The program itself is spyware and data mines information from our system. Wouldn't be hard to believe that the database you referred would be made up from the settings we use and that the spyware records. I have been looking into the Nvidia option to find out if its spyware or not and have yet to find a conclusive answer.Originally Posted by KeyboardDemon
Right now a lot of tech and gaming sites/magazines are reporting on AMD's Reward Program launch from yesterday.
Most are missing the fact that this program was released to a limited few of us in December-
http://rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbish/sorako18/news/52b37...ogram-12-19-13
They then committed fraud/lied to us here-
http://rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbish/sorako18/news/52e6f...re-beta-update
and here:
http://rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbish/sorako18/news/52f58...w-ways-to-earn
Notice how the original launch is called a Soft Launch and clearly shows the offer made and what was needed to achieve the earnings and rewards. A soft launch is not the same as a beta it is used for fine tuning. Such as Your going to open up a chain of a 100 stores in 2 years so next year you open up 10 stores to get a better idea of your costs, prices, wages and other factors. You then make the appropriate adjustments. Just because its a soft launch this does not give you the right to go back because you were losing money and retroactively make those changes (recharging people the difference of your mistakes, taking back pay, and such). In the gaming world think of a soft launch more to the "Early start" that some get for pre ordering or what not, though this usually is a bonus more than anything and in some cases a Soft Launch can be used as a bonus.
They second two links they are trying to confuse people by now calling it a BETA, the raptr application was stated to be in a beta and still is in Beta, but the rewards program was not launched as a beta back in December again refer to the first link. A beta on the other hand is specifically used for testing of bugs and faults of the software. The software itself is not running as intended and needs to be fixed. Where as what happened here and clearly shown in the second link is they made mistakes calculating the costs of running the program.
The second link even shows that they were aware of issues, and instead of stopping the program and making their adjustments they choose to allow the program to run longer having users spend up to 6 hours a day using their app with full intent of changing the terms to a huge advantage to themselves, fraud. This also happened 1 week before the store even opened denying us the chance to spend the points we earned in the original offer before they deducted us those points.
In many threads raptr employees tell the community that it was a beta and compare that to how MMO's run their beta's saying how they could of deleted all the points and we should be glad we kept some.
They also in that last link state that this was not AMD, yet the first link and everywhere on the web its listed as AMD's Program.
I don't know what's more upsetting that companies can treat their consumers this way, or that gamers take the lies and thank them replying "its better than nothing".
The Nvidia option is most likely to do the same in some way. None of these things are done for the good of customers,only to make more money. Plenty of Google services do the same.
Moreover,do you think Valve is not doing the same thing?? They pretty much know your hardware,how many games you play,how long,who you play with,etc.
Those points you get at Tesco. That is used for market research.
Ultimately I uninstalled the Nvidia experience. It was pissing me off with its stupid popups.
Make the assumption all of it is spyware and then consider whether the benefit is worth it to you or not.
Last edited by CAT-THE-FIFTH; 21-02-2014 at 01:26 AM.
I wouldn't call it Spyware, in as much as we knowingly enter in to an agreement to 'share' the information with the parties concerned when we install the software, with some of the software we hope to benefit from the data submitted by other users so that we too can enjoy an optimised gaming experience without having to go through the trial and error of finding the right settings ourselves.
I would consider those programs or applications that gather data without your knowledge or consent to be Spyware. In terms of AMD Raptor or nVidia's GeForce Experience where data is collected about the PCs hardware, the games that are being run and the settings that those games are played then yes, I can see how people would find that intrusive. Personally I like the one touch button to handle all of the settings for my games, plus I like to be kept informed about the latest drivers when they come out and I am enjoying being a lazy gamer.
Here's a review of GeForce Experience and here's an overview of AMD Raptr.
As for spyware yup knew from the get go, that's why after I originally installed it with the drivers I had removed it, then got a notice about the giveaways for running the app from a different rewards program. So gave that a go wasn't to bad, planned to remove when it was done, during that program was when they started the soft launch of the Points system. It was pretty clear from the link I provided first that in about 3 months time we would be able to get newer titles like BF4 and Theif and we also knew that the store would open in a few months. Well a week before they opened the store they cut our points, I went from 26k to 4k or something like 350ish hours to 12 hrs. I was about a week or two from the 30k rewards they had shown. Now a week later I am at barely below 5k, and the only games offered at that price are those that are given away frequently or on sale at steam for under 5 bucks.
All honestly been using it for months and yet to find the optimization to work well. It usually gives lower settings than what the game itself defaults to even though its not needed. Its rare for new games these days not to come out with some form of self optimization.
My points were slashed in half, I went from close to 6,000 to just under 3,000.
I think Raptr wasn't as good with its optimisations as GeForce Experience, but when I was using Raptr I was running an HD6990 and not many people were using those at the time. What I used to do was optimise my games to get the points and then change the settings myself.
The only prize I won on Raptr was for a game that was also available free through Steam, I can't remember the game now, but I think it was one of those games that started as a Half Life mod and then got released as a game in its own right, not Left for Dead but something similar. I can't even see my prize history, at the start you had to win an entry into the daily sweepstakes, and I won that on many occasions and was able to view how many times I had entered in the Beta, but that's all gone now too.
Its good that AMD are doing this to stay competitive against Nvidia & I can now get free games for playing the games that I like. However I would still prefer Nvidia graphics cards however i like AMD processors.
Right now there is 9 games available out of those 9 I have gotten 7 for with out buying them for doing things such as signing up for a site, or registering a product. This program wants you to commit Hundreds of hours to get the same titles. Personally if you enjoy chasing a carrot, have at.
I don't why you are complaing about free games. I had the Geforce Experience installed for a while and got eff all apart from popups.
But at least they were free pop-ups, right?
I don't know if nVidia have changed this recently, or if I have just grown used to closing them down that I do it without noticing, but I am not really noticing pop-ups much in mine, though now that I've said it they will probably be popping up everywhere and all of the time now.
This is all looking pretty good. Raptr auto-updated and I was suddenly 1800 points to the good. Hoping to get some pretty nice goodies out of this.
The optimisation seems to be offering more than NVIDIA and there is also a couple of of discrepancies between games for the two. NVIDIA thinks I am capable of playing Black Flag on much higher settings than AMD but AMD thinks I can use higher settings for Civ V than NVIDIA...
I seem to be racking up the points - 35 here, 25 there.
On the other hand - I don't know if there's been a software update - but Raptr's taken to giving me crash type error messages when I shutdown. Only way to stop this is to explicitly shutdown the Raptr client before hitting OS shutdown. Not cool.
Other thing that bugs me is that 2/3's of my games are "Insufficient community feedback on this title" - and there's some surprising ones like MoH:Warfighter. And there's the casual type games - where there's no real graphics settings to play with. It'd be nice if there was a more meaningful message on those - e.g. "No graphic optimizations possible with this title".
Got to laugh though - got a message the other day saying that because I'd decided to give BF3's campaign a rerun I was now rated higher at it than 79,828 other players. Does that mean I can change my sig to say "L33t BF3 ply3r"? ROFL.
Career status: still enjoying my new career in DevOps, but it's keeping me busy...
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