The biggest feature coming in 1.0 is of course the ladder, as covered in the previous two blog posts. But there are more goodies coming as well!
Automatic Booting
This was mentioned in the previous blog post, but it deserves its own section. This is a third boot timer, next to the vote-to-boot time and the direct-boot time, that game creators can specify. When the auto boot time is reached, WarLight will automatically boot any players that have not taken their turn, without requiring anyone to press the boot button.
This is really useful for tournaments, where someone holding up a game can cause the whole tournament to become held up. Automatic booting also applies to the Force Join system that’s already in place for tournaments – a player does not join their tournament or ladder game before the auto boot time is reached, they will be automatically joined to the game (with a random color, if their color was not available.)
The Dashboard
The Dashboard is a new page that will be accessible by clicking the “Home” tab or the WarLight logo in the top-left. This page gives an overview of the latest things that have been happening around WarLight, such as:
- The newest maps that have been created.
- Recent forum posts across all forums.
- Recent posts to this blog.
- Recent ladder games.
This makes it easy to check on recent events without visiting each individual section.
The Statistics Window
The existing graphs window will be absorbed into the new statistics window, which will show a variety of interesting statistics about the game. The statistics window will only be available for WarLight members. In addition to the graphs that currently exist, it adds two new sections: relations between players, and player statistics.
Relations between Players
The “relations” tab shows how much each player has fought with other players. It’s great for determining who has been fighting who.
It can be switched between the following metrics:
- The number of A’s armies killed in fights between player A and B.
- The number of A’s armies killed in A’s attacks against B.
- The number of B’s armies killed in A’s attacks against B.
- The number of armies that A defended with against B’s attacks.
- The number of armies that A attacked with against B.
In the real game, you can hover your mouse over a cell to show a description of what that cell represents. This makes it easy to understand what the numbers mean.
Player statistics
The player stats tab shows a variety of statistics about each player.
It shows the following metrics:
- Total number of orders issued.
- Total number of attacks issued.
- Total number of deployments issued.
- Total number of cards played.
- Total number of cards received.
- Total number of cards discarded.
- Total number of transfers.
- Total number of successful attacks. (territory captures)
- Total number of failed attacks.
- Total number of armies attacked with.
- Total number of armies lost by attacking.
- Total number of armies killed by attacking. (defending armies killed)
- Total number of armies transfers.
- Total number of armies deployed.
- Total number of times attacked.
- Total number of armies that attacked this player.
- Total number of armies killed while defending. (attacking armies killed)
- Total number of armies lost while defending.
Statistics Brainstorming
I want to hear about any more statistics you’d like to see. I plan to add more in subsequent releases – let the brainstorming begin!
Misc Features
- Sort Tournament Players: When inviting players to a tournament or forwarding a tournament invite, the players list can now be sorted.
- Performance Enhancements: Many areas of the site have been worked on for performance, and will load much more quickly. Particularly the My Games page has been sped up a lot, and the page that lets you invite players to a game will also load much more quickly.
- Force Join: The Force Join system has been de-coupled from nudge, and is now a first class citizen. This just means it’ll work more reliably. Players will be force-joinable in any tournament or ladder game once they’ve reached the direct boot timer without joining a game.
- Members-only open seat prerequisite: Ability to restrict the open seats in your games to WarLight members only.
Wow the stats portion is going to be awesome. It would be nice to know some of those things for big FFA’s. Also, the Auto Booting is going to be huge, it will move everything along a lot quicker.
Two questions:
1. Will automatic booting be retroactive? (at least in tourneys?)
2. Could everybody possibly get like a week or two of “premium” as an incentive? 😉
Automatic booting is off by default and won’t be automatically enabled for any existing tournaments or games. However, if a tournament createor sends me an e-mail with their tournament ID, I may be able to enable it for that tournament. However, it may take several hours to take effect for existing games, as the feature was not designed to be enabled mid-game.
could make new members get a trial membership to hook them into the idea as well…
Ohh I can’t wait!! When do you plan to release it?
Within a week if all goes well.
Some statistics I’d like to see:
* The number of armies/percentage of armies the player used to defend only per turn. This would be the number of armies in all territories adjacent to an enemy (not neutral) – the number of such territories (since there’s always at least 1 army/territory) that were not moved that turn.
* Similar, the number of armies/percentage of armies used to attack per turn. This should take into account the enemy territory at the beginning of the turn as the second attack from 2 different countries to the same country can become a transfer if the first is successful.
* A “most valuable territory” indication for each player. This would be the territory which had the most kills, both as defending territory and as offence coming from that. This could be a separate “most valuable defending” and “most valuable attacking” of course. A top 5 or top 10 would be even better. 🙂
* Defence to offence (or vice versa): How many armies each turn have been used both as offensive armies and as defensive armies, preferably also which one first, which one later.
* Card delay: average number of turns between getting the cards and playing the cards.
* Just for fun: watching statistics tracking: see how many times each player watched the stats during a match.
I’m sure I’ll think of many other things later.
Excellent ideas! I’m going to look at these for the 1.1 release.
perhaps a showing of orders/attacks/transfers carried out, as compared to ones just sent? IE, attack only into your own territory expecting an attack prior that didn’t happen, etc.
and curious which one would show up on the stats screen? the orders actually done, or the orders placed?
Just wondering from what game that statistics window was taken from
And more important are you going to ban The Impaller for killing close to 800 of your troops in that game?
The Impaller seems to have done one heck of a job that game..
No kidding Pink. We sucked in that one. I suspect we were on a 2 person team and fought with Eitz/Bowdown early taking both teams out. That’s based only on the screen shot though.
looks more like 5v5 to me
And also for auto boot, what happens if both people dont go?
The auto-booter boots in a random order, so the player will be determined randomly.
I’m concerned about auto-boot mixed in with real-time games and conceivable serverside lag… I know it’s not a regular issue because you have a habit of making this site badass as far as lag is concerned, but in such an instance where a player is *unable* to login for reasons beyond their control, serverside, during the auto-boot time, would it be possible to detect such issues and push back the auto-boot accordingly?
an example is the lag we had a few days ago that kept me mostly out of a game for close to 90 minutes.. and while i was not awol, someone else had been out of the game til 96 minutes before we could reliably log in.. now as i understand it, the winner would of been randomly anyone else, since he would of been booted, and then the remaining players would of been booted 5 minutes earlier *presuming the creator set it for a 5 minute auto-boot*
I agree it can be dangerous – you’re well within your rights to not use/join games with auto boot enabled. Of course I’ll make every effort to keep the site working (just send me an e-mail if you ever notice it struggling.)
Just a bit ago I joined a real-time game against Heyheuhei and after a couple turns, Comcast decided it was a good time to turn off my internet. When a technician came out the next day, he told me they accidentally disconnected it when they meant to disconnect one of my neighbors.
My point is that there will always be some things out of our control. Auto booting will not be on by default – if you’re really concerned about it, I’d recommend just avoiding auto boot games.
I only bring it up on the occassion that there might be a way for warlight to notice the error and correct it on it’s own, if at all possible. personally, unless lag issues get seriously out of hand, i don’t foresee it becoming an issue. as i said before this is probably one of the most stable sites I’ve seen, especially considering the bandwidth per user it requires.
Who won?
I had no internet and could not finish the game 🙂
Great! Auto-boot will help a lot in tournaments!! There are a bunch of them that are completely stalled!
Thank you!!
I’m fairly certain that was the furtunes change quickly game that I made. Duke chastised Eitz for suiciding on him right away, lol. Impaller was his usual self, downplaying the fact that he had no shot a winning, meanwhile Fizzer and BM bullied me. Yep, pretty sure I remember that game 🙁
As for the statistic page, I’m a stats junky so I love it. I’ll try and post later on once I’ve given it more thought. For now, looks great.