now that i read the post scriptum by Qi, i agree with him 200%. He perfectly named exactly all i've been thinking of lately as far as Warlight is concerned...

I agree with RvW and Qi.

In Fizzer we trust.

you're sending mixed messages here...

Guys you shouldn't talk like this :D Ok you want an ELO rating system; put it on uservoice. If you don't get it, fine quit. IMHO, the best players are those who stick around here and do what they can to improve their (and the community's) WarLight experience. Those players embrace and enjoy the updates Fizzer codes (single-handedly O.o) and then try to work with what Fizzer provides to make great tournaments/leagues/rating systems etc. These players are awesome :)

Look at the Nations Cup, the Clan League, Ineffables take on the WPA, ps' ladders, the Promo/Relegation League. The players who made them could easily say; oh we don't have this feature on the game yet; lets just retire. But no, they decided to try and make it themselves, and most succeed.

So basically, what I'm trying to say is, sure, it would be great to have ELO and thousands of other features on WarLight. But don't harp on about it. What happens will happen, and you should either enjoy the changes that come and work with them to have a great WL experience, or, you can quit. It makes no difference to me which option you chose; you aren't irreplaceable :P

qi with your theory then over time people will soon start getting bored of level 4 then what do we do after ELO do we give them a level 5 what could that be.

I just hope that the "member only" rewards for this system aren't useless things like additions to profiles or new colors or anything similar. I'm not saying that's what I'm expecting, but I've seen a lot of useless stuff like that in other games and I don't want to see WL become one of these places where your membership is just for show, to make you 'look' better.

Yeah I hope that doesn't happen Eagle. But I'm not going to speculate anymore. I think these levels are great so I'm just going to sit back and enjoy WL 2.0 :)

@Fizzer: I wish you had asked some input from the player-base for this, although i haven't seen it play out yet(if i understand correctly, i will even have to create an alt to unlock things one-by-one, i think this is actually quite good, although it would be best to just add a button to reset your level to 1)
I would have suggested that unlocks not be tied to a level for which "X" games have to be played/won, but tied to certain game-settings used.(for example, you wouldn't be able to unlock multi-attack before showing you understand how transfer only/attack only orders work)

@ELO:
I think warlight has quite some features for players who simply wish to show they're the best(games(showable on profile) tournaments(showable on profile) ladders(showable on level) and stats(showable on level).
It's up to the player(s) themselves as how important to regard them.
(Which is quite nice, put up that 1v1-strat 512 players prerequisite:1v1 65% won on your profile if you want to show something impressive, or just that mirror-earth-game that you might even have lost but that you enjoyed a lot or thought it was funny)
So i'm not realy sure whether some players do truly miss something, or are just done with Warlight, or just haven't realized their options and used them.
(Or just haven't managed to put competitive players on their invite-list)

I would make an extra category in games for ELO though(like unranked, ranked, ELO-ranked) since i would consider ELO-games full competitional, because you wouldn't play ELO-games for fun/try-out-something-experimental kinda gameplay yet you might wanna keep that gameplay-style in most of your games)

I have to agree with Qi as well. I was never #1 on the 1v1 ladder but I would have been had Beelzebub not stalled his game against me. I also believe I could have been #1 on the 2v2 ladder when I borrowed the Scorched Earth account from Nauz to make my run, but I lost interest after winning my first 4-5 games. Right now I feel like I am at the very top level, and the only thing I have yet to do is prove that to people. That's not enough to keep me very active in warlight. I still enjoy occasional warlight games but not more than 5 or so multiday games at a time. I would love to see an ELO system in 2.0 :)

To respond to RvW:

Come on guys, when was the last time you remember Fizzer implementing a new feature sloppily or without thinking it through?

Never. You can't think of everything yourself though. While Fizzer is truly amazing for everything he has done here and all he continues to do, not everyone can think of everything. That's why big companies use multiple people working on projects, not just setting each person on their own and letting them loose on the world.

I have never voiced negative opinions of Fizzer, or WarLight, in the least. I've actually had no issues, and in my years spent playing, I have only found one bug (which I reported and he fixed within 20 minutes). You can call me a fanboy too if you want, but I think those who truly care will voice an opinion if the care deeply about something. I wouldn't have bought my membership, another player's membership, and pledged a third to the winner of the Dr. Typesomething tournament if I didn't care about this game.

The only issue I see at all is a minor annoyance from people such as myself, or HHH, or Gui, or anyone else with 4,000+ games who could potentially be a high level, put 1,000+ hours into playing this game, and have nothing to show for it in the new system. Give those players a "before" score, or an honorary score, or a star or something on their profile even. I know it is meaningless, but at least acknowledge them or something.

My suggestion: let's all just look forward to WL 2.0, because (statistically speaking :p ) it's probably going to be awesome! Let's not spoil the anticipation with endless discussions of "but maybe it will be bad", because honestly, I see no reason to seriously worry about that possibility.

I think everyone should be looking forward to this. This game has improved very steadily for the entity of the game. Fizzer has been very diligent in dealing with updates, dealing with players, and taking suggestions. I'm very excited to keep up with everything, I just don't want it to almost be like a soft reset of the stats, where what he had before 2.0 means nothing. I would fear that many of those players who are close to quitting would just go ahead and quit because they feel like all their time has now been spent wasted. I'm not at that point, it would just be a minor annoyance for myself.

Don't let my one possible criticism overshadow my excitement for this. When I saw there was a blog post about WarLight 2.0, I nearly jumped out of my chair. I think everything he is doing, he is doing for the right reasons. I wish more people could buy memberships and help the game become profitable. He deserves something for all his hard work and right now he isn't getting it. Again, hopefully this can change things for him.

I wonder if there's going to be a member-only campaign?

those players a "before" score, or an honorary score, or a star or something on their profile even. I know it is meaningless, but at least acknowledge them or something.

Agreed. Myhand and Gui can go sulk about the lack of global ELO and independence and not needing badges all they like, I want my "was around before badges were a thing"-badge!

I don't see how a global ELO, while more interesting than levels/xp for sure, would provide this great new challenge that the demi-gods on level 4 are so ostentatiously lacking. That said, a proper on-site method to create custom league-systems would indeed be great.

Right, being able to edit forum posts would be nice, too. Go WL 2.0!!

ELO allows objective differentiation of players/SEEDS in leagues/tournaments/prereqs

Additionally ELO could lead to a reason to play when there are no other incentives to play. I know I'd play tigger more and arrange more games with gruff if I knew the games counted for something

Yeah it surely would be nice to have this little informative four-digit number right below my profile picture. Nicer (and much more useful) than a level/xp counter. No argument. I still don't get why it would make you play Tigger more, but yeah, bummer.

My guess for why we are getting levels instead: marketing (badges/levels/xp are the shit, the level 4 target group is marginal anyway, also: levels are meaningless, they measure activity, not skill, the counter can only go up, never down, which is most pleasant to look at) and probably some technical concerns as well (how to exactly implement it, what counts, what doesn't, how much, teamgames, FFAs... complex, not exactly easy to get it right - and: levels are meaningless, they measure activity, not skill, the counter can only go up, never down, so getting it right is less crucial).

Regardless of my opinion about whether WL 2.0 should have ELO or not, there is a practical problem with the idea.

A big part of WL, at least for me, is multiplayer (more than two people):

• As far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong), ELO only works properly for one-on-one matches, not for n player FFAs.
  
• Additionally, ELO doesn't work for team games (the ELO rating of a team is most certainly not the sum of the ELO ratings of the players in the team).
  
• Then there's the problem of the AI; is the AI going to get a rating? But (if I understand correctly) the AI is parametrised, so how would that work?
  
• And what rating does a player get who gets replaced by an AI halfway through a game?

Lastly, even if you could solve those issues in isolation; a player can take part in 1vs1s, FFAs, teamgames, any of those can contain (replacement by) AI players... Unless I'm really missing something, ELO doesn't get anywhere close to properly dealing with all those cases.

Sure, you could go with an ELO system which only takes into account games it can handle (1vs1, where no AI is involved at any stage), but that would open up an attack surface to game the system, as well as making it (in my opinion) largely meaningless, since it only measures a very restricted subset of games. (Note: everybody is of course entitled to think that subset is by far the most important skill set to measure; if you do, can we at least agree that is your opinion, not a cold hard fact?)


ps. Nice one Yeon! :)

teams could have ratings, would be a specific rating for a team (like ladder), players turn into ai = loss counted on ELO, practice games wouldnt count as elo, and booted player dont turn into ai = normal setting

#RvW Nobdy asked for a ELO rating on FFA. We aew just interesting on 1v1 - 2v2 - 3v3.

Gnuffone,

Except for the 2vs2 ladder, there are no fixed teams, so ELO for 2vs2 and 3vs3 still wouldn't work (there's far too many possible teams).

And the problem with "Booted players turn into AI" and "Surrendered players turn into AI" still stands. How do you propose to compute ELO if a booted (turned-AI) player wins a game?