HEX Update – Chatter

We have a guide to our new chat client, and the large-scale test tournament news

Greetings, HEX fans! We hope you’re enjoying the Arena Test Server, and thank you for helping us test this upcoming feature. We’ve already made multiple updates to the test server thanks to the data we’ve gathered, continuing to improve the upcoming patch for both usability and stability.

If you missed Cory’s initial stream, you can find it here. If you haven’t downloaded it, you can still download the new test client and participate if you have an active HEX account and logged in once before February 2nd, 2015. Hit this link and get started!

Chatter

For those of you who are in the game and watched the stream, you saw the new chat client. With a new modern look, it has a few general goals. First, we want players to find this tool usefully familiar and use it intuitively, immediately. Second, we want information to be easy to parse—both in what you’re sharing, what others are sharing with you, and who’s sharing it. Third, we want this to scale with our evergrowing userbase.

You’ll see that there are a variety of colors indicating what type of message is being shared. You’ll see orange chat, purple chat, and more depending on what’s happening and who’s sending the message.

With our new chat tool, conversations are broken out by topic. If you want to trade, hop into trade chat. If you want to talk to your opponent, you jump into battle chat. Have a question? There’s a help channel. Of course, those handful of categories won’t address all your needs. That’s why we have a tool that allows for custom channels, and you can protect your channel with a password. So, you can talk to your friends or a group of people and also make sure that nobody is butting into your conversation. When we introduce dungeons, we’ll also add a local chat channel where you can talk strategy or share stories with people who are in your same general area of the map.

You’ll notice more functionality with this tool as well as it connects different systems to one player. I can right-mouse-click a portrait and instantly send a private message (whisper) to that person. In future updates, I’ll be able to challenge that person to a match, whisper them to trade, or more.

Finally, there will be customization options. These won’t be live when the Arena patch is launched, but we want to allow custom portraits. Within that, we also want you to be able to choose from a variety of emotions with your portrait.

One of the greatest barriers in text communication is being able to communicate voice or emotion. How many times have you said something sarcastically, only to have it taken literally or vice versa? With the portrait choices, you’ll be able to keep your portrait and choose from a variety of emotions. If that doesn’t get the job done, we also have emoticons to make communication even easier and more casual, fun.

Tournament Rescheduled

We announced that through the testing data that you backers have provided, we’re decided to reschedule the free large scale testing Sealed Deck tournament that we announced. When we have a new date and time, we’ll let you all know here on the website. You can read more about that here.

AI Misplays

For those of you who are in the Arena test server this weekend, please note that we have a forum where you can submit your bugs. Please let us know what type of client you’re using (Mac or PC), your username, the date, time, and time zone, the bug you experienced, where the bug happened, and any other useful information like card interactions, cards in play, etc… Screenshots are very helpful. If you’re in Arena and you feel the AI makes a mistake or misplay, we have a forum thread where you can post your feedback. Thank you again for helping us test this upcoming feature.