Leaderboards reimagined — gamerpic rows, XCT Core gems and a cleaner look

The leaderboards just got a big visual refresh — and a few new boards to climb.

A fresh look on every board
Each member's row now wears their gamerpic as a soft, blown-up background, so the board feels personal at a glance. Names are pulled into the centre, ranks are clean plain numbers, and the old clutter — medals, VIP/Founder/Admin badges and xbox.com links — is gone. A floating XCT Core gem now sits beside every score, and the whole top toolbar is finished in our signature green liquid glass.


Card view, the XCT way
Switch to the grid view and every member becomes an XCT-style card — a smaller round gamerpic up top with a big, bold gamertag below.


New boards to climb
Three new contributor boards sit at the top — XCT Core, Referrals and Cards — and the tenure and contributor boards now include every registered member. Open the leaderboards to find your row.

Also new this week
• Feed Rewind rebuilds your achievements, gamerscore, games started and purchases over any date range as real feed cards — save the whole recap as an image.
• Cleaner share cards export a dedicated layout with big poster art and your stats beside it.
• A feed settings cog lets you toggle card types and switch on a compact mode, and you can now disable likes/comments on your own cards.
• Streak timezone is now its own setting, separate from your display timezone.

Introducing Referrals & XCT Core — invite friends, build your Deck, earn currency

Two big new features land today: Referrals and XCT Core. Invite your friends, collect a deck of reward cards, and start banking XCT — our brand-new currency.

Referrals & your Deck
Every member now has a personal invite link (and a short code) under Community → Referrals. Share it to X, Bluesky, Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, Reddit, LinkedIn or email — and when a friend joins with it, they’re automatically added as your XCT friend.

As your referrals add up you unlock a Deck of 11 collectible reward cards — from Welcomed (for joining through a friend) and Spark (your first referral) all the way up to Visionary at 100 referrals. Locked cards sit greyscale; unlocked ones light up in full colour, with a progress bar counting down to your next tier. Click any card to view it full-screen.


Joined before referrals existed? No problem — there’s a “Who referred you?” box to credit the member who introduced you (one-time), and your unlocked cards show off on your public profile under the new Deck tab.

XCT Core — a brand-new currency
Referrals now pay out in XCT Core. You earn 100 Core for every completed referral, plus a one-time badge bonus each time you reach a new card tier (+100 for Spark, scaling all the way to +15,000 for Visionary), and +100 for your Welcomed card. The floating gem in the top bar always shows your balance.

Open the XCT Core dashboard to claim your rewards — every reward has its own claim button, and claiming plays a little animation as the Core ticks up into your balance. You’ll find a full “how to earn” breakdown and your complete earning history there too.


What’s next? XCT Core is racking up right now so you’ve got a head start — spendable rewards are coming soon. Start sharing your link today and build that Deck.

What’s new: achievement pages reimagined — pack tagging & colours, unlock times, smarter search

A huge update to the achievement game pages.

🏷️ Community pack tagging & colours — Tag every achievement to its DLC or Title Update pack (admin-moderated). The whole page is now colour-coded by pack: the progress bars split by pack, the pills match, and a new legend lists each pack’s gamerscore and achievement count.


⏱️ Unlock dates & times — See exactly when you unlocked each achievement, in your own timezone (e.g. “18:11 GMT”, milliseconds on hover), with a new date-format setting and a country flag on your profile.

⚑ Full flag set — A complete achievement flag taxonomy with emoji (Missable, Stackable, Online, Difficulty-specific and ~30 more), plus flag moderators.

🔎 Smarter search — Finds games whatever the word order (“batman lego 3” finds LEGO Batman 3), copes with ®/™ symbols, honours admin renames, and drops DLC and demos so you get the game you searched for.

🏆 A complete achievements directory — /achievements now lists every game that has achievements (~15,700, up from ~14,500), including ones whose list isn’t scraped yet.


🎆 Feed sparkle — A subtle firework on Pro / VIP / Founder / Admin upgrade and game-completion cards.

📱 Mobile & app — A new mobile menu and layout, an accessibility pass, and XCT is now an installable app (PWA).

➕ More DLC, automatically — A new scanner fills in DLC nobody owns straight from the Store, so add-ons show up in every game’s tag picker.

See the full list on the Changelog tab.

What’s new: Art Manager, the Games feed, the Achievements directory & rarity

A big couple of days on XCT.live — here’s everything that landed.

🎨 Art Manager — Every game’s artwork (square icons and box-art) now comes from a single curated source of truth, so the right art shows up everywhere — your Collection, the Store, Achievements and your profile — instead of the odd random DLC thumbnail. There’s a full admin tool to review, replace, upload, paste or pull fresh art per title, a browsable gallery with zoom, and an automatic “broken art” scanner that flags rotted Microsoft image links so they can be fixed.

📰 Games feed — A new Community → Games feed tracks store and achievement activity across Xbox: brand-new games, DLC, editions and bundles, delistings, price changes, and newly-added achievement lists (including title-update achievements). Filter it by card type.

🏆 Achievements directory — /achievements is now a site-wide directory of every game we have an achievement list for — including hidden and pre-release titles other trackers don’t show. It carries the full Store filters and views, shows each game’s achievement count and total gamerscore, lists one row per unique game, and lets you expand any game to see its individual achievements.

✨ Achievement rarity — Every achievement now shows its global rarity % (how many players have unlocked it), both on your profile and across the directory.

👤 Profile refresh — A cleaner, more compact layout; your Recently Played / Completed rows now use the curated art; pick square icon or full portrait box-art (shown uncropped) and choose how many games each row shows. Plus a native Compare tab to line your achievements up against another gamer’s.

💬 Messaging — Friends and messaging are now open to everyone signed in with Xbox (no longer subscriber-only), and your sent friend requests now show in the Requests folder so you can cancel them.

Under the hood: faster page loads and a couple of stability fixes to keep the site snappy. 💚

Microsoft fixes the Windows 8 Xbox sign-in bug — and XCT's Win8 Bridge helped get it there

For months, a wave of older Windows 8 / early-UWP Xbox games could no longer sign in to Xbox Live — breaking achievements across hundreds of titles. The cause: those games still used the deprecated XBL2.0 auth handshake that Microsoft's servers had stopped honouring.

We built the open-source XCT Win8 Bridge as a stop-gap: it sits between the game and Xbox Live and transparently swaps the legacy XBL2.0 token for a modern XBL3.0 one, restoring sign-in and achievement unlocks on affected titles (Reckless Racing was an early confirmed fix).

The problem — and the bridge — got picked up across the community: r/xbox, Pure Xbox (“might have solved how to fix hundreds of broken Windows games”).

Then came the best possible outcome: Microsoft fixed it at the source. An Xbox engineer confirmed that they’d pushed a server-side fix — “we pushed out a fix yesterday that we believe may fix the issues with Windows 8 sign-in and games unlocking achievements.”

Players are confirming it in the wild — the “Windows 8 games are being worked on / working again” thread on r/xbox is filling up with success reports.

That means many of those broken Windows games should now sign in and unlock achievements on their own — you may not even need the bridge anymore. It stays available for anything still affected, but the real win is the fix landing where it belongs: on Microsoft’s side. Huge thanks to everyone who tested, reported and shared. 💚

Next up: the Windows Phone devices are coming out of storage 👀

Retro Xbox 360 gamercard on the Summary tab

Sign in with your Xbox account and the Summary tab now leads with a retro Xbox 360 style gamercard: gamertag in the yellow stripe, your profile picture, a Rep row built from your rarest equipped badges (tenure, gamerscore tier, then up to three Initiative badges), total lifetime gamerscore, your picked Zone, and a strip of the five games you've played most recently. Pick your Zone from the dropdown below the card — Recreation, Pro, Family, Underground, or Cheater.

Tenure leaderboard

New built-in board ranks every tracked gamertag by years on Xbox Live, sourced from the profile tenure badge. The board auto-refreshes every November 15 (Xbox Live launch anniversary) so tenure year-counts roll over with Microsoft's clock.

Leaderboards toolbar: switcher, filter, search + 5 new boards

Jump between any leaderboard from the toolbar dropdown, filter to All / Members / Xbox Employees / Rare Gamertags, live-search by gamertag, and use Find Me to page-jump to your own row. New boards: Games Played (with achievement), Total Gamerscore, Games Completed, Gamer by Achievements Won, Gamer by Completion %.

Richer per-achievement detail

Achievement detail rows now show full millisecond-precision unlock timestamps, the rarity tier label (Rare / Common) alongside the percentage, a Secret chip on hidden achievements, in-progress progress bars ("73 / 100"), and a Challenge chip with the end date on time-limited seasonal achievements.

Games Played leaderboard back on the index

The Games Played leaderboard is now a built-in card alongside Baby Games. Tracked gamertags are ranked by total titles played across Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Xbox Series, sourced via the Xbox API.

Tracked gamertags now appear on custom leaderboards

Custom leaderboards can now show tracked (non-registered) gamertags alongside registered xct.live users — their per-game gamerscore is fetched once and cached, so any leaderboard whose game list overlaps their library will surface them automatically.

Custom leaderboards now support editors

Leaderboard creators can grant edit access to other users via a user-search picker on the leaderboard detail page. Editors can add and remove games; only the owner can manage the editor roster or delete the leaderboard.

Tile images for custom leaderboards

Pick a tile image for your leaderboard from any game it tracks. Card thumbnails now render at the image's natural aspect ratio — no more cropping.

Leaderboards moved to the top ribbon

Leaderboards is now its own top-level tab right after Achievements, instead of being buried as a sub-view.

• Set main gamertag now syncs instantly — picking a new main in Manage Gamertags pushes it to xct.live straight away instead of waiting for your next scan, so the site reflects the change immediately

• GFWL Downloader fix — multi-part games (Viva Pinata, Resident Evil 5, etc.) no longer extract a full copy per .cab. Spanned cabinet sets are now extracted once into a single folder, so a 7 GB game takes ~7 GB instead of ballooning to ~100 GB

• Leaderboards reimagined — every board got a fresh look: your gamerpic now sits behind your whole row as a soft background, names are centred, ranks are plain numbers, and a floating XCT Core gem sits next to each score; the toolbar is green liquid glass and the grid view now reads like an XCT card (smaller round gamerpic, bigger gamertag). Plus three new contributor boards — XCT Core, Referrals and Cards
• Feed Rewind — a personal recap that rebuilds your achievements, gamerscore, games started and purchases over any date range as real feed cards, with milestone moments; save the whole thing as an image
• Better share cards — sharing a feed moment now exports a clean dedicated card (big poster art, your stats laid out beside it, XCT logo) instead of a screenshot
• Feed your way — a settings cog lets you toggle which card types you see and switch on a compact mode (click to expand), there's an animated-emoji picker in DMs, and you can now disable likes/comments on your own cards and mute like-notifications
• Streak timezone — your achievement-streak day boundary and your display timezone are now separate settings, so streaks line up correctly
• Store sale columns — the store can now show sale start, sale end and days-left columns, and few-column views spread neatly across the row

• Achievement pages, reimagined — every achievement can be community-tagged to its DLC or Title Update pack (admin-moderated), and the whole page is now colour-coded by pack: the progress bars split by pack, the pills match, and a new legend lists each pack's gamerscore and achievement count
• Unlock dates & times — unlocked achievements now show when you unlocked them in your own timezone (e.g. '18:11 GMT', milliseconds on hover), with a new date-format setting and a country flag on your profile; hover a stat to see who unlocked it
• Full achievement flag set — a complete flag taxonomy with emoji (Missable, Stackable, Online, Difficulty-specific and ~30 more), plus a flag column, flag moderators and a 'Flags Confirmed' profile pill
• Smarter DLC tag picker — sort DLC by name or install size, filter as you type, already-tagged packs float to the top in their colour, owned DLC are marked, and a price link opens the regional store; cosmetic add-ons can be marked 'non-achievement' to hide the clutter
• Rename games & DLC (admin) — a pencil renames a game or DLC with a preset platform-suffix tick-list (W10 / X1 / SX / 360 / Switch / …) and a revertable record, so editions and achievement stacks read cleanly
• Better search — finds games whatever the word order ('batman lego 3' finds LEGO Batman 3), copes with ®/™ symbols, honours your renames, shows games not DLC, and de-duplicates editions
• Complete achievements directory — now lists every game that has achievements, including ones whose list hasn't been scraped yet (~15,700 games, up from ~14,500)
• More DLC, automatically — a new scanner pulls each game's full add-on list straight from the Store, so DLC nobody owns still shows up; refreshed weekly
• Community feed sparkle — a subtle firework on Pro / VIP / Founder / Admin upgrade and game-completion cards, plus shovelware 'new game' cards filtered out
• Mobile & app — a hamburger side-menu, a mobile layout pass, an accessibility (WCAG AA) pass, and XCT is now an installable app (PWA) with an offline shell
• Lots of polish — a consistent loading spinner everywhere, the footer always sits below the fold, tidier profile stat pills, and a pile of small fixes

• Customise the achievement table — every game page's achievement list now has a full table customiser: drag to reorder columns, tick columns on or off, filter Locked/Unlocked, set a default sort, and save named views that follow you across devices
• Full game descriptions — game pages now pull in the complete store write-up (the short blurb sits in the banner, the full description at the bottom), and 60,000+ games were backfilled so it's there across the catalogue
• Game pages polished — the regional price table is collapsible (collapsed by default), the gallery leads with screenshots instead of cover art, every column header has a hover tooltip explaining it, the page is slimmer and centred, and store links stack neatly
• Cleaner achievement list — slimmer, left-aligned, content-width columns with full-line descriptions, the ID next to the icon, bare gamerscore numbers, and tidier Xbox % / XCT % columns (e.g. '7/7 (100%)')
• Owned games show the Collection icon — game tiles, feed cards and profile pages now mark games you own with the Collection grid icon instead of a green tick
• Edge-to-edge tile art — box art (Games for Windows, Xbox 360 boxes and the like) now fills its square tile instead of sitting inside a letterboxed frame
• Store fix — 'Best Currency (grouped)' now groups correctly when you've set a custom gift-card price or Argentina conversion formula, so regions no longer scatter
• Feed art fix — game art on achievement and completion cards no longer leaves gaps around odd-shaped covers; the rounded frame hugs the image

• Always up to date — Powertools now always checks for and applies the latest update on launch, so you never run a stale build. (The old '--no-update' opt-out has been removed.)
• Create desktop shortcut — Powertools now has a one-click 'Create desktop shortcut' option right on the main menu (no need to set up a batch first). It drops a shortcut on your desktop that scans every signed-in gamertag and uploads to xct.live end-to-end with no menu and no prompts; pin it to the taskbar for a one-click recurring scan

• Game Installer: large installs no longer falsely time out — the per-package install timeout now scales with the package size instead of a fixed 15-minute cap, so big games (e.g. a 78 GB build) get the time they need to stage instead of being killed mid-install and reported as a timeout
• Game Installer: 'Launch' after install now starts the right game — it reads the real app id from the installed package instead of assuming 'App', so games whose launch id differs (most of them) open correctly instead of just popping a File Explorer window

• Game Installer: out-of-disk-space installs now recover — Windows stages MSIXVC games onto your default app drive (usually C:), not the drive the download sits on, so a big install could fail with 'not enough disk space' even with room elsewhere. The installer now checks free space up front and, if the default drive can't fit the build, lets you pick another drive (registering it as an app-install location if needed); the same picker also appears as a recovery step if an install fails mid-stage. Large installs also no longer time out after 5 minutes

• Game Installer: install from a custom directory — alongside the existing 'Install from /downgrader_downloads' shortcut there's now an 'Install from a custom directory' option that opens a folder picker, so you can install already-downloaded packages from anywhere (point it at a parent folder of game folders, or straight at a single game folder)

• Game Installer: the Source column now tells you whether a version is in the CDN.json archive AND live on Microsoft's actual server — a '+ server' tag means the package URL is confirmed downloadable from Xbox's CDN right now (e.g. 'cdn_json + server' vs archive-only 'cdn_json')
• Game Installer: skips the slow FE3 multi-ring scan when a modern endpoint already resolves a live package — faster discovery with no wasted round trips

• Game Installer: Xbox console builds no longer masquerade as PC — archived Xbox One/Series .xvc packages (which can share a title's ContentId with its PC build) now show their real platform (Xbox Series / Xbox One) and an 'xvc' format, so the PC (Desktop/msixvc) build is unmistakable when downloading

• Classic & delisted game pages — every Xbox 360, Games for Windows and Windows 8-era title now has its own game page, even ones long pulled from the store: its decoded Xbox 360 title ID, achievement list, and which XCT members own it
• Xbox Live Arcade is now a platform — filter the Store, Games and Achievements by Xbox Live Arcade; every XBLA title also shows under Xbox 360
• 3D Slot Machine — a new profile game-picker: spin a 3D arcade cabinet to land on a random game from your collection (Genre → Year → Game)
• Search from anywhere — a live search box in the top bar instantly finds members and games as you type, and game results jump straight to the full game page
• Achievements directory — filter by Xbox 360 publisher code, decoded straight from the title ID, with a “Has decoded ID” / “No decoded ID” toggle and a multi-column dropdown; new columns show each title's product ID and its legacy/hex/decoded Xbox 360 ID
• Members badges — the Members list gained a Badges column showing each member's VIP, PRO, Founder and Admin status
• Companies tidied up — a studio that both develops and publishes now shows as one row with both DEV + PUB badges instead of two, and the total company count shows in the menu
• Feed celebrates upgrades — going VIP, Pro or Founder now posts a card to the Community Feed
• Game pages polished — key facts moved into the banner, artwork scales to fit (never cropped), developer/publisher names link out to their sites, the full owners list scrolls, and the achievement count is fixed (no more “2 of 73”)
• More star ratings — Store ratings now fall back to a second catalog for delisted games, so far more titles show a rating
• Profile polish — sub-pages open instantly with no home-screen flash, the tab strip stays put while switching, game tiles open the full page in a new tab, and grids fill complete rows at any width
• Stats fix — the public profile's By-platform totals no longer double-count Play Anywhere games
• Achievement flags — flag submitters get a thank-you message when their flag is confirmed, and admins get a faster batch confirm/deny queue
• Support XCT — a green “Buy me a coffee” button now sits in the top bar, and the sign-in screen shows a live member tally with a claim-your-badge call to action

• Download HTML rebuilt — the offline copy of your collection (Collection ▸ Download HTML) is now an exact mirror of the live Collection and Purchases pages: the same sidebar filters, sorting, columns, de-duplication and totals, all working with no internet connection
• Game pages — progress bars — every game page now shows your achievement and gamerscore progress against the site average, plus how many XCT players have started and completed the game
• Game pages — tidier layout — a game's key facts moved up into the banner, achievement artwork now fills the row height, and your browser tab shows the game's name
• Collection — the Achievements filter's “Achievements Earned” and “No Achievements Earned” options now work, matching against the achievements you've actually unlocked
• Spot delisted games — the Store and Games filters now have a working Listing Status filter: show only games still on the store, ones that have been delisted (no longer purchasable anywhere), or hard-delisted (store page gone entirely). XCT scans every game in members' achievement lists daily to keep this current — 8,300+ delisted games flagged so far

• Friends feed — the Community Feed has a new Friends sub-tab showing activity from just your XCT friends; add friends from the Members tab
• Full game pages — every game now has its own page (tap the ↗ next to any game name, or "Full page" in the details popup): all the facts, every region's price with a price-history chart, the full artwork gallery and trailer, bundle links, physical editions, community stats, and developer/publisher profiles with their socials
• Game comments — talk about any game right on its page, with threaded replies and likes
• Achievement flags — flag individual achievements as Unobtainable, Discontinued, Multiplayer, Online-required, Turbo OK, Time-limited or Glitchy; the community votes and confirmed flags show on the game's header
• CDN build notes — every captured build of a game is listed on its page, and you can attach notes to each build (debug menus, version quirks)
• Game assets gallery — a new Gallery sub-tab with every game's store artwork: cover art, banners, screenshots, logos and trailers, filterable by type and genre, plus a full-screen shuffle slideshow; the art is archived, so it stays viewable even after a game is delisted
• 1,600 mystery games identified — collection items that showed as “(unenriched)” now have their real names and artwork, including delisted, region-exclusive and long-dead store products
• Activity heatmaps levelled up — the public profile's Activity tab gained a Gamerscore-per-day layer, day-by-day spending in purchase tooltips with per-year totals, and games you started but never unlocked anything in now count as started
• Collection accuracy — games shared from someone else's console no longer count as owned, and Xbox 360 store purchases you've actually played are restored to your library; both fix themselves on your next scan
• Feed is the new home page — xct.live now opens on the Community Feed when you're signed in, and site news + changelog updates appear there as cards
• Ribbon menus — Home and Profile are now dropdown menus listing all their sub-sections, so every page is reachable in one click

• Compare achievements with friends — pick up to 3 XCT friends and see a side-by-side, per-game breakdown of gamerscore and progress, with a head-to-head banner showing who leads, a gap column for your easiest catch-ups, cover art, and a click-to-expand per-achievement diff that highlights exactly which achievements each friend has that you don't. Launch it from the Achievements tab, a friend's profile, or a shareable link
• Team Coverage lens — flip the compare view to see, across your whole squad, which games everyone's done and which nobody has yet; toggle between “completed” and “played at all” and filter to Nobody done / Mixed / Everyone done / Only I haven't done to plan co-op nights and catch-ups
• New Members tab — browse every XCT member with a linked Xbox account, sortable by gamerscore, games played, or member number, each with links to their Xbox and XCT profiles and an add-as-friend button
• Store: new “On sale, Unowned, Sorted by price” saved filter, and the built-in XCT filters now sit in their own labelled section in the Saved Filters dropdown
• Collection tab now sorts by Purchased (Newest first) by default
• Achievements: the page header moved into the sidebar so the games table gets the full height of the screen
• Profile pages got tabs — your public /u/ page now has a tab strip (Activity, Achievements, Games Played, Completed Games, About, Trophy, Stats) that switches instantly without a reload
• Edit your profile in place — open your own profile and tap the ✎ Edit button to change your banner, bio, theme, accent colour, avatar shape & frame, social links, which sections show, your featured games and your trophy cabinet right where they appear, each saving on the spot (the old settings editor panel is gone)

• Store install sizes — every game now shows its approximate install size in the details panel, there's a new sortable “Size” column you can switch on in the Store list, and the filter summary shows a running total install size for whatever you're looking at
• Leaderboards: filter by platform — a new platform dropdown (including Games for Windows Live) re-ranks every board by how many games each player has on that platform
• Leaderboards now open on VIP Members by default, and VIP stats refresh automatically every day
• Trophy Cabinet no longer stretches out of shape — the 3D cabinet keeps its correct proportions at any window size
• News posts can be liked (anyone signed in) and shared in one tap to X, Bluesky, Reddit, Facebook, Telegram, or copied as a direct link