Announcing WarLight 1.4

WarLight will be going down on Wednesday, May 25th at 11pm PDT (6am GMT) for up to 1 hour. Please plan accordingly for any fast games or single player games that may get interrupted during this 1 hour window.

During this time, WarLight will be upgraded to v1.04.0. This blog post contains a summary of what’s changing.

Ladder Graphs and Arrows

When viewing a player or team’s ladder information, WarLight now shows you a graph of their previous rank and rating:

Further, all of the ladder pages now show small arrows that indicate the movement over the past week:

Profile Additions

The little speed graphs on the left side of profile pages received a small addition. It’s now split between real-time games and multi-day games. Additionally, the multi-day game graph now has a new section for turns that took longer than a week.

The Gold Stars that you can earn by completing single player levels quickly are also now shown on your profile.

Percentage Attacks

When issuing an attack, you can issue them in raw army numbers or by percentage. A small change is being made to the way that percentage attacks work.

Previously, attacks by percentage were calculated based off of the number of armies on the source territory. Now, attacks by percentage are calculated based off the number of armies that are available to attack with.

Let’s look at an example. Say you have 21 armies on Brazil and 21 armies on Argentina. Say you transfer 20 armies from Argentina to Brazil, and then attack Nigeria from Brazil with 50%.

When the attack happens, Brazil has 41 armies, but only 20 of them can attack (the other 20 already moved since they came from Argentina). In the old behavior, WarLight would calculate 50% of 41 and attack with all 20 armies. In the new behavior, WarLight will take 50% of the armies that are available to attack, and attack with 10.

Round Robin Tournament Limits

When creating a round robin tournament, tournament creators now have the option to specify how many teams/players will be allowed to join the tournament. Of course, there’s still a “Start Tournament” button, so this number really specifies the maximum number of players. When the tournament is full, it will automatically start as well, which relieves the tournament creator from having to click the start button.

While this is only a minor convenience for non-team tournaments, this fixes a key problem that existed for team round robin tournaments. Since the tournament now has a maximum size, it can help guide players into forming even teams. Since the tournament can’t start with uneven teams, this makes it significantly easier to get team round robin tournaments up and running.

Ladder Matchmaking Tweaks

The ladder’s matchmaking algorithm has to walk a fine line. If it tries to be too selective in the matches it creates, some people will complain that they aren’t getting as many games as they’d like. Conversely, if it’s less selective, some people complain about who their opponents are. I’m trying to tweak it only in ways that logically make sense, and to make sure I’m not overcorrecting it one way or the other.

The ladder has eligibility requirements for two players or teams to be matched against each other. For example, they can’t currently be playing each other, have just finished a game with each other, or have had a match created against each other in the last 3 games.

The first change being made is that the ladder eligibility requirements now go both ways. Teams or players won’t be matched with someone, even if they meet the requirements, if that other person doesn’t meet the requirements back at them. This is a logical change that will help bring some stability to the matchmaking algorithm.

Since this will cause some people to receive fewer games than before, the ladder range is also being increased to counteract this. The range the ladder looks at has been increased from 25% to 30%.

Even with this increase, I expect some people will have stagnated games in the short-term due to this new requirement. However, as a few more games finish, this will pass and everything should return to the same quantity of games it was at before, but the quality of opponents should be much higher (i.e. fewer repeats and more diversity.)

Bug Fixes

– Fixed bugs around retired ladder games.
– Fixed a bug that caused the “A” hotkey, when used to skip watching the latest turn, to make the game think you hadn’t watched the latest turn and sometimes revert back to the watching state (such as when exiting history.)
– Fixed a bug that was causing the spy’s card “Can spy on Neutral” flag to not obey templates.
– Fixed a bug that was causing the team-size box to not obey templates.
– Sorting the My Games page by Game Name now does a case-insensitive sort.
– Fixed a bug that was causing stroke opacity to be inconsistent on some maps.
– Fixed a bug that caused the Send Feedback window text to not be selectable with the mouse.
– Fixed a bug that caused errors if you went too far back into the “All Forum Posts” archives.
– Fixed a bug that sometimes caused an error when a host changes the invited players from the lobby screen.