You stuck up assholes are why I essentially quit this game

they're arguing over...1 joke? it's not even offensive joke!

As someone who recently joined the MDL, I say that only half the issue of why low-mid tier guys were addressed here. You guys talked about the need to reach and educate the low-mid tier players, which is inherently the first hurdle that needs to be jumped if you want to have them join the MDL.

The issue that I didn't see mentioned is retaining low-mid tier players, which I guess is going to be MUCH trickier. IMO the MDL as is right now isn't designed for mid-tier players. There are always exceptions, but for the most part, those guys have a tendency to teach themselves gameplay on a single map. Why do you think ROR is so popular? I know when I was starting out it took me a while to branch out to more than 3 maps. I didn't really branch out until I was confident in my understanding of how to play the basics. I didn't like feeling lost on a new map. Honestly, even now I'm sometimes just not in the mood to start with 0 knowledge and just want a game I know. To many newer players, that feeling is amplified for reasons stated above.

If you want the MDL to succeed with mid-tier players, I think a restriction on what maps are played is going to be necessary. New players should start with the lowest rating possible, and as their rating improves, new maps are unlocked. If they are drop in ratings, their map availability drops also. As a side note, I also think the total number of maps needs to be reduced. I think even experienced players don't want to learn so many new maps. Variety is nice, but sometimes it feels like a chore when every game you need to analyze the map in full.

Edit: Don't eat dinner mid-forum post...you'll come back and realize this is NOT the forum to post this idea.

Edited 4/14/2017 00:26:25

This is highly amusing to me and of course I'm on team ps. No one wants to exclude players and I think this CLOT teaches other people how to play. Tired of asshole "elitists"? There are some here willing to play with you and I guarantee most will help you if you so desire. If not then just play a game and enjoy. There are a multitude of templates and if you don't like one then veto it. This is the best CLOT I have seen since joining WL. I don't play it much but it's fun and great way to learn new templates. If this is not supported then we only get ladders littered with commanders.

Zack Fair: Deadman is working on a template packages system to address that.

TL;DR: I think all you really need is community. People will give you all sorts of reasons for why they won't join a ladder, but in reality my experiences suggest that it's because it's full of strangers or doesn't have enough people they know/interact with and ultimately just seems orthogonal to their own Warlight experience.

Also for the record, where are people getting the impression that I came here to trash MDL?

I know that Great Expanse, Benoit, and others have talked on other threads about a project I'm working on and mischaracterized it as something built to take people away from MDL; in all frankness, I don't think they fully understand what the project is. To reiterate for one last time, I'm on 'team ps' insofar that I want MDL to grow, only came in here to help out ps (and totally missed the video URL in the top post, thinking this was just a memepost- my bad; I was actually curious as to why no one had mentioned the nice video that had popped up on the MDL homepage), and am not interested in trashing or damaging a ladder that I really like and am currently playing 9 games on...

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@Zack: I think your hypothesis probably has merit, but I think the implementation you suggested would have some undesired side-effects (salvageable, though, and also pretty much every first iteration of something has its flaws). Ultimately up to MotD/Muli, though.

Template anxiety is a good point; that's the most common complaint within the Hydra Discord when people say they're not joining MDL (sad reacts only).

I also think that community is important when it comes to retaining players. Like The Lord pointed out, I haven't contributed anything lasting or concrete to this community but for a while I did run a few public ladders (and by run, I mean spend an hour a day manually creating and checking on games- sad times) and I think some observations can be made off of those (and the CORP internal ladders they grew out of). IPL and CSL bot had a large number of templates (which were a common source of complaints); IPL 1v1 actually had about the same number of templates as MDL, although they weren't as varied (no Commanders, no MA, no LD) or frankly as consistently good as the ones Farah's put together for MDL.

The clan distribution looked pretty different from MDL, with two mid-tier clans leading the charge:



And before that, when I ran CORP (sad reacts only?) I had to try to get CORP players to join a strategic ladder with 29 1v1 templates. Managed to get about 1/3 of the clan; CSL was alive for 2 months, iirc, and by the end it had 41 players- not the biggest number, for sure, but I think it was moderately successful given that I was mainly working with a diplo clan. It had players like Niklas/AI and mm3100 (solid 1v1 players) at the end, but also players that still struggled to understand strategy (I mean that in the sense of "3 picks on a template with 3 starts") and didn't really have a chance of rising to the top quite then- kind of like the bottom of the 1v1 ladder, where players are just starting to get good at the basics.

In any case, I'll cut to the chase because I only came to this thread to offer whatever insights I'd gleaned from those experiences. I think the biggest factor in getting these players (or any player) was community; they didn't all stick around because they were good or because they liked/disliked the templates or even because the games were fun. I think they stuck around because people like them were on the ladder and it was a big event that was relevant to their experience on the site even when they weren't participating in it (at least with CORP, I tried to make the ladder a big deal).

Part of that involved me going around spending time PM'ing people, asking them for input, trying to get discussion going- but most of that didn't happen because of the people running the ladder and just grew organically as subgroups of CORP (like the "Dutch Mafia") joined. They stuck around because they talked to each other about it, played against each other, and invited more members of their subgroup to join.

They were able to have conversations about that ladder on their own wavelengths instead of in terms of the top player on the ladder. I think there were plenty of people on IPL that had no idea who Timinator or the other top players on that were- because it didn't matter to them. So that's why I chimed in here (probably not that successfully or intelligently, as Dogberry and ps pointed out) to say that maybe memeing about alhazi is only going to attract players who already have an idea of who alhazi is, not the sort of disconnected players that would actually round out the ladder.

I don't think MDL needs to change in any way for that; as far as ladder mechanisms go, it's already close enough to perfect that improvements don't matter. But being an 'unofficial' ladder props up some unique challenges and the only way to really address them is by trying to reach out to communities and talk to them on their own terms (Deadman doesn't have to do that himself, ofc).

Edited 4/14/2017 01:00:21

"TL;DR: I think all you really need is community. People will give you all sorts of reasons for why they won't join a ladder, but in reality my experiences suggest that it's because it's full of strangers or doesn't have enough people they know/interact with and ultimately just seems orthogonal to their own Warlight experience."

Flawed argument. If someone had this mentality they wouldn't join WarLight , They wouldn't join open games meaning they wouldn't be level X to join the ladder.

However , I agree with Knyte about the community aspect of ladder. I would love if the MDL had a designated chat that anyone can join on the actual mDL site so players (The medium-low tier players could ask questions and put suggestions) the learning experience should be a enjoyable one with plenty of resources. Videos are great though but nothing beats the real human interaction.

If I was a newbie and let's be honest the newbie would be bewildered of the new templates , I think instead of watching videos that don't go really into the basics bit more intermediate-advanced it would be nice to have a live chat so you could ask someone to give live help.

Knyte is on to something here and I could see great potential here for the MDL to perhaps exploit?

@Platinum: That's true. I was just leaving aside the phase where players are unclanned, disconnected/unaware from/of the community, and spend most of their time playing open games. Ime, it's really hard to get those sorts of players even when you find promising ones (I spent a bunch of time trying to quietly recruit to CORP skilled players from auto-games, like HotBeachBum, and I think I got maybe 1-2 from there; today I try to get random players I meet in auto-games to join the 1v1 ladder and still not much success there).

I don't really know whether there's a trick to recruiting disconnected random players. You don't really have a channel to pull them in and I think most of them aren't invested enough to do anything that requires more than a few clicks to understand and set up games. Might just be because I'm terrible at recruiting them, but I think the optimal route is just to wait until they join the community-at-large- the good ones almost always do.

Not sure about the chat; most sites with a designated chat but not a huge userbase (<1k) just have like 0-1 people active at any given time and it looks kinda bad. Even the big clan Discord servers are pretty inactive most of the time. I was just talking about trying to tap into existing communities and getting them to join in batches by finding their high-traffic nodes (i.e., players like OxTheAutist, Zephyrum, Semicedevine- in the case of diplo- that are connected to a lot of other players within their community and frequently communicate with them); the conversations could just happen in games or on the big discussion thread.

If MDL created its own chat channel, it would already be competing with clan Discord servers/Skype chats and in-game chats at the very least.

Another idea: see if you can get Fizzer to advertise it on Twitch at some point? They have a big silent crowd on there, I think. Might be hard, but Fizzer does seem really interested in community events and on friendly terms with just about everyone; he's a nice person and I think he'll at least be receptive.

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There actually is a version of the hypothesis in that previous post that accounts for what Plat pointed out, but I figured a sentence discussing click-through rates and exponential decay would probably get too unwieldy and make it too easy for me to accidentally say the exact opposite of what I mean.

Edited 4/14/2017 04:31:44

Ok so knyte has done something for the community - that's laudable.

As for criticism/advice, in my opinion people too often call others racist without there being much merit to the claim. I think that might put off some of us. Not that this has anything to do with the CLOT.

Hey I have suggestion to grow what ever it is you are talking about. Stop using acronyms(I mean what does CLOT even stand for?), and stop using inside jokes about player's who I have never played. These things create a barrier to entry. If you want midtier players like me to even take an interest in your thing, I need to understand what the thing is that you are talking about. You have a video for me to click, that's great, but why would I watch a 14 minute for a ladder I know nothing about, especially when this site already has a functioning ladder that suites my needs fine. I don't mean to sound like an asshole. I am more just saying, I've been playing for a year and half, and this is the first time I've taken an interest, because I have never understood what it is you are talking about. What is CLOT?

Edited 4/14/2017 05:47:01

CLOT: Custom Ladder Or Tournament. Basically a ladder that is made by players and not Warlight.
MDL: Multi-Day Ladder. There are real-time ladders and multi-day ladders.

The next question that I would need answered is why should I care about MDL? What value do I get from joining MDL? Again not meaning to sound offensive or insulting. I am sure MDL is a great thing, and it is ran well.

I guess what I am saying is if you want people to join your ladder, I believe your posts should clearly state what this thing is you are advertising. I would like to see something like this as a post:

"The Multiday Ladder (MDL) is ladder created by users of Warlight as an attempt to do [fill in the blank]. We believe this ladder is an improvement on the site's ladders for [blank reasons]. It is ran like [insert quick summary of how it works]. If you would like more information about this ladder or how to join please watch the following video:[insert link]."
Again not trying to insult anybody, this is just my opinion, formed via my own expirence.

The Multi-day Ladder thread pretty much covers all that. But here's the simple version: The Multi-Day Ladder is a 1v1 ladder with a bunch of templates, really high average player quality, reliable maintenance and updates, and an overall setup that stays exciting much longer than the 1v1 ladder manages to. You can also play more games at once.

Basically, you take the 1v1 ladder and add in all the popular improvements that people have been suggesting for years, and you get the Multi-Day Ladder. So it's worth your time because it actively tries to be, unlike the official ladders.

Check it out at https://md-ladder.cloudapp.net

Edited 4/14/2017 06:14:43

Move yourself
You always live your life
Never thinking of the MDL
Prove yourself
You are the move you make
Take your chances win or loser

See yourself
You are the strategies you take
You and you, and that's the only way

Convert, convert yourself
You're every move you make
So the turn goes...

The problem is this site is full of lonely assholes that feel the need to tear each other down and degrade one another because this one went to MIT or that one has a boat. It's ridiculous male bravado that is turning anyone who could give two shits off!

No one sees the value in the ladder or the forums because of the seething hatred coming from the posters.

Imagine if we all supported each other or pretended to care what the other had to say.
Imagine if we acted like a community instead of a bunch of lone wolf's fighting over scraps.

I'd say for shame, but you'd take it as an attack.

Edited 4/14/2017 08:09:05

Everybody agreeing is definitely worse.

Not sure why this thread turned into giving knyte abuse, he doesn't deserve it and it doesn't look good for anyone reading this thread.

The next question that I would need answered is why should I care about MDL? What value do I get from joining MDL? Again not meaning to sound offensive or insulting. I am sure MDL is a great thing, and it is ran well.

This point from joey I think sums it up nicely. This ladder will have the biggest appeal to people who have already played and burnt out on the 1v1 ladder. Trying to attract people who haven't done that yet is alot trickier.

I've been playing for a year and half, and this is the first time I've taken an interest, because I have never understood what it is you are talking about.

why should I care about MDL? What value do I get from joining MDL?

Any ladder (that uses a ranking system and a code for matching closely-ranked players) has the potential to contribute to your Warlight gaming skills.

This one, Master of the Dead's multi-day ladder (why not "multi-template ladder", by the way?), is different than most of the other ladders associated with Warlight, because of the number of 1v1 templates being used, almost all being really good, fun to play and meaningful: The number is 40 something - it is a high number, for sure. And there's a good variety.

Being an average WL player who gets bored easily with a certain template, MDL is something I was long waiting for. Frankly speaking, I was dreaming of something along this line (if I was a coder, I'd definitely do it myself). The high number of templates doesn't discourage or intimidate me at all - because as I see it, the point is not getting better in a number of templates but getting better in a number of skills. This is made possible on MDL thanks to the variety in templates. On top of this, some good players (e.g., ps and Master of the Dead) really spend a lot of energy and time on giving hints about the templates and overall gameplay - check the YouTube videos ps posts for instance.

In short, to answer why anyone should anyone be interested in the MDL: Skills come first, that's why (they're more important than winrates). And skills are improved by balancing critically repeated practice with challenging your skills in variety of situations. MDL is promising especially in this respect. It really awards you, especially if you are eager and ready to spend some time on Warlight to improve yourself.

Cool stuff, too bad it's 2k17 and wl is not hip anymore

First post in 2017 which literally made me laugh out loud.

Imagine if we all supported each other or pretended to care what the other had to say.
Imagine if we acted like a community instead of a bunch of lone wolf's fighting over scraps.

Yeah, but we don't and we are, so why bother?

Edited 4/14/2017 15:50:20