Hi everyone, hope you're having a great Wednesday!

I took a bit of a Warlight hiatus from about 2017-2021 but I've been getting back into it recently.

I noticed that now when I create a game with open seats, I get a warning that the games fill very slowly, and they're not lying! I'm lucky if I get a 2v2 or 3v3 with 3 day boots to fill within a few days, and even then I have to do the open seat trick 3 to 4 times to keep it on the open games page. This is quite a stark contrast from the games I would make in 2016, where we would easily get an 8v8 with 8-hour boots filled in a matter of hours. Even on a real time game, pooncrew and I used to get 3x4 games filled in minutes and play multiple every morning while we were at work. now we're lucky if we can even get a 3v3 to fill on our lunch break!

Did something change with the game where open games aren't being pushed or something? it seems crazy that it's now harder to get a game filled up when there seem to be a lot more active players.

thanks for any insight

people didn't like the updates and the game increasingly began to lean more toward idle players. people sheltering in place due to covid lockdown is now over. I left for a year and returned and saw the same thing. I guess around the time when I left everyone else scattered too.

QM happened, people now mostly find games through QM and therefore open games fill really slowly.

which updates were unpopular just out of curiosity? I know I missed quite a few but the basic gameplay seems pretty similar to how I remember it.

how could fizz dog foresake us like this? :(

The solarsystem is circling around joeydavis again.

Short answer is Quickmatch - has most popular templates and decreases the need to check open games.

people didn't like the updates and the game increasingly began to lean more toward idle players. people sheltering in place due to covid lockdown is now over. I left for a year and returned and saw the same thing. I guess around the time when I left everyone else scattered too.

Idle was released in 4 July 2020 and all updates between then and 24 November 2021 were all about Idle (because it was new, I guess). Having that different player base wouldn't affect how long it takes for open games to fill though. I don't see how Classic not having updates during that time would be a reason for people to leave or not join open games. I wouldn't say players "not liking" updates would affect number of people joining open games.

which updates were unpopular just out of curiosity?

To my taste, every update within the recent 4 months was really boring.

In a way there’s more Classic updates than ever before. There’s at least 100 mods. Anyone can join but only members can create games using them.

You could say that warzone is more active nowadays with QM, which caused different templates to be more popular (Small Earth and Auto Europe LD)

I dont think you can just blame QM for this. The open games are different than RT games QM can offer.

But I suppose players are not even looking at the open games tab anymore, so blame QM for that?

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The solarsystem is circling around joeydavis again.

Wdym "again"? Are you suggesting that at some point in the past it didn't?

thanks for the insight everyone! It's really a shame, we had always used open games to find active players to recruit into our clan and join our tournaments. But now it doesn't seem very much like it's even worth the work to create games. Our tournaments still fill quickly though so I guess that's the good news?

QM is mostly 1v1s and lots of players use QM. It’s probably a major factor. There is the chance that those growing up WZ are less active for IRL reasons.