Announcing the Seasonal Ladder

I’m pleased to announce that WarLight is getting a new ladder! The new ladder, called the Seasonal Ladder, works a bit differently than the existing 1v1 and 2v2 ladders. While the current ladders are never-ending grinds for the top spot, the seasonal ladder hosts 60-day seasons, where each season will use different game settings. This will give us an opportunity to explore WarLight’s great wealth of maps and customization options on a global scale.

Each season is ranked independently of each other. At the end of the season, the rankings are fixed and will be preserved for all time, and will appear on winning player’s profiles.

Since they’re ranked independently, it’s easy to sit out a season if you don’t like that season’s settings or just need a break. One could view the seasonal ladder like a sprint, whereas the 1v1 and 2v2 ladders are more like marathons.

Games

Each player that plays in a season will get 15 games*, and will never play the same opponent more than once in a season. Having all players have the same number of games adds even more fairness to the final rankings that the existing ladders don’t enjoy.

On the first day of the season, all players get 4 games. Every 4 days after that, one more game is added until all players have 15. If a player joins the season late or leaves it early, they are not guaranteed to get 15 games. However, the ladder will try to catch them up to the rest of the crowd, and in most cases will be able to.

Rankings

The rankings are determined using the same ELO scale that the existing ladders use, with one small modification. Players who play fewer than 15 games (due to leaving the ladder early or joining late) get a penalty of 40 rating points per game. It’s best to join the season before it starts and stay in it for the whole 60 days to ensure you do not receive a penalty. The penalty exists to ensure players can’t game the system by intentionally joining the season late and riding to a high-rank by getting a few lucky games.

Force-finish

In order to ensure a winner can be declared and the rankings can be finalized, all games in a season must be finished by the ending date, which is exactly 60 days after it began. If a game isn’t done when the season ends, it will be immediately ended by WarLight. The winner will be determined by adding up how many armies each player controls on the map, then adding in each player’s income times two.

All players are expected to give every effort to finish their games before the end of the season. Players who intentionally drag a game out to a force-finish will bring great shame to their families for three generations. (okay, not really.)

Settings

The settings for the first season have already been determined and will be announced in a future blog post (coming very soon). I’m very interested in everyone’s opinions for maps/settings for future seasons! Please submit your ideas to the ladder forum.

Initially the seasonal ladder will only support games with two humans (AIs are possible, though I can’t think of a scenario where it makes sense to use them.) In a future release, I plan to upgrade the ladder to support more than two players per game, which will allow for FFA seasons and random-team seasons.

The first season will start in early December. Like the other ladders, only WarLight members may join. You will be able to join the ladder once the next release is live (v1.09), which should hopefully be live within a week or so.

* Some players may get 16 games, since there are cases where it’s not mathematically possible to give everyone exactly 15 without duplicates. Getting 16 is neither an advantage or disadvantage.