Cleaning Up the Tournament Formats

Greetings everyone,

Today we’d like to take some time and talk to you about the tournaments in HEX.



Our goal with the in-client tournaments is to provide an environment where you can join and play against other players for rewards and bragging rights. We want you to be able to do just that in a simple, clean and reliable manner.

After gathering info from within the game (So. Much. Data.), we decided on some (drastic) changes to the existing tournament lobby to improve the experience for everyone:

We are suspending Scheduled Events indefinitely effective with the next full update.*

We are removing the Swiss Draft tournaments completely effective with the next full update.*

We are removing the Constructed Gauntlet tournaments effective with the next full update.**

The Scheduled Events were always going to have a time component as additional entry requirement, where you would either be there for the start or miss it. The tournaments ultimately ended up not starting. Waiting for Scheduled Events was becoming a lot like waiting for Friday Night game nights – and we have always loved that HEX goes beyond that with the digital space it inhabits. We may decide to come back to this format and use it for potential official tournaments in the future, but for all intents and purposes, Scheduled Events will be retired.

Swiss Draft as a format has its own challenges and our data shows that it failed to master them appropriately. Having both a regular Draft queue and a Swiss Draft queue meant the potential Draft player population would be split. The elimination and ranking system of the Swiss queue is not as intuitive as Single Elimination and ultimately does not lend itself well to a great new player experience. In an ideal world having a separate Swiss Draft creates more opportunities for players to participate in different tournament formats, however it appears to be detrimental to (especially new) players enjoying the Draft format altogether.

If you have tickets for free entries in scheduled tournaments, don’t worry. We will convert them into gauntlet ticket entries.

That’s it for today! We are always looking for constructive feedback from you, our players, so please don’t hesitate to send us your ideas and comments.

Thank you!

Game on,

Tilo ‘Shardreg’ Franke

*A previous version of this article mentioned that July 7th was the date these tournament formats would be removed. We got some good news from engineering and we now anticipate the update to be before July 7. We have updated this article to reflect that these changes will happen with the next full client update.

**A previous version of this article failed to mention that we will also be removing the Constructed Gauntlet tournament queue. We are doing this for the time being to focus constructed play in the new ranked ladder. We will be evaluating this going forward, and you can read more about this here.

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