Seems good, right? The messages are being sent! Well today I poked around the Developer Center to see where I could view these statistics. The whole idea behind implementing this API was to track which levels the players were dying most in (AKA the most difficult levels) and what score players finished the game with (AKA gauge the overall difficulty).
In order to gauge these things, I would want to be able to read the statistics being tracked. But guess what? According to this forum post, you can't! The statistics get sent over to Kongregate, and you never see them again. Kongregate can use them to make badges, leaderboards, and whatever else for your game, but any useful statistics a developer might use to tweak difficulty or design won't be a badge or a leaderboard, so they will apparently never see the light of day.
All of this is of course solved if I were hosting the same on my own servers and used API callback URL's to fetch the statistics. But I'm not hosting the game myself, nor do I have plans to. Most forums have suggested using third-party systems, I'll give those a shot.
And now I'm failing to see what the point of the Kongregate API even is. Shiny badges and leaderboards are all fine and dandy, but if I can't take advantage of user statistics to improve my game, why bother recording them?
Update: The only way to "view" the statistics is the have them posted to the publicly available leaderboards. I enabled this, just so I can see them, but will disable them at some point.
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