Chat and Friends

A tournament scene is a community, not just a schedule. Braket has live chat woven through it, plus easy hooks into Steam's friend graph, so the people you compete with can become people you know.

The lobby and tournament channels

Chat lives at the chat page, and it opens on the lobby: the arena-wide channel where everyone hangs out. This is the general room, good for banter, questions, finding practice partners, and the ambient hum that makes a scene feel alive.

Alongside the lobby, Braket automatically creates a channel for each active tournament. When a tournament is open or underway, it gets its own room, and the chat navigation lets you hop straight into it. These per-tournament channels are where the real match-day energy is: coordinating windows, trash-talking before a knockout, reacting to upsets in real time. When a tournament wraps and falls out of the active set, its channel bows out too.

Chat updates live. Messages appear instantly for everyone in the channel, and a presence counter shows how many people are in the room with you. It also works perfectly well without any of that: the page is fully server-rendered, so even with scripts disabled you can read and post. The live layer is a bonus on top of something that already works.

@mentions

Want to get someone's attention specifically? Type an @mention with their name. Mentions are highlighted so the person you called out can spot that you were talking to them, even in a busy room. It is the difference between shouting into the crowd and tapping someone on the shoulder.

Adding opponents on Steam

Chat is where you meet people, and Steam is where you keep them. From any player's profile, and anywhere their name appears, you can jump to add them as a Steam friend. Because you signed in through Steam, Braket already knows whether someone is your friend and shows either a "you are Steam friends" badge or a one-tap "Add on Steam" link.

This is a deliberate choice: Braket does not try to rebuild a friends list from scratch. It leans on the social graph you already have on Steam. So the natural flow is to meet a worthy rival in a tournament channel, pull up their profile, add them on Steam, and now you have a practice partner and a nemesis for seasons to come. That is how a scene actually forms.

Private messages

Beyond the public rooms, Braket has direct messages for one-to-one conversations. Any profile has a message button to open a DM. Starting a brand new private conversation is a Braket Premium perk (page 11), but replying is always free: if someone with Premium DMs you, you can talk back at no cost. Private channels are visible only to the two of you; nobody else can even see they exist.

Chat etiquette and moderation

Braket takes a clear stance here, and it is worth saying plainly: pristine communication is not optional. A lot of competitive scenes tolerate a toxic chat and pay for it in players who quietly leave. Braket would rather keep the room welcoming, and it gives everyone the tools to help.

Anyone signed in can report a message. See something that crosses a line? Flag it, and it lands in the moderation queue for the studio's admins and community managers to review. Reporting is your lever, and using it is a service to everyone else in the room.

Moderators keep the peace. The studio's admins and any community managers they appoint can remove messages, temporarily mute a disruptive player, and turn on slow mode to cool down a heated room by spacing out how often people can post. When slow mode is on, the channel shows it, so you know to take a breath between messages. Moderators can also pin important messages to the top of a channel, which is how announcements and match instructions stay visible above the scroll.

Removed messages are handled honestly: the content disappears from view, but the moderation action is logged, and chat is retained for a defined window (about 90 days) so there is always a record if something needs review. None of this is meant to make chat feel policed. It is meant to make it feel safe, so that the good conversation, the rivalries and the inside jokes and the "gg" after a brutal final, has room to happen.

Be sharp, be competitive, talk trash if that is your style. Just keep it clean enough that the person across the bracket wants to come back and beat you again. That is the whole idea.