Month: October 2012

Congratulations to [WM] dead piggy for winning Season V with a very impressive 17-3 record! It seems that 17-3 is more often than not the metric that defines a champion, as all of the seasonal winners so far have posted 17-3 records except Rubik87.

Season VI is going to be a bit of a departure from the low-luck settings of Season IV and V. Season VI will use automatic distribution instead of manual distribution. This means that you don’t pick which territories you start with, and instead are randomly assigned territories.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “But Fizzer, won’t automatic distribution mean that games are determined by luck?” It’s true that luck plays a role, but here’s the way to look at it:

• Everyone will lose 15% of their games due to getting worse starting positions than their opponent.
• Everyone will win 15% of their games due to getting better starting positions than their opponent.
• It’s what you do with the other 70% of your games that determine your ladder rank.

Personally, I’m excited for it – I think it’s going to be my favorite season! This season will be great for those who are weak at the territory selection part of the game but strong at the expansion/army movement part.

The settings are the same as Strategic 1v1, except with automatic distribution, no wastelands to make bonuses more equal, and an extra blockade card is also thrown in so you can make your own wasteland. You can practice the settings with this template: multi-player single-player.

The season begins at midnight GMT on Monday! (This will be Sunday night for those in negative timezones, such as North America). If you’re a member and not already in the seasonal ladder, you can join here. Have fun!

(* 15% is an estimate, the actual number could be higher or lower. The point is that the odds of getting good territories is the same as the odds of getting bad ones and it will factor out over the course of many games.)

WarLight is changing its hosting provider from Rackspace to Amazon. Rackspace has been a good home for WarLight over the years, but ultimately it’s far too expensive for a game with low revenue like WarLight. This update also contains a new scaling architecture that will ensure WarLight won’t slow down when lots of players are playing.

This new architecture is also a step towards being able to crank up the refresh speed. One day, I hope manually clicking the refresh button will become a thing of the past and games will just always be live.

The swap over will happen sometime in the middle of the night tonight (aiming at 1am PDT 8am GMT). If all goes well, the move will be instantaneous and won’t require any downtime or even be noticed by the players. Even real-time games won’t be interrupted. However, if you do notice an issue with the website, please let me know by using the report bug page or e-mailing fizzer@warlight.net.

The wiki, blog, and archive database will move over later. Probably sometime this weekend.

This move will also upgrade the server to version 1.15.3. This is a small update that fixes a few bugs and has minor enhancements.

– Fixed a bug that caused an error when customizing tournament settings.
– When creating a co-op multi-player game (a team of humans vs AIs), the “AIs Surrender When One Human Remains” setting is automatically disabled. This setting doesn’t make any sense in co-op games since the AIs would want to surrender immediately when the game started.
– Made a few minor adjustments to the wait dialog: It now always prints the entire message when it’s long, and the background tint was removed.
– The aspx extensions are now optional in page urls.
– Fixed a bug when creating a game from a map page that caused the template to say the game would be on the Earth map.
– Fixed a bug when viewing history that caused players who were booted during territory selection to show as having an income.
– Fixed a bug that caused the vacation page to always say 0 vacations had been used.

It’s worth noting that these changes have not yet gone live at the time of this posting. These will go live when the host changes late tonight.

Also, as an aside, recently ReCaptcha has been failing at stopping automated spam comments on this blog. Manual moderation is stopping them from appearing, however if you make a legitimate post and it doesn’t appear it may have been lost in the moderation noise. Please e-mail fizzer@warlight.net to get it approved. Eventually I’ll work out a better captcha system.