Welcome to "the big one". This is a compilation of all of our changes that have gone out to Out of Games over the past couple of months, and some that escaped patch notes even before that! This is long, possibly boring, but it is well worth reading if you want to gain some knowledge in what's been changing.

Staff

Normally I don't talk about the staff-specific updates in these threads, but I wanted to make an announcement that we've put a significant amount of effort into retooling our common workflows to modernize them and provide a better user experience for us.

Personally, I'm able to create content much faster now with our new article and guide tools, and I know other staff members have been happy about improvements to the workflow - though some are still using older tools still as the newer ones mature.

My personal favourite addition is we now have drafts and autosave. You'd think a website that was so focused on content would have had these on day 1. Nope. And it's already saved my bacon a few times!

General

• New Editor

  • TinyMCE is no longer the default editor on Out of Games.

    • You will still find it on any pages that have not been converted to the new website theme. These are very few.

  • We have a custom version of TipTap now powering our content creation tools and commenting.

  • This is a much more modern editor, and everything is more customizable for us.

  • Markdown shortcuts work reliably.

  • You can use a "/" character to pull open a menu to quickly format content.

  • Better live previews - check out quotes and images!

    • Quotes are super duper awesome now. Trust!

  • Autocorrect suggestions actually work now.

  • Syntax highlighting while you are in code mode, along with prettified code. Wooo!

• Fluffy Filters

  • This is our internal name for the filtering system that powers card listings, deck listings, and all kinds of listings.

  • A complete rewrite to focus on performance.

  • No longer do we load in all data for fields on page load, improving the page performance.

  • Filters are now on the left-side of the page on larger displays instead of on top, improving user experience.

• YouTube videos now correctly embed again.

• Added a page for our Editorial Standards.

• Added an About Us page.

• Reintroduced spoilers.

  • These were gone for a moment!

• Comments that are deleted and spammed (staff only!) have updated styles to make it more obvious what their status is.

• Child comments now have correct indentation.

• Improved performance of pagination site-wide.

• Pagination is more consistently styled across types of content.

• Reimplemented countdowns.

• Added a new version of lightbox, our gallery script.

• Fixed an issue where structured data on comments was incorrect. This is for search engines.

• Fixed comments being unable to be edited.

• Fixed replying to comments showing an ugly, unstyled chunk of comment until the page was refreshed.

• Fixed comment buttons sometimes not appearing.

Realms

• We can now easily force refreshes of caches for the realm navigations.

• Realm navigations can now be managed by staff members in a much cleaner UI, allowing us to make very quick updates.

• Navigation on mobile now uses a drawer to improve the user experience.

• Headers are now more condensed on mobile so they don't take up so much screen space.

Hearthstone

• Misc updates for Cataclysm expansion.

• Rarity colors have returned to card links.

• Tooltips work again! Sorry that we didn't have these immediately with the new website theme.

• Decks

  • New theme migration.

  • Decks have received a major style overhaul on both the listing and detail pages.

  • You no longer have to scroll far down the page to read comments, now you can read them beside the deck list (unless there are a ton of them!)

  • Condensed buttons into share and settings dropdowns to clean up the interface.

    • These are not commonly used, so it makes sense to add a tiny bit of friction for their use. It makes pages look cleaner.

  • Rewrote the mana curve feature.

  • Added a "Test Your Mulligan" feature that allows you to draw a sample hand from the deck and mulligan cards away. Give it a try!

  • Deck embeds look the sexiest they ever have.

• Cards

  • New theme migration.

  • A major style overhaul in how these pages are constructed vs the old versions.

  • Card images now show as Normal first and then buttons appear to switch between the various cosmetic types if they exist.

  • New Legality feature showcases what formats a card can be played in.

  • Explore card pages to learn more about them.

  • Hearthstone's internal DBF and String IDs now appear on the card pages.

    • These aren't useful for the vast majority of people but they might help someone, they certainly help us debug cards, and they may show up in search engines more easily if people ever need to search for the ids.

  • Note that many of the newer cards don't have audio data. We are working to improve our card data importer to start extracting this data from Hearthstone again so all card pages can be as beautiful as can be.

  • Fixed issues where tooltips for cards would load the card page itself instead of the tooltip creating a messy experience.

• Deckbuilder

  • Brand. Spanking. New.

  • Everything is completely rewritten.

    • The deckbuilder has gone through so many iterations of rebuilding before being released to the public.

    • Our old deckbuilder was very basic and when Hearthstone started getting more complicated, we couldn't augment it to make it fit the new game.

  • This new deckbuilder is built upon a generic set of features which will enable us to build other deckbuilders for card games much easier.

  • Specialized card interactions are now supported to make deckbuilding more Hearthstone-like:

    • Prince Renathal updates the maximum card count to 40.

      • Not new but the way we handle this is!

    • E.T.C., Band Manager now has support so you can build his warband!

    • Reno Jackson and other Highlander cards now warn you when you add more than 1 copy of a card to your deck.

    • Baku the Mooneater now automatically filters the deckbuilder by Odd cost cards.

    • Genn Greymane now automatically filters the deckbuilder by Even cost cards.

    • Tourist Cards are now fully supported.

      • When you add a Tourist card to the deck, a new tab will appear with cards that can join this tourist.

      • If you remove the tourist, the cards that were in the deck from this new set of cards are also removed.

    • Fabled Cards are now fully supported.

      • When you add a Fabled card to your deck, the tokens associated with the card will also be added into the deck list.

    • Zilliax Deluxe 3000 is now supported.

      • Yeah, too little too late on this once considering rotation. But it proves how much more flexible our new deckbuilder is.

      • If Blizzard adds any other cards like this in the future, we're able to support it trivially.

    • Twist Mode support!

      • This was very easy for us to implement, we'll have to wait and see if Blizzard ever brings it back.

      • For now, it is disabled until a new season begins.

      • Similar tech will be able to be used for Tavern Brawl, but we have not yet implemented that one.

  • When you add 4 or more of a tribe/race or a particular spell school, the deckbuilder will suggest that you filter by this type.

    • Its completely optional, and you can easily undo it when you click the new "Show Me" button for these suggestions.

    • This will only show you one tribe/race and one spell school suggestion; It's whichever one has the highest count in your deck.

    • Just a fun little feature that can help make finding synergies easier for players of all types.

• Card Backs

  • New theme migration.

  • Additional updates are planned for the future.

  • As of posting, we know some card backs are missing. The next Hearthstone patch will solve this problem.

• Card Pack Opener

  • New theme migration.

  • Rewrote the frontend code to make it slightly more fancy.

• Secrets Calculator

  • Added this as a new feature.

  • Understandably this is not very exciting for most veteran players, and it is questionably important in modern Hearthstone, but its a fun little tool.

Guides

• Moved to the new site theme.

• Now support a sidebar which shows you the different sections within a guide and other guides in the same category.

  • This allows us to make guides more concise while allowing easy one-click access to other related information.

  • The sidebar is hidden on smaller screens and on mobile, you can show it with a simple click of the sidebar button.

  • This went through three different iterations on the live website, quite happy with the current one.

Other Card Games

Other card games that have seen support on the website in the past have all been migrated over to our new theme systems. They still need some more love though, so expect that to come in the future.

There is still a lot more to come and I will be sure to post patch notes more often so everyone can follow development closer. Considering potentially doing weekly reports on site updates instead of daily, but we'll wait to see how it goes. The goal right now is to ship updates as soon as they are ready which means the site could see half a dozen updates over the course of a day.