So after hearing about it for a while, I decided to take a look at the current state of Ready to Play. Since I installed it from impulse, I assume I got the latest version. Now my impressions:

It recognized my login info from impulse. That is convenient, I suppose.

Then it asked me to configure my matchmaking priorities, and my own info. The asked information was utterly meaningless:

It asked my skill level, which means nothing. How skilled one is depends on game or even genre. There is no such thing as a generic skill level that means anything. Being good at first person shooters is no use when playing civilization. So that meant nothing. It asks for internet connection speed, but whether that is relevant depends on the game you want to play. Since matchmaking seems to be nongame specific that means nothing too. It asks for computer quality, which again depends on the game whether it is important. A good computer is needed if you play something like supreme commander, but is utterly irrelevant for games that are more than a decade old.

So when they asked me to rank these items by importance, there was almost nothing to rank. I had to pretty much enter the options randomly, since virtually none of them had any importance. I can't imagine that will result in finding compatible players.

Then it displayed a list of games it found in impulse. I carefully unselected all of them but the ones I would want to play multiplayer, noticing that there was no select none option. Which meant I had to deactivate them one by one, very annoying. Then I selected OK, and all my selecting did nothing, since all of the games I deselected were ready to play.

"Then what was it I just did?" I asked myself, and started deselecting again. The program now displayed correctly that there were two games ready to play. Now I wanted to add some games that I did not buy in Impulse.

So I selected add more games from the big drop down list, since the game I wanted wasn't in the list. I got a list with exactly the same games. But there was another add game button. A lot of harddisk activity later, I was presented with a very partial list of games from the games explorer, and a mess of shortcuts from the start menu. But without the search function that makes the start menu useful in windows 7/vista. So finding the game I wanted was far from convenient, and it looked like some games that were in my start menu, were not even in the list.

But I found the games, and added them. Then I pressed OK. But they were not added to the drop-down box, so I could not select them to be ready to play. I tried again, but the dropdown list where I can select what games I would like to play remained the same. So I tried restarting the program.

After restarting, the game list and dropdown box were back to their default select all and only those games listed in Impulse. Games I deselected were selected again, and the games I added were now gone from both lists. I tried adding again, but that didn't work either. I tried running the program as administrator, in case lack of privileges was the explanation for its odd behavior, but that changed nothing.

So I uninstalled it.

But I wonder, while Ready to Play is in beta, people do seem to be using it. So not everyone can have had as bad of an experience as I did. So I wonder, did I do something wrong? Or did the program just get broken by the latest update?