https://www.warzone.com/blog/index.php/2025/12/update-5-41-find-me-guides/

Love the update!
I especially love the update to the PromptFromList function. I never used it because I really like to add color to the options, but now this is done automatically for players :)

I love the dichotomy between
- adding FindMe for ultra non-competitive mega games
- removing zero-transfer orders for super sweaty 1v1 players trying to squeeze every bit of intel they can out of T1

Warlight is for everybody! Seems like a good update :)

AMA thread: https://www.warzone.com/Forum/857557-fizzer-ama-monday-20251205

Implemented feature requests:
• None

(if I missed any, let me know!)

Edited 2025-12-14 12:20:35

This is very nice :)



Glad to see all the bug fixes too!

Great, I love the "favorite tournament" button !

Is there any way we could get an option or a mod to allow only the host or specific players to boot? It’s very frustrating when players boot when people may need a little extra time due to other circumstances. At least for mega games this option would be great, as people end up wasting gold when impatient players boot without permission

To be honest, I was expecting several people to be complaining about the removal of the phantom move and subsequent new bugs, but it appears people know how useless that would be.

Nevertheless, I am still sad to see them go.

Not because they were a good feature, because if you had to phrase it in a feature request you couldn't. A 0 army move makes no sense, asking for a feature that reverse the move order would make sense. But Warzone works in ABBA, so a 0 move only reverse it half of the time.

However, just like how the best speedrun glitches in other games were never intended, phantom moves enable a whole new level of gameplay. Phantom moves were an advanced "feature" that unlocks new strategies to those that care for them, and didn't really hurt newbies that don't understand it.

Warzone to me is this magical thing that always has more strategic tricks to discover, fueled by a game engine that has quirky rounding rules, and funny ways of dealing with the move order between its turn phases. So by that logic, not everything has to make sense, and I'm just sad to see yet another trick being taken away. And not just any trick, but a beautiful trick, one that requires someone to understand the move order, turn phases, card interactions on the move order, and what Warzone displays to your opponent.

Oh well, can't wait to find out what new tricks are now possible with the AABBAAABBB move order coming from new bugs introduced to fix a feature that wasn't a bug.

Perhaps I should introduce it as a mod one day, but I'm not sure if its entirely possible to recreate this behavior.

And not just any trick, but a beautiful trick, one that requires someone to understand the move order, turn phases, card interactions on the move order, and what Warzone displays to your opponent.

It's a trend that has been going on for years. I call it 'simplification'. Over the years, luck percentage was eliminated on the ladders, after which came Weighted Random, which was replaced by Straight Round. The move order standard went from Random Move Order to Cyclic Move Order (and NLC in some cases). Attack-only moves were then removed, prerequisites were shaven down to the most used ones, etc.

The strategic community didn't like most of those changes at first, but that community got a lot of new players to whom it made more sense to have these predictable and logical settings. While I love Weighted Random on some templates and think it can add a lot to a template like the old 0%WR ladder, the general opinion has shifted to the setting being luck based and not strategic. There is no need for Fizzer to embrace a legacy playerbase or the old guard when the new settings are more enjoyed by the newer - and majority - of the playerbase.

These 'tricks', like a phantom move, a dirty gift, a Timinator Blockade or the JZ Delay might follow suit someday. The argument that it only adds depth and doesn't hurt anyone was shown as non-important when attack-only got removed from the 3v3 ladder.

I would love for these quirks and tricks to remain in the game, but it serves a very niche playerbase.

Conclusion: make the 1v1 ladder 0%WR again! :)

yea nobody plays the 3v3 ladder for a reason lol

these changes might be good for the community at large but it's the hardcore fan base that grew the game from the start. why not just remove classic completely and make warzone idle only? it's good to respect the strategic community imo

Yes Farah, I get why Fizzer is doing this (he can't run his company of 500 good strat players), but it nevertheless feels like taking away a bit of what makes WZ so special to me, slowly simplifying its soul away.

And yes, the ladder should get its attack-only back too! The luck can stay away tho, because you can't do math with that, and unlike phantom moves is actually impossible to explain how it works 😅

The difference between your ladder example and phantom moves is that its a change to the engine instead of a change to a template.
Even if Fizzer (rightfully) makes the default experience so its more accessible to more players, but people can still enable attack/transfer only on their own templates if they want to use it.

I'm not worried about the average newbie no longer being exposed to thing XYZ, but it being removed all together is rather disappointing. I support most things that will flatten the learning curve and improve retention of new players into this lovely game.

Put phantom moves behind a setting thats default off, and everyone can do as they please.

Edited 2026-01-02 17:13:07

As someone who was part of these findings, I would side with JK on this, but Farah is correct in a way too. In an ideal competition (or real life event) as a game designer you would want to remove the extra clicks from the game as much as possible. Meaning, that if everyone uses something like phantom move, then it’s wasteful. But other features like attack-transfer-only or conditional delays are situational and not trivial, therefore I could never understand if sometime in the future they get removed — that would be a huge mistake.

Anyway, we are not there yet and probably never will (as in esport if you will), so I don’t agree with the vision of removing something so unique and niche. It’s like removing the very heart of your game. But it already happened, eh… no big deal I guess.

Just for your information, Fizzer only solved this issue visually, the phantom move still technically reverses move order at the end and Order Delay Card’s move order is still affected by phantom move before it. So ha ha

Edited 2026-01-02 17:13:10

I love phantom moves! I left a comment about that on the blog post itself.

I didn't know they swapped the move order though. In fact I had never understood how move order works with Order Delay Cards. I was going to ask, but then figured the community would want me to test it myself, so I did: https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=43256787. Still, I welcome any further insights.

Also I see Fizzer has explained Order Delays here: https://www.warzone.com/Forum/552125-order-delay-cards-work

The intuitive pursuit of simple answers to challenging questions instead of examining details and discovering knowledge having become the norm is how the world will go down, just to write down what is steaming in my mind when I read discussions like this.

For the case at hand, it is true that reducing clicks is most generally improved game design. However, what truly makes this game special is how game understanding alone gives you an edge. Removing any features which give people with better game understanding an advantage (and this was one!) is like removing random parts of a heart during heart surgery because you casually forgot what is special about the heart that distinguishes it from all other organs, and what its purpose is. For no better reason than to make something mildly simpler, a feature was removed which was a tactic out there new players could discover.

This is the core of what makes this game fun, and intellectually challenging games most generally. If I wanted as few clicks as possible, I would not be playing games at all. Consider who your audience is.