Cube Cobra

Release 4.0

Added 2020-07-24 22:50:14 +0000 UTC

I'm very excited to bring you this release today! I needed to skip the last release, as I was (still am really) in the process of moving to a new place, and I didn't have the extra time to prepare a proper release. I'm back to (almost) fully operational now, so you can expect us to resume the normal schedule. You may have also noticed a TCGPlayer advertisement banner, or a banner displaying a donation or merchandise link. This was more a experiment to see if I could help cover the gap in server costs, and I did learn a lot. The TCGPlayer ad got some clicks, but had a conversion rate of 0%, compared to our typical 7%. This tells me that it provided basically no value, so I won't be showing that anymore. I did however, get a consistent uptick in new Patreons, so you will occasionally see the other two banners.

Today's release mainly consists of two changes. The first is the addition of Grid Draft! This feature request had sat on our backlog for a while, until one of our 'Lotus Cobra' tier patreons had requested higher priority on this feature, so here it is! This mode is particularly exciting because it provides a way to do a draft with another human player, on one machine locally, in addition to the normal bot drafts. I debuted this feature in Cube Outside The Box's stream earlier this week. You can watch the vod here. This release also represents a huge milestone with our performance improvements. I understand the downtime yesterday was quite brutal, and I'm sorry for any inconvenience due to that. That downtime did allow me to fix several issues related to how we lookup decks, which was a huge bottleneck in overall server performance. It's still quite early to know for sure, but the current metrics are looking very promising. The biggest bottleneck right now is using the cube search feature, which is a challenging issue to tackle. Be sure to expect more performance improvements in the future.

New Features: