Part 2 of the Quickmatch system is now live! If you haven’t read part 1, make sure you read that first.

This update includes template voting, meaning that the community can now decide what templates the quickmatch system makes available for its games.

Of course, you don’t have to play on all templates, as you can simply uncheck the templates you don’t like.

How does voting work?

Quickmatch can have up to 40 templates. The first 6, currently, are reserved by WarLight so that we can control the newbie experience. Note that we reserve the right to take up to the first 10 for the newbie experience in the future, but right now we’re only taking 6. The rest of the templates are decided entirely by vote.

Once you win 40 quickmatch games, you’ll unlock your first vote as well as access to the voting section of the game. By winning more games, you’ll unlock more votes, up to a maximum of 10 votes.

You can put your votes into any template, up to a maximum of 3 votes on a single template. You can take your votes back out of a template at any time, so you can always change your mind and move them around.

Once every 24 hours, the votes are tallied and each template is assigned a rank from 1 to 40. Those 40 templates will be the ones available to quickmatch that day.

Votes are public. Every template will show how many votes it has and who put those votes in.

Players who stop playing WarLight for two months will have their votes automatically removed from templates. They can always put them back in, but having them auto removed helps ensure the current votes accurately reflect the will of the community that still plays.

As long as you have at least one free vote, you can propose a new template. By default, the system will put up to 3 of your votes into it, but you don’t have to keep them there.

In the future, we’ll auto-delete templates with 0 votes, as it means even their creator didn’t care about them. This part won’t be implemented until templates stabilize.

When proposing a new template, you should set it to real-time and set the boot you’d like to see real-time games on that template use. Multi-day boot times will always be 25 hours. Be sure to set the number of players in the template based on how many players should be in the game (add 2 players/open seats for a 1v1, more for FFAs or team games). Note that autoboot and respect vacations are always enabled.

When you unlock templates in quickmatch, you’re actually unlocking a rank. For example, if you’ve unlocked 12 templates (including the starter one you get for free), you’ve unlocked the rights to the 12 templates that you specifically unlocked plus the top 12 templates by rank. This means if a new template moves into rank 12 due to votes changing, you’ll automatically get it with your next quickmatch win while still progressing towards unlocking the next rank.

Try it out and let me know what you think!