Patch Notes — April 5, 2026

What's New

Spectator System (Coming Soon)

The foundation for live match spectating has been built. When it goes live, you'll be able to:

Watch Live Matches — Browse active games and spectate in real time
Hype Actions — Send emojis, shoutouts, and reactions that players and other spectators see live
Privacy Toggle — Control whether others can watch your matches

The spectator system is fully implemented on the backend and will be enabled in a future update once testing is complete.

Bug Fixes

Erosion (Mizu School) Fixed — The Erosion skill wasn't triggering correctly. It was checking the wrong player context, so the debuff on enemy cards near hidden allies never activated. Fixed — Erosion now properly punishes enemies who place next to your hidden cards on high-crystal tiles.
Shinpodo Combo Breaking — Fixed a case where Shinpodo Mode could continue even when your newly placed card was immediately destroyed by an enemy's persistent damage zone. The combo now correctly breaks if your card dies on placement.

Visual & UI Polish

Gold Theme Alignment — Continued refining the gold visual identity across both the game client and the marketing site. More consistent button styles, glow effects, and color accents.
Website Section Backgrounds — Each section of riftwars.metamachina.io now has its own ghosted cyberpunk grid texture with subtle drift animations, plus gold gradient dividers between sections.
Spectator UI — Clean new spectator bar showing live watcher count, match info, and hype action panel.

Under the Hood

Audio system improvements for more reliable sound playback across devices.
Performance optimizations on background assets (compressed WebP, CSS-only animations).

What's Next

We're continuing to polish the game and the website in parallel. More bug fixes, balance tuning, and quality-of-life improvements are in progress. If you run into anything weird, let us know in Discord — your reports directly shape what we fix next.