Today, Scott Henson, the Xbox Partner Group Program Manager, took to the Xbox Wire to announce that lots of new features are coming to Xbox Insiders this month. The features are all inspired by the feedback of Xbox fans and will begin appearing over the next weeks, with the ultimate goal of helping shape a wide release to the broader and general Xbox community. The features include Arena on Xbox Live, enhanced profile and activity feed, and much more.
According to Scott Henson’s post, with the coming features for Arena on Xbox Live, Insiders will soon be able to discover tournaments from Xbox One or the Xbox app on Windows 10, get notifications when a match is ready, and jump directly into a match on the Xbox One. Insiders also will soon be able to enjoy automatic results reporting, and show off the results on your activity feed.
Activity Feed and Profile will also see some additional improvements:
- Custom gamerpics are finally here! From your console, Windows 10 PC, or mobile phone, update your gamerpic with a custom image. We’re excited to bring this top fan-requested feature to Xbox Live and expect it to be in preview longer than other features to ensure it’s great for everyone when released.
- New ‘Join broadcast’ button in your profile, one of the many ways to access the game stream of someone broadcasting their gameplay.
- Your profile will display your Arena tournament history and upcoming tournaments.
- In your Activity Feed, we’re adding the ability to hide individual posts, pin posts to the top of your feed, and filter posts by friends, games or Clubs.
Next up is Looking for Group (LFG.) Soon, with LFG, Insiders will be able to LFG posts from the Achievements tab, related to the Achievement they are trying to finish. Microsoft is also adding the number of open LFG posts to the Game Hub and Club Hub headers, and other changes include the following:
- When you create an LFG post, as the owner you will be able to see new vetting cards that include hero stats from gamers interested in joining your party. Hero stats are contextual to the game you’re playing, showing you relevant stats like kill/death ratio, rank, or score.
- Have you made a successful LFG post that you want to create again? Now you can see previous LFG posts that you have created, participated or shown interest in, and can copy them to create new posts.
- When creating an LFG post, see all the recent tags you’ve used and easily select them.
- Club owners can upload custom images for their Club logo and Club background. Just like custom gamerpics, we expect this to be in preview longer than other features to ensure it’s great for everyone when released
- Club owners and admins will be identified and labeled in their text posts to better help them stand out and manage their community.
- Club owners and admins can pin a post at the top of their Club feed.
Rounding out the new features are some changes to My Games and Apps, and Settings. Insiders will soon have the ability to filter their game library by platform, including Xbox One and Xbox 360. Other new features for this area include:
- Captive Portal support for wireless internet is coming to Xbox One, which allows for Wi-Fi authentication through a browser. Great for colleges, hotels, or public Wi-Fi locations
- In the Settings, we’re adding the ability to select Kinect auto-zoom for Beam and Twitch broadcasts, as well as for the Skype app.
- On the Xbox app for Windows 10, we’re adding the option to select the audio input and output sources for Party chat.
Do you like these improvements? As always, Xbox Insiders will see these features first in the next few weeks, so it’s best to stay tuned for more information. These features were all long requested by Xbox fans, so it’s very reassuring to see that Microsoft is listening to the feedback of Team Xbox. Let us know your other thoughts in the comments below.
