Farah and Gentlemen,

I am creating this thread to share a concept with you, not to launch something on my own or to try to make the community agree with the whole thing. I want to present you my idea and collect improvement suggestions or, even better, superior ideas and to see if you either like it or think it is rather unnecessary. As for me, I support this general idea so much (as some of you may have heard already) for several reasons:

a) The strategic community is slowly dying out. When I joined Lynx two years ago, there were at least twice as many strategic players as today. We could benefit a lot from creating an additional motivation to continue reaching achievements for the creme de la creme of WarLight.

b) WarLight is attractive to a similar clientele as chess is, these two games have many aspects in common. The very best chess players have the possibility to gain a mastery title to "crown" their chess career, this would be a great thing for WarLight too.

c) WarLight doesn't have a reliable skill indication. Players without a clan may be very good, but not noticed in the strategic community if they rather play for themselves than to communicate. Mastery titles would finally offer a criteria to solve this.

If that sounds irrelevant to you, feel free to stop reading here. If it sounds interesting, please mind the following blueprint. It's only an idea, some of my points can be changed completely, removed, others can be added etc., this is only meant to roughly show you what kind of system I imagined.

Basic conditions

1. Mastery titles need to be claimed. You will not be assigned a mastery title if you don't claim one.
2. Mastery titles can't be lost. Once they are assigned, the Master decides himself if he uses the title or not, it can't be taken away from him unless the assignment took place based on false information.
3. Claiming a lower mastery title doesn't prevent you from claiming a higher one later. It does neither give an advantage or a disadvantage.
4. Mastery titles are assigned by a committee out of seven members, one from each Division A-clan. If a claim is supported by four of its members, its acceptance gets announced. If the committee decides to reject the claim, it has to provide a legit reason why.
5. By being assigned a mastery title, you gain the permission to add it to your name, tagline or bio, that's up to you (chess players have it in front of their name, for example GM Magnus Carlsen).
6. The mastery titles channel provides lists of all Masters and (should the situation arise) a swindlers list of players which use mastery titles they don't have.

Minimal prerequisites for an International Master (IM)

1.) Owning a trophy*
2.) Having won an AWP or a WGL or having been QM Supreme Leader**
3.) Being a main account (to prevent the appearance of more Masters than the actually existing number)
4.) Having not less than one year of experience

Minimal prerequisites for a Grandmaster (GM)

1.) Owning three trophies*
2.) Having won an AWP and a WGL and having been QM Supreme Leader** (to exclude pure RT or MD players and ensure that the claimer is elite overall)
3.) Being a main account
4.) Having not less than three years of experience

*The played during beta trophy and the create a beautiful map trophy don't count. The 1st place in the coin leaderboard trophy does only count if it's honourably earned and not farmed with a partner (this is usually obvious and is supposed to be evaluated by the committee).
**Due to the fact that leading QM requires so much time, it can be replaced with the MDL trophy which is the only equally challenging achievement to it. To ensure that your QM leadership is indubitable, take a screenshot of the leaderboard when you are 1st globally.

Looking forward to opinions!

Edited 10/19/2018 05:59:36

Sounds fun i always look for new competitions to knack... I'd participate

Seems fun.

To preempt another possible criteria, don’t use winrate as a criteria because people shouldn’t be held accountable for the opponents they play or how long it took them to get good, and encouraging farming wins is silly.

Also the years played requirement seems ridiculous; if someone who has played 2 weeks is better than me they deserve whatever chance to qualify for these, however unlikely these cases may be

Edited 10/17/2018 19:56:01

@Smoove I fully agree with you about a hypothetic winrate criteria. About the experience points: This is primarily intended to exclude hidden alts which can't be proven to be alts.

From the discord chat(s) this was discussed in, a few key points:

1) Grandmaster Title should be 'as hard as possible'. Several people agreed that the MDL is probably the best measure of skill. Therefore, a GrandMaster should at least have the MDL trophy.

2) The amount of trophies doesn't mean a lot. MDL and Seasonal are way harder to get than the 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 and RTL.

3) WGL is an event on a specific date, on a specific time. For someone in e.g. Australia, it's rather hard to participate.

4) AWP and WGL are way easier to win (if we're talking single tournaments) than the MDL, 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, RTL ladder.

5) x years of experience makes little sense. There's many examples of people becoming great in less than one or three years.

6) Fizzer needs to be involved for legitimacy

Other than that, i like the idea.

seems cool but maybe not friendly to newcomers. if the strat community is dying the last thing you wanna do is become more elitist

also i dont see the strat community dying, lots of new communities are being made too all the time

also having a clan doesnt rly do anything other than let you play clan league, which can bring more recognition, but the ladders do that well too

No abuse of @everyone!

;)

So basically you want to give masters official master titles? =D

I dont agree on the preset that strat is dying.

Other than that, have fun!

I like the concept. Overall I think its a good idea. But I think there might be a few flaws (as I am sure you expected). The first being the idea that the Division A clan members should be the ones to give out the title. Seems like it might create an perverse incentive for players to try and aim to join these clans in order to gain the title.

I feel like this system is overly complicated. You don't need Fizzer to award titles either.

Why not just create a clan for all these super-elite players? Could just call it the MASTER Clan (for emphasis) and put all the Masters in it. The clan tag taked care of the need for a Master status marker, and your committee/criteria get replaced by the naturally high bar that emerges when elite players decide whom they want to claim as being on their own level.

Edited 10/18/2018 00:07:05

>three years

RIP Sora

fr tho, why any year requirement?

I've been playing since 2013 ! I am a veteran >:D

edit: can i get bootmaster plssssss

Edited 10/18/2018 01:13:48

Just my thoughts:

[X] The strategic community is declining.

[ ] Elitists who unanimously predicted M'Hunters would get completely demolished in the A division are capable of assessing skill.

Hey alex,

I appreciate any attempt to come up with new ideas. I'm not too keen on this one though, and doubt I would ever apply for/take up the title myself as I strongly dislike elitism. Definitely not without major changes. My thoughts are:

- If the strategic community is declining, it is because it is an unwelcoming place for new players (despite a few great individuals like yourself who are keen to talk strategy with new players). This, rather than preventing retirements, should be the focus.

- One of the worst things about the community is its habit of creating artificial drama, mainly for the entertainment of people who are bored of the game (most new players just want to play in peace). Subjectively awarding titles will obviously lead to such drama. If you go ahead with the idea, please award the titles based on objective criteria - no adjudicating panel.

- Drawing the panel from Div A clans adds to the problem, in my view. If you must have a panel, I suggest ensuring that there is at least one clanless player, at least one further player from outside Div A, and at least 2 reasonably new players on it.

- One thing I like is that your original idea incentivises playing the official ladders, so don't get sucked in to too big an MDL-focus. If you want to stop people winning the title with runs, then X days at #1 or Y months in top 5 will deal with that.

- But we all know that AWP ranking is the only thing that really matters :-p

The only thing i see which is unwelcoming to new players is the unwillingness of good players to play bad templates and get to know new players trough that. Back in the days you were bound to play some crap if you wanted to play a certain amount of games. Nowadays we have a ''too good offer'' of quality competitions like awp or mdl which give enough games for everyone.

Elitists like myself or kicorse are trapped in their safe zone and it's probably hard for newbies to find and enter that safe zone

MoD, it is for people who are, or were recently, new players to evaluate how welcoming the community is.

If you want details of why I think this, you can start a new thread - I don't want to hijack alex's.

But my point is that this idea would add to that by introducing the drama of officially-endorsed subjective evaluations by Div A players, as well as adding another unhealthy layer of elitism (I am no elitist - it is not the same thing as being good at the game.)

I direcrly answered on your post in a serious way (except calling you an elitist) and i didn't say your points were wrong. I don't see how drama is a huge problem, since i didn't see drama for quite a while. Whenever someone asks a question about gameplay or strategy, i see that question being answered seriously. I tried to show up where the main problem lies more likely than on a drama environment which seems inexistent currently.

When there wasn't such a big offer on good games i frequently joined random games of all styles and talked to people who didn't know the community yet, leading them into the community. That kind of interaction seems to be gone to a big part.

Yeah, sorry if my response seemed rude. I was just making that point that you aren't well placed to assess how welcoming the community is for newer players. Similarly, I can't comment on how it used to be.

I guess I disagree about drama ("stalling", CL9 hysteria etc.), as well as about the constructiveness of the responses that new players and map/template-makers usually get. I'm also sad about the lack of appetite for innovation and the preference for old familiar maps even if they have objective flaws such as dodgy connections.

I think it's because many of the most forum/discord-active people no longer enjoy playing the game very much, but do still enjoy talking about it. There's nothing wrong with that, but I don't think that the community should be driven primarily by their interests, as it currently is.

I feel that alex's idea, in its current form, is for such people at the expense of new players (elitism + drama).

Can one of the pre-requisites be winning CL10?

I think this seems unnecessary in general. What is the point? Does WZ need another system to determine skill qualification? If so, what you have proposed doesn't really seem to define much other then the opinions of a small group. I do think this would be great if the privilege of getting a higher title than another player is for bragging rights and banter. Then the small group of people, or better yet big group of people, can decide who is better at talking shit, thus fertilizing motive to disrespect your enemy in game challenges. It'd be like a P/R league for banter.

For example:

Your idea sucks and mine is better. If you disagree, let's settle it over a game of Macedonia no-split.

Edited 10/18/2018 10:44:41