There is much discussion recently about CW improvement (probably as it always has been).

And there was an assumption that idle rewards dont matter for majority of CW players and dropping the rewards would not change much.

I cant estimate what would happen if any changes were imlemented, but I tried to estimate, how much of CW activity is actually done by idlers.

- Who is an idler? - Based on the stats of Prime (idle-focused clan), I would call an Idler anyone who has completed level 10 "The Siege of Feldmere" of WZI and has the "Defeat the Idle level The Siege of Feldmere" achievement. Also added EH level as a proxy for those who had ascended.
- Timespan - last 3 CW seasons from 17 to 19
- Activity % - lets measure how many games of total CW games are played by idlers

Disclaimer: Mostly by the responsible use of Warzone API data was gathered on >4k games from CW seasons 17-19 with >900 unique CW players.

The final results are:
- 75% of CW games are by players who have beaten level 10 in WZI
- 36% of CWgames by players who have beaten Europe Huge in WZI
- 8% of CW games by players who have super ascended WZI

So I would assume that idlers do matter! Idlers make 3/4 of CW activity. #MORECWREWARDS!

Someone might also predicted that result by the previous researches of template popularity (spoiler: SEAD is the most popular), but now we have better evaluation.

And here is a neat per-clan breakdown (players are attributed to a clan based on the last CW game, which they have played):


Edited 9/23/2022 00:51:23

I haven't reached Europe Huge, but I am only in it for the idle benefits. It is the be all and end all for me.

Trying to force a Dev to do something by having dozens of people boycott a game to bring in changes, some of which would drive even more players away and for which I doubt too many actually care one way or another, or to suggest harassment campaign like some have, for changes which deep down are probably more self serving than anything... this has to be a troll attempt.

But hey, go at it. I encourage it. Any players who resent being strong armed by their clam to playing on with some Don Quixote nonsense, I am sure you will find a welcoming home in Prime.

Let me preface that, regardless of the results of this analysis, I strongly support: #MORECWREWARDS!- especially if we can get them to distributed more consistently across a player's activity (rather than having large cliffs dependent on clanmate activity).

---

By your criterion, I am in those 75% of Idlers (https://www.warzone.com/Achievements?p=3022124041). I have not played Idle for months. It took me over a year to finish Reconquest. I have AdBlock and userscripts set up to hide as much as possible of Idle from my gameplay experience. I have never been motivated by Idle rewards to play CW; as you know, I join the raffles only to keep Idle rewards from reaching Idle addicts, the same way I buy half the fentanyl from my local dealers so that others may get pushed to finally quit. I play CW purely for interesting real-time games and- if I'm being brutally honest- so I can get a small dopamine hit out of probably facing a weak player and defeating them and feeling a little bit better about my ability in this game.

I'm definitely an edge case, but this illustrates the weakness in your looser criteria, especially when the biggest Idle players are often heavy Classic players as well- unlike the bulk of Prime. The fact that your analysis has the same Idler% for TLA, Prime, and Excel challenges your interpretation of the results- clearly Prime players are far more motivated by Idle rewards than their peers in TLA & Excel.

So it's a generous assumption that:
1) Having beaten Feldmere makes you an Idler, and
2) Those who have passed those Idle milestones and play CW do so chiefly for Idle rewards (i.e., they are likely to quit CW if Idle rewards were removed)

I'm guessing you got this data off of profiles and achievements. Could you break this down a little bit further, then, between primarily-Idle players, primarily-Warlight players, and mixed players? Proposed classification scheme:

A player's Idle tier is determined based on:

• Idle Tier 1: has super-ascended
• Idle Tier 2: has beaten Europe Huge
• Idle Tier 3: has beaten Reconquest
• Idle Tier 4: has beaten Feldmere

A player's Warlight tier is determined based on:

• Warlight Tier 1: has a peak rating above 1800 on the 1v1/2v2/3v3 ladder or above 3000 on the Seasonal Ladder
• Warlight Tier 2: has participated and gotten ranked on any ladder
• Warlight Tier 3: has the "Quickmatch Rate 500" achievement
• Warlight Tier 4: has the "Quickmatch Rate 200" achievement

A player is a:

• primarily-Idle player if their greatest Idle tier (lowest number) is more exclusive [lower] than their greatest Warlight tier
• primarily-Warlight player if their greatest Warlight tier (lowest number) is more exclusive [lower] than their greatest Idle tier
• mixed player otherwise

This is just one classification scheme, please feel free to come up with your own. It maybe a little bit annoying or inaccurate to implement- the tiers I suggested may be mismatched in attainment rate, but you can just look at achievement% (filtered, of course, on players who have played Warlight or played Idle, since these games do not have equal active player populations- so general attainment% for an achievement would bias the analysis against primarily-Warlight players) to figure out the correctly matching tiers. However, I think your classification of "Idler" is far too broad and your assumption about the coupling of that and CW motivation far too generous, predisposing the analysis to a predetermined conclusion.

As the saying goes: If you torture the data enough, reality will confess.

I think my concerns could be substantially mitigated by also looking at players' degree of advancement in Warlight proper. So if you are able to, please rerun the analysis with that consideration.

Edited 9/23/2022 01:20:10

The technology so far allows only for achievements analysis, so I had to some modifications.

'WZI T1': True if 'Super Ascend in Idle' in player achievements
'WZI T2': True if 'Defeat the Idle level Europe Huge' in player achievements
'WZI T3': True if 'Defeat the Idle level Reconquest 1065' in player achievements
'WZI T4': True if 'Defeat the Idle level The Siege of Feldmere' in player achievements

'WL T1': True if 'Quickmatch rate 1000' in player achievements
'WL T2': True if 'Win a seasonal ladder game' in player achievements
'WL T3': True if 'Quickmatch rate 500' in player achievements
'WL T4': True if 'Quickmatch rate 200' in player achievements

Results:
Total % WZI T1 = 8%
Total % WZI T2 = 36%
Total % WZI T3 = 65%
Total % WZI T4 = 75%

Total % WL T1 = 18%
Total % WL T2 = 40%
Total % WL T3 = 76%
Total % WL T4 = 87%

Total % WZI main = 28%
Total % WL main = 45%
Total % WL mixed = 27%

And here is a neat per-clan breakdown:

Thanks! So it looks like removing Idle rewards probably would trigger a substantive drop (10-20% is what I'm eyeballing off of vibes math) in Clan Wars participation. And increasing them could increase participation as well. I hope there's some experimentation here, although experimentation may have already happened naturally due to the varying difficulty of getting Idle rewards across the seasons.

Tbh, I don't think dropping the rewards would actually increase playership, just reduce the complaints for non-Idlers that the rewards are crappy or begging to swap the Idle rewards for WZC rewards (which is essentially just coins - nothing else you can realistically works).

Converting the per-clan breakdown into categories:
Majority of primarily-Warlight participants
M'Hunters
Myth Busters
Polish Eagles
Battle Wolves
Alien Elite
ONE!
SPARTA

Majority of primarily-Idle participants
Prime
The Fancy Dot
Mothership
HAWKS*

Majority of primarily-mixed participants
{101st}

No majority of one type
Le Furie Azzurre (plurality primarily-Warlight)
Harmony (plurality primarily-Warlight)
TLA (plurality primarily-Warlight)
Partisans (plurality primarily-Warlight)
Blitz (plurality primarily-Warlight)

Eagle Fang Dojo (plurality primarily-Idle)

Excel (plurality mixed)
Italia Caput Mundi (plurality mixed)

* this one is surprising, they're a Division A CL clan with a long history and many very good players; it may just be the case that their CW participants are the more casual players

if you play idle (which most ppl have tried and let's say 1/3 or 1/4 play regularly. completely making this number up tho, not sure how to tell who is actively playing) the rewards are rly nice, so it should be obvious that a lot of ppl play for idle rewards. even at myth busters a lot of us followed Dom, and he is very interested in the rewards afaik. that is why there are so many mains in myth buster

Hello.



What? How you come to this? 😅
I guess the one does not exclude the other ^^

Edited 9/23/2022 07:37:28

Warzone Idle stands for

Warzone I ''Don't'' like Enormous-balls

Ok Hawks members, what say you to this? Primarily Idlers? (;

Ok let's look a little deeper. This comment represents that the "majority" of Hawks members that play CW are mostly Idlers.

5 Hawks member play CW, so majority is 3. Ok fess up folks ... the 5 are:
Brak
(ง︡'-'︠)ง let's fight!!
RDW
Charlie
Hunta

Which 3 of you are primarily Idlers? Confess your sins, you have been (somewhat) exposed!

Isnt it more humiliating to you that a primarily Idle Clan is playing in Division A Clan League 😜😜

Going through HAWKS players in Seasons 17-19:

Player          | Warlight Level | Warlight Tier | Idle Tier | CW Games Played | Computed | Eyeballed
----------------|----------------|---------------|-----------|-----------------|----------|-----------
Charlie         |             59 |             3 |         2 |              47 |    Idler |     Mixed
RDW             |             63 |             1 |         2 |              43 | Warlight |  Warlight
Brak            |             62 |             2 |         1 |              40 |    Idler |     Mixed
let's fight     |             62 |             2 |         3 |              22 | Warlight |  Warlight
John            |             61 |             1 |         2 |              12 | Warlight |  Warlight
MMM             |             60 |             5 |         5 |               6 |    Mixed |  Warlight
Hunta           |             63 |             1 |         3 |               4 | Warlight |  Warlight
GuestNWHSzY     |             64 |             1 |         3 |               1 | Warlight |  Warlight

("Eyeballed" is me eyeballing their profiles.)

At least for HAWKS, the scheme camembert proposed and FiveSmith modified seems to have persistently overestimated players' Idle interest relative to their Warlight interest. I suspect it's because we used noisy indicators and ignored some of the obvious ones (level, points/30d, gold trophies, ladder history, games played, miscellaneous achievements you rack up while playing Warlight), while for Idle every milestone becomes an achievement. The tiers probably don't have parity in terms of likelihood of achievement conditioned on how serious one is about a game. We might just need to do a little more sophisticated statistical analysis to pick good tiers.

Looking at my own Achievements (https://www.warzone.com/Achievements?p=3022124041), I'll be Warlight Tier 2 (won a seasonal game) and Idle Tier 3 (beat Reconquest). This seems to understate my relative interest in Warlight compared to Idle. I've probably spent over a thousand hours on Warlight (7.5k games played would require only 8 minutes per game to hit 1000 hours) and fewer than a hundred on Idle (16 levels, which would require 6h15m/level to hit 100; I do not recall spending 6h15m thinking about any Idle level, rather just opportunistically clicking on them sometimes, often weeks/months apart, in the middle of playing Warlight.)

Edited 9/25/2022 18:46:58

I think that this discussion and conclusions shifted to a wrong pathway.

The original intent was not to categorize players in "Main Idle" vs "Main Warzone/Warlight".
It was to estimate players who "play Idle" (and probably might/should for the idle rewards) vs "dont play Idle" (and probably dont care for the idle rewards).
I still believe, that it is the right way to assess, whether idle rewards matter. You dont need to be playing "main idle" to care for the idle rewards.

As for methodology, it is as good as it is. The best way to draw conclusions would be ofc to do A/B tests, and a good way would be to ask people, what they feel.

On a side note, in fact any noticeable percent of "main idlers" (let's say we somehow are able to estimate that number) would be fascinating, because it highlights the fact, that CW manages to attract people, who absolutely dont care about multiplayer.

---

Probably I did overshoot the idlers' participation rate, when was using the 10 level achievement.

After some considerations, I would re-estimate it as at least not less than 25%:
- 8% comes from those who super-ascended, as this is a major idle milestone, which has been available only since less than a year ago
- 15% from Prime, FDC and Mothership clans (excluding their games, which fall under 8% above) - which are casual clans with casual communities
- a few % from some CW active people from other clans, which I consider to be active idlers from the type of their global chat activity

Super Ascension is a pretty good indication . . . but maybe don't even need quite that much ... was going to say 3 Ascensions, but there are no achievements for that.

Hmmm... then maybe...?

Defeat all Idle levels twice
Defeat all Idle levels thrice

But you can SAsc w/o doing that. So maybe any of SAsc or either of above?

It does still count non-active Idlers among the counts though (like me, people who have quit). Assuming it's 25% though ... that's big enough to not be negligible, so let's just say there would be some unhappy campers if Idle rewards were removed.

The real problem though is all you can really do for rewards is give out:
(a) coins, or
(b) achievements/trophies
(c) Idle rewards

Achievements & trophies are cool but once you get them, you're done, and the elite ones (MVP of whole season, etc) would be like winning the 1v1 ladder, reserved for the few top players. So unless there's a "trade in" option for Idle rewards to coins, not much is going to matter to the 75%-ish beyond the coins @ end of season.

The real problem though is all you can really do for rewards is give out:
(a) coins, or
(b) achievements/trophies
(c) Idle rewards

(d) premium colors

A color you get if you got at least 15-20 wins in the most recent CW season would be so fetch. Cosmetic rewards are a good fit for Warlight. Plus encouraging players to git gud and win more would elevate the level of competition, not just participation from higher-skill players.

This is veering into letter-to-Santa territory but it'd be so based if each CW season came with a custom color you could use to flex that you participated & won a lot in that season.

Edited 9/26/2022 00:40:46

^ no reason to stop at colors, we need emotes and skins!

Animated profile image frames! Badges that show up with your tagline! Special animations for your attacks/transfers in-game! Being able to change the font of your username! Unlockable taunts that show up on the game board (instead of chat) when you have a successful attack or defense!

Purchasable access to an exclusive dating app for players with high-enough Elo!

Edited 9/26/2022 00:43:03

TLDR for everyone else: People decided to show statistics to calculate the idler percentage active on CW.
However, the definition of "Idler" was flawed, and so were the statistics, mainly based on achievements,
e.g. idlers that quit after ascension or got bored of it

And also suggestions of non-idle rewards




(Have I missed something?)

Edited 9/26/2022 00:44:25

That's pretty much it, still supports a conservative estimate of at least 25% of CW activity coming from players who care about Idle rewards.

It's kind of a moot point because I doubt Idle rewards would ever be removed from CW. CW bridges Idl*rs & people who deserve human rights. Warlight players will play Warlight because they like playing Warlight. Idl*rs will play Warlight for Idle rewards. Simple as.