d) for me, and for several other players I suspect. My game count is simply too high. Or to be more precise my game count of games where I need to think a lot.

The MDL is great and I love it, but it is one of many warlight competitions. CL9 has started and team games take a lot of time and effort, a new Seasonal Ladder season started too, as soon as the Elitist Africa one ended, a new AWP tournament is created every week...

And the reason I put MDL on hold isn't because I like it less than the other competitions, but because it was the only one I could put on hold. :p
CL9 and Seasonal Ladder XXVIII have to be played now, but I'll still be able to join MDL in two months if I want.

Anyway, I suspect the new Seasonal and CL9 are to blame for this decreased activity on MDL. It wouldn't surprise me if the number of active players on the 1v1, 2v2 and 3v3 official ladders had decreased as well.

rak president

A player that loses most of his games will probably drop-out of this ladder because it is frustrating to lose all the time. 1v1 ladder or such ladders have way more different level of skills compared to MDL; you have elites on top, then super good, then good, then decent, etc. until you reach the very bottom of the ladder where you have quite below average players against whom a newbie to strategic gaming will be able to win probably 40-50% of his games, which is motivating.

Yeah. I agree, although I'm not sure what I can do to bring more players in.

My suggestion is allow 1 game at a time, at least to attract new players ("special offer" lol).
If your point is to prevent players from stalling top position by minimizing games played once on top, you could state "during your first 3 months (or 20 games), you are allowed to play only 1 game at a time". Then see how it goes, if it works better, if it could stay permanently, or not.

I'm not a fan of 1 game at a time. It will reduce the games played on the ladder significantly.

And the reason I put MDL on hold isn't because I like it less than the other competitions, but because it was the only one I could put on hold. :p
CL9 and Seasonal Ladder XXVIII have to be played now, but I'll still be able to join MDL in two months if I want.

Anyway, I suspect the new Seasonal and CL9 are to blame for this decreased activity on MDL. It wouldn't surprise me if the number of active players on the 1v1, 2v2 and 3v3 official ladders had decreased as well.

Hmm. That is actually disheartening. Seems like the "never-ending ladder" format isn't as attractive to people. The 1v1,2v2,3v3 ladders seem to have the same problem as well. People usually aim for something, and once they achieve or fail at their goals the team stops playing(since they can always play again at a later time?)

I think MDL has a good core of players who will continue to play. I doubt the player count drops below 50(in the future). This is a good enough number to run this CLOT(even if the experience isn't as great as it would be with 100 players).

However, this does influence the team ladder I was planning for. I'm not sure people will stick around long enough if it has a similar format(even though a lot of people have expressed interest). I'm going to have to rethink that.

Yeah. I agree, although I'm not sure what I can do to bring more players in.

Players adore the achievements ;)
Make different achievements for the different player levels.
Or I don't know, it is only a brainstormed idea :D

For me it's b) + d).

I don't like playing a template without putting in a decent effort to learn it. And learning 30+ new templates is daunting.

Yeah some people just don't want to risk themselves on a template they don't know, because they could eventually lose on it, and it would affect their win rate. Stats are important you know ! :/

My opinion is:
1. MDL not known enough. I myself was asking, what the hell is Guiroma and Balck see? An advise was to go MDL to see and practice them. A solution could be get into achievements, e.g. on player page I can see his record on RT, 1v1, seasonal ladders, but not on MDL.
2. Very strong competition, some kind of elitist ladder. And elitists can be to much.
3. A bit to much templates. As templates to CL and even to some extent to seasonal can go from MDL, smaller number would increase possibility to master them and be prepared for CL as well as seasonal.

If the number of templates is an issue, then maybe every month swap out some templates? Then the total number of templates are lower but overall there is still enough variation.

Maybe decide which templates to swap in and out by whatever clan plays the most games, or has the most players in the top 30 etc

Maybe some drop out of most vetoed templates, that the number not increase?

It's not the number of template at any time, it's the number of template to learn and know during your trial to reach top rank, which takes more than one month. So if some templates come back the month after, you still need to master them if you dont want your rating to be impacted.

If players could choose a few templates, say 10, and then 1 is added randomly from the rest (no veto), then diversity of template is here (you'll just discover new templates slower) and impact on your rating is low.

The large number of templates is not a problem in my opinion. As a matter of fact, it's a draw for some players (me included) who joined the MDL in order to discover new templates.

And while I understand that some templates can be dropped at some point, I wouldn't recommend choosing them based on vetos or on community votes. If we did that, we could probably say goodbye to all LD, MA and special-settings templates.


@motd: I don't think there's much you can do to quickly bring in new players, short of mass-spamming people playing in the other ladders. Perhaps ask Fizzer if he can promote the MDL somehow, through the Community page, a blog post or an announcement? He's probably the only one who can reach the players who don't know the MDL yet.

Ekstone's idea of achievements is interesting though. It could be a good way to get some of the less-skilled players to stay. There could be achievements for playing or for winning on 5/10/15 different templates for example.

Achievements would be a fizzer task as well

The learning curve with regards to the large number of templates (51) on MDL can be a challenge. To address this issue, I have a proposal. I would like to hear what people think.

• Divide all the current templates into template packs.
  
• There is one base template pack which contains 10 templates. Everyone must be signed up to this pack. This pack will contain the most mainstream templates, but at the same time should be as diverse as possible.
  
• All the other templates are split up into packs of 5 each. These template packs are optional and will group similar templates together.
  
• If a player receives a game on a template in an optional pack, they will get some bonus points regardless of the result of that game(for being brave!). This encourages you to try new templates once you get familiar with the base pack.
  
• The probability of getting a game from the base pack or an optional pack will be the same for every player. This ensures that everyone has an equal chance of getting bonus points from playing on optional templates.
  
• Every player will get a total of 3 vetoes in the new system. If two players(signed up to just the base pack) are matched up, the CLOT has at least (10 - 3 vetoes from A - 3 vetoes from B = 4) templates to choose from when allocating the game.
  

This allows us to keep a lot of templates on MDL, but at the same time reduce the learning curve for new players. Breaking up templates into appropriate template packs will be a challenge, but can be worked on.

If this feature is implemented, it will pave the way for a member-only pack. This pack will contain templates which use member-only features like commanders, bomb cards etc. A player signing up for this pack must be a member. If their membership status changes later, and game creation fails, they will be awarded an auto-loss.

@Quiksilver, you don't have to learn 30+ templates. You just start it and if something different comes up, just check some games if you want and play it.

I think similar to Rakleader, template amount is not the problem; I think the problem is time and advertisement. Talk with Fizzer and if he puts it in the community page I think the numbers will increase.

How does the rating system work on MDL? Do ratings expire?

If I could play a bit, and then pause if I get busy with other things/have too many new templates, and then resume w/o taking a rating hit because of a break then I think I would get round to playing MDL sooner.

In general MDL works great, but I think there are 2 main reasons why players retire:
1) It is an elitist ladder
If you see the average rating of the participating players, it becomes pretty clear, that for average players it is even hard to keep their rating about 1500 points. This can be really frustrating.
For me this means I would need to invest a lot of time to get a decent rating.
2) There are many other games to play.
To get good results on MDL you have to spend time on the templates and I think some players lack of tome. If we take me for example: I participate in CL and play 3 templates. Current competition in my group is hard so I have to spend a lot of time on these games. Furthermore I need to practice the other templates which means at least 4 games on ladders (2v2, 3v3). Then there is AWP, seasonal ladder, internal clan league and many other events and games.

Right now I think the biggest problem of MDL is, that it has attracted a lot of very good players and average and low level players avoid this ladder. This leads to a very hard competition. If these low level players join the ladder they start with 1500 elo points and play against players, which are way better than them. This can be really frustrating.

Maybe it is an idea to create games with open seats and promote MDL in these games. I do not know if an advertisement at the end of such a game could be done by a Mod in future versions of WL, but maybe thats an idea.

In general I think, we need to attract more average level players (everyone likes to win some games).

How does the rating system work on MDL? Do ratings expire?

If I could play a bit, and then pause if I get busy with other things/have too many new templates, and then resume w/o taking a rating hit because of a break then I think I would get round to playing MDL sooner.

Games expire after 5 months but I think only a certain amount of games count towards your rating (like most recent x number or so?). Don't worry about ratings just hit it up and see if you like it :P

I think the Packs sound interesting but imo advertising and a wider range of skills is more important (obviously not so much you can do about that but perhaps the Packs might help lead to a greater diversity in skill )

Edited 4/7/2017 21:26:30

yeah i also think template variety is positive rather than negative, there are couple of expections, but most templates seem to be so that you can play them at least relatively well even if you have never tried that template before (and you can always check games for that template which should help too)
though this might still be a problem for a player whose main interest is superhigh win rate and ratings, that kind of player might find a problem with not knowing each template perfectly, but perhaps MDL is more about finding new templates and having fun than being only about how high rank/ratings you can reach? It's propably not even possible to make one ladder so that it has great variety and is fun to play and also fits for player whose only interest are win rates and ratings
Also about the issue with need of more players i think that the main problem might be only certain corner of WL might even really know about MDL and spreading it to those who don't know about it might help to get more players but also help with the issue with the average skill level being quite high (which in turn might help to get back some of the players who had left cause they thought that the MDL was too hard for them)
since it seems that only couple of clans have more than two or three ppl in MDL, one way to get more might be that those players in clans with only them or one or two other players from that clan in MDL could perhaps advertise MDL for their clanmates, buns's idea of letting clan with most games finished/most players on top 30 and so on to decide about template swapping could be modified for this, there have been polls about some settings of some templates i think (and might have been about templates as well) so what if this would be implemented so that say once in month (or weekly or whichever time period is good) there would be some possible changes with templates/template settings amd say clan with most active players on MDL could choose one thing, then perhaps clan with most players on top 20 could choose one thing and so on this might be good incentive to get players recruit their clanmates for MDL, i don't know perhaps there could even be some sort of clan leaderboard haha (this wouldn't actually even need to be clan-based, it could be player based so that player with most games and player who has recruited most could get to choose from templates/template settings, but i don't know how feasible it was to do in that way(to know who has recruited which new players)

Edited 4/7/2017 21:41:24

I am still of opinion that 2 things should be integrated in WL : MDL as an official 1v1 ladder and Muli's userscript.

If you want a high rank and rating with easy wins on a boring template, join the 1vs1 ladder. If you prefer diversity and good competition with a great opportunity to learn, join the mdl.