Warzone has just been updated to version 5.24.1! This is a small update with fixes to several bugs and making other small improvements to the game. This blog post describes what’s changed.

This update is live now on the Warzone website at https://www.warzone.com as well as in the Standalone Client. The Android and iOS apps will receive this update within the next week or two.

Ladder Boot Times

I took a look at how the ladders have been performing since the recent ladder refresh in 5.24.0, where the boot times were adjusted to use banked time, among other changes. If I take all recent ladder games, group them by week, and plot the percentage of those games that ended by boot, I can see that the percentage of games that end by boot is down significantly in the last two weeks since the ladder refresh:

That’s a good thing!

Nevertheless, there have been calls from the community for higher boot times, so I will convert 12 hours of banked time into fixed time. This will go live for all ladder games created after the 5.24.1 update — it won’t affect games that were already created.

I know some players have been calling for the boot times to be returned to a full 3 days for every turn, but I just don’t think it’s fun to have to wait three full days between every turn of a game. I’ve heard this from players over the years too — it’s generated a lot of complaints whenever someone gets stuck in a game where their opponent is waiting a full three days between every turn. And I agree — it’s simply not fun, and I’m not willing to put out a game I wouldn’t recommend playing. Three days is fine on occasion, but it shouldn’t take that long for every single turn every single time. If you really need three days for every turn, you can always make your own Warzone games and set the boot time to whatever you want, but if you want to play the official Warzone ladders then do so when you can commit to taking your turn at least 5 times per week.

Other Changes

– Classic: Updated ladder rewards to encompass more players.
– Classic: Ladder pages now show the name of the template so you don’t have to click the button to see what it is.
– Classic: Seasonal ladder pages now show the start and end date.
– Classic: Fixed ladder removing players on auto-commit.
– Classic: Fixed ladder “…” row to only appear when there’s a legit jump in players.
– Classic: Fixed the boot percentage displayed on profile. It now properly takes into account games where a player was booted multiple times, or a game where they were booted into an AI, or a game where they were booted but their team won.
– Classic: Fixed randomized slots in community levels.
– Classic: Fixed single-player “try again” button on levels with randomized slots.
– Classic: Fixed the performance of the ladder page for very active players by showing a sample of their rating/rank history instead of all of it.
– Classic: Fixed deleted accounts not being removed from active games.
– Idle: Fixed a bug that could cause the daily door dialog to get stuck open if you can’t use the power that was granted.
– Idle: Fixed 100% hospital upgrade time reduction.
– Idle: Fixed “No session 2” error.
– Idle: Fixed the armies/money hover rapidly appearing and disappearing when holding a smaller device in landscape mode.
– Website: Fixed numpad “.” button.
– Website: Fixed map of the week text “1 votes” -> “1 vote”
– Website: Fixed excessive decimal places on graphs.
– Website: Removed note about moved links under the community tab.
– Mods: Special units with a negative combat order will now fight before armies on that territory.
– Mods: Added WL.TickCount() for measuring the passage of time accurately.
– Mods: Fixed a bug that made a generic error if GetTurn was called with an invalid turn number. Now it simply calls you back with nil.
– Mods: Fixed Game.Orders returning orders for the previous turn if called right after a turn advanced.
– API: Fixed Query Game API on custom scenario games.

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.24.0! This update has a major ladder refresh, improvements to custom scenarios, and more.

This update is live now on the website and the standalone client. The Android/iOS app should receive this update within a week or two.

Ladder Refresh

Warzone’s ladders are getting a major overhaul! Warzone’s ladders are competitive arenas where players compete for the top rank. Warzone has four ladders: 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, and a seasonal ladder that changes its template each 60 days.

The ladders are unlocked by leveling up or by purchasing the Mega Strategy Pack. Once unlocked, you can join them on the website by going to Multi Player -> Ladders, or through the app by clicking Ladders on the multi-player tab.

See the previous blog posts for details about what’s changed in the ladder refresh.

Slot Picking

When joining an open game that uses a custom scenario, you’ll now get an option to pick which slot you’d like to join instead of being given a random one. This makes for a much better experience for those joining diplomacy games.

Mega Games can now use Custom Scenarios

Mega Games are games that involve more than the usual 40 player limit and can go all the way up to 400 players. Prior to this update, mega games could not use custom scenarios, but starting today they can! However, the catch is they can only do so using the new Randomized Slots setting.

Randomized Slots is a feature that game creators can enable when creating games using a custom scenario. When enabled, the game will not show slots at all at game creation time or in the lobby, and instead will assign every player a random slot when the game starts. This feature is primarilly added for mega games, but it can be used in any custom scenario game.

Misc Added Features

– Classic: Added the ability to sort friends by how recently they’ve been online.
– Classic: Added the ability to view who is online when forwarding tournament invites.
– Classic: Added the ability to view who is online when searching for players by name.
– Classic: Added the ability to turn off the chat dialog in the app settings. Also increased the threshold for when the chat dialog will open.
– Classic: When hovering over the clock in the upper right corner, it now explains which timer is the turn timer and which is the banked timer.
– Unity: When inviting players to a tournament, added the ability to sort players by several different things instead of only offering sort by name.
– Website: Added “critical sounds” volume control to app settings menu so the volume of the turn advance sound can now be adjusted.
– All: When inviting players to your clan, a green circle now shows accounts that are online.

Other

– Website: Moved Ladders, Tournaments, and Clan Wars links from Community to Multi-Player.
– Website: Inviting players to a tournament now uses UJS so that it gets the new features added to this page.
– Website: Fixed P and M hotkeys for zooming (short for plus and minus)
– Website: Fixed size of the yellow highlight in the attack/transfer dialog so it doesn’t get super huge when few armies are attacking.
– Website: Fixed yellow “0” not being shown when attacking with a commander and 0 armies.
– All: Fully removed Facebook and Apple sign in options (all players were notified months ago). If you lost access to your account, use the “Forgot password” option with your e-mail address. If you never set up an email on your account, contact Warzone at https://www.warzone.com/Contact
– Unity: Added the ability to report players directly from the app instead of having to be redirected to the website.
– Unity: Fixed “map not in memory” error that could rarely come up when creating games.
– Classic: Fixed allowing nudging someone right after adding them to a game.
– Classic: Fixed a bug with quickmatch where templates could forget your checked state if they were voted out, then you updated a different template, then they were voted back in.
– Classic: Fixed mega games getting laggy when the clock is updating every second.
– Classic: Fixed tournament creation so it doesn’t give negative player counts anymore when dragging sliders too far to the right.
– Classic: Fixed green online circle so it’s visible on players with the green color.
– Classic: Fixed orders not saving after being set by a mod.
– Classic: Fixed a bug that allowed wunderwaffe to pass negative armies as an attack.
– Idle: Fixed “dismiss all” button so it doesn’t re-appear after balloons are closed.
– Idle: Fixed a bug when conquering the last territory of the map that could make bonus icons not disappear.
– Idle: Fixed a bug that made auto dig not correctly record its progress during a long absense.
– Idle: Fixed a bug that could cause errors when money/s is negative.
– Mods: Mods can now use the “#” operator to get the length of a Warzone-provided dictionary, like Map.Territories.
– Mods: Fixed UI.IsDestroyed() so it’s now aware of objects created by previous script invocations.
– Mods: Improved error message received if an invalid color string is provided.
– API: The GameIDFeed API now only returns games in the last 30 days for the 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3 ladders.

Ask Fizzer Anything

Fizzer will be doing an ask-me-anything session on twitch where you can ask any questions you have! This will take place on Saturday, May 13th, at 11am PDT. See this link for the time in your timezone or a countdown. If you aren’t able to make it but still want your question answered, you can post your question in this forum thread and you can watch the replay after the event.

The previously mentioned ladder refresh now has a planned release date: Tuesday, May 9th! (Tomorrow as of the time of this writing). This will go live along with update 5.24.0, which also contains a bunch of other non-ladder goodies.

It’s important to stress that this is the planned date — if anything goes wrong during deployment it could be delayed. But this is the date I will attempt to launch the new ladder system.

Based on community feedback, the move order of the ladders will stay at cyclic and will not be changed to no-luck, and the announced boot times are increasing by 1 day banked time.

The 1v1 ladder will change its map to Modified Medium Earth Board map, which is functionally identical but just looks prettier.

Each of the ladders will also now have a unique color that can be unlocked by reaching rank #1 (same logic as the trophy award). Once unlocked, the color can be used forever. Past winners of ladders will not get the new unique color, only those who qualify after the refresh.

Season LII of the seasonal ladder will launch within a day or so of the ladder refresh. It will be the first season with the new rewards. The template will be Guiroma. (as picked by Beren as usual.)

Hope you’re excited as I am!

Warzone’s ladders will soon receive a refresh, marking the first time this has happened since they were introduced back in 2011!

Warzone has four ladders: The 1v1 ladder, 2v2 ladder, 3v3 ladder, and the seasonal ladders. They are designed to be competitive arenas where players can compete with each other at the highest level.

The ladder refresh is designed to keep the spirit of what the ladders have always been, while making them more accessible, more fun, and fixing some of their rough edges. This blog post gives an overview of what will be changing about the ladders in the next update.

New Rating System

The 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3 ladders will change to use the TrueSkill rating system. Ratings in these ladders will now update immediately after the end of any ladder game instead of having to wait hours to see your new rating as you do today. The effect of each ladder game on your rating is shown in the end-game dialog for each game, as well as showing your new rank which will also update immediately.

This also means that games won’t “expire” anymore. Your rating will only change when you finish a game. Ratings will be a much more permanent thing — if you leave the ladder and come back later, your rating will be exactly where it was when you left, regardless of how long you were gone.

Ratings will now start at 100 instead of 0. As part of this refresh, the ratings and ranks of all players on these three ladders will be reset back to the starting point of 100. All players in these ladders were notified about this weeks ago, so this should hopefully not be a surprise to anyone who is affected by it. Everyone will still maintain their history, such as their best ranks and the graphs that show rating history.

Games will also be created more quickly so you won’t have to wait as long to get a game.

Rewards

Today, the ladders only give out points as rewards because that’s all that was available to give out back in 2011. With this new update, all of the ladders will give a variety of rewards, such as coins, idle powers, artifacts, etc. Everyone participating will get rewards, but the rewards will get bigger the better you perform. Over 30,000 coins will be given out every week to ladder players, so the highest ranked players will certainly be rewarded for their skill.

There are two ways to earn rewards: Holding a high rank and achieving a new league (see below.) The rank rewards are given out every Sunday to all players who have been in the ladder for the entire week prior. In other words, if you leave the ladder and re-join during the week, you won’t be eligible for that week’s reward. This incentivises players to stay in the ladder long-term, rather than doing “runs” as was the case in the old ladder.

The gold trophies that can be earned for being #1 will also only be earned if you stay in the ladder for entire week prior to the rewards being given out on Sunday.

Leagues

The 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3 ladders will now have leagues, such as Bronze, Silver, Gold, and more. You can achieve a league by raising your rating to specific thresholds. When you enter a new league, you’ll be notified via the end-game window on that game, and you’ll also receive rewards the first time you enter each league. The rewards start weak for Bronze but get more significant as you rise up through the different leagues.

App integration

All of the ladder UI will now be available in the iOS and Android app, instead of only being available on the website as it is today. This means that you can join and leave the ladders via the app, as well as view leaderboards and ladder games and such.

Ladders are the last major feature that has never been integrated into the app, and having app/website parity has been one of Warzone’s long-standing goals. We’ve seen the list of website-only features shrink and shrink over the years, so it’s very satisfying to finally see the last major feature finally get checked off this list!

Team Ladders

The 2v2 and 3v3 ladders today require you to join as a team with your friends. In the new ladders, you will have the option to join individually, in which case you’ll be matched up with other players who also joined individually to play as a team.

In today’s ladder, only the team as a whole has a rating, but in the new ladder each player will have their own rating. This is made possible by TrueSkill which natively supports having a team game where players on each team have different ratings.

It will still be possible to join as a team with your friends, but unlike today’s ladder, your rating won’t start over at 0 every time you switch teammates. Instead your rating is your personal rating which won’t go away just because a teammate changed.

The ladders will try to only match individual teams versus other individual teams, and fixed teams with other fixed teams, but if it can’t be done it will be possible (but should be rare) for a fixed team to be matched with an individual team.

Booting

Today, ladders use a 3-day boot time. This made sense back in 2011, but today we have internet-connected phones and the game is much more accessible. Therefore, boot times for all ladders are being reduced. The 1v1 ladders will use a one-day boot with an additional day of banked time (for a total of 2 days). The team ladders will also use a one-day base boot, but give three days of banked time (for a total of 4 days, which is actually higher than now) to help with teammate coordination. Join ladders when you’re ready to play, not to stall.

In addition, if any player is booted from a ladder, they will be immediately removed from that ladder. This is especially important for team ladders, where a boot can hurt your team. Booting should be rare in ladders as they’re considered the highest level of play.

Seasonal Ladder

The seasonal ladder isn’t receiving as many changes as the other three, but there are a couple small things changing.

First, the seasonal ladder will go back to 60-day seasons like it used to be before it was increased to 75 days.

Second, there will no longer be big gaps in between seasons, as the next season will always be started about a day after the previous season ends.

Third, rewards are being updated, but will only be given out at the end of the season based on your final rank (no weekly rewards or leagues).

For some time, Beren Erchamion has been in charge of picking seasonal ladder templates via community vote. This will still be the case after the refresh, but now that the seasonal ladder is on a more strict schedule, if he fails to pick a template in time it will fall back to Fizzer’s pick.

Template Changes

The templates are staying mostly the same as today. The 3v3 map will switch to the Europe Remake map, which is functionally identical but just looks slightly prettier. The boot times are being reduced (as outlined above).

I am considering changing the ladders to use Pure Skill, since I don’t think that the highest level of play should involve the use of randomness. This would just mean changing the move order from Cyclic to No-luck Cyclic, to eliminate the starting coin flip of who gets first pick. I’m interested to hear community feedback on this change.

Notifications

Finally, the notifications that the ladders send are now much more useful, letting you know what rewards you’ve earned (or how to earn rewards if you didn’t qualify for any), congratulating the top players of the ladder, and announcing what templates will be next in the seasonal ladder.

Conclusion

The new ladders will go live when 5.24.0 is released, which should hopefully be in the next week or two. Hope to see you on the battlefield!