Hi All!

It’s been quite some time since the last product update, in fact it’s been the longest gap since summer last year! This is due to the fact that over the last four weeks we have been releasing a lot of fixes and new services that aren’t seen by users, but that were required in order to release what you guys asked for; the FACEIT client, championships / team leagues, scrims, and many other things that will be available to everyone over the next few weeks.

The first tangible result of all these different refactors is the release of the Full FACEIT client into private beta. Over the coming weeks we will be announcing more of the features mentioned above, as well as a few new things that we believe will drastically improve your experience on FACEIT!

FACEIT Client Private Beta

Since we released the Anti-Cheat client at the end of last year many of you have been asking us to build a full client with all the features you can find on the web version of FACEIT. Since then, part of our team has been focused on building a client that could not only replicate the experience on the web, but rather improve upon it. Today we are finally ready to start the private beta of the client and start receiving feedback on how you think we could improve it.

The FACEIT Client Login Screen

The Private Beta Process

In order to get access to the private beta you can apply here. While initial feedback so far has been very positive we still expect this phase to last at least a couple of weeks as we work out on a number of bugs and improvements that have been suggested so far.

The Client vs. the Client Anti-Cheat

For time being this client is NOT a replacement for the Anti-Cheat. This means that if you are using the client you will still need to have the Anti-Cheat client running in the background in order to play AC protected matches.

The main reasons why we decided to work on two separate clients are:

The current focus of the team on this full client is to bring the best possible experience on FACEIT in terms of UI/UX, which is different from the AC team’s goal (to identify and block as many cheats as possible).

The fact that the AC is required to be significantly more intrusive than standard clients, we didn’t want to force players to have that open every time they want to interact with FACEIT.

The AC requires a number of security measures, including custom encryption and protocols, to avoid reverse engineering by cheat developers. These would slow down development over a general client significantly.

That said, we will eventually add the AC as an optional component of the main client, and we expect to do so before the general release. The final result we expect is for users to have three options:

The main client without the AC: for those of you that want the client to be the main experience on FACEIT, but do not require the AC to run all the time. The main client with the AC: for those of you that want the client to be the main experience on FACEIT and need the AC to play. The AC client without the main interface: as a lightweight option for those of you that need the AC, but don’t want to have a more comprehensive & heavier client running while playing.

We will give an overview of the new features and benefits of the client and why we decided to implement them as soon as we open the beta to everyone.

Videos Improvements

As many of you know in December last year we launched a partnership with Plays.tv to include videos of your best plays in certain areas of FACEIT whenever you connect your FACEIT & Plays.tv accounts. Today we’re releasing the first step into improving media discovery on FACEIT!

With close to 18,000 videos uploaded so far, we’re still missing a way to discover this original content created by the FACEIT community . That’s why from now on you can explore all videos uploaded by FACEIT players on the videos tab of the game’s dashboard.

Although now sorted by upload date, in a future release you can expect this original content to be curated and personalised. Have a look yourself at the CS:GO and Dota2 dashboard and leave us a comment with your feedback here below.

Besides the new videos tab on the game dashboard, you can now also explore videos straight from an Organizer profile. As an example, check out 30 original plays from February’s ECS Season 3 Qualifier on the organiser page of ECS.

FACEIT Stream Bot

The past weeks we’ve been working on a new feature for you streamers and viewers out there. While watching a stream of a FACEIT match, we thought it would be useful to have a chat bot listening to your commands and providing links to the match room, tournament page, brackets, user profile, or even give real-time updates on the match score.

Today we’re bringing you the first version of the stream bot, introducing FACEIT_GG for Twitch. FACEIT_GG provides your viewers with a link to the match room when starting a match and to the stats when finishing a match, with more functionalities coming soon.

For now this is automatically enabled to all streamers on FACEIT, but we are working on a setting for you to enable or disable this bot. For best performance on your stream, it is recommended to add FACEIT_GG as a moderator to your channel by writing “/mod FACEIT_GG” in your chat.

Other / Misc:

We keep updating the AC client on a weekly basis as we keep improving detections and fixes — we’ll update you about the results in the next blog.

Added a number of additional security layers to further prevent suspicious activity on certain accounts

When 2FA is activated all old session tokens are invalidated

Fixed a bug in the Plays.tv integration that was not allowing to showcase more than 10 videos at a time on profiles

Split and upgraded organizer and social graph services to improve scalability and allow for better recommendations beyond friendships

Released first version of the new match service to allow any user to create and manage matches [private beta only]

Released first version of the new queue system that allows for different types of queuing (solo only, premade only, etc.) depending on the queue [private beta only]

Hope you enjoyed the update. See you on FACEIT!