Product Update: Chat V2

AccelByte Cloud’s Chat service allows players to send and receive messages to their friends or party members in real time, including notifications to inform users of messages being sent or received. In Chat V2, there will be a chat filtering and gRPC plugin with the primary focus being improvements in:

1. Personal chat with persistent history
2. Session driven chat rooms (includes party)
3. Reporting and moderation
4. Function override to empower developers to build their own custom functionality 

With our Chat service, we wanted to update the scalability of game session chat, party chat, and personal chat as well as implement both Gauntlet and Notification Load Tests to improve our system. Read on to get the details. 

Game Session Chat, Party Chat, and Personal Chat

Our previous chat service in Lobby focused on delivering three foundational chat experiences: personal chat (direct messages), party chat and global chat. Over time we realized this didn’t scale well with additional use cases our customers wanted to provide to their players, so we have been working on a new service that’s flexible and integrated with our Multiplayer V2 (MPV2) – a session-based player matchmaker offering more flexibility and managed by our Session Browser.
With Chat V2, developers can enable personal chat as well as define many additional player experiences with chat by using our MPV2 sessions, such as team chat, raid group chat and lobby chat, supported through our SDK and OSS. 

How it Works

Enabling chat rooms will now happen as part of Session Template definitions by setting TextChat to true through the SDK, it will be false by default. If true, once a session is created using that Session Template, the chat room will automatically be created. 

When players join a session, they will automatically be subscribed to the chat room membership allowing them to start sending messages to and receive them from the room, requiring no explicit invitation acceptance.

When players leave a session, they will automatically be unsubscribed from the chat room membership and can no longer send messages to or receive them from the room. And once a session is removed or soft-deleted, the corresponding chat room will automatically be cleaned up. 

The new service will also support persistent chat history and sending messages while offline, allowing for developers to create player inbox experiences.

What You Can Look Forward To

Our goal with Chat V2 is to provide our customers with flexible services while maintaining high targets for concurrency and latency: 500k CCU connected persistently at 99.9% reliability. To that end, we are excited to announce the below capabilities.

Chat Rooms for Different Group Activities

We will be enabling our customers to easily define different chat room experiences tied to sessions and parties. This will allow for a large number of group activities to support chat between players, such as:

• Players can interact with each other in a Lobby chat room prior to the game match starting
• Players can participate in team chat rooms to coordinate their strategy
• Players can participate in temporary raid group chat rooms, composed of multiple parties
• Players will be able to participate in persistent Guild chat rooms
• Players will automatically be subscribed/unsubscribed to Session and Party chat rooms based on their Session membership status
• Game Servers can create location-based zone chat rooms for players to participate in based on their location in the map

Extended Features to Empower Players

We will be releasing new functionality to improve the communication experience between players as well as enable our customers to build additional experiences outside the game, such as:

• Players can access a persistent inbox of Personal (direct messages) chats, including the ability to filter
• Players can mute chat rooms they are subscribed to
• Players can send/receive messages when offline
• Developers can create addition communication experiences outside the game, e.g. companion apps or website experiences

Robust Reporting and Moderation

We will be releasing new reporting and moderation tools for our customers that will ensure an optimal experience for their players, such as:

• Players can report bad chat behavior
• Admins can review reported issues including snapshots of the offending messages
• Admins can ban reported players from sending and/or receiving chat messages

Code-Level Customization to Override Default Filtering Functionality

We will be enabling our customers to provide code-level override to our default text filtering/processing so that they can easily control the experience, such as:

• Developers can override our profanity filtering/processing functionality with third-party tech
• Developers can integrate third-party solutions to help predict bad actors based on chat behavior

Interested in learning more about our services? Request a demo here.