^ Lmao. Sarcasm or not that's pretty hilarious

Edited 7/4/2015 00:31:37

Still, Fizzer tends to completely ignore the community and their suggestions, some of which he might benefit a lot from. (Must I remind you all of Warzone?)

And Warlight hasn't seen any real, new, major features for as long as I've been around.

^ Enabling sockets is a pretty sweet feature.

That said, if Fizzer wants cool stuff to happen, he needs to open up the API to non-members and instead open up warlight to more developers.

@knyte with some of the people on here, I wouldn't do that if I were Fizzer. He could open it to certain people who ask permission and deserve it (you).

Epicular, you're right, definitely nothing new since you joined... Definitely no new ladder (real time), game modes (coins), play style (no split) or cards (bomb). Nothing new at all and certainly not countless minor adjustments to improve gameplay

Warlight is not dead at all. quit worrying and play :)

@Richard Sharpe Don't forget the two CLOTs, which I recommend all players join (particularly real-time one)

@Ben: There's no way to damage the site just by being able to make API calls as long as proper restrictions are placed (which don't exist right now- if a Member wanted to, they could do significant damage to Warlight or at least to a set of players).

I see no good reason to make people pay to access the API unless Fizzer intends to keep the API very underpowered (I'm pretty sure even the Yo API does more than the Warlight APIs right now) and not, y'know, working like an actual API. Warlight has a strong developer community- just look at the people playing in the Warlight AI Challenge- and it should leverage it to create growth.

WarLight is not losing players.
WarLight is losing the kind of player that will give money to Fizzer.

Most people I play with I haven't played with before. That's the difference. Lack of community.

Epicular, you're right, definitely nothing new since you joined... Definitely no new ladder (real time), game modes (coins), play style (no split) or cards (bomb). Nothing new at all and certainly not countless minor adjustments to improve gameplay

Oh really? A new game mode that will get Fizzer more money? A card that probably took 10 minutes to program?

Will get users more money. After all, he gave out a ton of free coins. And who cares if he is trying to get more money? The dude deserves it for the work he puts into this game, especially with cheap bastards like yourself who won't give a dime for your hours of enjoyment

there has been 985,302 new games since Feb 13th.. which is the time of my latest active game.. ahah

451,222 new games since apr 29th, the last game I was invited to.

means the average was 7037 since feb 13th, and only 6941 since apr 29th... ofc' I didn't take time of day into account, but meh

Warlight has died on Kongregate already, that's why I transfered here, but the same fate will happen here too, everything has it's day eventually, just accept it... Play while there are still players around, that all you can do.

unless we take the last option and move to steam there are lots of people there.

Edited 7/4/2015 15:00:55

I just started a few weeks ago, and I'm here to stay!

We are not in any danger of dying as a community. However:

One thing we can all do to ensure the future of Warlight is to get other players hooked. Find friends, play a game or two with them teamed up, RT, and then just hold their hand and be patient. Warlight's addicting to many people, if they like what they see, and if you keep playing with them, they'll stay.

Pardon the random thoughts in this wall of text...

I've been saying this for a long time: Lifetime Membership was a bad idea. In order for Fizzer to continue to get money for running the site this means he needs a steady supply of new players to purchase memberships. Which means Warlight needs to be continuously growing. Constant growth is a shitty business model (despite so many startups & companies seemingly wanting to be that way).

It's possible that Fizzer doesn't want to try this because of potential community backlash, but he really needs to make memberships subscription. In this way his income from the game scales with the number of users (assuming a constant percentage of subscriptions). Then he doesn't need constant growth to maintain the site... it can be maintained with much more realistic growth or even a stable community.

All these gimmicks he implemented were poorly thought out ideas that, if he actually heeded the opinions of others, never would have been close to being implemented. Warzone and coin games being the most ridiculous. But they all came from the standpoint of "We need more growth! We need to attract new users!" But the strength of Warlight IMO has always been its community. I think instead Fizzer needs to get his income from the community, not gimmicks. And that means making membership a subscription, with tangible benefits that make memberships worth it.

Opening up membership-only things to the entire community was a mistake, at least to a certain degree. Look at tournament creation. Once that became non-member only tons of crappy tournaments were being made and no one could find a good tournament to join. Then Fizzer basically killed open tournaments as a result. All of which didn't happen if you still needed to be a member to create a tournament. Now in the coin era, you can still make an open tournament, but it's stupid expensive. If it cost a buck per tournament people might make them. But right now no one is.

What Fizzer should be doing is looking at (1) what makes up the Warlight community, and (2) what would those segments of the warlight community pay for?

I see the warlight community made up of (1) Casual and new players looking to have fun, possibly playing with their friends (2) Competitive strategic players, (3) Roleplayers. Notice that gamblers are NOT on this list... making coin games a very perplexing option. I think strategic players and roleplayers are most likely to give money to the site, and the goal is to try to convert as many of casual players into strategic players and roleplayers as possible.

What sorts of features would enhance the strategic experience?

What immediately comes to mind for me: a mechanism for doing CLOTs that is easier for causal programmers or non-programmers to get into. Look at something like Heroku or Wordpress or Shopify that has a huge ecosystem of addons. Running a CLOT should be no more difficult than adding the appropriate addons and setting the proper settings. The current state of CLOT is to, if I understand it correctly, FIGURE SHIT OUT FROM SOURCE CODE. Basically CLOT is a half-implemented solution that really could have added a lot to warlight. Add a price tag to a good clot system, sell addons, and a lot of players could be willing to pay the price. But as it stands, I would have to spend many hours of research through poor documentation in order to get even a simple CLOT going, and I would rather just pay money than commit that much time - and I'm a career programmer!

What do we do instead? Organize tournaments and such by hand using external tools. Imagine how WSOW, Clan League, [20], and Promotion/Relegation league could thrive with CLOTs. Imagine if all the effort spent on coin games - a feature hardly anyone uses - was instead spent on improving the CLOT system. Or hell, even just add byes to tournaments!!

tl;dr: Fizzer needs to figure out how to make revenue from the existing community before he should even think about how he can grow the community. It's the fact that he's thinking backwards about the problem that leads to, from our perspective, a lot of perplexing decisions that damage the game of Warlight we love so much.

Addendum: If you follow what's been going on with reddit.com lately, the new CEO is implementing a lot of changes in attempt to monetize the site, but at the expense of its core user base. One phrase I keep hearing is that she is simply not creative with her ideas, so she's using the sledgehammer of "make site appealing to advertisers, open up new advertising streams." The old community be damned. Reddit might be able to get away with this because of its sheer size. Basically it would be like how facebook dumbed down over their history, but still kept a lot of (awful) users. I don't think Warlight has this luxury, because it's niche and small. Warlight needs its community.