Out of Cards Changelog - 2020-08-24

Since we've pushed out a few updates since this was last updated, I'm going to include some additional changes just so everyone is aware of them.

New Features

Hearthstone

• Card pages now support full art.
  • It is going to take some time to get all of Hearthstone's full art into our database, but it will come with time. 
  • We can also create and showcase wallpapers on card pages!

Runeterra

• The collection manager has arrived! See our dedicated announcement post.

Changes

Hearthstone

• You can now filter by Artist on the card listing.
• Card pages now display their artist when we have full art available.
  • If we have a link to the Artist's website, we've included it here.

Runeterra

• Deck listing now defaults to the hottest decks on the site.
  • This should have been changed a very, very long time ago. Apologies!
• Deck widgets in news articles and on the portal now display their Shards cost.
• Ruenterra Expansions page overhauled to use images like our Hearthstone one.

General

• Added a link to our Merch store on the navigation.
• Avatars now get resized to a maximum of 180px by 180px.
  • If your avatar isn't a square, it's going to be forced into being one.
  • Unfortunately, we no longer support animated gif avatars because of this. They may make a return in the future.
• Listings on the site now tell you how many results were returned.
  • Admittedly, this needs to look a little bit better since its very plain, but its functional!
• Made an update to our RSS feeds to assist readers in finding our thumbnail images.

Bug Fixes

Hearthstone

• Fixed an issue with collection calculations displaying too many missing stars on deck pages.
• Removed note about how the collection manager can't be automated and replaced it with a link to the HDT plugin.
• Fixed a missing Hearthstone breadcrumb on Tavern Brawl pages.
• Fixed collections not correctly syncing. (This has been fixed for over 2 weeks)

General

• Fixed an issue where some users were getting Premium access without paying for it.
• Polls no longer generate client-side errors if you are not logged in.
• Achievement triggers no longer generate client-side errors if you are not logged in.

Regrets

Runeterra

• We didn't get out voting and discussion site rewards for the Call of the Mountain reveal season.
  • There was a bit too much going on to get this out. Our site migration took much longer than originally expected which pushed this back until the point it no longer really matters.
  • Thanks to everyone who is participating anyway!

Quote From anchorm4n

Great work, thanks for your dedication! I'll use the opportunity to request a quality of life feature. I really like the concept of the portals. Would it be possible to expand this feature to the point where users could permanently choose one of them in account management? 

It's a very interesting point of discussion. The original idea is we were going to let everyone decide what they would see on the homepage as far as the news went. Over time though, I no longer thought that was the best solution and instead provided the portals that we now have. The way I've seen it, having the portals be dedicated places gives people a more tailored experience for each title and they have more benefits by visiting them individually if you so choose. It is easy for people to update their browser bookmark for the site so they can visit the portal over the homepage.

Allowing for a swap-out also sucks because if someone happens to follow two games instead of one, they wouldn't have a special homepage option available to them.

Now, some of that is a bit dated though and I'll explain why!

We've got a feature dropping either late tonight or tomorrow which brings back decks to the homepage. Our first iteration of this was exactly what we see on the Hearthstone portal, but it was silly to have Hearthstone decks be the only thing featured on the homepage. The new widget has some customization to it which will allow you to select a default game and even a default sort so that you will always see what you want when loading up the homepage. A good example of this would be for Wild Hearthstone players. If you want to only see Wild Hearthstone decks on the homepage when you visit, this will be exactly what you're going to see. You'll also always have the ability to view the other stuff by using the available sorts, but your default preference will be saved.

This might get extended to news posts.

The decks part of it wasn't very complicated to figure out and make performant. With news being simpler than decks, the ability to customize which games get displayed on the homepage news feed for any one person isn't a difficult extension. I do dislike that you lose some potential overlap. Maybe one day Riot makes a really cool Runeterra announcement that could entice a player that is only interested in Hearthstone, but has been having a negative time recently, but it won't be able to because they decided they only wanted to see Hearthstone news. One workaround I had considered for this problem is we'll inject major announcements (flagging articles them as such) into the homepage feed no matter what, but this would only be confusing to people.

I see pros and cons on both sides of it. Ultimately though, I do think leaving the choice in the hands of everyone is a good idea. You're all smart enough to decide what you want to see and on the very tiny chance you visit the homepage and don't get to see that Wizards is giving everyone a bunch of free stuff because you only want to see Hearthstone content, that was that person's choice to make.

No ETA on news on the homepage changes, but decks are arriving very soon. 

Quote From anchorm4n

That's a real cool feature, thanks a lot! Also for letting us know your thought process. The customer service on this page is insane. As a certified quality manager, that warms my heart.

I did say when we launched I always wanted my transparency with stuff =D

My only regret is that we don't talk more about upcoming stuff. Sometimes stuff just isn't worth talking about if its too far out because it would let competitors know what we're thinking. I'd rather anyone that wanted to lift features from here instead have to be reactionary. Though, no one has made an attempt at that yet over the past year so that's funny :P

I didn't say stuff enough, so, stuff.