Today at 3pm GMT (11pm PST), WarLight will be updated to version 1.10.0. The update should only take a few minutes, however it will require players to refresh their browser so please plan ahead for potential interruptions to real-time games. I’m working on a system to allow updates to happen seamlessly, so downtime won’t be required, so hopefully these types of interruptions can be minimized in future releases.

Instead of one big feature, this update contains a lot of small improvements to the site and a long list of bug fixes.

Bonus Border Color

When a player controls a territory whose border is the same color as they are, the border is now displayed slightly lighter. This ensures that the territory borders are always visible, even when a player controls a bonus that is the same color as they are.

Bulk Remove from Invite List

The Manage Invite List page is getting a new tool that will allow you to remove all inactive players from your invite list. Just click Bulk Remove and the site will give you an option to specify how many days inactive the player must be for them to be removed, or you can just enter 0 to remove everyone.

Tournament Interface Improvements

The tournament interface is getting some long-needed improvements.

First off, the display of single-elimination and double-elimination tournaments has been updated to fit better within the space allotted. Namely trading vertical space for horizontal space since vertical space is at a premium. Also, the game boxes are displayed in a lighter color once the game has begun so it’s easier to tell at a glance how far along a tournament is.

Second, you can now highlight the games of any specific player, just like how your own games are highlighted. To do this, just click their name in the bottom players list and click the new Highlight Games button. This makes it much easier to check the progress of another player.

Lastly, the performance of loading large tournaments has been improved significantly. This is done by not initially showing declined and invited players in the players list. If you do want to see declined and invited players, a new button is provided to show them. Further, declining tournaments no longer invokes a full refresh, so declining tournaments is even faster yet.

Ladder Tweaks

The 1 v 1 ladder now requires 15 games to receive a rank instead of 10. This will help bring more stability to the ladder.

Season II of the seasonal ladder will play 20 games instead of 15 like in Season I. Four games will be created on the first day and one more every three days after that. Further, the seasonal ladder has been adjusted so players are more likely to receive games against players closer to their skill level. The game settings for Season II will be announced once Season I ends.

Abandoned Games

WarLight will now enforce a new policy around games that are started but then are abandoned by their players. If a game goes over 101 days without advancing, the players holding it up will be sent a warning e-mail. Two weeks after the warning e-mail, they’ll be auto-booted, regardless of whether or not the game had auto-boot enabled.

The purpose of this is to clean up some of the stale games. There are some games that haven’t advanced in over 1000 days! This will allow the games to be archived, which will increase the speed of the site, namely the My Games page.

Games that are still in the lobby after the two-week warning will just be deleted, unless they’re tournament games, in which case the players will be force-joined.

101 days is a minimum. The system isn’t super aggressive about sending out warning e-mails, so it may not send them out on exactly day 101. It will get around to it usually within a week.

Template Improvements

When creating a game with a template that you created, the boot times and game pace (multi-day versus real-time) will now be defaulted to the values saved in the template. This makes it faster to create games when using a template.

Misc Changes

– In real time games, the clock no longer makes an audible tick if you’re not alive in the game anymore (eliminated, booted, etc.)
– Real-time games are now eligible to be archived 24 hours after they finish. Multi-day games continue to wait 10 days before archiving.
– Creating a game or accepting an open seat now cause vacations to end. This stops trolls from activating a vacation and joining/creating a bunch of games that won’t be able to advance.
– The change name page now asks for confirmation to ensure players know they can only change their name every 20 days.
– The automatic panning now waits half a second after showing a successful attack before panning, to give you a chance to see the results of the attack.
– Fixed a bug in the map designer’s SVG parser that would cause strokes to not scale along with an object.
– Fixed a bug that caused templates created on the single-player tab to not include yourself.
– Fixed bugs around game loading that caused games to be left in unusable states when connection failures occurred.
– Fixed a bug that caused playing the same game from multiple browsers to not update each-other in some cases.
– Fixed the Home and Community tabs, as their words were a pixel or two off when selected.
– Fixed a bug that caused a surrender email to be sent when a player that had turned into an AI surrendered.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error message when a teammate played a card that you were in the middle of playing if the card involved UI (blockade, spy, gift, etc.)
– Fixed a bug that caused an error message if you started to play a card that involved UI, but then opened up the cards dialog, discarded it, then finished playing the card.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error message if you started to play a card that involved UI then double-clicked its submit button.
– Fixed a bug when creating games that caused the “Create Game” button to not be visible if there were too many teams.
– Fixed a bug that caused the private message box to be active even when a game is archived and can’t receive new chat.