Awesome :)

# Episode 3: A bridge to Warzone Community Newletter

As the WCN is obsolete now and has not been updated for a few months, I just decided to make a really short recap of major events, since the most recent release of WCN.

Warzone update 5.26

After almost a year of no updates, Warzone got updated to version 5.26.0

The promoted feature is the new rendering engine and the availability of 3D in browser, which can be turned on by modifying the URL.

Also, a lot of minor changes, yet some are, IMHO, quite controversial.

There was a blog post, but no official forum thread (yet, there is one more less dedicated to the update) and no AMA so far.

Links:
- https://www.warzone.com/blog/index.php/2024/04/update-5-26-preview-of-new-rendering-engine/
- https://www.warzone.com/Forum/756729-warzone-update-hypothesis

Clan Wars seasons 42-46

- The dominance of Myth Busters continues, they won all the past seasons
- Biggest achievement for clan Harmony, they finally managed to get top-2 for the first time in the clan's history.
- While the list of CW competitive clans is more or less the same, the ranks from 5-9 change a lot every season. The Last Alliance managed to get top-1, and {101st} actively fluctuate, etc.

Currently it is season 47. It started with a record breaking timeslot, with the most players playing a single CW slot though the whole CW history. Optimum seems to be pushing for top-1 (or at least, they are very solid at top-2). Will see after the season ends, how it works out for them.

Link: https://wz-cw.5smith.ru

HTL Finale

The "Harmony Tournaments Leaderboard" finale series of tournaments was announced. Basically, this is a subset of Harmony tournaments, which are available to the public and have some form of continuous competition.

What distinguishes this event from lots of others, is that there is a real money prize pool of $500, paid out to the top 6 players. Great initiative!

Link: https://www.warzone.com/Forum/750442-introducing-htl-finale

1k idle super-ascensions by Ivan0

The Super-ascension leaderboard got a new mark recently.
Ivan0 reached a milestone over 1,000 super-ascensions. Crazy!

He also released a video of a full super-ascension done in under 30 minutes.
If you are into Idle, it is worth to check that out.

Links:
- 1000th SA: https://www.warzone.com/Forum/589522-superascension-leaderboard?Offset=1206
- Video: https://www.warzone.com/Forum/589522-superascension-leaderboard?Offset=1208

Harmony-Eternity clarification thread

No one expected, but after a few months of public silence, Harmony manager posted a "clarification" statement.

It was mostly a rehash of the same old drama. Yet, among new facts:
- We got a link to a Clan League preparation game, which added a lot of tension and escalated the situation
- Accusations of an attempt to bribe Eternity (no details on that)
- The existence of Survey of Harmony clan members by Eternity
- Intent of Eternity to release some CW template guides
- A big throwback story is mentioning of player Phakh Gokhn, who had been a recruiter for clan HAWKS a few years ago, and whose style resembles Eternity's one

Link: https://www.warzone.com/Forum/752922-eternity-harmony-clarification

Who is Truth Dragon

An old Warlight-era player returns and makes a new account using VPN named "Truth Dragon". Despite him posing as a new player, people quickly understand that he uses an alt account, because he plays too good for a newbie.

Truth Dragon makes his way to Myth Busters and makes some new friends there, yet also establishing different relationships with other members of the community.

As of now, the event is mostly over, but so far no one has cracked who the Truth Dragon is.

Link: https://www.warzone.com/Forum/755855-truth-drangon

That's all :D
Comment, like and subscribe!

Previous episode: https://www.warzone.com/Forum/757659?Offset=25

# Episode 4: CW season 47. OP pushed, but MB's reign continues

The CW season 47 ended a few days ago. The season started with a timeslot which broke the record of highest number of players and games throughout the whole CW history.

After a long break Optimum was seemingly making a push towards top-1. For a significant amount of time they were able to tie with MB in terms of activity, but not in terms of winrate. After the first week, Optimum already lagged by 30 wins behind having 56% winrate against MB's 68%. Myth Busters won top-1 again.

The season ended with Optimum having 61% winrate, which is high enough to secure a solid lead against top-3, but is not enough to beat MB's 70%. Actually by the end of the season, Optimum's number of total wins was closer to top-3, rather than top-1.

Is it really possible for Optimum to beat MB in the nearest future?

I would say "no". With overall decrease in WZ activity (stale meta + summer time) and no real changes in CW, there is just not enough available talent to fill up a engaged+skilled roster in a traditional way.

Even Optimum now signs up players of under 1k QM rating to the CW team. Not sure, if that's a path to top-1, because unlike the mid-tier "50%" clans, lowering CWR doesn't help Optimum and every their loss is giving advantage to MB.

What would a new contender need to overthrow MB?

Probably find some new way to "cheese" in CW. MB pathed their way to the top by making a clan of alts to siphon talents from top clans for part-time CW. Something groundbreaking would be needed today to overthrow MB.

There have been theoretical ideas of "is it possible to make a special team from top players of many clans just for the sake of one-time dethrowning MB", but as far as I know, they are only ideas.

Another option, which came to my mind, is find a way to leverage the skills of active, yet lower skilled players during the CW games. Either through some tooling, or by better players helping lower skilled players during the game ("Over The Shoulder Playing").

What do you think?

Previous episode: https://www.warzone.com/Forum/757659-prime-hour-click-now?Offset=38

# Episode 5: Clan and CW changes are coming?

(And a coin contest!)

We are now in the 49 season of Clan Wars. The highlight of previous season is that Harmony tied with Optimum for top-2 but due to the mod-128 tiebreaker, Optimum got top-2 and harmony was left with top-3. But I am here not to discuss that.

Lately (hm...a few years) there has not been much change in Clan Wars. There have been changes to CW in the couple of first seasons (introduction of new templates, tweaks to the template selction), and in 13 season CW prizes were increased, but since then we are playing the same old good Clan Wars.

Threads about changes to CW or to clans (in relation to CW) have always popped up here and there on the forums. I was actually surprised, when in autumn-winter 2023 there were no such threads. Yet recently, there has been a surge in the quantity of such threads. Maybe JK will post a link to his updated list of CW threads ;)

From a overview, the issues, which people complain about a the same:
- clan cap (which was introduced to support Clan Wars)
- template selection
- rewards
- participation mechanics

It is interesting, that while most of the issues are valid (except the "rewards" issue), people suggest such a wide range of ideas on how to fix them, that some of those ideas are just making the clan life and CW strictly worse, than they are currently. Forums are open to everyone to post, thus people who don't even actively play CW, feel that their opinion is most fair. Unfortunately for us, Fizzer may listen to those ideas and implement them. (Imagine a situation, that a person, who has never run a clan, and is not in clan for a long period of time, suggests an idea which makes Clan Manager's life worse, and it gets implemented? Well... you don't need to imagine that, as literally that exact situation happened in the most recent Warzone update.)

The debates in these threads a very heated. To understand, how heated the debates may be, just know, that my opponent in one of those debates ventured as far as to try to revoke my Warzone life-time membership, because of my CW suggestion.

With so many ideas, floating around there have emerged dedicated groups, which try to make a consolidated proposal to Fizzer based on gathered. I remember such groups were even a few years ago ("Let's Improve Clan Wars" by l4v.r0v), and I got invited to a few new groups recently.

We got one juicy leak though: in one of his responses Fizzer said, that he is working on something about clans and we should expect news about that in the next few weeks.

What exactly is he planning, we dont know.

---

So, my today question for you:
- What will Fizzer actually implement in the next few weeks (or even months)?

The closest answer will be rewarded with 50 coins!
Practically winning a big raffle, but better!

When the next update, featuring anything major about clans, comes out, I will review your answers and if any of those will be at least roughly on target, I will rewards the author. Please, play attention that this question is not about "what Fizzer should implement", but "what Fizzer actually implements".

Post your answers! :D

Previous episode: https://www.warzone.com/Forum/757659-prime-hour-click-now?Offset=39

I know some things that he has planned for the next update but it’s not relevant to this thread.

Kabix 2v2 will be added or another template change.

You don’t know what for certain if you’re having the to say alternatives.

Kabix 2v2 will be added or another template change.

That's the power of positive thinking, which I like. Since Doctor K has experience in making his Uservoices implemented in WZ, it is time to go and rig the contest by voting here: https://warlight.uservoice.com/forums/77051/suggestions/48526994 he-he

I have a general feedback: while I would like to watch this thread because I quite enjoy reading the sorta-kinda-podcast, getting an update about *every single response* is a bit too much. In other message boards, a situation like that is sometimes solved by creating separate discussion/comment threads for the individual "episodes". This is a bit more effort to set up, but might benefit the overall readability as well, because you can also scroll through and find things faster in case you wanted to go back and reread something.

I have a general feedback: while I would like to watch this thread because I quite enjoy reading the sorta-kinda-podcast, getting an update about *every single response* is a bit too much. In other message boards, a situation like that is sometimes solved by creating separate discussion/comment threads for the individual "episodes". This is a bit more effort to set up, but might benefit the overall readability as well, because you can also scroll through and find things faster in case you wanted to go back and reread something.

That is an interesting idea. I might try it in the future, when I expect a lot of discussions. Yet, I am not sure how to prevent people from posting here.

Currently, to ease the search:
- I maintain a updating list of link to each of the episodes in the very first post of this thread.
- I add link to previous episode to the new episodes

In the WCNewsletter, I also had a standalone curated blog with RSS export, but I doubt, that anyboy used it.

Clans in 3D!

More seriously some comfort of life things for clan managers, like being able to mail all members. Fix the bug for clan requests notifications on mobile. Being able to put your clan as a prerequisite on games and tournaments.

Just kidding, it's definitely going to be clans in 3D.

# Episode 6: Game stats dump

Recently I was collecting some game data, and managed to get a count of all Warzone games, and do some categorization. Seems interesting to look at it ;)

The following is a chart with the quarterly Warzone game counts by various categories:


Disclaimers:
- A high rez chart with more details on imgur: https://imgur.com/OnsdHIN
- There is no breakdown of QM and Auto games by templates, because for simplicity I only used game names as source data. Breaking down QM is probably an idea for a future research.
- For all the Lotto fans: the lotto games are labeled just having "lotto" or "lottery" in their name, and, what is more important, the lotto labeled games are the lotto games, which otherwise would fall into the "Other category", as (see previous point) QM Lottos are not separated from QM category

Insights:
- When people complain: "Less open games now in Dashboard, than a few years ago. Warzone is dead!", they are totally wrong. QuickMatch helped Warzone to greatly increase the number of games played, and is still the king now! Feel free to redirect them to this post with stats ;)
- All the ladders are barely noticeable in the grand landscape of Warzone. If you are a ladder Warlus, then... you definitely not the WZ majority :p Also note that there is a spike in ladder participation in 3-4Q 2023 after the Ladder revamp was implemented.
- Even outside the QM, lottos are a big chunk of WZ games. Lotto games count is more than Ladders, more than CW, more than Auto.
- 2Q 2020 - Covid spike?
- 2Q 2024 - Idk, why the game count dropped so significantly. Any ideas?

So, what do you think? Have I missed anything interesting in the chart?

Previous episode: https://www.warzone.com/Forum/757659-prime-hour-click-now?Offset=40

Edited 7/7/2024 16:52:17

This is a great and interesting statistic, thanks for your work! As for your interpretation of the results, there are two aspects you should consider:

- You cannot use number of lotto games to determine the share of players playing lotto games, because an average lotto player plays a lot more games than an average strategic player. So if you want to find out how many players mainly play lotto games, you've got to heavily discount the total number of games you see. As a lotto game takes 10-20 times less time to play than a strategic game, you might want to try dividing the number of games by a number in that ballpark.

- If people say there are fewer open games now, and you say there are many Quickmatches now, then you are talking about different things and neither of you is wrong. The vibrant open games community is pretty much gone, and there is no statistic that is going to tell you that, because the number of relevant games would be too small and there is no hard criteria that would allow you to identify the games as such. This is something you need to have experienced back in the days to see the difference.

Edited 7/7/2024 04:37:41

QM, auto game, and other make all other categories extremely hard to visually see the amount of other games.

Dang, 2024 Q2 had just as much lotto tourney games as regular tourney games 😱

Nice stats, thanks a lot 5s!

the lotto games are labeled just having lotto in their name

Does this also include "lottery"?

Does this also include "lottery"?

Nice question! Actually they didnt. I wonder what lotto-synonyms I might have left out ;) I have now recompiled the data and updated the chart. The post now contains the correct update chart (the old chart is stil here: https://imgur.com/t5F30hp)

With the updated chart we see:
- The share of lotto games increased significantly compared to the old chart.
- Lotto is the only significantly growing game type of 2Q 2024. (Basically Lotto is keeping Warzone alive in 2024 :D)
- The lotto spike of "2013-2015" is both bigger and longer

Were any significant features added that are unlocked with levels around the correspinding timeframes? No, right?

Might want to include other lotto game names that don’t include the words lotto or lottery

https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=4944202

https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=4945613

https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=5005798

https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=5044006

https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=5034114

https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=5048090

https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=5054506

https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=5108380

https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=5109251

https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=5114473

https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=5116799

https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=5121759

Were any significant features added that are unlocked with levels around the correspinding timeframes? No, right?

We need to summon some good Warzone historian to the thread!

it's not surprising that there were more Lotto tourney games than regular tourneys, b/c multiple players generate multiple Lotto tourneys, some of them Round Robin which can generate ~200-ish games

sometimes it's for XP, sometimes it's for wheel spins, but Lotto games can be spammed so fast so hard that i'm actually surprised they don't rival the 'other' category; but it is humourous to see that there were more Lotto games than CW games [chuckle chuckle]

just read this line:

- Lotto is the only significantly growing game type of 2Q 2024. (Basically Lotto is keeping Warzone alive in 2024 :D)

[more chuckling]

and since we're on the topic, if you want to join the Free Daily Wheel Spin community, check out this thread: https://www.warzone.com/Forum/767437-free-daily-wheel-spin-community

and soon we'll have another ~200 lotto games that don't even contain the word "lotto" or "lottery" (;

Edited 7/7/2024 20:43:26