I’m pleased to announce the availability of the CLOT framework! CLOT stands for Custom Ladder Or Tournament. This is a way that players can create their own automated ladders or tournaments that far exceed the capabilities of WarLight’s built-in ladders and tournaments.

How it works

Each CLOT is hosted as its own website, separate from WarLight.net. This website manages the ladder/tournament — it has full control over how games are created, the game’s map and settings, how players are ranked, how the ranks are presented, etc. Players who want to join can go to this website to sign up with their WarLight account.

CLOT is an open-source framework that contains everything needed to create a CLOT website. The player creating a CLOT must be a WarLight member, but there are no restrictions on who can join and play in it.

It’s expected that the player creating a CLOT should know how to code, as the framework provided is just a skeleton example to get you started. Players who want to create a CLOT website will extend the framework to meet their needs. The framework is written in Python, but it could be ported to any language if you want to work in something else. It works by communicating to WarLight through the public APIs to create games and get updates on them.

Examples

Since the CLOT framework is an open-source programming tool, it can be used to create all sorts of different types of ladders and tournaments. It’s only limited by your imagination! Here are some examples of things you can create with it:

• Clan battles: WarLight gives you access to the name and tagline of players joining, so you can parse out what clan they’re in by looking for clan tags. Then you could make a system that invites players to battles based on their clan, and show rankings of how well each clan is doing.
• Promotion/relegation league: These leagues that have been popular on the forums can now be completely automated.
• Vote-who-will-win tournament: You could make a single-elimination tournament where, before it starts, players can view the tournament bracket and cast votes for who they think will win. You can even allow players who aren’t participating in the tournament cast votes. Then when it ends, you can not only display the winner, but also who voted most accurately.
• Real-time ladders: You could make a scheduling system that allows ladders made up of real-time games to take place. For example, players could tell your website when they’re on-line and ready to receive games, or you could work out a scheduling system where players input what times of the day they’re available.
• Anonymous tournaments: You could make tournaments that don’t reveal who’s participating until the tournament ends.
• Best-of tournaments: Like a single-elimination tournament, except each match is a best-of-3 or best-of-5.
• World domination: Using custom scenarios, you could make a tournament where each round moves up to a bigger region of the world until the championship is on a world map. For example, say you get the first round as an FFA on a Italy map. If you win on Italy, then you go onto the second round, which is on the Europe map and you start with Italy. If you win on Europe, then you go up to the championship which is on the world map and you start with Europe.
• Seasonal ladder followed by playoffs.
• Ladders with rotating settings or maps.
• Ladders with your own rating algorithms or settings, such as a 3v3 ladder or FFA ladder.
• Choose-your-team tournaments: There’s nothing stopping you from creating pages on your CLOT website that input extra information for each game. For example, say you’re making a 5v5 tournament. You could pick 10 random players for each game, and elect a captain for each team who alternate choosing players for their team.

Getting Started

Check out the Getting Started guide on the wiki for instructions on how to get started using CLOT here. If you get stuck, there’s a new forum section for CLOT development, so feel free to ask questions!