Announcing release 1.00.3: Markdown, Ladder improvements, and more

WarLight will be going down on Saturday, February 26th at 2pm PST (10pm GMT) for up to 30 minutes. Please plan accordingly for any fast games or single player games that may get interrupted during this 30-minute window.

During this time, WarLight will be upgraded to v1.00.3. Once the deployment is complete, you can view all of the changes on the Change History page, but this blog post also gives a good summary.

Forum Improvements with Markdown

Markdown is a popular syntax for allowing more flexibility in forum posts than just plain text. After this release, the WarLight forum will allow you to include bold, italics, different font sizes, clickable links, and even in-line images in your forum posts.

This will be applied retro-actively to all existing forum posts, so all links that exist in posts today will automatically become clickable. Once the system is live, I will make a forum post in the General forum describing how to use the special features.

Strategic 1 v 1 Luck Change

The Strategic 1v1 template (and therefore the ladder games) will have their luck reduced from 18% to 16%. This value is chosen since 4 armies attacking 2 armies will never fail at 16%. At 18%, the odds are 99.91%.

Ladder Rating Changes

The ladder rating system is getting a few minor tweaks. First off, ratings for new players will start at 0 instead of 1500. This doesn’t really affect much other than initial matches and mentality, but I felt this is necessary to reinforce the point that the current rating system does not start you at 1500 and raise/lower your rating based on your wins and losses. This is entirely my fault, since I presented the rating system this way, which was a mistake. The Bayesian rating system rates you as best it can with the available information – the idea that you start at 1500 is just plain wrong and should never have been introduced.

Second, the game creation algorithm has been tweaked. The main goals behind this algorithm are to try and match you with players that will get you fun games, while also putting an emphasis on playing new players so there aren’t a lot of repeat matches, while also not stagnating your games if you get stuck waiting on a few busy/slow people.

The ladder is settling down and pretty soon we will have what I consider an “established ladder.” The experience of a new player joining into an established ladder is important. With this new algorithm, the idea is that a new player will start at the bottom and work their way up. As they keep winning, the ladder will jump them further and further up the ladder until their win rate stats to stagnate and they find their final position. The Bayesian algorithm is perfect for this kind of system, since a strong player working their way up the ladder won’t penalize the players they beat on their way up much, since those player’s ratings will re-calculate dynamically based on the new player’s final resting place.

Third, the Best Rating column has been tweaked. This column remembers the highest rating you have ever achieved. It’s getting a partner, Best Rank, which will act similarly. However, both of these fields will now only be recorded once you’ve exited the provisional period. This prevents the early fluctuations from awarding a higher Best Rating than was really earned. Also, the Best Rating column has been hidden from the main ladder page just to keep things more tidy. You can still view the value by clicking on a player’s name. The existing Best Rating for everyone will be reset.

Finally, the game creation algorithm has also been improved so it’s possible to receive more than one game per ladder update. This doesn’t guarantee you that it will create every match possible, but it’s a step in the right direction. More work still may be coming in a later release to make it full up all available matches.

Non-member Map Creators

In the previous update (1.00.2), map creators were allowed to invite past the 6-player limit when creating games on their own map. This has been improved even more, and now map creators can use all of the member-only game-creation features when creating games with their own map. This means they can use custom scenarios in multi-player and also specify any luck percentage for their games.

Dashboard Improvements

You can now click on the maps on the Dashboard to preview them. Further, a “Show all” link below the new maps was added that takes you to a new page that lets you browse all public maps.

Similarly, the Recent Forum Posts section grew a “Show all” link. This link takes you to a new page that lets you view all new posts across all forums at once.

Misc Changes

– Player’s profiles now link to their corresponding ladder page.
– After clicking “Show all” next to a list of ladder games, the ratings of each participant now show up in a new column.
– The 2v2 auto game is now fixed teams instead of random.
– The Reconnaissance card now moves the camera to the spot it was played on.
– Blacklisted players are no longer auto-added to your invite list via the auto-add system.
– The ladder now highlights the player being viewed, or yourself on the main ladder page.
– Updated the Variants page with three new variants: Juggernaut, real locations, and Chinese Checkers.
– Fixed a bug that prevented auto boot from working in games that involved AIs.
– Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause a Force Join to fail when a player did not have an automatic color.
– Fixed a bug that was preventing the member icon from showing up in the lobby.
– In the Tournament Settings window, the tournament settings were moved from the right to the left side to make it more balanced.
– Deleting a testing map now deletes any templates that were assigned to that map instead of causing an error.
– Fixed a bug that caused distributing games to appear at the bottom of a list of ladder games.
– Fixed a bug that was limiting the number of people that could be invited to tournaments too strictly.