I've been at 5 games since I joined. Personally I enjoy it

Maybe if you had it alternate between med. earth, earth and europe

I just feel this way about the entire game.

Hmm... I just decide after a couple months of not playing this game that I'd give it one last try.

http://warlight.net/MultiPlayer.aspx?GameID=1355821

I can see that the community of this game has gotten better. Oh, and that open games list just seems to be flooded with great games made by great members of the community. Way to go, Fizzer!

Why would u surrender in that game???

He was booted; the ai surrendered. hence the 'strategy' comment on the chat.

I'm so bored of the 1x1 medium earth games. The games that have me most interested at this point are the team games and the varients. Everything else has gotten too repetitive. The ladder should allow direct challenges and multiple maps.

I hate the way you guys complain. The ladder is quite excellent and I would love to be a part of it. Also I will voice one more thing. Who Made you play/join the ladder?
My Rant over :P

answer me this Kalash. How would you rate your excitement playing the same 20 people over and over on the same map for 3+ months straight? Obviously it's hitting a majority of the players pretty hard because everyone has their ladder game count low because they're getting bored with it. They are only staying with it to keep their ranking in the ladder. No one is trying to climb/fight back up. I agree with Duke, without Direct Challenges and multiple maps, this ladder is going to get very stagnant.

I think there is no goal for the ladder at this point. I think we need an overall accomplishment and have this set up like a Season. Where we get 1 month to get the highest overall rating (make it a mystery until the end of the 1 month block). Also make it so you have to get a solid amount of games in to be considered (30 or 40). The rating system may have to change for this as in we might have to take into consideration the win/loss ratio.

Then we announce the top 10 after a month, give points out (10 to 1st, 9 to 2nd, 8 to 3rd, etc) and then start it all over again and have people climb up. The next block can be a different map so that other players that are better at certain maps can get a shot and proving themselves. Impaller may be great at Medium Earth 1v1, but what about Europe? or Poland?

After a couple runs, we'll total up the points and see who the overall winner is. Then we can give that player a 'Trophy' to put in their profile.
This brings me to another point, we should have Clan Profile pages. That way we can post these trophies to the Clan page. When we start building pride, we're going to create more competition among players.

I know BP started a thread awhile back saying that we can possibly set up a different point system for games and this is fairly related to that.

The fact is; people ARE getting bored with the ladder and I think a big change is in order.

Great ideas Ruthless, especially the ranking mystery part.

Idea: If you had a season with a set number of players in a section, then everyone could play each other a set number of times and a much simpler points system would work well. Like a league format I suppose, with different sections having different maps and settings. You might need more members but many more would participate if there was more diversity in the competitive side of WL.

wow i totally skipped your middle paragraph.

HERP

Didn't see it like that :/ But only if your at the top would you play the same people?

Ace -- was that a TLDR moment? lol

and Kalash -- you can see on this thread that mostly the top 20 have replied. I'm sure when you're lower its pretty great to try and work your rank higher.

Yeah it was a bit lol

Anyway, even I'm feeling ladder fatigue and I'm down around 30th :P I've dropped to 1 game and getting your rank higher is harder said than done because you generally have your rank for a reason. I've been down here since pretty much when I started so it seems I deserve it XD

I'd be fine with maps like Europe or old earth, or whatever. As long as the map has balanced bonuses and at least a decent amount of people who have tested it, then I think that's a great idea. Also, I'm positive I can adapt to whatever map is flavor of the month, but I guess there's only one way to find out :).

It'd be interesting to try a handicapped ladder someday to make it more of a challenge for the epic godlike people on top of the ladder to play people like me that lose games professionally :) Perhaps for every 100 points of ladder ranking above the opponent, you could lose 10% rounded down of your total deployment down to a minimum of 50% of total deployment rounded up (so you'd never start out with less than 3 deployment a turn for instance).

Or maybe something simpler like forcing autopicks on the higher ranked player or at least giving the lower ranked player an automatic first pick for distro. Who knows, it would certainly spice things up for those at the top of the ladder, and would mean there wouldn't need to be the whacky matchmaking algorithm, anyone could just play anyone and have it be a reasonably fair fight.

Devilnis -- If there was a handicap i'd almost guarantee the handicapped person would lose a majority of the time. Most of the time, the person wins because they are more efficient with their armies but that a disadvantage of even 1 army per turn can be crippling. They may seem like blowouts but the amount of armies wouldn't be a good factor as it's what you do with them.

With picks, auto would also make it too hard if one gets to pick and the other just gets whatever. On giving the opponent their 1st and 2nd...the handicapped player can just adjust to that and set themselves to counter that start.

All things that I would consider to be exactly part of the point - To make it so that those who observably have the tools to succeed at it must face an uphill struggle every time so that it remains a challenge. If that means that the struggle is failed and the person who was handicapped loses, then the ranks will change and next time the handicap will be less or non-existant and the player's overwhelming skill will win out and they'll be back up in the ratings again.

Self-balancing systems never fail to balance given a long enough trial, the rankings would converge to an accurate representation of who is better than whom just the same as they do under the current ladder - It would just be a more adventurous path. Anyways, I didn't mean to say the current system is broken, just that I'd like to see something like this someday.

Handicaps can be more subtle than that too. An extra army on the first turn is a 20% boost to income with a strong potential multiplier effect.

I think a handicap should work off the bonus for territories controlled. That way it never kicks in before you have a given number of territories. You could also apply a set formula to account for the differencial in ranking with a cap. Hypothically it could start at 1 extra army per 20 territories and drop by 1 per ranking differential. So a differential of 1 spot has a negligible effect of 1 extra army for every 20 territories you control and a differential of 10 spots gets you 1 extra army for every 10 spots and a differencial of 15 or more gets you 1 extra army for every 5 territories.

Then you allow direct challenges regardless of where they are on the ladder.

Obviously the numbers would have to be tweaked a bit, but you get the idea. I'd like to be able to play somebody in the middle of the pack with a handicap.

I wouldn't find that particularly enjoyable. I find playing people of a similar skill level on even footing to be far more enjoyable than playing someone ranked much lower on uneven footing. I would probably stop playing the ladder if it changed to this.

Yeah I like Duke's system as described - I'm not really picky about what form a handicap would take, just that it was well thought-out and subjected to the scrutiny of the player base (and Fizzer ofc!) so that it's well-balanced. The main point would be to make it so that all players on the ladder are able to play all other players on the ladder and have it be guaranteed (insofar as it's possible) to be a reasonably competitive game.