Hi there!

here we are with a product update! For those of you that missed the last ones, you can find here the client open beta announcement with a description of what we have been trying to solve with it.

Also, whether you’re a developer, a designer or in general would like to work in esports, check out our open positions here!

Stop Matching Solo against Premades

Solo and duo players that do not want to get matched to play against a premade team is a hot topic and probably the feedback we are getting the most from players in the last few months. We are aware of the frustration that this can bring and we are testing a number of solutions, including:

Giving a disadvantage to premade teams when matchmaking (live) Create a separate premade only queue (test this weekend!) Forcing the algorithm to avoid or delay matching of premades vs. solo Hubs — there already a number of solo only hubs on the platform, which do not allow premades or parties to queue. This leaves it to the organizer and the hub community to decide the settings they prefer and leads to hubs with the most competitive experience (i.e. the Swedish Pro League).

At the moment premades are scored with a bonus/malus system. This means that when a premade team enters the queue its average Elo is boosted to take into account the advantage of playing together. This is a change we introduced recently and that should already have brought some positive results. Other the coming weeks we will keep monitoring results and tweak this.

As we evaluate all different options, this weekend we will be running the first test with separate queues for premade teams. Throughout the weekend the CS:GO Europe premium queue will not allow premade teams and parties of more than three players to join. Instead if you want to play with a premade team you can enter a dedicated 5v5 premade queue.

The results of this weekend will help us understand how the queue, matching quality and matching times are impacted by similar changes and decide whether to introduce this as a permanent change.

For what concerns hubs, those of you that have been following our blog and/or have been using the client already know a bit about them. This is a tool we are currently developing and that is currently used by a few dozens partners to create their own in-house leagues and matchmaking / leaderboards. While we are planning to release and explain this to everyone in a few weeks, you can find a few of the solo only hubs run by some partners here:

Client Update

As many of you know, the client is now in open beta since a couple of weeks ago. Since then over 100,000 of you have been using it and we have been gathering quite a lot of feedback. Over the last few days we have been focused on bug fixing (see Other & Misc at the bottom of the post) and adding a few features based on your feedback, including:

added ability to mute notifications for hubs

added refresh button to header

improved recommendations to only include hubs that have a minimum affinity to your user (i.e. location, friends, etc.)

You can see the full post regarding the client here or download it by clicking the button below!

Stats by Competitions

We’ve upgraded our stats system to be able to track your performance within a competition. Now you can see your kills, deaths, k/d ratio and many more game specific metrics for the competitions you’ve joined, as well as compare them with your opponents.

FPL Dota 2 Europe Competition Stats

You can check it out for Dota 2 at FPL Dota 2 Europe or for CS:GO at FPL CSGO Europe.

Organizer stats

As an organizer you want to track the performance of your competitions. Now you can track your most important performance metrics including:

Total followers gained / lost

Total players that joined / left your competitions

Total matches played across competitions

Total game sessions / total unique players in your competitions

Total subscribers gained / lost

On top, organizers can also fully understand which players join their competitions by grouping the data by country, skill level, competitions and more.

Check out the new followers of the FPL on a weekly basis

To check out the performance of the competitions you manage, head over to your organizer page, open the settings tab and click “Stats”.

Developer Tools Private Beta

Over the past couple of years the nerdiest of you have been playing around with our APIs to build your own software. The problem is that those APIs are meant for internal use and can therefore i) change very quickly and ii) block calls that may be “fraudulent”. Given all the feedback we have seen on this we have decided to open to the community a set of APIs and developer tools that can make your life significantly easier.

With this first private release we are opening two main tools:

FACEIT Connect: This is the FACEIT OAuth, which allows to verify the users’ identity on FACEIT. Data APIs: these are a set of APIs that have been used by a number of corporate partners to retrieve FACEIT information over the past years. The advantage of this set of APIs is that we maintain and version them to improve stability of third party tools.

While we keep working on adding more data and additional tools, if you wish to test the current tools you can apply for the private beta here.

Remember, while the portal is accessible, this is still a private beta phase. Be merciful and let us know what else you would like to see on our developer forums.

FACEIT Forums

Wait, did someone say forums? Yeah, we finally opened a forum and deprecated our uservoice suggestion board.

We felt we needed a place where each of you could share his feedback, while learning more about the different features we are developing and where you could discuss this directly with us! You can find all forums here.

Other, Misc. and Bug Fixing:

Fixed a bug with match room not showing when in voting state for clients that had been idle for too long

Upgraded match room chat to new chat application

Added go to “competition” link in the match room to easily get back to the hubs of those matches

Upgraded match room header to show competition details

Upgraded Captcha on login and signup

Applied a number of style fixes

Fixed a bug that was resulting in a number of match room chats not being properly created during peak times

Improved Anti Cheat scalability

Hope you enjoyed the update. See you on FACEIT!