FACEIT Client Open Beta

Breakdown of the features in the FACEIT Client

From the start of this year we have been working hard on building a FACEIT client that not only encompasses the experience of today but drastically improves the way you engage, compete, and play on FACEIT.

A client has been a long time coming, but we wanted to make sure we built a client that tackled the most voiced issues from the community on the platform today, which is why the feedback we’ve received from community forums, support tickets, rounds of usability testing, our closed beta, and more has been vital in shaping the client.

What’s new?

New Navigation

Improved Matchmaking Queuing

Personalised Homepage

Community Hubs

New Chat

Notifications

AC Integration

Speedy Navigation

We wanted to make navigating around the platform easier, useful, and super quick. That’s why we focused on improving our information architecture to support a much clearer, better organised, and structured navigation.

Much of our ongoing user research has highlighted that our existing navigation could be better organised to reflect the way players navigate around the platform.

The new and improved navigation allows you to queue and see your competitions, see which friends are online, view past match results at a glance, contact your teammates and view your favourites and more all from the new sidebar design. Most importantly, all of this can be done in a single click.

Improved Matchmaking Queueing

Playing on FACEIT can be somewhat overwhelming — Which matchmaking queue am I in? What event am I competing in? What ranked league am I in?

To improve the play experience and the concept of matchmaking events, leagues, and settings we have introduced matchmaking dashboards as well as the the ability to queue directly from the new sidebar.

Matchmaking dashboards show a player’s ranked league, their active event they are participating in, other available events, and the settings of that queue. You can now queue directly using the ‘Play’ icon in the sidebar or from the ‘Play’ button on the matchmaking dashboard itself.

Personalised Homepage

The new homepage is the result of an ongoing effort to improve personalisation and discovery across the platform. It is now easier to find competitions of interest straight from the homepage and to catch up on your progress on FACEIT from the homepage.

Recommended tournaments and hub competitions are now surfaced on your homepage, recommendations are based on many factors such as mutual friends, your location, a competitions popularity, and more. Suggestions are still much of a work in progress, but our aim is to improve and show competitions that are of interest to you.

The new homepage also features your personal stats for your registered games, your region & country rankings, and who is currently playing on the platform.

Hubs

Along with the release of the new client we are starting to surface a new competition type that some of you might have already noticed with the experiments of some partners like the Polish Pro League and the Swedish Pro League circuits: ‘Hubs’! Hubs are the competitive system used by the FPL for quite some time. They are the next step in the evolution of FACEIT and have the goal of giving each community and organizer the ability to create their own FACEIT experience. Each Hub has its own queue, chat, and leaderboard, and its owner can manage each aspect of the experience.

A hub can have a game mode queue, different join types (solo, party, team), leaderboards, rules, and membership entry requirements. Each organizer is able to customise it based on the requirement of it’s community (i.e. only from a certain country, skill level, match based on skill vs. “first in first out”, join only as solo or only as premade, give points based on Elo or with a flat system, ban AFKs for 5 minutes or for a month).

While we will launch and present hubs properly in a few weeks (internally we refer to the next release as Reborn Step 2), the client homepage and recommendation system is the first place where you will be able to start seeing them.

While we are still in the process of building, testing, and improving the first Hubs with selected partners, if you would like to start using it and build your own Hub for your community, feel free to shoot us an email here.

New Chat

One on one, party, and team chats are now all part of one chat UI that can be used anywhere on the platform. The new chat ‘floats’ in the client, orders your conversations by most recent, notifies you of new message, and lets you see who is in your party or team chat.

We decided to build the new chat from scratch and only include features that improve on the existing chat. Instead of multiple chat boxes littered across the footer of your screen, chats are organised into a single UI list to make navigation between conversations effortless.

The addition of message formatting, typing indicator, revamped emojis, profile cards, mentions, and redesigned UI were a must to help make the chat more engaging. The overlay UI allows you to explore FACEIT without sacrificing the ability to chat with friends.

Timely Notifications

Competition invitations, new messages, friend requests, team invites, and mentions will never be missed with the new notifications. Notification badges and optional desktop notifications help to inform you of what’s going on, when you’re away or in a game.

Additionally, if you have Windows Notifications enabled, you will receive a notification for each important action happening on FACEIT. Someone invited you to a party? Someone mentioned you in the match room? You were in queue and found a match? No worries — you’ll see it even if the client is minimised or hidden.

AC Integration

If you have the FACEIT Anti-Cheat already installed you can now activate the Anti-Cheat directly from the client. The Anti-Cheat button will automatically login and activate the Anti-Cheat for the duration that the client is open.

Please Note: at this time the Anti-Cheat is only available for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

If you don’t have it installed yet, simply click on the AC icon in the bottom corner, download it, and install it easily.

Join the Beta

You can download the open beta at FACEIT.com!

During the open beta we encourage all our participants to give as much feedback as possible, bugs, improvements or suggestions can be feedback over at our FACEIT Open Beta Client Forums.