B44-REVIVAL

The site now plays a supplied match-found sound when a demo ready check opens and when you press Play test sound on Account; a Volume slider (0–100%) appears under the sound control and saves the chosen value to your account once you stop moving the slider. The API accepts and validates a new preference readySoundVolume so the value is persisted and used by the site and the ready-check playback.

Signed-in pages now open one push-only Socket.io connection to the API while you are signed in; the header shows your connection state (Connecting…, Online, Appearing offline, Offline) and the site re-reads the players-online count from the activity API when your connection comes up. The live channel is documented and the dev/proxy instructions updated so the web socket is forwarded correctly in development and production.

Public player profiles now display the bio saved in a player's Account page, and the account country picker includes Kosovo (XK) where Steam uses that code. The site and API read and persist the profile/bio and country as the account data source.

Staff can force-start a waiting match: the site/mod issues the server's AddBot command to fill teams up to 5v5 and then triggers the native countdown to start the match. Admin commands sent to the server are logged so the action and sender appear in the match log and record.

Players now start at 750 Elo and their first 10 rated matches are treated as placement matches: those placement matches move Elo three times as much for the individual player and are marked in the rating history and public rating view. The ranking code and API views were updated so placement progress and placement-match counts appear in player rating responses.

Every game server now uses a join password set by the website for each match; test servers fall back to the image's test password (b44revival). The classic console connect syntax (connect <ip>:<port> password <pw>) works and was exercised on the test server.

Ensure a match's winner is taken from a surrender (if present) or from the team with more rounds, instead of using the last round's stale winner; this corrects match result data emitted at match end and fixes incorrect winners shown in match/round APIs and pages.

Damage events written by the server now record the attacker for human hits when the server applies the hit (the attacker/weapon comes from the hit call the server executes), so player ADR, hits, accuracy and per-weapon damage are no longer zeroed for human players. This corrects the match reports and per-player stats that previously missed many human hits.

The site now serves country flags from the bundled country-flag-icons package and uses a deterministic default avatar chosen from the site images when a player has no Steam avatar, so the same player gets the same default image everywhere (header, rankings, profiles). This reduces external asset requests and makes flags and defaults consistent across pages.

The sidebar's Discord button now fills the available width in the full sidebar layout so it is visually aligned with the rail and footer controls; the rail and phone-drawer variants keep their expected layouts.

The ranked match configuration and documentation were updated: the project uses the chosen ranked match length and related settings (change recorded in the server configs and docs). The server/runtime configs and website docs were updated to reflect the new ranked format and the agreed settings.