After almost three years in development, WarLight will shed it’s beta tag and launch 1.0!
WarLight will be going down on Saturday, February 19th at 1am PST (9am GMT) for up to two hours. Please plan accordingly for any fast games or single player games that may get interrupted during this 2-hour window.
During this time, WarLight will be upgraded to v1.00.0. Once the deployment is complete, you can view all of the changes on the Change History page.
WarLight is not finished!
Just because it’s being called 1.0 does not mean that I’m done working on WarLight. This is just a milestone – I have no plans of moving on to a new game. To further reinforce this, the company that will own WarLight has been named WarLight, LLC.
Features Summary
In case you haven’t been following along with the previous blog posts, here’s a summary of the changes coming to WarLight:
- The Ladder: The WarLight ladder is a ELO-based ranking system where players compete for the top spot on the ladder. Initially a 1 v 1 ladder will be available, with more coming later.
- Automatic Booting: A third boot timer, next to the direct-boot and vote-to-boot timers will be made available to game creators. When players reach this time, WarLight will boot players that aren’t playing from games automatically, without requiring any player having to click the boot button.
- The Statistics Window: The current “graphs” window is being absorbed into the new statistics window, which provides a variety of interesting information about your WarLight games.
- The Dashboard: The dashboard gives an overview of the latest things that have been happening around WarLight, including new maps, forum posts, blog posts, etc.
- Membership System: WarLight is adopting a freemium-style membership system.
Membership
While I love free things, it�s obvious that WarLight cannot continue forever without bringing in revenue to keep the servers online. WarLight will adopt a “freemium” model, which is just the latest term for having a free service alongside a premium paid mode that offers more features or a better experience. WarLight will sell lifetime memberships which give access to features of the site that the more hard-core players tend to want to use, such as ladders and the statistics window.
Many of the features restricted to members only apply to game creation. This means that a member can create a game using the cool member-only features and invite all of their non-member friends to a game. This is designed so that, within a group of friends that play WarLight, only one person needs to become a member to allow all of their friends to enjoy many of the member benefits.
Member benefits:
Price
Rest assured, WarLight will always be free to play! WarLight membership just gives you access to more features.
It’s tough to decide between a one-time or a reoccurring fee for a site like WarLight because it has a high cost-per-user in hosting fees. Everyone likes one-time fees, and it would certainly generate more sales, but the trouble with one-time fees are that players who play for a long time eventually end up costing more than they originally paid in. Most of the sites similar to WarLight all have reoccurring fees.
In the end, I’ve decided to launch WarLight as a one-time fee. However, it may change to a reoccurring fee in the future — but of course, anyone who purchases now is buying a lifetime membership which will never expire. The reoccurring fee would only apply to those who purchase after the switch. This will help grow WarLight faster, and it also serves as a thank-you for everyone who helped test during beta. Don’t miss this opportunity!
WarLight offers more than any other Risk-like strategy game online – the game creation options are far more flexible than any other site, and games move far more quickly since everyone is able to play at the same time. WarLight’s one-time fee means, over time, WarLight is less expensive than the others, too:
Limiting paid members ability to invite more than 24 players to a tournament seems like a typo. Or are you talking only about forwarding invites? Most tournaments have more than 24 players — a 5×5 could only support 4 teams with that model. Tournament creators need control over the invite lists and the ability to invite a much higher number (why cap it at all).
Kudos on the price point. I’ve paid a lot more for lots of games that I stopped playing after a week. $30 is good. I assume we’ll be able to pay with credit cards securely?
Reading fail. You said max you can invite to a game not tournament. I guess I can see that. Not many games with more than 24 players, but it does seem like an arbitrary number. No 5x5x5x5x5 games then. Is this purely a server support issue or is there some other reason you’re barring super large games.
The 24-person per game limitation is the current limitation that already exists in the game today. This number exists only because there are only 24 colors, and every player must have a unique color. It’s difficult to add more colors since you end up getting colors that look nearly identical. Some day, I’d love to implement striped patterns or something that would allow for bigger games. You can vote on this here: https://warlight.uservoice.com/forums/77051-warlight-features/suggestions/1144583-increased-player-limit?ref=title
> I assume we’ll be able to pay with credit cards securely?
Yes. Payments will be handled by Amazon Payments. Your billing information is never shared with WarLight, so you know it’s safe and secure.
I suggest you launch with a monthly and a lifetime option. The monthly could be $4.99. Obviously the $29.99 lifetime is a better value, but autombilling a credit card is nice too. and a lot of players may not want to take the plunge without testing out the full featured game first. Also there might be sticker shock for some outside the U.S. (who also have to pay currency conversion fees).
Good idea! This is definitely something I’ll think about for a future release.
When you say “Ability to control how much luck affects games you create,” how does that interact with preexisting game templates with different luck rates?
Any games created by a non-member after Saturday will have a 75% luck percentage.
So what about Auto Generated games like the Multi-day and Real-time 1v1 you have up now? I know those use the strategic standard of 18% luck, since those are essentially created by Warlight itself (obviously a paying member). I assume those are going to stay open for all non-members to join in those.
Correct, they will still be available for anyone. They’re good for practicing for the ladder.
Even if I were to quit Warlight tomorrow (which I don’t plan on doing), I’ve already gotten way more than $30 worth of enjoyment out of this game. So I’ll definitely be buying a membership. Congrats on reaching 1.0!
exactly.. I’ve paid $50’s for games I’ve played less overall i think..
^^ This.
Another good thing comes out of this release is that you will see an extreme decline of duplicate accounts from people.
I also really like the fact that any of the changes will not effect any of your previous games. People will still have a chance to finish out the ones they have if they don’t intend on paying.
One thing to consider is Tournaments that are already created but haven’t started yet. Will those new games from the tournament be able to be created if a non-member created the tournament before the threshold?
Yes, tournaments that have already been created will continue unaffected.
I agree, great job on the price point! I feel it’s definitely worth $30 for a lifetime membership. I’ll be purchasing one when the time comes. Great work!
Will you continue to allow players to have the same screen name when they start paying? No duplicates would be nice.
Saturday’s release won’t affect usernames, but we can certainly talk about doing something like this in the future.
Yeah, getting a lock on Ruthless would be nice
Exclusive rights to a name could be a member benefit. It’s something to think about for a future release.
No question I’ll be buying.
Is it credit card only or are there other options (like PayPal?)
The only annoying part for me personally, is the luck. I love low luck, less than 20% preferably, guess the number of games with low luck will be smaller than it is now though…
It isn’t mentioned in this post, but I assume the members-only open seat prerequisite is also implemented in this version?
How much for exclusive rights to the color orange? 😉
Lifetime memberships make a great deal of sense for a game such as Warlight. Unlike games that offer some sort of progression with Warlight no matter how long you take off you can come back and not be at any disadvantage. It’s always your wits vs. theirs and that will never change. (I hope!)
That said agree with Duke and think a periodic payment option should be available for those who want to try the game out with all the bells and whistles but are not ready to jump in feet first.
there are the new cards, and occassional tweak to the rules you gotta watch out for after a long absence though..
I agree with everything that has been said. Rewarding the people who helped make Warlight a success is a classy move. I say with no reservation in my thoughts that Warlight will be around for a long time, so eventually a monthly fee will have to be implemented to pay the bills. Thank you and cheers to making it to 1.0.
Will the ELO system be incorporated into multiplayer games or just 1v1? I know ELO isn’t really set up for FFA type games, but Scrabble on FB does it by considering multiplayer matches as a series of 1v1 games with the winner vs. each of the losers separately. Maybe not acceptable for some folks, but it is a nice bonus for beating multiple players at once. And losers only get one loss.
Cheers.
ELO will only be for ladder games, which (for now) are only 1v1. More types of ladders will come in the future, but they will always be separate from normal games.
will there be any updates/changes to the current system of ratings that are shown on your profie?
Many users I meet are European. Keep in mind that credit cards are not as widespread in europe as in the US. So implement different paymodes, for example paypal.
I’m very much looking forward to these new features and I think the freemium model is a great choice for the site. A few things:
1- As mentioned many people live outside the US and even many of us who do live in the US don’t rely on credit cards because of the financial crisis etc. Therefore I think that having PayPal and other payment methods are a must.
2- Many have mentioned using a monthly payment system to allow people to test out the site and the new premium features. Many other freemium sites (mostly MMOs but some games as well) offer free 14 day premium trials. I think that this option should be available at least for a short time. I use WarLight everyday, but I hardly ever create games. I definitely want to support the site and I am very thankful that you have been singlehandedly supporting the site, but I am not sure if my use is worth paying for. Having a 14 day premium trial would allow me to be sure of what I want/need. Also, many players would start multi-day games during the trial and then continue to pay, at least for the first few months. (Even if this offer is only available to Beta players it would be great)
3- Get Apps. iPhone, Android, Mac OSX. All great distribution platforms. (Dealing with Apple may be annoying but is probably worth it.)
4- The ladder system is great BUT if it only includes premium players it won’t be an accurate representation of the WarLight rankings. (I could be wrong here being that the best will probably be willing to pay…)
5- Pay-to-Play tournaments with cash prizes. Possibly very hard to implement because of the global nature of WarLight’s userbase. And the system would have to be stricter in terms of treaties, booting, placement etc. But imagine a system where everyone pays 5 dollars to be in a tournament. 20 players is 100 dollars. 50 goes to the winner. Or something along those lines.
6- Leagues- I’ve mentioned this before on the forum and Uservoice but there could be officially sanctioned, competitive leagues. These could be pay-to-play or just part of the premium model but would be a huge draw.
Anyway, thanks for all the hard work. Looking forward to the update.
I think the dashboard needs to show how many comments are on each blog, so you know if there’s anything new to comment on..
and a refresh button..?