I believe it would definitely help encourage activity. I know that we might be pretty insulated in our larger clans Krinid (M'Hunters, and TSFH), but my original clan (and the clan I'm on on my alt) - The Republic of Korea - is on the small side. I've talked to many many small clans, mostly through my quickmatch games. I can't tell you how many of them said they wanted to do Clan Wars, but that their clan was too small to compete.

And they were all good players too. They just weren't connected to 2/3 clans on top. Imo, that's the real problem. But yes, I 1000% think that the top 20 performers limitation would drastically increase participation. Pretty much no one competes now because they know that, no matter how good they are, they simply cannot compete with the top 2/3 (due to size alone).

Also, I think it's ok if the top performing clans do so for "strategic" reasons. My goal was to reduce the barrier to entry for all players, including casual players. And the game is already balanced to match high elo clans against each other. If a clan has a slight edge for being good (we're really talkig about a couple more wins a day if you do the math), they deserve it. At least the other clans will be able to do well enough that they will actually want to play/ devise strategy to become #1.

Edited 6/28/2021 08:40:06

LOL @ 1000%. You have the assuredness of 10 people. (;

Then you can cover my lack of confidence that this would actually stimulate activity. I think it would boost results for clans that are already making a run for the top but aren't quite there like Excel (only 25 members), TLA, Polish Eagles, Saber Rattlers, Nestlings (interesting, they are faaaaar ahead of Hawks in CW, lol). Maybe even make Python a force again, they were competitive in S1 but then dropped off.

But even in this new system, they still have to get 20 players actually playing every day to be competitive.

Tbh, if the goal is make it more accessible for more players/clans to play, it needs to be less demanding. Having 40 or even 20 players play every day to be competitive in rankings is just too demanding for most clans. This is a casual event, but 20+ players playing every day is not a casual level of activity.

Someone wrote it earlier, but clans have been here since a while, and the reason for joining one were not CWs. Most people won't join a clan just to play CW, and most clans do not recruit people just to be more competitive in CW.

Are there clans with idle and CW as main purpose? If yes, I believe now they have better chances to win (assuming they are aggressive with recruiting or merging), limiting the number of players does not help them, rather makes it more difficult to reach high rank.

Maybe "top 20 performers limitation" would increase the participation on short term, but once the ranking adjust, and become stable again, would it change much? Wouldn't it actually become even harder to surpass the clan ahead of your clan?


Bottom line is, regardless of what changes you make to the cap / score counting, some clans will not have a chance to win, or reach top 3, or even top 10. If this is enough to discourage the members from playing, then you do not improve the participation.


I believe the main reason why we don't have more people playing, is because the incentives are too small, given how long one season takes. I think best way to improve the situation is simply more rewards, maybe even daily ones - for example some temporary boost / cache in idle even for playing a CW game, better one for winning it, and for the whole clan at the end of the day, depending on participation, win-rate, current rank or sth. Include very very tiny coin rewards in those, to also somewhat encourage non-idle players.

Edited 7/4/2021 00:05:41

Include very very tiny coin rewards in those, to also somewhat encourage non-idle players.

Yeah, the rewards for a non-idle player is quite low :/ (<20 coins for me at least iirc)

Would also be nice if we could trade in the clan war idle rewards for like 50% of their coin value (or some other percentage), so it could incentivize the non-idle folks more.

re: Melda's proposal - seems to me that that would avoid the tie (good point) but make CW a competition dominated by top-heavy clans (i.e., MASTERs) who're able to get 20 players with high win rates.

I think Widzisz's redirect makes sense- this is really about motivating players to play. But instead of focusing on rewards, what about somehow making CW intrinsically fun to play (the way QM and ladder games are)? Not sure how, but hoping maybe you all could throw ideas for that.

Excellent points from Widzisz & l4v. Make it less of a battle for the top ranks (that can still happen in parallel) but more of a "hey I'm glad I made time to play CW today" affair.

@Ocean, I think I got 17 coins for our 3rd place ranking last season. So ~1.5 coins for each, of <1 coin for each game I played. LOL ... so yea, it's not about the coin winnings.

I personally find CW fun, but I think the timeslots make it difficult for most to reliably play, and thus less fun for most players. It forces players to really be serious about CW to make a difference in season rankings, despite claiming to cater to the casual crowd.

But l4v's point is perhaps the best ... it needs a draw to make people want to intrinsically play CW. People are here b/c they like WZ, but what's the draw to make them choose CW over other regular games? Or to make them play more WZ (CW games) in addition to whatever other WZ games they already play. It can't just be about the rankings, else only 5-6 clans will only ever truly care. Some material draw to play CW over other types of games even if you're not a top ranked clan.

I'm new to the game and CW, but in my opinion, CW is intimidating to casual and newer players as they almost certainly will face more experienced/skilled players in every game. Having divisions or leagues (based on previous season rankings with smaller territory maps) will help encourage people to at least try to play games rather than play a few and then quit because they feel like they can't compete on the individual level which reduces overall clan activity.

More active clans with less skilled players could still win long term against less active clans with high skilled players with the current settings.

Also as someone who doesn't really play the Idle game, the rewards are pointless. Perhaps an alternating reward system for each territory would be more of an incentive.

Yep, at very least during the start of the season, I ran into very good players on both, SE and MME. Coin tournaments/ games have worse players than CW - by at least one class! I leant my lesson and I stay on FB and MME MA.
You need some personal ranking system, first few games by 1v1 winrate, then by CW ELO. Then match people with similar rankings.
All in all, you need more slots (so players don't have to plan when to join CW), more players/ slot (so you get matched with players of your level) and more settings/ slot (so if I don't like some settings, I can still join a slot). And we are back to the original question: how to make causals join CW? Wouldn't be better to use QM (the only working RT game generator) and implement CW in it?

Edited 7/12/2021 21:39:14

Sent the thread to Fizzer to see what he says

rewards for playing CW games is dope.

rewards for winning CW games is sick.

rewards for earning a territory would be big incentive if you are close to earning it, to win and to play.

sounds like brilliant idea

i think we want to be careful when we ask for all this rewards, fizzer will think we are greedy ;)

that being said small incentives could have big effects. especially the reward for earning a territory/winning clan war game.

^ if the rewards are too big and plentiful then the game will become boring as people get vast amounts of money

I think even tiny rewards like making each CW game a free 1 coin game would improve participation. We've seen that people join all sorts of weird tournaments if they are free to enter and have a coin reward - even if it's small.

Don't think we're in jeopardy of people having "vast amounts of money". As it is now, getting 3rd place in CW got me 17 coins last season, so even if you increased that 10x, it's far from being a "vast amount" given that it stretches over >1 month period and >30 games played.

Anyhow, it's a moot point anyhow, regardless of what we ask for, obviously a change that breaks the game would never be implemented.

This was Fizzer's response to me btw:

"The current data is way too early to draw any conclusions from. Clan Wars is a very new feature. You may not have been around, but the seasonal ladder was not very competitive in its first 10 seasons either. It takes time for people to organize. I predict by season 10 we'll have a much healthier competition for the top spots. I'm not going to make changes on something that's still developing."

Thanks for sharing that.

I'm not terribly fussed about the # of players not changing right now, but I am disappointed that that response implies that nothing else is changing either, namely the timeslots, which I think need work to make it more accessible/easier for people to play.

That also implies that nothing material will change until season 10, which will likely be at least 6 months from now. :(

well hopefully fizzer will have read this i think there are some very good points made! it is his game and he does a very good job! seasonals are very fun and im sure clan war will keep improving

This would be nice.
It would also be nice to drop the rating altogether and let the only important stat (number of wins) count towards matchmaking, so that low-skill clans like MH can stop gaming the system by willingly decreasing their rating in order to get easier matchups or free wins.

so that low-skill clans like MH can stop gaming the system by willingly decreasing their rating

Either M'Hunters is dropping games on purpose, which isn't a winning strategy, or there is a lack of understanding here how Elo works.

- Easy introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnOVLBbYlU0
- Calculator to play with some numbers: https://wismuth.com/elo/calculator.html#rating1=1200&rating2=1000

The last time some of your clanmates were talking on Discord about M'Hunters decreasing their Elo by joining certain games, there were some helpful Python players helping me to explain why this is, practically speaking, an impossibility.

Edit: Ah no, on Discord your clanmates thought we were "artificially rising our rating" and not "artificially depressing it". But anyhow, the linked Youtube video should still help.

Edited 7/27/2021 14:18:07

@Sephiroth

If PKU, WG or ONE! would start playing games we could alter their rating and take our true place as 3rd. As is, we're only avoiding those 3 clans with our lower elo than yours. In the first week they had played a combined 51 games. Over 39 timeslots and 102 templates. I think we managed to avoid you perhaps twice?

And free wins? You're really struggling there #lolz
Maybe Norman has a free wins youtube link for you