The chess equivalent of SEAD is pawns only, not bullet

I also don't believe that SEAD is newbie friendly at all. This is not just because of the crazy 1 minute boot timer but also because they do not forgive any mistakes. Both SE and SEAD are the 2 most unforgiving and probably aggressive templates I can think off.

The only reason the SE templates are perceived as newbie friendly is because they somehow look like classical risk and more importantly, they are the first templates unlocked by quickmatch. Also I guess some people have called them newbie friendly so others are just parroting that without thinking.

Completely disagree with this. If a noob plays a seasoned vet in each of the CW templates they will have the best win rate in SEAD and SE1W. We only need to go back one page in this thread to see what happens in Strat 1v1 for example.

SEAD and SE1W have the lowest skill floor and is the most luck based template.

Edited 9/28/2023 23:59:55

Completely disagree with this. If a noob plays a seasoned vet in each of the CW templates they will have the best win rate in SEAD and SE1W. We only need to go back one page in this thread to see what happens in Strat 1v1 for example.

Thanks for calling me a noob I guess.

WarTog am always puzzled by suggestions and how to improve on Clan Wars, because they almost always come from players who don't seem to understand what Clan Wars is.

I am absolutely one of those, and you are right, I don't know what Clan Wars is anymore. but after what being said about it I feel like someone will pop-up and say CW is a famous Chinese dish...

I would appreciate it if we just ignored what kind of strange creature CW is and focus on its behavior instead.

So if someone were to start suggesting changes to the Boston Marathon that would make it "better" at accurately determining a winner - (Special lanes for the pro runners? Give the elite athletes a 10-minute head start so they don't have a bunch of randos bumping into them at the starting line? Maybe establish restrictions to eliminate runners who aren't "serious"? (I mean, seriously, why are there wheelchairs out there?)) - such suggestions would be a complete waste of everyone's time, because they completely miss the whole point of having the Marathon in the first place.

but CW isn't a marathon and my suggestion wasn't to give an advantage but trying to restore the balance :(

since you don't understand what my suggestion is (no one did) I think I will have to explain it again


First things first, my suggestion wasn't solo but was based on fixing some of the issues that would occur if Elo system was employed to CW

So, in order to understand my suggestion, you need to first understand the issues with the Elo system, which are the following:

1. since the competition would depend completely on participation, CW throne will fall to active clans rather than elite clans and that will conflict with Fizzer's conception about CW. This might be the major cause as to why Fizzer would reject elo ranking

2. Elo system will encourage elite clans to stack in one single slot even more than the correct system cuz if a clan dominate a single template they won't be affected by this rating and thus farm even more wins

3.Elo system will encourage players to create alts every new season to ensure gathering as much wins before getting to their normal rating. And since all clans are limited to approximately 50% win rate, every addition win worth a lot.


The solution would be to simply change the winning reward from giving 1 win to giving some points, then involving other factors that can alter this result, like the elo of the opponent.
(Points and CWR are different things; points can't go down and are reset to zero by the end of the season.)

For example, if we were going to give 10 points for winning a match, we can give 1-10 more points depending on the elo of the defeated opponent.


Even though the competition will still heavily depend on the number of participants, these additional points will allow elite clans to compete for the top spot. Also, players will start focusing on defeating stronger opponents to get these additional points instead of smashing noobs to reach the top.

Additionally, Fizzer can alternate those points to what he believes are more valuable in CW - participation or quality games.


That's all. See ya.

Edited 9/29/2023 01:46:20

3.Elo system will encourage players to create alts every new season to ensure gathering as much wins before getting to their normal rating. And since all clans are limited to approximately 50% win rate, every addition win worth a lot.

I'm not sure why everyone keeps coming back to the alts issue. You can abuse alts in any system, wasn't that exactly what Nono was doing in the current one? If you actually keep track of the players elo though it would be much easier to detect those alts and then ban them and take away the wins from the clan. Much harder to detect them if you just track clan CWR.

SEAD is obviously noob friendly. I think comparing it to bullet chess was poor, but maybe true in the sense that it’s very fast and you miss out on a large amount of content actually in the game.

So did BBJ beat you 10-0 yet?

SEAD is noob friendly simply because (a) it skips the picking stage, and (b) the board is small enough that even new players can make guesses where their opponent is and make strats for it.

Put a noob on MME and suddenly they're thrust into picking without knowing anything about picking (don't grasp picking order, don't make enough picks, cluster picks, glean 0 Intel from picks, etc) and just attribute being found by their enemy and having thier bonuses broken to luck. And then make silly moves on top of bad picks, and b/c there's so much happening over many turns, don't know where the real problems are.

Let noobs learn move order, kill rates, delay moves, etc, on a map they can get their heads around.

@Norman,

Is your stance is that no template is newbie friendly? Because of the CW template SEAD is clearly the most newbie friendly for the simple reason players don't have to make picks.

I think any map can be noob friendly if you pit them against other noobs. SEAD gives the most chance to a weaker player against a stronger one though, although if the weaker player is a real beginner, they might struggle with the timer. If one of my sons would start playing, I would definitely recommend them to go for SEAD only in the beginning though.

So did BBJ beat you 10-0 yet?

No, we were at 5-0 and he needed a break and I needed to go sleep. Don't know when he will be back to finish it though.

I see, well best of luck, not impossible to win 2 of 5 against him! By the way, are these ratings public anywhere? I'm curious.

Edited 9/29/2023 02:44:14

I see, well best of luck, not impossible to win 2 of 5 against him!

If not impossible, it's at least VERY unlikely for me. Doesn't mean I won't play though. I was having a blast yesterday.

By the way, are these ratings public anywhere? I'm curious.

I don't feel comfortable releasing them because people with low ratings can take it as a personal attack. FiveSmith might add those to his site at some point, although he will probably calculate it slightly differently. Plus mine are more and more outdated every day, since I am not updating it with the latest games, I am focusing on the last season for my test. You are quite high up there at #15 btw.

Oh, and one more thing. I couldn't release the whole of it even if I wanted to because I have the elo list by player ID not player name. I can look up specific people but I didn't actually need player names for anything so I didn't bother getting that data.

Edited 9/29/2023 02:56:56

@TheGreatLeon:

Completely disagree with this. If a noob plays a seasoned vet in each of the CW templates they will have the best win rate in SEAD and SE1W. We only need to go back one page in this thread to see what happens in Strat 1v1 for example.

Yes, SEAD introduces some degree of randomness which introduces a lower ceiling for the win rate of someone playing perfectly. I don't see the correlation between upsets being possible and a template being easier to start out with.

@Orcus:
Is your stance is that no template is newbie friendly? Because of the CW template SEAD is clearly the most newbie friendly for the simple reason players don't have to make picks.

Not having to make picks introduces a whole new concept of probabilities into the game. Without further intel, every unknown bonus has a 50% chance of being an opponent spawn and every bonus combination has a 17% chance. If you don't play it out perfectly, you even lose with an Australia + South America spawn. Seasoned SEAD players know the script by experience while newbies do not.

I'd like to argue that there is a great difference between "simple" and "easy + beginner friendly". The people arguing about SEAD being "easy + beginner friendly" are IMO mixing this concept with the simplicity of SEAD which I am not arguing against. I also associate SEAD with being "simple" however for me this means that it is brutal and unforgiving. "Simple" means that there is a clear meta to play it and you get brutally punished for deviating for it. You lose 1 single army along the way and this might be enough for the opponent to finish you off. So it is not "easy". The reason AI feels more confident to win against OrangeSpider in Strat 1v1 is because because of the complexity of that template, AI can somehow fall behind and still wiggle himself out of it. In the SE templates he would have been done for after falling behind.

Edited 9/29/2023 05:28:00

btw: for anyone who wanted to see ratings, 5s has them up on his site now:
https://wz-cw.5smith.ru/leaderboards

edit: Just to clarify, those are not the ratings I have calculated, he is using his own system.

edti 2: Just because it's fun I've decided to see how different my calculations are from 5s, and it seems that his calculations have no factor for confidence, and are way more inert than mine, so in his list players with more games will be rated much higher than on mine. Here are the differences between my top 20 and his top 20:

My top 20:
1. YappiDoor - 1744 (#1 5s)
2. Licota - 1727 (#158 5s)
3. ♦ Drizzy Drake ♦ - 1688 (#16 5s)
4. Rufus - 1687 (#3 5s)
5. SerFen - 1674 (#4 5s)
6. Beau - 1673 (#182 5s)
7. Stonewall - 1658 (#11 5s)
8. adrenaline - 1652 (#17 5s)
9. Johnny - 1651 (#6 5s)
10. Norme - 1649 (#2 5s)
11. Korra - 1646 (#89 5s)
12. Bonsai - 1640 (#10 5s)
13. StealthFalcon - 1637 (#5 5s)
14. Ares - 1629 (#13 5s)
15. Andreas - 1624 (#14 5s)
16. Master Ryiro - 1624 (#19 5s)
17. alexclusive -- 1623 (#25 5s)
18. FleXUS - 1620 (#7 5s)
19. kkkkkk - 1619 (#265 5s)
20. Looking for a furry to date. Mail me. -- 1619 (#46 5s)

5s top 20:
1 YappiDoor - 717.5 (#1 mine)
2 Norme - 673.1 (#10 mine)
3 Rufus - 649.6 (#4 mine)
4 SerFen - 645.7 (#5 mine)
5 StealthFalcon - 642.1 (#13 mine)
6 Johnny - 606.2 (#6 mine)
7 FleXUS - 605.3 (#18 mine)
8 Timinator • apex - 599.1 (#26 mine)
9 Will of D.#1 - 597.7 (#30 mine)
10 Bonsai - 597.0 (#12 mine)
11 Stonewall - 587.4 (#7 mine)
12 Jack Norris - 585.1 (#43 mine)
13 Ares - 584.4 (#14 mine)
14 Andreas - 577.2 (#15 mine)
15 Xeno - 568.6 (#47 mine)
16 ♦ Drizzy Drake ♦ - 566.8 (#3 mine)
17 adrenaline - 563.9 (#8 mine)
18 Dom365 - 561.0 (#25 mine)
19 Master Ryiro - 545.2 (#16 mine)
20 AJ Chiller - 538.2 (#66 mine)

Edited 9/29/2023 07:05:17

Interesting. There might be some activity + recency bias but generally I am not surprised seeing those results. Thanks @OrangeSpider + @FiveSmith.

I personally prefer 5s ratings to mine because I am #289 on his list and all the way down at #504 on mine. Oddly enough both point systems converted to odds give me around 2.5 out of 10 wins against Jeep, which is 99.9999% not happening.

edit: For a matchmaker though I think my system is better because it shoots up alts to high elo fast (within 10 games), while with a system like 5s uses they would remain down until they get a bunch of wins. Just look at the kkkkkk guy for an example. But if you just want to rate players by skill then his system is probably better.

Edited 9/29/2023 07:13:04

So top 8 on yours is:
Adrenaline
Octane
Octane
Rufus
Fen
Rufus
Stone
Adrenaline

I’d say Smiff’s one is better because you need to work your way up to a top rating. Though it frustrating that 100ish games are needed to get to the top, at least it’s not 500 like in QM.

I’d say Smiff’s one is better because you need to work your way up to a top rating. Though it frustrating that 100ish games are needed to get to the top, at least it’s not 500 like in QM.

Yeah, if you want to just rate players for epen, then it probably is better. Mine is better for matchmaking though. Although both predict 0.25 chance for me against Jeep which is clearly incorrect, so there is that.