Profiles Level-Up, Literally, on Out of Games

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Birthday week 2026 continues today with a large addition to the website - our leveling system!

Profile Overhauls

Our user profiles have moved over to our new theme and sport a very new header. Check out my profile!

Levels? An experience bar? Reputation levels? You bet! To push the community side of Out of Games, and to introduce a progression system on the website, we have introduced what we are internally calling the "rpg" system, and for good reason; This isn't the end of putting the games in games, but more on that later.

User profiles have the same info on them that you've always come to expect, everything just has a fresh coat of paint. We've also fixed the issue that was present since the move to a realms-based website where Threads was not currently showing up because it was still pointing to our old forum data.

Achievements also load much faster, and we'll be sure to be spicing up this system going forward too with more fun things you can unlock.

Note that avatar borders do not currently work with the new system. The old way that we did avatar borders is.. painful to say the least. These will be migrated in the future so that your profile can truly shine, and our sanity will be able to stay high which will also allow us to implement more of them, faster.

Leveling on Out of Games

We've introduced a whole leveling system! The level cap is level 50, though that requires a wild amount of experience to hit, so anything past around level 15 is purely cosmetic. We've implemented some level-up rewards along the way which give everyone more website features as they level up. To go from level 49 to 50 you would need 6348919 experience...

The primary goal to the leveling system is to help us fight spammers better. We've unfortunately added a very slight amount of friction for normal users, but we've built it in such a way that it doesn't require too much interacting with the website to unlock basic features. This also helps us prevent users from mass creating accounts to vote on their own content, which has been a problem in the past. Although still easy to bypass, at least it's going to require people to participate in the community somewhere. Premium members bypass all of our restrictions .

• Level 1

  • The default level, you're a member here!

• Level 2 (20 XP)

  • You can now create threads on realms.

• Level 3 (40 XP)

  • You can now vote on all content.

• Level 4 (80 XP)

  • You can now customize your avatar.

• Level 5 (120 XP)

  • You can now edit your profile and your posts.

• Level 6 (300 XP)

  • External links will now appear in content you create.

• Level 7 (500 XP)

  • You can now feature content on your profile. (Note that this is temporarily disabled, we'll get it in again shortly).

After level 7, your level is purely cosmetic. Level 7 is going to become our main goal level which unlocks everything that we want to put behind an interaction wall. I understand this may not be the best solution for the problems we have encountered in the past, but it will help us better understand bot behaviours and, hopefully, put an end to the most basic ones.

I am considering locking decks behind the leveling system as well, which if done, you would be able to create decks, but you would not be able to mark them public until after you reach the correct level. This would be very obvious to users, and would not penalize anyone who just wants to keep track of their own decks and don't care if they are public.

True Story: We are under active attacks being based out of China, Brazil, and Singapore. They are being filtered out at Cloudflare's level but millions of pageviews are being sent to us via bots and have been for weeks now. People, are assholes.

Earning Experience

Experience is quite easy to earn! All you need to do is participate on the website, its that simple. Here are ways you can earn experience and how much you earn for each of the tasks:

How do you know when you've earned experience? You'll see a +XP on your screen (near the bottom) telling you how much you earned when you earn it. A leveling bar will also appear at the bottom, showing your progress to the next level. You can also visit XP & Leveling in Account Management to see a breakdown of your earnings.

But wait, experience calculations do get a bit more complicated than just earning a basic amount!

• Premium users earn double experience.

• If you don't earn experience for a bit of time, we'll give you "rested experience" to double future experience gains.

• Logging into the website everyday and simply browsing the site, a single page view, can earn you experience streak boosts.

• The first action you take every day rewards double experience.

• We can run experience events on realms to increase the amount earned... maybe during a Hearthstone expansion release?

Also, you will notice a few things on that list that you might not understand yet. Don't worry, we'll let you know when you need to know =). There are some anti-spam functions that help us curb people who are spamming for experience gains. I won't mention those publicly but most users aren't going to have a problem. If we see people who are legitimate users reaching them, we'll adjust the numbers.

Reputation

We've also added in a reputation section to the website! Much like earning reputation with factions in video games, we've also got factions here on Out of Games and we're calling them Realms. There are six reputation levels in total, though it is not possible to become Hated, and it won't be something people will be able to achieve under normal usage of the system, and no, being a vile human will not get you there either.

The six levels, are as follows:

• Hated

• Neutral (Everyone starts here)

• Friendly

• Honored

• Revered

• Exalted

If you've played World of Warcraft, yup, we stole the names from them and we even took the values required to reach each level.

At this moment in time, Reputation is a purely cosmetic system... and we gave it leaderboards. You can checkout the Hearthstone Rep Leaderboard , which has breakdowns based on all time, monthly, and weekly. Cosmetics? Yeah!

Whenever you post a comment in the context of a realm, such as a comment on a hearthstone deck which is from the hearthstone realm, your comment will display a reputation badge in the bottom right corner if you are Friendly, Honored, Revered, or Exalted. Staff members and premium members have badges too, and realm champions will as well...

We may also roll out some additional cosmetics on the site in the future for becoming different reputation levels on realms... stay tuned!

Earning Reputation

To earn reputation, you have to interact with each of the realms. Whenever you earn experience, if the thing you are earning experience for belongs to a realm, we will give you reputation as well.

You want a breakdown of your reputation? We show a tab on your user profile! Check out mine here .

Missed Yesterday's Announcement?

It's Birthday Week on Out of Games and yesterday we announced our recommitment to Hearthstone support on the website. It's a great post filled with lots of interesting information, so go and check it out! Here's a quick recap:

• Brand new deckbuilder , built for the modern day

• New card listing including beautiful new card pages, see Morchok!

• New deck pages, check out a taunt druid deck as an example.

• The pack opener returns!

• We added a new secrets calculator .

I hope everyone enjoys this small new update to the website and that we'll see you out and about earning experience. This is just the new core to our "rpg" system... certainly there has to be a reason why we're calling it an rpg system and not a leveling system... and I'm excited to roll out more updates in the future to better engage everyone here on Out of Games. Surely we must be getting close to an on-site event... right?

If you're noticing anything funky, or you have questions, please do drop us a note here in the comments or over in our site feedback realm .