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Updates | Posted by | 6 years, 6 months ago
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A Note on Supporting Multiple Games on Out of Cards

Hey all!

I wanted to just keep everyone in the loop where we're at when it comes to support multiple card games on the site.

As you've probably seen, we've begun to cover Legends of Runeterra, a card game from Riot Games which uses the lore of League of Legends. Right now, it is not possible to avoid seeing these articles on the homepage. I know this may be an inconvenience for some of you that only play Hearthstone, but do know that this is temporary. I am working on a solution that will allow logged-in users to customize their homepage preferences and logged-out users to at least be able to hide articles from other games.

Legends of Runeterra appeared out of nowhere so we were a bit unprepared for this. We're still looking to add Magic Arena support to the site by the end of year, so don't worry magic fans, we're with you on that!

The Navigation will be receiving a large update that will allow for game selection. We'll likely let logged-in users select their default navigation. The homepage will also be receiving a change at some point that will become generalized to all the titles we support and not just Hearthstone specific. At this time, we'll add in dedicated landing pages for all the games we support that will showcase things like decks, events, and discussions. We'll also give logged-in users the ability to convert the site homepage to one that supports only one game if they would like to.

I know some may not be a fan of us supporting multiple games, but it has been a goal of ours since the beginning. Especially when you see how Hearthstone can do so many things wrong, should the game every die we'd hate to lose the community we've created. Only good things can come from having multiple games supported on the site!

We'll likely be looking for some new volunteers to help with Legends of Runeterra, so if you're interested in that stay tuned for more information and be sure to stay active on the forums and discord! Anyone who is active on the site, showing their knowledge and helping out others is more likely to join our awesome team. We're also eventually going to look for people who want to help cover Magic Arena before we start on that, so stay tuned there as well.

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  • Hey all!

    I wanted to just keep everyone in the loop where we're at when it comes to support multiple card games on the site.

    As you've probably seen, we've begun to cover Legends of Runeterra, a card game from Riot Games which uses the lore of League of Legends. Right now, it is not possible to avoid seeing these articles on the homepage. I know this may be an inconvenience for some of you that only play Hearthstone, but do know that this is temporary. I am working on a solution that will allow logged-in users to customize their homepage preferences and logged-out users to at least be able to hide articles from other games.

    Legends of Runeterra appeared out of nowhere so we were a bit unprepared for this. We're still looking to add Magic Arena support to the site by the end of year, so don't worry magic fans, we're with you on that!

    The Navigation will be receiving a large update that will allow for game selection. We'll likely let logged-in users select their default navigation. The homepage will also be receiving a change at some point that will become generalized to all the titles we support and not just Hearthstone specific. At this time, we'll add in dedicated landing pages for all the games we support that will showcase things like decks, events, and discussions. We'll also give logged-in users the ability to convert the site homepage to one that supports only one game if they would like to.

    I know some may not be a fan of us supporting multiple games, but it has been a goal of ours since the beginning. Especially when you see how Hearthstone can do so many things wrong, should the game every die we'd hate to lose the community we've created. Only good things can come from having multiple games supported on the site!

    We'll likely be looking for some new volunteers to help with Legends of Runeterra, so if you're interested in that stay tuned for more information and be sure to stay active on the forums and discord! Anyone who is active on the site, showing their knowledge and helping out others is more likely to join our awesome team. We're also eventually going to look for people who want to help cover Magic Arena before we start on that, so stay tuned there as well.

  • Thanks for the information! A customized homepage with game filtering is really good. I'd like to suggest that really big announcements are displayed on the homepage, even if they belong to games not selected by the user, for example announcing a new game.

    Keep up the good job!

    • Quote From drfelip

      Thanks for the information! A customized homepage with game filtering is really good. I'd like to suggest that really big announcements are displayed on the homepage, even if they belong to games not selected by the user, for example announcing a new game.

      Keep up the good job!

      Agreed, some stuff definitely should still be visible to everyone. We'll be sure to have a way to flag articles so they always get included :

  • Thanks for the infos and for keeping us always updated on what you and the Staff are working on to improve OoC!

    The idea of a costumizable home page is really nice and would indeed be appreciated, expecially becuase by covering multiple games each member probably wants to highlight only some of them. Looking onward to see it implemented!

  • Thanks for the heads-up - and great sounding idea for the homepage!

    As an aside: IMHO one of the main issues that cause communities to fail (for want of a better word) is lack of communication. I'd say this was a perfect update. What not to like about it?

     

  • Being someone who may end up playing both games, I am not bothered by it at all.  In fact I hope you guys really jump on this game and set yourselves up to be a top site for LoR content, and community gathering.  I'd gladly wait on a few new features to the existing HS site, etc, if it means you guys are able to build a larger overall audience here at OoC by snagging a chunk of LoR players and bringing them here.

    The more people you get here, the more users you have, the more successful this site can be.  And that's awesome!  So HS, LoR, MtGA, if you want to expand into covering Eternal as well, that'd be cool!  It's not a super popular card game, especially after MtGA came out since Eternal was mostly an attempt to make a digital MtG clone that had better graphics/UI than Magic Online, but pretty sure it still has more users than Artifact.  :)


    Edit: Also, don't forget about The Bazaar.  You know, Reynad's deck building game that we first heard about over a year ago... but then again, I think they announced the game as they were finishing initial design and moving to code the first shell of an alpha test.  So would expect it may be a little longer before that one is out.

  • Even if it weren't possible to fully customise the user experience it would probably be a good idea for OOC to branch out into other (online) card games. As it stands, I don't see any downsides: There's obviously a lot of overlap with these games, both qua player-bases and qua design, mechanics, flavour etc. You get to increase the user-base of the forum, presumably increase traffic & forum activity and expand the scope of discussions, not to mention provide the prefect place to compare and contrast all these different games.

    I'm all for it. Great idea. That said, as an old school DotA player I'm morally obligated to look down on LoL  and anything related to it. :/

  • I'm a hardcore Hearthstone player and I'm glad you are covering other card games. Legends of Runeterra looks interesting to me and I'll probably give it a try at some point. Thank you for your dedication to the genre.

  • I've rolled out some initial support for "game switching".

    The navigation (and header image) will now switch based on what section of the site you are on. You'll initially need to "select a game" on the navigation to populate it, but after that you'll see header content that you want, with the ability to still switch to other games.

    I'm hoping to get an update out this weekend to get the Hearthstone and Runeterra section pages better than simply displaying news. I may also change the homepage up to use the "game switch preference" to decide whether or not it should load the Hearthstone-specific widgets.

  • I really appreciate this discussion. I'm a Hearthstone only player, and as awesome as some other games sound, I just don't have the time or money to dive into something else. I'm glad the site is expanding and supporting other games people are interested in, and equally glad that I'll be able to filter those posts out for myself. Kudos to Flux and the team for their work, and for the communication!

  • Is it correct I can currently (on mobile) only switch to one or the other, but not switch back to see both again (except by changing the url manually?)

    • Quote From Cleef2

      Is it correct I can currently (on mobile) only switch to one or the other, but not switch back to see both again (except by changing the url manually?)

      You can get back to the homepage by tapping on the Out of Cards logo at the top of the page. There you should have access to content from all games.

      Unless I misunderstood your question.

      • Quote From Fluxflashor
        Quote From Cleef2

        Is it correct I can currently (on mobile) only switch to one or the other, but not switch back to see both again (except by changing the url manually?)

        You can get back to the homepage by tapping on the Out of Cards logo at the top of the page. There you should have access to content from all games.

        Unless I misunderstood your question.

        I think the question is whether you can reset or turn off the filter to show all games by default, and/or whether such a functionality will be added later. 

        • The front page filter will work a bit differently than the navigation. The intention behind the navigation is to allow the relevant nav show up based on what "section" of the site you're on. If you're on the forums though, it'll show you whatever the last game nav you were on. If you were to "unset" the nav choice, all you'd be able to see is the forums.

          I do want to make an addition to the nav where we'll add some popular links to the Select Game dropdown so you don't have to go through multiple page loads to get to something like the card database or deckbuilder.

          For the articles though, we'll give you a list of topics/games you want to see on the homepage, and you can turn them on and off as you wish. We will, however, still have the rare article go through when a very important event is happening in a game that you're not "subscribed" to, such as when a new game launches or a new expansion launches. That's so we can give everyone a reminder about cool stuff happening. The ability to have articles filtered will probably be a logged-in only feature due to the extra overhead it will require (even though it isn't that much!).

          • I guess I should also add, I think it would be cool if we could find a good way to allow you to customize the navigation more and allow multiple games to show up. That would be something far down the road though if we did it since it adds a lot of complexity to how the nav works.

      • Quote From Fluxflashor
        Quote From Cleef2

        Is it correct I can currently (on mobile) only switch to one or the other, but not switch back to see both again (except by changing the url manually?)

        You can get back to the homepage by tapping on the Out of Cards logo at the top of the page. There you should have access to content from all games.

        Unless I misunderstood your question.

        You understood the question alright, thought I checked clicking the logo but apparently not lol.

        Thanks

  • I assumed the split/filter would also apply to the forums. Is something like that in the works? 

    • Not certain of the fate of our dear forums just yet. May allow categories to be collapsed as a preference on the forum listing. Homepage likely inherits the same settings as news, with off-topic and the relevant site forums also being included and not opt-out.

  • Sounds awesome.  I'm just now getting into magic arena and I got a LOR key an hour before they took it down so I'll be trying that when it comes back up.  Being able to come to OoC for info on all three would be the nuts.  

    I really like the idea of just having a tab for each one that changes the page and not mixing them all together but thats for you guys to iron out.  Looking forward to it.