I wrote my own data reader months ago, just because i'm curious. I certainly haven't gained any competitive advantage with it, as i'm outside the top100 and not a gold spender. Sounds like all the top teams are doing it anyway, so it's an even playing field up there. I mostly just check out my fellow syndicate members and opponents who beat me.

There seems to be a fair bit of anger directed towards the data-reading "cheats" instead of the lazy programmers at Funzio/Gree. Returning the entire row from the db query instead of the relevent fields is just crap coding.

Anyway, i'd love to know more about these other readers. I'm starting to wonder if there is more to the story.