If the presentation's decent enough that you're able to recognize the points and agree with them and you still decide to respond by getting all aggressive and personal (or meta by calling out the presentation), that's on you, pal.

I get that my reputation is crap with y'all, though, so no need to derail this thread any further lest it keep ps's video from hitting 100 views. Move to PM's if you want to continue whatever this discussion is; I'd still be interested/willing to help out with recruiting mid-tier strat players from clans that aren't at the top of any ladder, but it's your call.

Edited 4/13/2017 23:00:18

I am responding with anger because I support your position and it pisses me off that nobody is going to listen to you because you give them every reason to hate you. You are doing yourself and your valid positions a major a disservice.

Okay PM me and let me know how to turn off these magic powers that make me responsible for other people's emotions.

EDIT: I'd PM you but I'm on your blacklist. Will not respond any further on this thread b/c I'd rather not derail it.

Edited 4/13/2017 23:08:39

I'll purchase you a copy of the book "How To Win Friends and Influence People"

AMEN!!!

Dude you're a grown-ass man living on your own and raising a rabbit; you're supposed to have at least a modicum of maturity.

Are you really going to stoop to that level of hostility because someone you don't like tried to help you out?

If you want to get players with limited skill to join your ladder, your best bet is to PM people who've already got connections- people like clan leaders or players who often create games/tournaments or are just the hub of communication for some subcommunity (e.g., language groups). It's easier to get people to join in batches than it is to get them to join one-by-one. Try starting out reaching out to the big active community-leader type players in mid-tier strat clans; not necessarily the leaders but whoever's active and communicative within that clan, someone that people generally listen to. You could also join their networks/Discord servers/Skype channels yourself but typically they just tune out outsiders until you build up some rapport; for at least the types of strat clans where some people still play diplo often, there's just a few people who everyone pays attention to and everyone else gets tuned out 90-95% of the time. You also have a better audience with the average mid-tier strat player in the middle of a game (even on a 1v1 auto, but ime tournament/1v1 ladder games are the best contexts) than you have elsewhere.

Good luck.

Edited 4/13/2017 23:45:09

A catfight between two of the most stuck-up donnas of Warlight? Please continue, this is great fun! Right now I'm on team ps because he at least created something useful for the community - not only hot air.

You stuck up assholes are why I essentially quit this game

they're arguing over...1 joke? it's not even offensive joke!

As someone who recently joined the MDL, I say that only half the issue of why low-mid tier guys were addressed here. You guys talked about the need to reach and educate the low-mid tier players, which is inherently the first hurdle that needs to be jumped if you want to have them join the MDL.

The issue that I didn't see mentioned is retaining low-mid tier players, which I guess is going to be MUCH trickier. IMO the MDL as is right now isn't designed for mid-tier players. There are always exceptions, but for the most part, those guys have a tendency to teach themselves gameplay on a single map. Why do you think ROR is so popular? I know when I was starting out it took me a while to branch out to more than 3 maps. I didn't really branch out until I was confident in my understanding of how to play the basics. I didn't like feeling lost on a new map. Honestly, even now I'm sometimes just not in the mood to start with 0 knowledge and just want a game I know. To many newer players, that feeling is amplified for reasons stated above.

If you want the MDL to succeed with mid-tier players, I think a restriction on what maps are played is going to be necessary. New players should start with the lowest rating possible, and as their rating improves, new maps are unlocked. If they are drop in ratings, their map availability drops also. As a side note, I also think the total number of maps needs to be reduced. I think even experienced players don't want to learn so many new maps. Variety is nice, but sometimes it feels like a chore when every game you need to analyze the map in full.

Edit: Don't eat dinner mid-forum post...you'll come back and realize this is NOT the forum to post this idea.

Edited 4/14/2017 00:26:25

This is highly amusing to me and of course I'm on team ps. No one wants to exclude players and I think this CLOT teaches other people how to play. Tired of asshole "elitists"? There are some here willing to play with you and I guarantee most will help you if you so desire. If not then just play a game and enjoy. There are a multitude of templates and if you don't like one then veto it. This is the best CLOT I have seen since joining WL. I don't play it much but it's fun and great way to learn new templates. If this is not supported then we only get ladders littered with commanders.

Zack Fair: Deadman is working on a template packages system to address that.

TL;DR: I think all you really need is community. People will give you all sorts of reasons for why they won't join a ladder, but in reality my experiences suggest that it's because it's full of strangers or doesn't have enough people they know/interact with and ultimately just seems orthogonal to their own Warlight experience.

Also for the record, where are people getting the impression that I came here to trash MDL?

I know that Great Expanse, Benoit, and others have talked on other threads about a project I'm working on and mischaracterized it as something built to take people away from MDL; in all frankness, I don't think they fully understand what the project is. To reiterate for one last time, I'm on 'team ps' insofar that I want MDL to grow, only came in here to help out ps (and totally missed the video URL in the top post, thinking this was just a memepost- my bad; I was actually curious as to why no one had mentioned the nice video that had popped up on the MDL homepage), and am not interested in trashing or damaging a ladder that I really like and am currently playing 9 games on...

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@Zack: I think your hypothesis probably has merit, but I think the implementation you suggested would have some undesired side-effects (salvageable, though, and also pretty much every first iteration of something has its flaws). Ultimately up to MotD/Muli, though.

Template anxiety is a good point; that's the most common complaint within the Hydra Discord when people say they're not joining MDL (sad reacts only).

I also think that community is important when it comes to retaining players. Like The Lord pointed out, I haven't contributed anything lasting or concrete to this community but for a while I did run a few public ladders (and by run, I mean spend an hour a day manually creating and checking on games- sad times) and I think some observations can be made off of those (and the CORP internal ladders they grew out of). IPL and CSL bot had a large number of templates (which were a common source of complaints); IPL 1v1 actually had about the same number of templates as MDL, although they weren't as varied (no Commanders, no MA, no LD) or frankly as consistently good as the ones Farah's put together for MDL.

The clan distribution looked pretty different from MDL, with two mid-tier clans leading the charge:



And before that, when I ran CORP (sad reacts only?) I had to try to get CORP players to join a strategic ladder with 29 1v1 templates. Managed to get about 1/3 of the clan; CSL was alive for 2 months, iirc, and by the end it had 41 players- not the biggest number, for sure, but I think it was moderately successful given that I was mainly working with a diplo clan. It had players like Niklas/AI and mm3100 (solid 1v1 players) at the end, but also players that still struggled to understand strategy (I mean that in the sense of "3 picks on a template with 3 starts") and didn't really have a chance of rising to the top quite then- kind of like the bottom of the 1v1 ladder, where players are just starting to get good at the basics.

In any case, I'll cut to the chase because I only came to this thread to offer whatever insights I'd gleaned from those experiences. I think the biggest factor in getting these players (or any player) was community; they didn't all stick around because they were good or because they liked/disliked the templates or even because the games were fun. I think they stuck around because people like them were on the ladder and it was a big event that was relevant to their experience on the site even when they weren't participating in it (at least with CORP, I tried to make the ladder a big deal).

Part of that involved me going around spending time PM'ing people, asking them for input, trying to get discussion going- but most of that didn't happen because of the people running the ladder and just grew organically as subgroups of CORP (like the "Dutch Mafia") joined. They stuck around because they talked to each other about it, played against each other, and invited more members of their subgroup to join.

They were able to have conversations about that ladder on their own wavelengths instead of in terms of the top player on the ladder. I think there were plenty of people on IPL that had no idea who Timinator or the other top players on that were- because it didn't matter to them. So that's why I chimed in here (probably not that successfully or intelligently, as Dogberry and ps pointed out) to say that maybe memeing about alhazi is only going to attract players who already have an idea of who alhazi is, not the sort of disconnected players that would actually round out the ladder.

I don't think MDL needs to change in any way for that; as far as ladder mechanisms go, it's already close enough to perfect that improvements don't matter. But being an 'unofficial' ladder props up some unique challenges and the only way to really address them is by trying to reach out to communities and talk to them on their own terms (Deadman doesn't have to do that himself, ofc).

Edited 4/14/2017 01:00:21

"TL;DR: I think all you really need is community. People will give you all sorts of reasons for why they won't join a ladder, but in reality my experiences suggest that it's because it's full of strangers or doesn't have enough people they know/interact with and ultimately just seems orthogonal to their own Warlight experience."

Flawed argument. If someone had this mentality they wouldn't join WarLight , They wouldn't join open games meaning they wouldn't be level X to join the ladder.

However , I agree with Knyte about the community aspect of ladder. I would love if the MDL had a designated chat that anyone can join on the actual mDL site so players (The medium-low tier players could ask questions and put suggestions) the learning experience should be a enjoyable one with plenty of resources. Videos are great though but nothing beats the real human interaction.

If I was a newbie and let's be honest the newbie would be bewildered of the new templates , I think instead of watching videos that don't go really into the basics bit more intermediate-advanced it would be nice to have a live chat so you could ask someone to give live help.

Knyte is on to something here and I could see great potential here for the MDL to perhaps exploit?

@Platinum: That's true. I was just leaving aside the phase where players are unclanned, disconnected/unaware from/of the community, and spend most of their time playing open games. Ime, it's really hard to get those sorts of players even when you find promising ones (I spent a bunch of time trying to quietly recruit to CORP skilled players from auto-games, like HotBeachBum, and I think I got maybe 1-2 from there; today I try to get random players I meet in auto-games to join the 1v1 ladder and still not much success there).

I don't really know whether there's a trick to recruiting disconnected random players. You don't really have a channel to pull them in and I think most of them aren't invested enough to do anything that requires more than a few clicks to understand and set up games. Might just be because I'm terrible at recruiting them, but I think the optimal route is just to wait until they join the community-at-large- the good ones almost always do.

Not sure about the chat; most sites with a designated chat but not a huge userbase (<1k) just have like 0-1 people active at any given time and it looks kinda bad. Even the big clan Discord servers are pretty inactive most of the time. I was just talking about trying to tap into existing communities and getting them to join in batches by finding their high-traffic nodes (i.e., players like OxTheAutist, Zephyrum, Semicedevine- in the case of diplo- that are connected to a lot of other players within their community and frequently communicate with them); the conversations could just happen in games or on the big discussion thread.

If MDL created its own chat channel, it would already be competing with clan Discord servers/Skype chats and in-game chats at the very least.

Another idea: see if you can get Fizzer to advertise it on Twitch at some point? They have a big silent crowd on there, I think. Might be hard, but Fizzer does seem really interested in community events and on friendly terms with just about everyone; he's a nice person and I think he'll at least be receptive.

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There actually is a version of the hypothesis in that previous post that accounts for what Plat pointed out, but I figured a sentence discussing click-through rates and exponential decay would probably get too unwieldy and make it too easy for me to accidentally say the exact opposite of what I mean.

Edited 4/14/2017 04:31:44

Ok so knyte has done something for the community - that's laudable.

As for criticism/advice, in my opinion people too often call others racist without there being much merit to the claim. I think that might put off some of us. Not that this has anything to do with the CLOT.