The Feed

Reelfest

• Fixed an issue with Realm Waters not having fishable fish.

The latest edition has unveiled the story of the year: Clickbait Tycoon has been officially announced!

Check out the store page to get your wishlists on and to learn more about the game. Clickbait Tycoon was supposed to be a smaller-scale game in the Out of Games Arcade but grew into something larger that simply required a full release on Steam.

Thank you to everyone who helped provide feedback and tested during our closed alpha and got us to this point so that we could launch into Early Access. There are still some systems that need more work which is why the game is entering EA, but it is is expected that we will have the game feature complete in 6-12 months.

A 10% discount will be available at launch, so August 21 through August 28 is your time to pickup Clickbait Tycoon at a great deal. We will be increasing the price when we leave early access and we will let everyone know in advance of that happening.

Thanks all!

Activities

• Added new activity types!

  • Mini Crossword - A 5x5 grid crossword puzzle.

  • Picture Crossword - Draw a picture given numerical clues.

  • Memory Match - Match the pictures up in pairs to complete the game.

  • Word Ladder - Start with one word and change one letter at a time to end at another word.

• Do note that although we support all of these now, we will be adding new activities with these types over time. We could dump a ton of new activities, but it's better for us to drip them out.

Arcade

• We now have a lobby system to find other people to play multiplayer on-site games with.

• Multiplayer games on Out of Games require you to be logged-in to an account in good standing to play.

• Lobbies have chat, as do our multiplayer games. You don't have to use it, but it can be fun to banter with your opponents.

  • Do note that like everything else on the site, chat is logged. Anyone breaking our rules on the site will have their permissions to participate restricted or will face account bans.

• Added our first multiplayer game: Loot Drop.

  • It's Connect 4.

Hearthstone

• Fixed an issue preventing game data imports due to Hearthstone's updated Unity version.

RPG

• Added more behind the scenes stuff for skills.

  • It's almost like this fishing thing is leading to something grand...

I'll add in, many years ago we had detailed this system for our winter on-site event and it was quite extensive in what we wanted to do. It was ultimately way too much work to make happen and there is a reason we rolled out a leveling system on the site earlier this year.

This year, we're going to be doing something very similar during December and January and over the next few months we will be growing towards it.

Seasons

• Fixed Arcade Hour daily challenge so it now correctly fires upon completing two arcade activities.

• Arcade Hour now can be completed even if you fail to successfully complete dle games.

• Manually fixed Arcade Hour for people who should have already earned it today.

General

Achievements

• Added over 80 new website achievements.

• Added a new Seasons achievement category.

• Added a new Reelfest achievement category.

• Added a new Professions achievement category.

• Achievements now have pretty popups again.

• Achievements can now fire through our websocket connection which means if something earns you an achievement while you're on a page, you'll be told about it.

Listings

• All listings are now more performant due to cache additions in how we build out pagination.

Activities

• Fixed an issue that prevented daily activities from appearing at midnight site time (Eastern US/CAN).

Private Messages

• Fixed the styling error which made replies to private messages centered.

Authentication

• Fixed an issue with Steam logins.

Hearthstone

Pack Opener

• Saved packs without a name no longer cause errors.

Mythgard

Deckbuilder

• Fixed an issue with 404s.

RPG

• Fixed a positional issue with casting your fishing line.

We're already on August on this year? Holy shit.

To start off, I finished Easy Delivery Co., and I have a review of it right here (go read it!). I'm still grinding out that achievement on Super Woden GP.

I tried to play Denshattack, but then found out that my old computer can't play it. Learn from my mistake and read the required specs of the game before impulse buying it.

I'm slowly, but surely working my way through my backlog. I have a shit-ton of motorcycle racing games that I need to play. I'm currently on MotoGP 15.

A few updates have been pushed out this morning for our Reelfest seasonal event.

Seasons

• Fixed an issue where fishing icon was on top of the scavenger hunt icon.

• Added a "GO" button to daily challenge prompts to help guide people to the correct location (these are in activities).

• Fixed an issue where water balloon buttons were not appearing on user comments.

• Fixed bad styling on mobile devices for the Tackle Log.

August reels in the first-ever season on Out of Games!

For those of you who were around "back in the day", you'll remember Oozefest and Snowpocalypse, two on-site events that we'd run on a yearly basis around Halloween and Christmas. Reelfest is a new imagining of the events system which we are now calling Seasons.

You can access information about Reelfest directly on the Reelfest page.

Seasons

Seasons are a monthly occurrence which brings something new and fun to Out of Games. The current plan is to bring Reelfest back next August but with additional content so that we can build on these themes every single year to make them truly amazing events. Based on your feedback though, we could always change our thoughts on this.

Season Pass

There is a free season pass available to everyone. Progression takes place by earning seasonal experience in our daily and seasonal challenges.

Inventory (NEW!)

Now that we have a concept of items on Out of Games, we also have an inventory system! Upon finding items in your travels on the site, they will be placed into your inventory. You can access your inventory at any time by clicking on your profile in the top of the website. Mobile users, check the navigation hamburger icon.

The inventory can hold 50 items by default. Each time you gain levels on the website you earn additional slots. Additional slots can also be purchased in the shop.

Marketplace (NEW!)

Many items can be exchanged with other users of the website via the Marketplace. Prices are decided by the community, so trade for what you feel is right. If you want to get back to the marketplace, you can find it on the primary navigation.

What is reelfest?

Reelfest is our first seasonal event. It takes place during August as is themed around fishing. We're all taking place in this on-site RPG and this month fishing is the key.

• Every 15 minutes you can cast your lure to try and catch a fish.

• Different areas of the site have different pools of fish.

  • Work as a community to pool together your findings.

  • Staff members other than myself have no idea about the internal mechanics of this, so they can also have fun with the community figuring out how things work.

• If your inventory is full when you catch a fish, it is automatically sold at the docks for vendor price.

Fishing?

Hell yeah! There are 30 different fish you can catch by casting your lure. Do note that where you are on the website matters as some fish only live in certain types of waters.

There is a location on the site called Headline Harbor. I wonder what pages those could be under...

It should be noted that any fish you catch and keep will stay in your inventory forever. They do stack up to 99, so Reelfest won't be capping out anyone's inventories. There may be use for fish in other events during the year if you hold onto them. There will also be fishing present in other events, it just won't be a main focus.

Tackle Log

Everyone that's been catching fish can see a log of all your catches in the Tackle Log. We also keep track of the highest size you catch for each fish... how large of fish are you catching?

Sand Dollars

Our new currency for Reelfest is Sand Dollars.

On September 2, all Sand Dollars will be convert to gold at a rate of 5 Sand Dollars to 1 Gold. So be sure to spend your currency during the month of August because you can't take it with you.

Snowflakes, our currency from Snowpocalypse will be staying around each year though. That was our promise years ago and we're keeping it at least for this year's run of it in December and January. There may be some other uses for them...

Water Balloons

Another throwable currency? You bet! Water Balloons can be thrown at members during the event so go and get each other soaking wet.

Note that as of launch our buttons for throwing balloons is only up on profile pages. This will be fixed by the afternoon, comments are supposed to have the buttons appear as well.

New Shop Items

You can head on over to the shop to buy Water Balloons and more inventory slots under the Reelfest category. We also have a few pins available featuring some of our harder to get fish. Spend those Sand Dollars!

New Scavenger Hunt

We have a reelfest-themed scavenger hunt now available. Check out Summer Treasure Dive!

This also marks the moment that we have activated daily activities on Out of Games. Each day a new activity will be published and it considered the daily one. Some of them will be focused on our on-site event so be sure to head on over to activities each day.

I just played Calia Menethil and she resurrected a 3 cost minion instead of a Jailbird. Granted the Jailbird was played for 0 mana, but shouldn't it still count as 5 cost in the res pool?

Path of Exile 2

• Added Economy Hub with up-to-date pricing data for currency.

  • Unique Items is filling in too its just a lot of data.

• Added a small widget to the realm home to show quick exchange rates and popular items

Path of Exile 1

• Added Economy Hub with up-to-date pricing data for currency.

  • Curse of the Allflame league support is going to trickle in.

  • Unique Items is filling in too its just a lot of data.

• Added a small widget to the realm home to show quick exchange rates and popular items

Affiliate Programs

• We are now a member of the TCG Player affiliate program.

• Pokemon TCG Card and Sealed Product pages now have affiliate links.

Whiteout Survival

• Fixed an issue with the code redeemer

  • Century games changed the way code redemptions work

  • Now, you must go back to our tool to input your state number to continue using it

  • I am working on sending out messages to everyone who uses the tool to let you know

Apps

• Added a new page for our Companion App.

• Updated our page for our Hearthstone Deck Tracker plugin.

• Pages for our apps now automatically update when new versions are available for download.

Game Stats Platform

• We have background processing now of game stats.

• The initial rollout of this is purely on our backend and our Companion App (soon Deck Tracker Plugin) submits game stats to the service.

• This week we will begin exposing stats data to the front end of the website.

  • I don't expect it to be very useful right away due to a low population size.

Whiteout Survival

• Fixed an issue where gift codes were unable to be redeemed.

  • We had a small infrastructure issue that was causing redemptions to crash. Everyone should have the redemptions that were queues up now.

Hearthstone

• Made improvements to how we process collections that are uploaded from clients.

  • Includes adding support for Signature and Diamond versions of cards.

The Out of Games Companion Desktop application has been updated. You can find the latest updates at our dedicated companion page.

Companion is Windows only.

https://outof.games/companion/

Why Companion?

As Out of Games branches out into different games, so does the need to start building up data. For Hearthstone, this would come in the form of tracking games that are played so that we can begin to create insights on the website of what the meta looks like, live.

For Hearthstone, there are other tools that do the same thing; Hearthstone Deck Tracker and Firestone. You can run the Out of Games Companion alongside these tools but have your data also upload to our service to help us create a way to build out a free way to deliver the meta.

Out of Games has always been an ad-supported website. We've had a few paid features, like finding decks with your card collection, or being able to earn more experience, but we've never put content behind a paywall.

It's important we keep it that way.

Out of Games is not a premium-focused website. Our mission is to deliver top quality information about games to the audiences and so as a way of helping us do this and to support the endeavour, you can give us your gameplay data.

Companion supports Hearthstone right now, and not very in-depth yet. There are almost certainly problems. On initial release, our in-game overlay is not recommended for anyone being serious about Hearthstone because it isn't reliable yet. But, that's why we're releasing this as a beta test.

Companion is fast. Why? Because we aren't using clunky chromium-based frameworks. Everything is as native to the operating system as we can make it so it stays lean.

Patch Notes

• Added support for Hearthstone Collection uploading.

• Added support for Hearthstone game data uploading.

• You can optionally share your games played to our public feed (interface on Out of Games coming soon) so everyone can see what is being played. You can also decide to share the data anonymously; no username included.

• Added a basic deck tracker to see during matches.

  • It is not recommended for general use yet.

• Added a dedicated spot to see News from Out of Games on the home screen of the app.

• Added filtered News to the Hearthstone spot.

How you Can Help

• Give us your feedback.

• Tell us how this application can help you be a better gamer.

• What other games could we support to help you?

An update has been released for the Out of Games Hearthstone Deck Tracker Plugin, our first public release of the Stable branch.

You can find the latest version of our plugin for Hearthstone Deck Tracker at the following page https://outof.games/realms/hearthstone/decktracker-plugin/

Patch Notes

• Updated to work with the most recent version of Hearthstone Deck Tracker.

• Now supports uploading more than just Normal and Golden cards to your collection.

• Fixed an issue where uploads weren't working at all.

  • Do note that once uploaded, it takes a moment for the website to process your collection data, and many moments in the case where there are lots of users processing collections.

• Added new functionality for automatic updates of the plugin.

  • When a new version is detected, you can use the Plugins menu on Hearthstone Deck Tracker to select "Out of Games" and then hit the "Update Available" menu item.

  • You have to close Hearthstone Deck Tracker after clicking on update once it confirms that the update has been downloaded.

  • I recommend waiting a minute before reopening Hearthstone Deck Tracker just to make sure that everything updated smoothly.

• Added support for beta versions of the plugin.

  • We aren't opting anyone into this by default, nor can you opt-in right now because we don't have any beta versions. We will use the beta channel to test any larger features that could come to the plugin in the future.

Warning

If you are currently using the Out of Games / Out of Cards version of the Plugin (0.0.6 or 0.0.7) you need to delete the "OutOfCards.dll" and "OutOfCards.dll.config" files from your Hearthstone Deck Tracker Plugin directory before starting Hearthstone Deck Tracker with the new plugin. The new files are named OutofGames.dll and so they will not overwrite the old ones.

Nothing bad should happen if you run them side by side, it just will duplicate uploads and if you're on an old enough version, it's broken anyway.

I also recommend deleting the "Out of Cards" directory located at
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\HearthstoneDeckTracker

The reason? It starts you completely fresh with the new plugin version. If you don't, we migrate your settings over to the new build.

Hey all, smaller update today.

General

Accounts

• Fixed an issue where people logging in with BattleNet and Steam were unable to login to their accounts.

Deckbuilders

• The count of an individual card in a deck can not go above 50 in any situation.

  • Realistically this should be much less, but I'm keeping it loose in case some game ends up with a weird detail.

  • Yes, someone added 2 million of a card to a deck.

• All TCGs supported on the site now have their deckbuilders active.

Card Listings

• Added the "decks i can create" functionality to games other than Hearthstone.

Hearthstone

• Fixed an issue with our keyword pages not loading Fabled+ due to a slug collision with Fabled.

We're over a day in now for Violet Hold. How did you do with your pack openings?

Heyo! A new update has gone live on Out of Games. Here are the changes.

General

Backend

• Improved loading times for the site.

  • We had some downtime earlier today, a good problem to have when you're getting extra traffic, and some optimizations were made to keep things running smoother.

Hearthstone

Cards

• Imported a full set of data to catch a few cards that were missing from our database.

  • They were older cards, but still important that we have them. This shouldn't be an issue going forward since our patches are more intelligently handled.

Decks

• Added Hot, New, Top sorts to our deck listings.

  • A long time ago we had these, they caused some problems, we removed them. Now they're back and very performant!

• Made our URLs friendlier and SEO driven for decks.

  • We previously had custom pages for decks for all the classes, now we do the same thing for archetypes and the sorts.

  • This will be applied to other games on the site too as we roll out more updates to their pages. Hearthstone, as always, is our playground first for new features.

• PRO users can now filter decks by cards in their collections.

  • This feature requires a decent chunk of computing power on the backend, so we aren't able to offer it freely, however, we do show all users how much dust decks cost you to make.

  • In addition to this, you can also search for decks you can make but require a certain amount of dust (like 1600 dust so you can find a deck that you might be missing a legendary for).

General

Ads

• Reduced the number of in-article/guide advertisements.

  • No current plans to remove them, though it is still a topic of consideration. I might make a change so logged-in users see them slightly less often. The best way to remove ads entirely is to support us with a Pro Membership.

Editor

• Fixed an issue where when highlighting text the bubble menu could appear under the toolbar.

Guides

• The sidebar will now travel down the screen with you instead of requiring scrolling all the way back to the top to access it on non-mobile devices.

  • This was always the intention and was originally done that way but a regression caused this to no longer work. The sidebar has been revamped a chunk to make the whole thing less painful. Let us know if there's anything that feels wrong.

Realms

• Fixed an issue with tooltips disappearing or being cut off on realm headers.

Hearthstone

Cards

• Fixed an issue where cards were not importing during card reveal period.

  • We had a major change before this reveal period, there were some snags they have been resolved.

General

• Added a new polls system

  • We're now able to embed polls in articles, guide, and on the homepage!

  • We are able to allow people not logged-in to vote in polls as well to help encourage engagement.

  • Voting in a poll while logged-in allows you to earn experience and site achievements.

  • We can do choose an option, multiple choice, and ranked choice polls.

  • When we spotlight a poll on the homepage, it will be available for a limited-time and will appear at the very top of the website.

• Added a new "Random Page" function to the sidebar.

  • This will take you to a random page on the website. A fun way to discover new content!

  • We do weigh this a bit more in favor of visiting articles, so have fun exploring our over 9000 pieces of content we've written as news items over our entire history of Out of Games.

Hearthstone

• Fixed an issue where Mercenary cards could cause pages to return a 500 server error.

We're now one-third of the way through the year. What's everyone up to in May?

For the first time during one of these things, I don't actually have that much to contribute. I'm sure that'll change in due time.

Hearthstone

• Patch imported for today's game update.

  • That includes a fresh batch of card images woo.

• Fixed issues where many mechanics from the past several expansions were incorrectly flagged in our database and thus when we did our last card import, cards were missing their keyword associations.

  • All cards in the database have been reimported because of this.

• Fixed the issue where weapons were appearing with 0 Durability.

  • This fixes problems with Hearthdle.

General

• Minor style tweaks for the new theme.

Hello everyone. We're now a quarter of the way through the year already. Kinda wild to think, but what games have you been playing?

Yesterday I was playing solo PEAK and I finally got the achievement for climbing the mountain in under an hour, and with a blisteringly fast time... and after I almost completely fucked it in Kiln by wasting a piton, a rope cannon, and an energy drink.

I also started Red Dead Redemption 2. There was supposedly a glitch where people were able to unlock every single achievement by merely booting up the game and not even leaving the main menu... which I couldn't get to work (for journalistic purposes of course), but since I have one of the best video games of all time taking up a quarter of my computer's disk space, I might as well enjoy it while it's there. I'm beyond shocked that I can actually run it, but it's working pretty well.

General

• Activities

  • Fixed an issue where timers could get out of sync.

• Scavenger Hunts

  • Fixed an issue where clues could not be completed.

  • Fixed an issue where the third clue for our Cataclysm hunt could not be completed.

  • Fixed an admin issue that could create clues with the wrong urls.

    • This wasn't an issue... yet. Found the bug before it was one!

• [NEW] Hearthdle

  • Added as a new activity!

  • You can play Standard or Wild! Should we do Classic?

  • Sunday, daily puzzles will start. Right now, only the practice mode is active.

  • Fixed an issue with leaderboards not loading.

• RPG

  • Increased the font size of the XP text when gaining experience.

• Direct Messages

  • Overhauled interface.

Hearthstone

Huge note here about our datamining process. I've reworked a ton of it. Things are a lot more optimized, I've merged some of our scripts together so there aren't as many to run. Our card renderer has also been enhanced and we're rendering cards around 20x faster than before. What used to take a couple of days to render the entire Hearthstone card database (not something we do often, for record's sake), now takes a few hours.

• Deckbuilder

  • Fixed an issue where hero cards were not appearing.

  • Fixed the mulligan tool from giving you the same cards back.

• Card Backs

  • Rendered all card backs again.

  • Note: A ton of manually flagging still needs to happen, a lot of newer card backs are not showing yet.

• Cards

  • Rendered all cards again.

  • Removed our old image storage system with a faster one.

  • Updated all card crops for those pretty deck lists.

IT'S SO FLUFFY!!!

I can't believe it's already February.

Over in the Eastern US, there's been a lot of snow and some snowstorm warnings, though thankfully I've managed to keep power the whole time. I know in Australia, temperatures have been raising up to 50 Celsius (an American acknowledging non-American measurements, a sign of the apocalypse, I know!). How has the weather been for you guys? Hopefully not too bad.

What have you been playing?

After Old School Rally disappointed me, I was hoping my next indie rally game would be better...

And I'm not quite so sure what to make of it. It's not bad, but it feels like there's a lot lacking. It's just worse Art of Rally, which is a fantastic indie rally racer.

In other news, I got five PS5 games for Thanksgiving-Christmas and of as today, I've still only played two of them. Backlog curse.

First off, Happy New Year. We're so far into the 2020s and I really can't believe it. New year means new games.

My final major contribution and game I played was Old School Rally, and I was really excited for it, but it ultimately was just so disappointing. Despite that, I'm likely going to keep playing it anyway because the achievements are quite easy to get (even if one of them is grindy).

As I mentioned last month, I'm now a Stardew Valley player, courtesy of one of my best friends gifting it to me for Christmas. I've been playing it with her and her husband, and it's a great way for the three of us to just chill out and enjoy time with each other.