Warzone has just been updated to version 5.31.0! This update adds a new major feature called groups, as well as a bunch of smaller features and improvements. This blog post describes what’s changed.
5.31.0 is live now on the Warzone website, and this update will be coming to iOS, Android, and the Standalone clients in the coming week or two.
Groups
Warzone Groups are kind of like a clan in that they allow players to chat and socialize together. However, unlike clans, you can be in multiple groups at a time, groups have no size limit, and groups are completely free.
When you create or join a group, you’ll get access to the chat room for that group, which will appear right next to the Global and Clan chat rooms that exist today. You also get access to a private forum that only members of that group can access.
You can access groups on the Warzone website under the Community drop-down, or on the mobile app by clicking the head button in the top right corner. Here, any player can join or create a group for free.
When you make a group, you’ll be the owner of that group. You can promote any player to be a moderator of the group, or even promote players to be a group owner alongside yourself.
When you make a group, you give the group a name, pick a color for it, and specify a few other creation settings. The groups settings can be changed at any time in the future (even its name) by a group owner or moderator.
Groups can either be open, meaning that any player can browse and join it via the Open Groups button, or closed, meaning players have to be invited to the group to be allowed in. Any moderator or owner can invite players to a group. Warzone makes it easy to invite players by name, from your friends list, from a clan, or from any player’s profile page. If you invite a player to join your group, they’ll get a notification in via the envelope button in the upper right with an option to accept or decline the group invite (assuming they’re running app version 5.31.0 or newer, which is required to interact with groups).
If a group owner leaves the group, another player will be picked to be the new owner. If there are any moderators, they’ll get picked first, otherwise a random player in the group will be picked as the new owner. This way, groups always have an owner.
Why use Groups?
Groups can be used for many purposes, such as:
- Friends that want to keep in touch even if they’re not in the same clan
- Players that enjoy the same type of games, such as diplomacy games
- Players that want to talk about specific features, such as map creation or mod development
- Players that are in a game together and want to discuss the game, such as a team that formed in a diplomacy game
- Players that want to have real-time discussion about Warzone’s regulated topics such as politics
The possibilities are endless. Ultimately it will be up to you, the Warzone community, to determine how groups are used. This update is just the first step in groups, and I hope to see them evolve over time. Feel free to use the Feature Requests forum to request new group features as you see them. The idea for groups themselves was a feature request posted to this forum!
What about Discord?
I know many players already use Discord for this purpose, and that’s totally fine. If Discord is working for you, please continue using it. Warzone’s chat room will never be better than Discord, but I know some people don’t like or aren’t able to install a separate app, don’t like switching between apps, or they like the integration that comes with being able to open the Warzone profile of every person they interact with.
Free Idle Arena Wins
If you start searching for an arena opponent, but no game is started after about a minute, you’ll now win the arena and get the reward without playing a game. This helps reward people who are trying to find matches but aren’t able to.
No-Split Delete Button
When playing Warzone Classic games in no-split mode, there’s now a “delete” button in the attack/transfer dialog. This makes it much easier to delete attacks if you’ve changed your mind, since previously you had to search for that order in the orders list to delete it.
Forum Search
The forums now have a search feature! It’s a pretty basic search, but it’s better than nothing. When viewing a forum you’ll now see a search button added to the top that lets you type in a search term and return forum threads that contain your search term.
Clan Wars improvements
Clan wars is now slightly more generous in giving out free wins. Previously, players only got free wins if none of their clan-mates queued on the same template in the same timeslot. Now, players will get a free win even if their clan-mates are queued on the same template. It is limited to one free win per clan per template in each timeslot.
When viewing the list of timeslots in a clan war, Warzone now properly sorts the latest timeslots to the top.
When viewing all clan war games, Warzone now properly sorts the free wins under the day in which they occurred.
Viewing Cards
In a Warzone classic game, when using the “View Opponent’s cards” button, Warzone now shows you all cards on one page instead of making you click a button next to each opponent’s name to look at their cards one at a time. This makes it much easier to view at a glance what is going on with everyone’s cards.
Ask Fizzer Anything
This Monday, December 23rd at 11am PST, Fizzer will be doing an Ask-Me-Anything session live on twitch! Feel free to drop in and ask any questions you have, or if you can’t make it, you can post your questions to this thread and view the recording containing your answer after it’s over.
Other Changes
- Classic: In the no-luck analyze dialog, the number you selected is now highlighted green.
- Classic: Added a “Game Start” line in the chat so it’s easy to see what chat was sent before the game started versus after.
- Classic: Fixed the turn numbers displayed in chat, they were displaying 1 too high before.
- Classic: Fixed the “random slots” game creation option so it can’t be used along with “let players pick territories” since that combination could result in errors when starting a game. Now, the random slots option is presented as a third distribution option when custom scenarios are checked, and the options were re-worded to make them clearer. To make this page cleaner, the custom scenario option was also moved to the top of the page, since the text below it depends on what is selected for custom scenario.
- Classic: Fixed invite-by-code games not allowing more than 24 players to join.
- Classic: Fixed deleted accounts showing up on quickmatch leaderboard.
- Classic: Fixed showing your current ladder rating in the end-game dialog of seasonal ladder games (it used to say “unknown”)
- All: Fixed forum post creation allowing players to type in more characters into the subject than the subject allows.
- Idle: Fixed challenges not showing as completed until the page was refreshed.
- Website: Fixed large images in feature request forum so they’re now sized down to the width of the page to be fully visible. Only fixed for posts created/edited after this update.
- Website: Fixed a bug that sometimes made the fog texture not appear in Firefox.
- Unity: Updated the Idle icon on the main menu so its style matches the others around it.
- Unity: Fixed back button/gesture causing all tabs to go back instead of just the current tab.
- Unity: Fixed showing too many decimal points when editing ladder data to show on your profile.
- Mods: Added support for modded templates to the CreateGame API
- Mods: Added proper support for neutral special units.
- Mods: Fixed GameOrderCustom.TurnPhase not correctly persisting in multi-player.
- Mods: Fixed lua global state not persisting in some cases on the website.