accurate' reflection or not, it's just unless it's you logging a timesheet of time served, it'll never be all that accurate.

 

It wouldn't know - that's my point. I don't like the idea of having a 'time played' stat on my profile precisely because the game can never know exactly how much time I spent on the game, it can only calculate how long the game was launched. I wouldn't want to block the idea if other people do like the stat, but I'd want the option to hide it on my profile because I don't want an inaccurate stat on there.

 

Based on what other people have said, it also looks like it's producing inaccurate results for some games, and not showing at all for others, which would make me want it on my profile even less. If it can't be calculated accurately and consistently across all games, then I think it's just going to make profiles look like a mess and I'd prefer to opt out of it.

 

49 minutes ago, Lordidude said:

 

You can put the console in rest mode.

 

I do tend to forget about this since I mainly play on older consoles, but this still wouldn't help where I think I'm only going to be 5 mins or so, since I wouldn't bother putting it in rest mode just to answer the door.

 

Also, admittedly an oddly specific scenario, but I have also purposely launched a game I'm not playing on PS4 to use the party voice chat alongside a non-PS4 game with others, because they wanted to use the PS4 party chat rather than discord or similar, and my theme/menu/whatever they're called was too loud. I could have probably figured out how to mute the theme, or temporarily disable it, or got the person without discord to sign up/download it etc, but they were already in a party and playing this way when I joined, and after a couple of minutes of messing around in menu settings I gave up and just did that to get in game with them.

 

 

(Just to be clear - I'm not criticizing the way the stat is calculated, as I understand why it would calculate all time in a game and I'm not saying they could improve the accuracy by calculating it another way. I'm saying the stat itself can never be 100% accurate because there's too many variables that can't be eliminated, and therefore I personally do not want the stat to appear, in the same way I wouldn't want a game I never played to randomly appear on my profile. I also don't want to block it for others if they play differently to me and find value in the stat, I just want the option to not have it on my profile).

[LoveInHell]

I would like this too as well as hours played in total on this account, I think that would be insane to know.

[GT__Jedi]

Just what I need to see - how much time I'm wasting in my life playing some of these inane games 

[KingmathyGoodman]

It´s not accurate, i just registered to see my numbers and i found something interesting. There are games like Need for Speed Heat, The Crew 2, Sébastien Loeb Rally EVO... that i played on my main account while i had this one logged in and the time are seen for this account too. So if you have more that one account logged in on the ps4 while playing, the time would show for all those accounts.

[Forrest_01]

I’m for this as much as I am against it – I experienced something similar with timewastedondestiny.com. Whilst it was intriguing to see that I had logged around 1,800 hours in Destiny 1, it was also somewhat depressing to see that I had logged 1,800 hours in Destiny 1.

[Arcesius]

The numers seem to be off in many instances, but they are on point in others... I obvously can only comment on games that have in-game tracking as well... For example, in my case: 

• Nioh: 190 hours. That is exactly what my savefile says. The same for Nioh 2 (175 hours). These numbers are accurate for sure. 
• Final Fantasy X. Exophase tells me I played this game for 198 hours. I have a single savefile for this game, and it reads 100 hours and some minutes. That's a discrepancy of almost 100%. 
• WipEout: Omega Collection. According to Exophase, I've played this for 91 hours. But I got the plat in around 30 hours, which is what my savefile also shows, and I certainly did not idle and watch loading screens for over 60 hours ?

There are more examples. So yeah.. would be neat, but it's completely off in most instances, so I'd rather not have this implemented. 

[Shadiochao]

1 hour ago, Arcesius said:

The numers seem to be off in many instances, but they are on point in others... I obvously can only comment on games that have in-game tracking as well... For example, in my case: 

• Nioh: 190 hours. That is exactly what my savefile says. The same for Nioh 2 (175 hours). These numbers are accurate for sure. 
• Final Fantasy X. Exophase tells me I played this game for 198 hours. I have a single savefile for this game, and it reads 100 hours and some minutes. That's a discrepancy of almost 100%. 
• WipEout: Omega Collection. According to Exophase, I've played this for 91 hours. But I got the plat in around 30 hours, which is what my savefile also shows, and I certainly did not idle and watch loading screens for over 60 hours 

There are more examples. So yeah.. would be neat, but it's completely off in most instances, so I'd rather not have this implemented. 

 

Final Fantasy X being so high is because of Final Fantasy X-2. All that's being tracked here is how long you've had the application open. These games run from the same application, so there's no way to find specific times for individual games within it, at least not on PS4. Exophase's solution to this will be to display the same time for both FFX and FFX2, and other games that share applications.

 

Nioh and Nioh 2's times will generally be the same as what it shows on your save file, because the ingame timer keeps going even when paused, loading or looking at menus.

 

I don't know what's up with Wipeout. You say you didn't leave it idle, but I feel like that's the most likely reason. Other explanations could be that the ingame timer is only active during races, or someone else is using your account or PS4 to play it without you knowing.

[Arcesius]

42 minutes ago, Shadiochao said:

Final Fantasy X being so high is because of Final Fantasy X-2. All that's being tracked here is how long you've had the application open. These games run from the same application, so there's no way to find specific times for individual games within it, at least not on PS4. Exophase's solution to this will be to display the same time for both FFX and FFX2, and other games that share applications.

 

Actually, I was wondering why FF X-2 doesn't have any hours tracked, that actually explains it. So it's 198 hours for both games together, that makes sense. 

 

 

Quote

I don't know what's up with Wipeout. You say you didn't leave it idle, but I feel like that's the most likely reason. Other explanations could be that the ingame timer is only active during races, or someone else is using your account or PS4 to play it without you knowing.

 

Oh I surely left it idle every now and then, but I definitely didn't for 60+ hours. It's also not the only game with those issues. I played twice through Pier Solar and the Great Architects, and have meanwhile practiced the Eternal Slip minigame for 6 hours. My playtime should be 20+ hours, yet Exophase shows 9. My Hollow Knight savefile reads 80 hours, Exophase gives it 100.

 

Or for example, RDR2.. I can see in the Social Club that I got 100% in the game in 105 hours, and that I played RD Online for 51. So that's 150 hours. Exophase tells me I played this game for 274 hours, which is ridiculous.

 

I mean, I play 2 hours a day at most, and I never leave my console on when I'm not playing. So there is no chance that those numbers are due to idling. And there is no chance that someone else is using my PS4 ? My girlfriend probably doesn't even know how she could turn it on. 

Edited November 5, 2020 by Arcesius