That’s as close as it gets! When votes are this close, I lean towards keeping things as they are. So the map will stay on Medium Earth.
Most people want to keep it on random, so on random it will stay.
Increased to 20 it is!
The luck modifier will be reduced to 0%!
Rounding mode will stay on weighted random.
Blockade card will stay at 351%.
This one is close, but the majority want the matchmaking range reduced. I agree it should be reduced. The original 30% value was set when the ladder was much smaller, and back then games were created much more slowly due to the more limited number of opponents. I say let’s try 20% and see how it goes.
The game expiration time shall be increased! I think it makes sense to move it to 5 months to line up with the 2v2 ladder.
Four roughly equal quadrants -- you guys can’t agree on anything! The 2v2 ladder expiration time will stay where it is.
This is an interesting one! For a long time I’ve wanted to see a new map for the 2v2 ladder. Final Earth edges out the other contenders, and I agree it’s a great map.
2v2 blockade card will stay at 500%.
Most people like the idea of requiring games to be consecutive. However…
Most people also like the idea of switching from Bayeselo to TrueSkill. I generally like the idea of switching the 1v1 and 2v2 ladders to TrueSkill, however it also involves a lot of code-changes so it won’t happen as fast as the other changes in this poll.
TrueSkill is an even better improvement than the change to require consecutive games. For one thing, requiring consecutive games only fixes one specific part of the way people try to exploit the ladder – there are still other ways that would be left unaffected. TrueSkill has other benefits as well, such as giving you your rating updates as soon as each game finishes, and getting rid of the steep game expiration cutoff. This is backed up by the numbers as well -- of the voters that didn’t select the “don’t care” option, a higher percentage of voters wanted TrueSkill than the consecutive games change.
Here are the results of the seasonal ladder feature polls. 1 indicates a dislike, and 5 indicates a like.
Real-time ladder:
Most people favor using banking boot times. Sounds good to me -- we’ll try it as an experiment and see how it goes.
Voters overwhelmingly favor hiding who is online. I agree with the sentiment, but this has some technical problems in implementing it perfectly. It’s easy to remove the list from the main real-time ladder page, and also remove the online status from the individual player’s ladder page. However, someone could still look at the list of recently finished games, and then compare that to their list of games that person is in to see who recently became available on the ladder. If the total count of players was shown, this could be combined with the previous list to give a pretty accurate picture of who is online.
Perhaps this could be countered by hiding real-time games until a few hours after they’re done. This just feels like a bad solution though. Even if that was done, there will always be some ways of figuring out who might be playing that can’t be stopped, such as people that play at predictable schedules or if someone always joins the RT ladder when they’re online.
When I originally developed the real-time ladder, I was hoping it would draw bigger numbers. If there were more people online all the time, I feel that hiding the list would be less important since, if there’s a large list of people online, you have less control over what opponent you’ll get. Certainly there’s a lot that can be done to increase the draw of the real-time ladder – the items in this poll is a start, and the process for joining a game can be streamlined to avoid making players refresh their list manually while waiting for a game to get created.
This one will stay on the backburner for now since I’m not sure how to best implement it. I’d like to open it up for discussion though – please post your ideas or thoughts!
Half of the voters voted for more templates, and the rest were split between keeping it at 10 and reducing it. The biggest problem with adding more templates is that it makes the ladder less approachable for new players, since most competitive players would want to learn all of the templates before joining. Players who don’t take the time to learn the templates before joining will likely get frustrated with losses and stop playing the ladder.
There’s also an element of this poll that needs to be considered. The players voting in this poll tend to be the most hard-core and active WarLight players. In some cases, this can skew the results away from what the average player wants, and I wonder if this is one of those cases. One of my core overarching philosophies for WarLight is to keep it simple and approachable for new players, and increasing the number of templates beyond 10 really stands out as something that’s counter to this philosophy.
What do you think? Please post your thoughts!
Real-time templates to remove: 5 means keep it, 1 means remove it.
Real time templates to add: 5 means add it, 1 means don’t add it:
Close race! China 1v1 has the most positive votes (4s and 5s). Treasure Map and Turkey are tied for the second most positive votes, but Treasure Map has more 5s and fewer negative votes, so it edges it out. Season XI and Season II were the lowest-voted templates on the to-remove list, so those two will be replaced with Treasure Map and China.
There will be a blog post soon announcing all of the changes coming in the first wave. Thanks to everyone who voted!
