There are four ladders on warlight currently. Three are multiday ladders. One is a realtime ladder. The realtime ladder has had the most people play it, despite being the most recent addition. Multidays are boring, and become more about time spent on each turn, and less about skill. Look at the open games tabs; players on warlight prefer realtime games to multiday games on average.

What I would like to see is 2 new ladders, both realtime. I would be interested in seeing a Strategic 1v1 realtime ladder (it remains the most popular template on warlight with the possible exception of Rise of Rome team games). The boot rates could be relatively low on this ladder since most players are familiar with Strategic 1v1. Maybe 3-5 minutes banked and 2-3 minutes per each turn. Another possible realtime ladder that would be great to see is a team ladder. It would have to be random teammates (which could lead to some potential problems) but I think it would be very popular. The only problem with this one is that I think we would see more beginners on this ladder than high level players, but I could see it being the most popular ladder.

The biggest reason I am asking this (and I'm sure many others feel the same) is that multiday games in warlight get boring fast. Realtimes remain fun, and you can decided when you want to play. Multiday games become a chore rather than an enjoyment.

Anyone got any ideas/suggestions for how to implement these ladders or do a CLOT on them?

Edited 6/25/2015 21:08:04

I like the idea of more realtime ladders (the only reason I don't play it is that I hate some of the templates) but can you please explain:

Multidays are boring, and become more about time spent on each turn, and less about skill.

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you, but the boot time really doesn't effect the skill required to win the game. Even in 3v3 games where my good friend Ko debates the merits of every single move, I rarely find myself spending more than ~20 minutes cumulative time per turn.

http://real-time-ladder.appspot.com/lot/5649391675244544

We do have another real-time ladder. Unfortunately, it's hard to get enough people online often enough to support it.

Yes, I like the idea of a strategic 1v1 RT ladder. Maybe the Auto RT Games can "be" the ladder. Just add a rating system to it :) This could be an open ladder, that you don't have to unlock by leveling up. (Well, maybe lv 20 or something, but way lower then for the others.)

CLoT is at a huge disadvantage, first the parings happens seldom so the wait time to get a game is long. Then you have to wait for players to join the game. And I am not even covering the fact that they "disappear" as there is no Quick access to the CLoT's. Right now CLoT is not really capable of doing RT.

Multi-day games certainly have the disadvantage of stalling to get ahead. RT games have some disadvatages as well, however. If your opponent trolls you, and you have something important to do, you could lose by boot. Also, sometimes you need more than 5 minutes to think about a turn. Neither is perfect, but I guess it would be nice to have an option for both.

If you are going to have another RT ladder, make it a 2v2 ladder with a half dozen plus templates.

@almosttricky: you can sort that out if you're running a Real-Time CLOT. Just query the game data API, check whether a player was booted, and then check if they were winning when they were booted (by some metric, like having 50% more armies than their opponent or 50% more income). There will be some flaws still but it would at least prevent boot trolling if you get the conditions right.

Well, I am always in favour of quality over quantity. In general I don't think it's about making more ladders, rather improving existing ones. First, I don't think CLOT is the answer, because the exposure is very limited. More than that, always any official ladder will be more successful just by being official regardless of templates and structure, because people will have more motivation to play them. The original idea of CLOT was:
a) make your own ladders
b) show it can be successful
c) if it is successful maybe it'll be implemented
In general going from b) to c) was always a pain given limited interest and motivation. Personally after experiencing SCII I'm in favour of making all ladders rt (with the exception of seasonal unless the structure is modified). It seems like most successsful strategic games are focused on rt experience. Still, there are many people who prefer multiday for very good reasons, so my personal recommendation would be making all ladders rt, but making one or more structured md events every year, possibly a huge official multiday champions league format with qualifications etc. Grand Prix format from accumulating points would also be acceptable for multiday. For me the reasons I'm currently not active on ladders are a bit different than those of an ordinary player so I'm interested if other people feel similar.

^ 2v2 multi-day ladder would be terrible for me. My teammate plays from Poland and I play from the US. >_<

Not much time zone overlap there, and we like to discuss our moves every turn.

+1 JSA and Sze

It would have to be random teammates

so if you dont play with the same people every time how would the rating system work? Are people individually rated?

""" The realtime ladder has had the most people play it, despite being the most recent addition. Multidays are boring, and become more about time spent on each turn, and less about skill.
"""

I disagree with this claim. There are about 36 players currently ranked on the RT ladder(of which only about 24 have a rating of 1600+). Meanwhile, the 1v1 ladder has 283 ranked players(and I would say that the top 50 are very good players).




"""Look at the open games tabs; players on warlight prefer realtime games to multiday games on average.
"""

Most players play with folks they know/trust so as to avoid boots and cooperate well in team games. There are a lot of games played besides the Open Games tab, and that needs to be considered as well.




"""
The biggest reason I am asking this (and I'm sure many others feel the same) is that multiday games in warlight get boring fast. Realtimes remain fun, and you can decided when you want to play. Multiday games become a chore rather than an enjoyment.

Anyone got any ideas/suggestions for how to implement these ladders or do a CLOT on them?
"""

It is very hard to keep a real-time CLOT going. A multi-day one is more feasible(I'm basing this on the #games played on 2 CLOTs(one MD, one RT) we had running. I can share them with you if you're interested.)

I've got a few ideas on implementing a 3v3 ladder with random teammates. However, given the amount of development work and support needed, the effort to publicize it and keep it active, this is not something I wish to do by myself. If you know of a few people who would like to help out, I would love to devote some time to it.

@Ollie
"""so if you dont play with the same people every time how would the rating system work? Are people individually rated?
"""

Yes. I believe TrueSkill allows you to rate players in a team individually(assuming they play different opponents - which they will in this format). I need to read further to fully understand how it does that.

RT CLOT would be impossible. CLOTs already suffer from a lack of interest.

I don't think you need the CLOT framework for this. As long as one of the accounts running the thing is at least L56 (or has a membership) and you don't want to deal with Bomb Cards, you can allow virtually every WL player (even L1's if you want) to play- which should significantly boost interest as well as the size of the player field (but also likely lower its quality a bit- but I'd say that could be justified as a necessary sacrifice for a viable Real-time CLOT).

It would work pretty straightforwardly:

- use a devolved version of the CLOT framework for user sign-up (or at least to verify that a user is signing up; you can of course use alternatives, but you want to avoid fraudulent situations where users sign up other users and the CLOT f/w looks like it's got a solid verification system at least)

- use the Game creation API to set up games. You just really need the user ID, template ID, and your own tracked data.

However, I don't know if you can call the Game data API on these games- would Warlight's system count you as being part of those games if you're the host but not a player, or would it return an error? If this part works, then everything is taken care of.

You know, it would be fantastic if the open games advertised CLOTS . Do you think we could all prod Fizzer enough to make it happen?

@FK - do we need to bother Fizzer with it? Let CLOT create some kind of autogame with advertise :)

Brilliant. :D

open games can still advertize the clots
i have done it before for TWM's livestream tournament and many players came to know about it
the only problem is that you have to stay there to refresh open seats once in an hour
to solve this we can make an alt and share it among few players so they can still be able to refresh open seats
last time i did it alone but still it was able to attract about 160 players,and more than half of them showed up for the tournament :)

you don't need alt and manual work, just use CRON to create/delete games - as far as i know it's scheduled to run every 10 minutes for RT ladder.

every run:
1. check if there is open game created by CRON earlier - if not (game started as 2 people joined) then create new
2. if game still exists and there's one player waiting for opponent ->
a) less than 60 minutes passsed since creation -> leave it
b) 60+ minutes passed since creation -> delete it and create new one with 2 empty seats(!)
3. if game still exists and no one is there -> delete and create new one

Also put some advertisment in host message(CLOT link, template list, etc) + warning that game will be delete if don't start before [creation time + 60 minutes])

Similar thing could be created for randomized bonuses ladder too

(!) I'm not sure if you can check who joined open seat game created by API -> if it's possible
instead creating new game without players maybe just create game with 1 open seat and 1 player

Edited 7/2/2015 07:18:30