Okay, okay, I know.

Every now and then suggestions to improve CW pop up.

To the extent they haven't been suggested already:

1. I would decrease the # players/ day to 20, to give smaller clans (more) equal opportunities.

2. It would be cool to have template rotation, kinda like in CL, based on a voting system.

I'm gonna get MH backlash now, but, come on, do we really need 3 SE templates, especially SEAD, when there are so many better ones?

SE are short and simple and thus as far as I am concerned the best ones.
SEAD do seem to attract all the boys to the yard, one would suspect it's milkshake is better than the others but if I were to teach you more I'd have to charge.

Lowering the clan cap and rotating templates have been suggested before (among many other things) with a resounding silence from our overlord Fizzer (peace be upon him) so don't hold your breath

I feel like lowering the clan cap to 20 would result in more participation from small clans. The few clans that have over 20 players participating would lose some players that want to participate to other clans. I feel like this would either result in a very competitive competition for first place (imagine having 5 clans full of M’Hunters or Mythbusters players) Or just having so many clans participating that the chance of getting top 20 for rewards is almost impossible and would eventually make more players not want to participate…

Also it would shorten the season by a few days most likely and would result in some of the top clans who are trying to get as many rewards as possible not getting those rewards. The 25 territories reward is already basically impossible for everyone not in Myth busters or M’Hunters and even if Fizzer lowered the requirements it would still be hard for many clans to get some of these rewards. I’m not opposed to shorter seasons but it might be hard for any clan to hit 25 territories or whatever the adjusted number of territories would be.

The main statistics of a good CW system are accessibility (if you want to play CW, you can), versatility (if you move clans, clanmate goes inactive, or are on vacations, it should not hinder CW progress) and competitiveness (since MH want to be the best).

Reducing cap damages accessibility and versatility (one player going on vacation will now have a bigger impact).


How do you fulfil all needs? Easily. Remove the cap. Let everybody from the clan play, even several times per day. This improves accessibility and versatility. How to keep competitiveness? Make only the first 40 games from your clan count towards PvP (zone captures). All other wins would contribute to idle bonuses, but not to zone captures.

I agree with most of the above points, with some nuances.

Reducing the player cap to 20 does, to some extent, hinder accessibility, but not too much. For instance, Partisans has around 50 members, yet less than 10 really play CW each day. From what I see, it's no different in other clans.

Sure, MB, MH, ... may fill the roster every day, but that's the result of begging, begging and more begging.

Reducing the cap to 20 and allowing accounts to play multiple times/day would result in a system where only the people that are actually interested will play and you can still fill the roster.

This would achieve both accessibility and versatility.
On top, you would have a system where it would be possible/easier for smaller clans to fill the roster; achieving competitiveness. (in terms of participation) across the board of clans.

As per the wiki and comments by Fizzer, the entire idea if CW was to create a competition where smaller clans have as fair a chance as bigger/more experienced clans. Clearly, that goal has been missed. Right now, it's all determined by how many players/day a clan can roster. If the majority of those are good, you end up top 2. No offence to Neeps, but the main reason you are 3rd is because you can roster a lot, each day, rather than because your guys are impressive.

As to the SE templates: fair enough, yes, they lead to short games, which I think is positive. I also prefer a 5 to 10min CW participation over a potential 1+h MME LD game.

But, at the very least, SEAD should be scrapped. That has nothing to do with competition, it's a pure lottery. And it affirms the impact of the number of players you roster. The more lottery tickets you can buy, the higher your chance of winning...

in the original risk you rolled dice, I don't mind a little luck involved. sead is not my favorite but it is very popular and at least a fast paced game

Let everybody from the clan play, even several times per day.

This also improves competitiveness by making CW winnable for non-elite clans just by mustering participation. While it advantages uncapped (pre-5.08) clans, having sustained very high participation in CW requires a lot of organization so I'd expect the clans doing this to back off after a couple seasons and for the winner of CW to change more often than at present.

was to create a competition where smaller clans have as fair a chance as bigger/more experienced clans. Clearly, that goal has been missed

+1000

CW is about as competitive as a "Who is the tallest person?" competition.

SEAD should be scrapped. That has nothing to do with competition, it's a pure lottery

This is not true, especially at the level of skill typical of SEAD CW games. As AI put it, SEAD has a 'skill ceiling.' CW gameplay generally does not run into that ceiling and there is a ton of strategy to SEAD gameplay even though it can be simplified to 'deny your opponent the win.' Even at my skill level on SEAD, the Elo model can fit just fine [how well the Elo model can fit results is a good measure of how skill-driven a game or template is- Elo assumes that P(A beats C) can be derived from P(A beats B) and P(B beats C), but this runs into trouble if you have a skill cap issue/etc.- suppose that there's enough luck in a game that no one can win against anyone more than 95% of the time. If A is so much better than B that they should win 95% of the time, and B is so much better than C that they win 95% of the time, you'd expect A to beat C some ridiculously high fraction (>99%) of the time; since they won't be able to beat C more than 95% of the time, you'll get an Elo contradiction where A's implied rating from P(A beats B) and A's implied rating from P(A beats C) is hundreds of points apart. In a perfectly skill-driven game, the core Elo assumption will never break, although Elo's specific distributional assumptions might not quite hold.]

At your level of skill, SEAD is probably not very fun, though. I'll concede that. We do need a rotation of templates with strategic merit to make CW fun for more people.

The more lottery tickets you can buy, the higher your chance of winning...

This isn't how CW works. CW uses ladder-style ratings for matchmaking (Clan War ratings are just TrueSkill), and then ranks clans basically based on # of wins. This means that, participation equal, CW just measures how well your clan stresses the ladder- i.e., how much the ladder matchmaking struggles to get your win rate to 50%. For clans near the middle of the CW rating distribution, it's pure participation however you slice it: if you win, you increase the Clan War rating, and your win will eventually translate into an additional loss for your clan due to the increased rating (remember, perfect matchmaking would imply a 50% win rate for everyone). If you lose, you reduce the rating and your loss eventually becomes a teammate's win. There's a lot of nuance to it because rating and matchmaking are far from perfect, but the Platonic ideal of a ladder system is to drive everyone's win rate to 50%, which is why rating and matchmaking at the clan level was a poor game design decision that sucks the fun out of CW by making players' individual skill levels only matter if they're in clans at the margins. For a clan like Partisans, a player could really, really improve on their skill level and not increase their value at all in CW because all their additional wins will just be offset by teammates' losses.

I think once you understand those mechanics, they become a little demoralizing and CW starts to feel like a chore. This, not just participation, is why only a few clans- with well-above average skill levels- are true contenders for the #1 spot in CW. Only they are able to sustain >50% win rates. A clan that wins 60/40 only needs 34 games/day to keep ahead of a 50/50 clan that plays 40. A clan that wins 65/35 needs just 31. And at some extreme like 80/20 (super-elite clan), you're unbeatable by an average (50/50) clan if you can play just 26 games/day.

Edited 8/22/2022 09:19:01

Very interesting insights.

Just fyi, my lottery comment was with regard to SEAD. Despite the strat and skill+factors definitely present, I can't be rid of the impression that they are muted by the luck factor.

But, I get your point about the skill ceiling and I agree that CW needs such a template.

Edited 8/22/2022 08:09:56

Just fyi, my lottery comment was with regard to SEAD. Despite the strat and skill+factors definitely present, I can't be rid of the impression that they are muted by the luck factor.

That was clear to me. My response was that SEAD is not unique in this regard, due to how CW matchmaking works.

I agree that SEAD as a template lacks strategic merit, at least by competitive Warlight standards. It's the centerpiece (along with SE1W) of the casual scene, though. Imo, the ideal CW time slot has both SEAD or SE1W & some strat template from a rotating roster (since competitive players need variety), so that the games themselves are enjoyable.

Edited 8/22/2022 08:42:44

That's not even remotely accurate and you know it. People can't grow or shrink but clans can certainly lose "tall players" to collectively "shrink" or gain tall players to "grow". MB managed to be "taller" than MH for a season, and is preparing to do next season as well.

CW is about as competitive as a "Who is the tallest person?" competition.

Also you make a case for SEAD being more competitive than people give it credit for, call it the centerpiece of CW, but then say CW isn't competitive. I guess you mean CW isn't competitive in the same way that CL is? eg: a competition of only strategic templates with a relatively small # of games by players per clan. I'll agree that they're competitive in different ways. And obviously I'll agree that it's not competitive in the best way either. It is competitive by a formula of skill * exhaustion (a snide way of saying skill matters, so does persistence/participation).

It would be interesting to see a season where the templates were voted in, and maybe even so a given template can't be in more than for example 2 of 3 consecutive seasons before it goes on cooldown for a month. Given the natures of the queues during timeslots (and your stats that you've pulled), I suspect season #1 would end up with the most popular templates as SEAD, SE1W, SECB, S1v1. Not sure after that, but if that continued for 2 seasons, would be interesting to see what the 3rd season would bring.

Though given how CW is implemented today, rather than a standard voting system, we're more likely to get a monkey's paw implementation of what we ask for, perhaps an implied voting system similar to the algorithm that determines the # of templates per timeslot, where every sign up during a timeslot counts as a vote for that template, no cooldowns, and the highest voted templates becomes what persists the season after.

In the end, let's just be happy it's not the entire QM selection, where we could get Siege, Duel, Castles and a bunch of other junk.

I like your proposal wrt the voting system.

However, for obvious reasons, I would include a cap on the number of votes per clan.

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In the end, let's just be happy it's not the entire QM selection, where we could get Siege, Duel, Castles and a bunch of other junk.
Defenitely!

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It is competitive by a formula of skill * exhaustion (a snide way of saying skill matters, so does persistence/participation).
Absolutely true about the exhaustion.

Though not a perfect fix, having a predetermined (and moderate) season-length would provide some alleviation.
If you know how many days the season is still to last, at least you can convince yourself to "give it all for the remaining x days".

Now, one can only make an educated guess and uncertainty kills enthusiasm.

Edited 8/22/2022 13:39:33

CW is a mix of participation and skill.
Most of the people don't even play. In my days in World League, heck, and even in my days in Fahrenheit, there are always those players who occupy one slot and not play anymore. This resulted in actual skilled people having to fight for first on a slot to 40, hence missing on more talent in CW.
My approach was always the same: scrap the 40 player cap of clans and CW. This way talent are not trapped by the fixed limit, more competition and the fight for talent, and increasing participation by a lot. Decreasing the limit to 20 would only make things worse, making competition higher, thus decreasing the chances of smaller clans . Just imagine: if more high-tiered clans are created to challenge the dominace of current clans, wouldn't it be harder for new people to start out?

On scrapping SEAD, SEAD creates a game that balances skill (both gameplay skill and template-picking strategy skill) and luck. You can face a random small-clan person, and he might end up in a much better start than yours, increasing the skill required for the higher-level to win. Removing SEAD means that a safe haven for smaller clans and weaker players is removed, thus decreasing the chances of such players to win, which ends up in a negative cycle: less players are attracted to CW, less players are more interested in competitive warzone, less talent in WZ , and eventually, high-tiered leagues like CL...

I think we agree on SEAD.
And, moreover, on the point that there should be a few "roll-the-dice" templates, to equalize the chances for less-skilled players.

Even if that would result in the better-skilled players avoiding those templates, it would still (and even more) reach its goal: lesser-skilled or time-constrained players would be matched against similar opponents.

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But, in addition to that, and I think we also agree on that, the player-cap should be reduced and the 1 game/day/player should be abandoned.

In the current settings, (smaller-member) CL Division A clans like One, Python can't compete with MH and MB.
They should have a fair chance.

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If not, CW is a missed opportunity.

Edited 8/22/2022 14:45:25

Why do some people want to turn CW into CL? We already have CL, a great event for skilled players, which however has its own issues (arguably even more serious than CW). And those people focus on ruining CW (about that later), instead of improving CL.

I would guess, that people play CW for 2 reasons:
1. Clan promotion (clan rank on the profile page, order of clans in clan page, etc) and CW spam in GC

I really think that this is the MINOR reason of two, because (have just checked) only 5 of 14 CL Div A+B clans bother to mention their CL achievements on their clan page.

And this issue, better be fixed by the increasing the promotion of CL.
BTW, did you know that Community Events page (https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?CommunityEvents=1) currently still offers people to join Clan League 14?

2. Rewards, mainly for Idle.

And I believe, that this the main reason for majority of players! Competitiveness of CW is a made-up thing like "eating most hotdogs in a minute", which arises from the competitive nature of humans, who can make competition out of anything. Scrap the rewards, and NEETs will not play CW at all.

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What would really stir up participation and enjoyment from CW, is getting more rewards for less efforts.

Now to the ideas mentioned here (not writing about other ideas, because there are plenty of topics on the forum).

- Decrease the # players/ day to 20

I would argue, that without any other changes, that would only harm CW participation and enjoyment. This seems to be already discussed above.

- Decrease the # players/ day to 20 and scrap the limits

This seems interesting, but someone need to think over the details. Without limit at all, we might end with try-hard clans

Also I already envision someone crazy enough by himself or making a Selenium-bot, who will play S1v1 with autopilot and just destroying the rankings. (We had people who were farming lottos, just to up their level, sure we will get CW farmers too)

- Remove the cap. Let everybody from the clan play, even several times per day. Make only some games from your clan count towards PvP (zone captures). All other wins would contribute to idle bonuses, but not to zone captures.

Yes, that's good.

- It would be cool to have template rotation, kinda like in CL, based on a voting system.

Yep, that's good, but...

/- Come on, do we really need 3 SE templates, especially SEAD, when there are so many better ones?

Yes, we need SE templates, especially SEAD.

That's the stats for 30 clans with most played 1v1 games this CW season:

Clan Name: Favorite template (game percentage of 1v1 templates)

M'Hunters: Small Earth Commander and Bomb Card (0.39)
Myth Busters: Strategic 1v1 (0.23)
NEETs: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.49)
Harmony: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.29)
Excel: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.38)
The Last Alliance: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.34)
Le Furie Azzurre: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.35)
Polish Eagles: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.44)
Partisans: Small Earth 1 wasteland (0.23)
The Fancy Dot ●: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.35)
{101st}: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.35)
Battle Wolves: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.41)
[Blitz]: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.37)
Eagle Fang Dojo: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.41)
Alien Elite: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.4)
Italia Caput Mundi: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.35)
Mothership: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.32)
HAWKS: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.38)
The Boiz Army: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.4)
Celtica: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.32)
WORLD LEAGUE: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.45)
CORP: Small Earth 1 wasteland (0.35)
ONE!: Strategic 1v1 (0.24)
Flunky Fizzers: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.37)
Cats: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.53)
German Warlords: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.38)
SPARTA: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.29)
Fifth Column Confederation: Small Earth Commander and Bomb Card (0.18)
ズKING: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.46)
Special Forces: Small Earth 1v1 Auto Dist (0.41)

Out of my head I believe that only one template could top SEAD. Adding Duel Lotto to the pool might be a game changer.

Edited 8/22/2022 20:22:25

Thanks for sharing.

A few thoughts:

1. Re the 2 reasons you list, that would be the main motivation for people to engage in CW:

1.1. Clan promotion: in my opinion, except for clan management, no-one cares about the CW rank on a clan's profile page, nor about the position of the clan in the last of clans.

1.2. Rewards: they are a nice to have, but I doubt that's the reason for people to play CW. If that were the case, people would stop playing after 1 game and/or 1 win, because that would enable them for the reward (assuming they don't care about the number of territories and, hence, the size of the reward).

2 RE (BTW, NEETs are moving to an uncapped clan next season...) : it's rather inappropriate to use this topic for stealth advertising/clan promotion. I invite you to edit your post.

Thanks.

Edited 8/22/2022 19:37:25

That's not even remotely accurate and you know it. People can't grow or shrink but clans can certainly lose "tall players" to collectively "shrink" or gain tall players to "grow". MB managed to be "taller" than MH for a season, and is preparing to do next season as well.

MB had very high average clan skill level- 540 CW rating right now (#2). My point about the Ursus Problem is that it's a collective action problem: "tall" players only add to "tall" clans- so it only works for MB like scenarios where you have a bunch of "tall" players at once. It's more than remotely accurate; it's how the fundamental mechanics of CW work. You saw this happen yourself when you were in TSFH where the clan would push very hard to try to win but never be able to keep up with (sustainably) higher-skilled MASTERs and M'Hunters. It's because, as good as Ursus and others were, having them participate offered nothing to TSFH that you wouldn't have also gotten from your weakest player. Meanwhile, M'H and MASTERs got much more mileage individually out of players substantially worse than Ursus- because well-above-average-skill players can only contribute collectively, by forming well-above-average-skill clans.

This is why MASTERs comfortably dominated while they played, then M'Hunters rocketed to the top and stayed there when MASTERs left, and were only displaced by Myth Busters. CW is only winnable by "tall" clans (relative to the pack- the bar has been getting lower each season as, other than M'H, high-skill players and clans have been leaving CW). For a clan like NEETs otoh, there's literally no difference between me playing for them once a day & Rufus, the best player in the game, playing for them once a day. That's demoralizing for players. Skilled or not, win or lose, what matters most- unless you're in a "tall" clan- is just whether you consistently show up. This also turns CW into a funnel to move "tall" players out of clans that aren't "tall."

Imo, this makes CW & the 40-cap two of the most destructive things that have ever been done to the Clan system. Players created clans to foster communities they could play with. Part of this was player development- clans in the past put extreme effort (e.g., https://tinyurl.com/csldata) into developing their players' skill levels and to add value to their game experience, in part motivated by incentives from CL and other sundry community events. Now that CW has created a central focus for (most) clans and framed players' expectations for clans, it's substantially narrowed what clans can become and limited their value to players. Developing and recruiting skilled players in a non-skilled clan is an even more uphill battle, as is building a clan that caters to old subcommunities like diplomacy or FFA- the newbie-to-clan pipeline is now built around CW.

In the long run of CW, every clan will become as useless and dead as Flunky Fizzers. CW delenda est. I'm not even exaggerating- we're paying a big price and will continue to do so because a game dev who has had very little experience with a fundamentally player-built aspect of the game decided to rework it entirely, overnight, unannounced.

M'Hunters think they're on top of the world. In reality, they were the first and to date biggest victims of CW. We lost one of the biggest forces for creating player value and in turn got a CW-obsessed clan that has to defend CW because winning CW is the only thing it's got going for it.

Also you make a case for SEAD being more competitive than people give it credit for, call it the centerpiece of CW, but then say CW isn't competitive

CW is a casual event, regardless of which templates it has, because of how its mechanics largely measure participation and how it's more or less stacked to only be winnable by a necessarily small number of "tall" clans. It's unexciting tbqh.

SEAD is a casual template with more strategic merit than people give it credit for, but low strategic merit by the standards of the Warlight competitive scene. There's no contradiction here, just an overloaded use of the word 'competitive.'

Why do some people want to turn CW into CL?

Warlight has 4 scenes:

- real-time competitive: this was the RTL and now -B's RTL, both of which are dead; there's also WGL, which is sporadic and requires coordination to work
- multi-day competitive: this is the MTL and Clan League, as well as the ladders
- real-time casual: this is CW & real-time QM
- multi-day casual: this is multi-day QM

This separation isn't forced; it's a product of the built-in events' mechanics. The community can't build casual events because it has no platform to market community events like the MTL to the bulk of the playerbase. This also shuts the community out of building real-time events, which similarly need a large player pool to work. Only Fizzer can create enough visibility for events to attract large enough player-bases for real-time and/or casual events, so the community events are generally just multi-day competitive (with the exception of WGL, which uses scheduling to have a sizable playerbase when it needs one).

But this division of scenes isn't natural. If you look at tetr.io or Pokemon Unite or chess or even Super Smash Bros, there's a continuity between the "casual" and "competitive" scenes- the "competitive" scenes are just the highest levels of the same scenes in which casuals play; competitive chess players don't abandon lichess the way WZ's best players generally give up on QM. Doing this with WL is not a novel idea- when QM was first created, Deadman pondered whether it could just replace the MTL. The only reason it can't is because QM's mechanics are set up (both the template selection and- more importantly- the rating/matchmaking) so that it has no competitive merit and therefore the competitive scene has to be created elsewhere.

Separating the scenes causes them to cannibalize one another because people don't have infinite participation time. In the ideal world, imo, CL/CW would be subsumed by a single clan-level event that covers the real-time & multi-day & casual & competitive scenes (so a versatile event that people can play casually or seriously) and QM/MTL/RTL could be replaced by a similar individual-level event. But the only path to this has to go through Fizzer since Community Events simply can't attract large-enough playerbases to sustain casual or RT scenes.

The casual/competitive conflict is entirely manufactured!

Edited 8/22/2022 19:52:24

Guys, why do you think that it is CW that cannibalizes CL and not visa versa? (at least i think so, please, correct me if i am wrong)

That's the estimate, which I did during previous CW season
- CW has a few hundred participants (550+ prev season) and a few thousand games played (~3k prev season) every season (=1 month)
- CL has 460 players and 1-1.5k games played in half a year.

Participation in CW in terms of playerbase is higher than in CL. If that's is due to the event format, then why do some suggestions still try to make CL out of CW.

My bet would be: it is because of idle prizes (and then my logic in the post above). Because all other stuff may be done better in CL with no need for Fizzer to take active management.

Edited 8/22/2022 20:35:48