With vanberge‘s recent gamer score whoring run I had an idea. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get a quality gamer score? One that automatically weights games based on how good they are?
Well, I knew of a web service you could use to make your own gamer card. So, I thought that I could use it pull in achievement information, and then weight the games by their aggregate scores on metacritic (I was also going to have games older than four years automatically drop off).
The first hurdle was trying to find an api for metacritic. Let me save you some time, there isn’t one. What I ended up doing was writing a quick screen scraper that I could use to extract the information, and then cache in my database. It was a pain in the ass, but it worked.
The next phase was pulling in the achievement information. This is where the wheels fell off the truck. I had not tried to pull achievement information form this before and, I was horrified to discover that it only pulls “Recent” game achievements. Or, roughly the last twenty or so game you played. So, for me, it was missing over 13,000 of my total gamer score. That’s no good.
Upon doing more research into the matter, there is no public way to retrieve this information. Basically, what you would have to do is log into people’s accounts on xbox.com, and then download all the html files with achievement information, and parse them. Fuck that.
I declare this project officially dead for the time being.
5 Comments
woot for screen scraping…
boo for project dead….but understandable
what did you use for the screen scraping solution?
I grabbed a php class someone else wrote that did not work, and then made it work.
Without question the outcome of this project would have meant I would have been victorious without question.
That is possible.