APIs could help. However, if it's not an official piece of core WZ, pretty the rewards are all gone, and would people care anymore?

@Arrow
How does abandoning CW solve any problems whatsoever? That's like if 2 kids are arguing over what game to play, just cancel all games whatsoever.

However, if it's not an official piece of core WZ, pretty the rewards are all gone, and would people care anymore?

The rewards can only be spent in-game, so the ultimate value comes from enjoyment of the game/event itself.

Considering CW is entirely contested within Warzone Classic, it seems strange to me that the rewards are effectively only for Warzone Idle. Obviously he’s trying to promote people playing both games, but it severely limits the incentive for anyone who only plays Classic to care at all about it.

If I want to play a game why should I play CW, when QM has better templates, happens whenever I want, and the CW rewards are meaningless to me as a non idle player?

@Beren
Indeed, seems no reason for you to play it at all. And you're in a non-capped clan, so it doesn't harm the clan that you don't play if they were to decide to try to be competitive in CW. They can still find up to 40 more to participate. It's only harmful if you're in a capped clan that wants to be competitive and can't invite a new member b/c a non-CW player is consuming a spot.

@l4v
Easy to say but let's be honest, people tend to go to wherever there are rewards, like GC, like CW, etc. Why just "play the game" when you can "play the game and get rewards". When both options exist, people will trend to the second. Unless like Beren, the rewards don't really matter to them (which is fine). And the point me and many others are making (including Beren), is that CW in itself isn't fun enough to just play on its own. The templates aren't great, the timeslots are terrible, etc, and thus it's really the draw of the rewards that it's relying on to generate activity, which is bad. It really should be made easy, accessible, fun enough to stand on its own so even if there weren't rewards, people would play it. As Beren stated, what does it really offer that QM already doesn't offering either at the same level or better? The answer of course is Rewards. That's it. It would probably be more effective to just find a way to merge CW to rely on QM matches rather than be a net new and inferior system.

I'd agree with Beren, I played idle for a brief period of time, got bored of it, and as a result, stopped playing clanwar.

^ krinid, that's my point more or less. The CW rewards have value because they can be used for additional enjoyment in-game (on Idle). So ultimately people still play strictly (directly or indirectly) for entertainment.

@Beren: Wordscapes' team tournament model on top of QM could be really nice: https://wordfinder.yourdictionary.com/blog/how-do-wordscapes-tournaments-work/

Basically, what if CW was just a measure of how active your clan is on QM?

Alternatively, CW could become something with more meaningful clan vs. clan clash instead of just a "which clans are more active?" ranking.

Edited 9/6/2021 03:34:45

Yeah Clan vs Clan is smarter. Like have templates and lineup like Clan leagues, but its only against 2 clan like a ladder. So for every win you get x points and for every clan loss, you get -x points. This way, clan wars can replace clan leagues, and provide a much better input of where each clan stands in terms of ranking/rating. So i suggest to make a clan wars ladder.

@knyte, what you linked regarding Wordscapes seems to me like a better way to do this, though Fizzer is rather committed to the CW-style competition, rather than a competition just built on top of QM.

@krinid, I missed one positive of playing CW over QM (for me at least). While matchmaking in CW is not great for reasons that have been discussed many times here, it is still better than in QM. If I play a CW game I am almost guaranteed to play someone in Masters due to my clan's CW rating and the fact that my template taste overlaps with theirs (i.e. i won't play at all unless the template is FB, Guiroma, Strat MME, MA+LD, and Strat ME if it's a template?). In QM only about 1/10 games is against an opponent who can give me a competitive match. The improved matchmaking is a function of the scarcity - if games were ad hoc we'd be back in the QM matchmaking situation.

The matchmaking benefit of CW varies based on a player's skill level relative to their clan. Players who are significantly better or worse than their clanmates instead get worse matchmaking (at least if we posit that the goal of matchmaking should be to create more evenly-matched games*), so clans where skill levels are less uniform (e.g., TSFH) don't reap the same matchmaking benefit. Some people join with the expectation that they'll almost certainly lose, others with the expectation that they'll almost certainly win. Over two seasons of CW (for both of which I had above-average skill relative to my clanmates), I can hardly remember any even matchups even though my skill level in general is middling enough that the ladders & QM are able to accommodate reasonable parity over half the time.

The scarcity is a good point, though. The ceiling for matchmaking quality is set by opponent availability so, in a real-time event, having a large number of people all playing at/around the same time can provide serious advantages if the matchmaking algorithm tries to optimize for evenly-matched games.

* Which may not be a good assumption here, since CW matchmaking- by rating at the clan level rather than individual level- directly does not attempt to optimize for individual matchup quality. Another thing we probably need to gather data for if we want to have some basis for claiming individual-skill-based matchmaking would lead to a better experience. This is interesting, because almost all other matchmaking systems I've seen simply assume that they should optimize for even matches.

Edited 9/6/2021 23:50:48