Warzone has just been updated to version 5.24.1! This is a small update with fixes to several bugs and making other small improvements to the game. This blog post describes what’s changed.
This update is live now on the Warzone website at https://www.warzone.com as well as in the Standalone Client. The Android and iOS apps will receive this update within the next week or two.
Ladder Boot Times
I took a look at how the ladders have been performing since the recent ladder refresh in 5.24.0, where the boot times were adjusted to use banked time, among other changes. If I take all recent ladder games, group them by week, and plot the percentage of those games that ended by boot, I can see that the percentage of games that end by boot is down significantly in the last two weeks since the ladder refresh:
That’s a good thing!
Nevertheless, there have been calls from the community for higher boot times, so I will convert 12 hours of banked time into fixed time. This will go live for all ladder games created after the 5.24.1 update — it won’t affect games that were already created.
I know some players have been calling for the boot times to be returned to a full 3 days for every turn, but I just don’t think it’s fun to have to wait three full days between every turn of a game. I’ve heard this from players over the years too — it’s generated a lot of complaints whenever someone gets stuck in a game where their opponent is waiting a full three days between every turn. And I agree — it’s simply not fun, and I’m not willing to put out a game I wouldn’t recommend playing. Three days is fine on occasion, but it shouldn’t take that long for every single turn every single time. If you really need three days for every turn, you can always make your own Warzone games and set the boot time to whatever you want, but if you want to play the official Warzone ladders then do so when you can commit to taking your turn at least 5 times per week.
Other Changes
– Classic: Updated ladder rewards to encompass more players.
– Classic: Ladder pages now show the name of the template so you don’t have to click the button to see what it is.
– Classic: Seasonal ladder pages now show the start and end date.
– Classic: Fixed ladder removing players on auto-commit.
– Classic: Fixed ladder “…” row to only appear when there’s a legit jump in players.
– Classic: Fixed the boot percentage displayed on profile. It now properly takes into account games where a player was booted multiple times, or a game where they were booted into an AI, or a game where they were booted but their team won.
– Classic: Fixed randomized slots in community levels.
– Classic: Fixed single-player “try again” button on levels with randomized slots.
– Classic: Fixed the performance of the ladder page for very active players by showing a sample of their rating/rank history instead of all of it.
– Classic: Fixed deleted accounts not being removed from active games.
– Idle: Fixed a bug that could cause the daily door dialog to get stuck open if you can’t use the power that was granted.
– Idle: Fixed 100% hospital upgrade time reduction.
– Idle: Fixed “No session 2” error.
– Idle: Fixed the armies/money hover rapidly appearing and disappearing when holding a smaller device in landscape mode.
– Website: Fixed numpad “.” button.
– Website: Fixed map of the week text “1 votes” -> “1 vote”
– Website: Fixed excessive decimal places on graphs.
– Website: Removed note about moved links under the community tab.
– Mods: Special units with a negative combat order will now fight before armies on that territory.
– Mods: Added WL.TickCount() for measuring the passage of time accurately.
– Mods: Fixed a bug that made a generic error if GetTurn was called with an invalid turn number. Now it simply calls you back with nil.
– Mods: Fixed Game.Orders returning orders for the previous turn if called right after a turn advanced.
– API: Fixed Query Game API on custom scenario games.
So obviously the bootrate decreased since booters get removed now. Also, many players joined the ladder cause the rating system was new, so they obviously won’t boot on the first week. This data is either meant to sidestep the issue or is really badly interpreted by fizzer. The latter seems unlikely cause i think fizzer is a smart guy.
I think this is a very important comment, although I disagree with the last part. I work with doctors, arguably very smart people, and they often misinterpret the data without realizing this. It’s really easy to overlook confounding factors and alternative explanations, or the opposite, as you do, fully assign the confounders as reason for the effect and dismissing any effect of the variable of interest.
I don’t think it’s possible to find any causal effect of a single measure like this, as several measures, including the removal of booted players, were included at once, and it won’t ever be possible anymore due to this type of outroll. That’s why if you really want to know those effects, you need to do A/B testing, which is not possible on Warzone.
In short: we cannot interpret this data as if, there are way too many confounding factors that are not taken into account.
Question is: does it matter? If the playerbase is happier on average, that’s a win. I’m personally not happy at all and won’t join any ladders anymore, but I’m just a single guy. My opinion is not more important than those of any of the thousands of other players.
I think there might be a chance that the lower boot rate is because of removing booters now immediately from the ladder, but just a guess 😉
I nevertheless like this update, thanks Fizzer.
Highlights of this update for me are;
1) Increased boot-time on ladder games
2) Improved reward distribution
Both of these are welcomed changes, thanks for listening the community Fizzer!
Is there not going to be a poll about ladder boot times then? I thought you said you’d do one in your last AMA.