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.
Tonight's update is our first release following our migration to DocumentDB. For those unaware, you may have noticed some severe latency issues the past week; I've been pulling some late nights to iron out all the kinks related to this migration. You should be able to feel an immediate improvement, our average latency has gone from 600ms to around 100ms! In addition to the performance improvements, this migration will help with stability, scaling, and make my job of managing the site much easier. The downside, is that our hosting costs have increased quite a bit. This migration was triggered from a patreon goal of $300, but the net costs were more expensive than I anticipated, and we're currently running about $200 over budget. This isn't the end of the world for me, but I would definitely appreciate any additional support through Patreon. There are two more infrastructure goals, both on a much smaller scale than the database migration. For card analytics, we have a script that gets run manually and infrequently, but I'd like to automate that process such that it runs every day, keeping card analytics fresh and up to date. It would also allow us to create histograms for card trends, which is super neat. The other change has to do with the machine learning portion of the site. Currently, that's being done on a separate server, and everything done is all manual. I'd like to migrate the machine learning to AWS Sagemaker, allowing us to keep the draftbots and recommender up to date at a weekly resolution. The latter change is much more extensive, so I can't commit to a timeline on that yet.
Tonight's release is a very exciting one. Before we get into the exciting new features, I wanted to share that I am giving away some special Cube Cobra snake tokens to all Patreons! If you are interested in receiving some tokens, you can support Cube Cobra here. Cube Cobra is almost completely funded through Patreon, and every cent of donations go directly towards server costs. We also just launched our new Inked Gaming page! We have some exclusive Cube Cobra playmats listed, and purchasing those playmats also helps pay for Cube Cobra server costs.
Okay, enough shilling for monetary support, what's special about this release? Well, you may have read Ruler501's Draftbot Primer, which goes into detail a huge rework we've been working on for our draftbots! This is a very difficult challenge that I've expressed frustration towards many times, and I think we have come to a game-changing solution here. In addition to the new draft bots, there are also some new tools around drafting, including running "Bot Only" drafts, so cube designers can observe how their cube may be drafted without spending the time drafting themselves. We also added a new view for decks where you can see the draftbot analysis for each pick made, that explains the reasoning of why that pick was made, and what other cards were in close consideration. Draftbots will also fully build decks, including adding basic lands. The bots are still far from perfect, but with how they're setup, we have a lot of levers and dials we can manipulate to improve them. If the draftbot seemed to make a dubious pick, share it with us on Discord! We would love the feedback, and can use those reports to further advance our draftbots. We also started tracking pick and pass data for individual cubes. We're not using this data yet, but this is something that's been asked for a lot. We will look into how we may utilize this data in future releases.