Hub Rules, Hub Applications & More

Product Update, 5 November 2017

New week, new update!

Last week we released an update which included a test for splitting premade queues from solo/duo/trio queues. While this was supposed to be a test limited for the weekend, we decided to extend it by a few days to gather more data. The data that we have been seeing is promising and we’ll probably address the results of the test in the next blog post.

But now let’s stop talking about the past and let’s start looking into what’s new!

Hub Updates

This week’s release includes quite a few changes on the hubs. As these are still in a sort of beta phase, we are adding a lot of things based on your feedback.

This release includes:

Hub Applications

Hub owners can now activate applications in the hub settings for private Hubs. This is all done in the Settings tab in your Hub.

When enabled, players will have the ability to apply to join your Hub with the requirements you set out to have in free-text form.

Once an application is submitted, a hub owner or admin can review it and choose if a player should be allowed in to the Hub or not.

Match Management

Starting this week we are introducing our admin tool into the hubs admin system. This means that i) hub owners can now give permissions to manage live and old matches to any role within the hub and ii) users in the hub can have a direct line of contact to the hub’s admins.

As a user if the admin tool is enabled in the hub you will see a “Contact Admin” button in the middle of the match page. Clicking this button opens a live issue into the hubs’ admin section. An admin will now be able to manage the issue from that section and coordinate through the match chat.

As an admin of the hub you can access the match management tools in the admin tab of the hub. Here you can select whether to display issues opened by users directly (Live Issues) or whether to display all matches (Matches).

For each of these issues / matches you can filter by status, team name and assignee and take actions such as restarting a match, setting results or cancelling a match.

This is currently active in ~80% of the open hubs. In the coming days we are going to add it as a default/permanent setting in all newly created hubs and tournaments. Please remember that when talking to an admin through the admin tool you are not talking with a FACEIT representative, but rather with an admin of the hub/tournament you are playing in.

Hub Rules

We’re now making it easier to communicate rules and general information about the Hub.

As the owner of a Hub, you can set your own rules under Settings and Rules.

The Rules page will appear in the Hub navigation menu together with an automatically generated section with details about the settings and policies displayed above the rules text.

Client Update

This week we had a minor client update, while most of the update is not visible (i.e. performance, bug fixing etc.), the one thing that is visible is that the website now knows if you have your client open.

This means that whenever you input a FACEIT url in your browser while the client is running you can now choose to open that section directly on the client instead of the website.

Additionally, based on your feedback we tried to make information about players in the match room more accessible. With the new update profile pages of players in the match room and in the chats are now opened in a modal, which means that you can quickly browse a player’s stats without ever moving from the match room.

If you haven’t tried out the client yet, you can find it through the link below.

New Payment Methods

Over the past two years a lot of you have been asking us to accept more payment methods beyond credit cards and PayPal. We never focused on increasing the amount of revenues for the company, but rather to improve the experience, which is probably why we never improved this before. That said in the last weeks we have been working into organizer subscriptions (i.e. the one currently used by SPL and many other subscriber only in-house leagues) to support organizers directly. This allowed us to upgrade our payment systems and finally add a ton of different payment methods and currencies!

Through this update you can now use over 700 payment methods on FACEIT including local bank cards, ePayment options, mobile subscriptions and prepaid cards. In fact, you could even pay with Bitcoin! Additionally, subscriptions are now priced in local currency when available, making it easier to understand how much you are actually spending.

Other, Misc. and Bug Fixing:

Added grouping for Chrome Notifications, from now on if you get more than one notification of the same type (i.e. message, friend request etc.) while you are offline, you will only see a single notification

Hope you enjoyed the update. See you on FACEIT!