Patch 0.20.1: The Ladder Turns

You no longer need to bring your own Hive account to play. The login modal and the claim boarding pass now carry a request option: tell us where to send the link, pick your username with availability checked live as you type, and we create the account for you. Your keys are shown once on a secure one-time page, ready to import into Keychain with one click or to download and store yourself. Keys are never sent by email.

The closed alpha ladder now opens on a schedule instead of standing still. Ranked play starts in Bronze, and each new ranked season steps the open tier up: Silver, then Gold, then Champion, then every league at once. The rotation advances by itself at each season rollover, so the field you are competing in changes as the alpha runs.

Twenty two achievements sat in the catalog with nothing feeding them, so they could never move no matter what you did. Every one of them is now wired to the thing it measures: chatting and reacting, opening packs, buying and selling on the market, fighting guild brawls, referring players, climbing WARPATH, reading the archive. If it is listed in the Gauntlet, it counts.

A WARPATH pass now spans both ranked seasons inside its window instead of ending with the first. When a ranked season rolls over mid pass, your level, your claims, and your track progress all carry straight through.

The cosmetics picker listed the whole catalog in rarity order, which buried the avatars, banners, and titles you actually own under hundreds of locked rows. Each tab now leads with what you have equipped, then the rest of what you own, and anything still locked sits below and reads greyed out.

A random ruleset draw could pair a rule that grants an ability with one that strips the same ability, so the two met in the middle and the match played out as though neither had been drawn. Draws are now checked for that conflict before the match is built, across ranked, custom, showcase, and tournament games alike.

Under Sabotage Protocol, an ability handed to a Fighter by its commander survived the strip when it should not have. The strip now runs after commander gifts land, so the rule removes what it says it removes. Back to Basics and Healed Out are deliberately unchanged: commander gifts still survive those two.

A Fighter with part of its armor chewed off showed an empty shield bar in replays even though the armor readout beside it still counted the rest. Damaged armor pips now render, and only fully spent ones stay dark, so the bar and the number agree.

A player who had not earned an achievement yet got a single empty prompt instead of the Gauntlet. The tab now renders the full catalog straight away, with every achievement showing as locked until you take it, so you can see what is out there before you have earned anything.

The season end tournament picker rendered blank for anyone who had not committed favourite leagues yet. It now opens on your highest unlocked family as a provisional pick you can keep or swap out, and it holds you to at least one real pick before it will save.

When the alpha countdown reached zero, the live readout was squeezed into the timer cells and rendered as a stray outlined box. It now switches to a clean gold status label the moment the timer lands, with no flash while the page loads.