Season II will be a 1v1 match like Season I, except this time each player will receive a diplomacy card that lasts for two turns. Since the diplomacy card stops all fighting between two players, and there are only two players in a 1v1 match, the card will essentially stop all fighting for two turns. However, neutrals are still attackable.

It is your job to figure out how this affects the your strategy. The diplomacy break could give you a chance to move defensive armies into position, give you time to travel towards to an opponent’s far-away bonus, or just allow you time to capture that bonus that you had almost completed.

Full settings:

– Each player gets exactly one diplomacy card and will never receive more. The diplomacy effect will last for two turns.
– Light Fog, just like Season I
– Cyclic move order instead of random, just like Season I
– In-distribution neutrals is back to the normal 4, unlike the 0 in Season I
– Number of cards you can hold without being forced to play one is increased from 4 to 5, to account for the diplomacy card.

You can use this template if you want to practice.

Joining Season II

If you already joined the seasonal ladder for Season I, you’re already joined to Season II and you don’t need to do anything. If you never joined Season I, or you left it, you must re-join the ladder to be in Season II here.

If you played in Season I and don’t want to play in season II, you must leave the ladder here.

Season I Results

Congrats to Rubik87 for winning Season I!

I wanted to talk a little about the final results. Some have noticed that the winner went 14-1, whereas the runner up, Yeon, went 15-0. Yeon was the only player to go undefeated in Season I.

In the ratings algorithm, how strong your opponents are is a big factor in determining the final rank. A player who plays really strong opponents is often rated higher than a player with a better record who played weaker opponents. The issue here isn’t with the ratings algorithm is behaving correctly, but rather the issue has to do with the fact that the seasonal ladder does not give you an option to choose who you play against. It’s tough to tell someone that they’re not #1 when they played flawlessly, especially when players above them didn’t.

To address this, a few changes are being made for Season II. The biggest change is that the ladder now tries a lot harder to give players games against players nearer to their skill level. This means that you have a lot more control over who your opponents are. Win your early games and you’ll be rewarded with stronger opponents. This will also help the matchups be more exciting.

Second, 20 games are going to be played instead of 15. In Season I, I was worried some of the less active players would find 20 games too overwhelming, but given that it’s easy to sit out a season, I think that it’s okay to be more aggressive for those who want to play more. Having more games helps the rating system get a better picture of your skill level.

I don’t think anyone will go undefeated this time – feel free to try and prove me wrong 🙂

Today at 3pm GMT (11pm PST), WarLight will be updated to version 1.10.0. The update should only take a few minutes, however it will require players to refresh their browser so please plan ahead for potential interruptions to real-time games. I’m working on a system to allow updates to happen seamlessly, so downtime won’t be required, so hopefully these types of interruptions can be minimized in future releases.

Instead of one big feature, this update contains a lot of small improvements to the site and a long list of bug fixes.

Bonus Border Color

When a player controls a territory whose border is the same color as they are, the border is now displayed slightly lighter. This ensures that the territory borders are always visible, even when a player controls a bonus that is the same color as they are.

Bulk Remove from Invite List

The Manage Invite List page is getting a new tool that will allow you to remove all inactive players from your invite list. Just click Bulk Remove and the site will give you an option to specify how many days inactive the player must be for them to be removed, or you can just enter 0 to remove everyone.

Tournament Interface Improvements

The tournament interface is getting some long-needed improvements.

First off, the display of single-elimination and double-elimination tournaments has been updated to fit better within the space allotted. Namely trading vertical space for horizontal space since vertical space is at a premium. Also, the game boxes are displayed in a lighter color once the game has begun so it’s easier to tell at a glance how far along a tournament is.

Second, you can now highlight the games of any specific player, just like how your own games are highlighted. To do this, just click their name in the bottom players list and click the new Highlight Games button. This makes it much easier to check the progress of another player.

Lastly, the performance of loading large tournaments has been improved significantly. This is done by not initially showing declined and invited players in the players list. If you do want to see declined and invited players, a new button is provided to show them. Further, declining tournaments no longer invokes a full refresh, so declining tournaments is even faster yet.

Ladder Tweaks

The 1 v 1 ladder now requires 15 games to receive a rank instead of 10. This will help bring more stability to the ladder.

Season II of the seasonal ladder will play 20 games instead of 15 like in Season I. Four games will be created on the first day and one more every three days after that. Further, the seasonal ladder has been adjusted so players are more likely to receive games against players closer to their skill level. The game settings for Season II will be announced once Season I ends.

Abandoned Games

WarLight will now enforce a new policy around games that are started but then are abandoned by their players. If a game goes over 101 days without advancing, the players holding it up will be sent a warning e-mail. Two weeks after the warning e-mail, they’ll be auto-booted, regardless of whether or not the game had auto-boot enabled.

The purpose of this is to clean up some of the stale games. There are some games that haven’t advanced in over 1000 days! This will allow the games to be archived, which will increase the speed of the site, namely the My Games page.

Games that are still in the lobby after the two-week warning will just be deleted, unless they’re tournament games, in which case the players will be force-joined.

101 days is a minimum. The system isn’t super aggressive about sending out warning e-mails, so it may not send them out on exactly day 101. It will get around to it usually within a week.

Template Improvements

When creating a game with a template that you created, the boot times and game pace (multi-day versus real-time) will now be defaulted to the values saved in the template. This makes it faster to create games when using a template.

Misc Changes

– In real time games, the clock no longer makes an audible tick if you’re not alive in the game anymore (eliminated, booted, etc.)
– Real-time games are now eligible to be archived 24 hours after they finish. Multi-day games continue to wait 10 days before archiving.
– Creating a game or accepting an open seat now cause vacations to end. This stops trolls from activating a vacation and joining/creating a bunch of games that won’t be able to advance.
– The change name page now asks for confirmation to ensure players know they can only change their name every 20 days.
– The automatic panning now waits half a second after showing a successful attack before panning, to give you a chance to see the results of the attack.
– Fixed a bug in the map designer’s SVG parser that would cause strokes to not scale along with an object.
– Fixed a bug that caused templates created on the single-player tab to not include yourself.
– Fixed bugs around game loading that caused games to be left in unusable states when connection failures occurred.
– Fixed a bug that caused playing the same game from multiple browsers to not update each-other in some cases.
– Fixed the Home and Community tabs, as their words were a pixel or two off when selected.
– Fixed a bug that caused a surrender email to be sent when a player that had turned into an AI surrendered.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error message when a teammate played a card that you were in the middle of playing if the card involved UI (blockade, spy, gift, etc.)
– Fixed a bug that caused an error message if you started to play a card that involved UI, but then opened up the cards dialog, discarded it, then finished playing the card.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error message if you started to play a card that involved UI then double-clicked its submit button.
– Fixed a bug when creating games that caused the “Create Game” button to not be visible if there were too many teams.
– Fixed a bug that caused the private message box to be active even when a game is archived and can’t receive new chat.

I’ve been experimenting with TrueSkill as a potential replacement for the Bayesian ELO that the ladders use.

I’ve put together a small sample app (download at the bottom of this post) that will calculate the ratings of players using the TrueSkill algorithm. This can be used to compare the results of the algorithms side-by-side. Below is the top 30 results of the 1v1 ladder, as of the date of this blog post.

Rank Player                  Rating     Wins Losses
---------------------------------------------------
1    zaeban                  2421.536   41   6
2    Gui                     2372.826   15   2
3    AceWindu                2354.958   17   3
4    Rubik87                 2308.389   32   8
5    unknownsoldier          2287.282   20   7
6    Heyheuhei               2264.112   62   23
7    Eitz                    2258.755   31   11
8    NuckLuck                2254.831   16   5
9    ????V                   2210.151   29   11
10   ????Chaos               2205.284   20   2
11   chas                    2203.465   36   15
12   Oliebol                 2187.576   21   8
13   20AquaHolic             2158.945   61   31
14   Yeon                    2151.634   18   6
15   13CHRIS37               2143.782   44   16
16   DrTypeSomething         2098.338   18   6
17   WMMekBlaze              2098.327   18   4
18   TheEmperorCornInMyTight 2079.722   61   29
19   MonsenhorChacina        2075.971   9    3
20   Mian                    2072.797   23   10
21   Hroptatyr               2071.86    26   12
22   PaniX                   2069.742   16   9
23   bytjie                  2037.808   20   11
24   Xyphistor               2018.273   71   39
25   alababi                 2010.574   18   8
26   REGLMentysh             2005.368   28   17
27   WMDazedInsane           1992.604   24   9
28   20TheWindowCleaner      1988.566   15   5
29   JimH                    1985.033   33   18
30   Tor                     1978.475   24   17

Rank Name                        Elo
------------------------------------
   1 AceWindu                   2176
   2 Gui                        2163
   3 zaeban                     2130
   4 ????Chaos                  2085
   5 NuckLuck                   2060
   6 Rubik87                    2042
   7 unknownsoldier             2039
   8 MonsenhorChacina           2029
   9 zibik21                    2021
  10 WMMekBlaze                 2004
  11 ????V                      1995
  12 Yeon                       1992
  13 Eitz                       1989
  14 Oliebol                    1981
  15 20TheWindowCleaner         1977
  16 Heyheuhei                  1963
  17 DrTypeSomething            1961
  18 chas                       1954
  19 PaniX                      1950
  20 Troll                      1943
  21 13CHRIS37                  1935
  22 TheImpaller                1933
  23 Mian                       1927
  24 fwiw                       1917
  25 alababi                    1907
  26 Hroptatyr                  1904
  27 LilEitz                    1892
  28 bytjie                     1886
  29 WMDazedInsane              1882
  30 Fizzer                     1879

The ratings are not important, just the ordering of the players. The wins and losses are only specified in the left table, but these are comparisons over the same games so the numbers are the same for both sides.

Even though Bayesian ELO is what the site uses now, you might notice some differences between the right table and what WarLight.net shows today. They’re not identical since WarLight doesn’t give ranks to players who have left the ladder, don’t have 10 games yet, or are on vacation.

Algorithm Differences

There are advantages and disadvantages between the two algorithms. The biggest difference is that the ripple effect that Bayesian ELO uses is not existent in TrueSkill. That is, when a game ends, Bayesian ELO applies the biggest changes to the players who played that game, but also applies smaller adjustments to everyone who has played either of those players, and so on.

The nice thing about TrueSkill is that when a game ends, you can immediately know how many rating points you gained or lost. Your rating also only changes when you finish a game. This also means that you can see exactly how your rating got to its current location, as each game can show its affect on your rating.

The disadvantage of this is that *when* you defeat an opponent matters. Say player A rises from #30 to #1 on the ladder. If you defeat player A when they’re at #1, you’ll get a much bigger ratings boost than you would have if you defeated them when they were #30. This isn’t true in Bayesian ELO, since the rating points you got from defeating player A rise as they rise up the ladder.

This is most visible in contrived examples. Say Player A defeat B, B defeats C, and then C defeats A. In Bayesian ELO, all three players would be tied, as their victories form a perfect triangle, evening each other out. In TrueSkill, player C would be the highest ranked, since they defeated A who was the #1 ranked player at the time of their game.

Running TrueSkill Simulations

As mentioned above, I wrote a command-line tool that allows you to run simulations of WarLight ladders with the TrueSkill algorithm.

You can download this tool from this link: WLTrueSkill.exe.

On Windows, this requires .NET 4.0 runtime to be installed. On Mac or Linux, the tool should work fine under a recent version of Mono.

To use the tool, simply feed it one of the Bayeselo Logs linked from the wiki. For example:

WLTrueSkill < BayeseloLog0.txt

By running the program with an argument of /?, you can see some additional options.

Feedback

I'm considering using TrueSkill for Season II as a trial run. Let me know your thoughts!

On Monday, January 9th at 8am GMT (midnight PST), WarLight will be updated to version 1.09.3. While the update is taking place, the website will be down for a short time. If all goes well, the downtime should last for less than 30 minutes.

The primary purpose behind this update is to add support for the upcoming Android preview. However, some other features snuck in as well.

Tips during Load

While WarLight is loading, it now shows basic information about the game. This is just a way to help teach players a few tips they might not know while they wait for the game to load. For example:

Profile Ladder Stats

Players can now control which ladder stats are shown on their profile. If there’s one you don’t want shown, you can turn it off by editing your profile and clicking the new “Show or Hide Ladder Stats” button.

Further, stats shown for the 2v2 ladder have been improved, especially in the case where players have played the 2v2 ladder multiple times with different partners. Not only does it show what rank you achieved with each partner, but it also allows you to choose which partners you wish to show on your profile and which you wish to hide.

Show Example Armies

When creating a map, there’s now a new button named Show Example Armies that will place a two-digit army number into every territory at its center point. This helps visualize how big the army numbers will be without having to go through the trouble of creating a test game.

This is useful for two main reasons:

1. When trying to place the center point, having an example army number shown makes it much easier to get the center point dead-on instead of having to guess.
2. Having the army number shown is an easy way to see if your small territories are too small. Since all territories must be big enough to fit their army number, this helps find out if a territory is big enough.

Failed Attack Visibility in the Fog

There’s a minor change being made to the way attacks show up in fog games.

If you issue an attack, but then lose the territory before the attack happens, the attack won’t take place. The tooltip for that attack just says “This order could not be executed.”

If you don’t have any adjacent territories at the time of the failed attack, WarLight won’t even show you that the attack was there and failed. This was a really odd behavior, especially since your opponents could see the failed attack since they had adjacent territories. You could see the attack in a no-fog game or after the game ended, but not during the game.

Now, WarLight will always show you the failed attacks you made even if you don’t have adjacent territories. This doesn’t reveal any more information, so this is not game-changing in any way. However, it eliminates a point of confusion that new players often hit, since they remember that they issued an attack but WarLight doesn’t show it to them. Now, it will show them the attack at its place in the turn, which will make it clear why the attack didn’t happen.

Misc Changes

– Fixed bugs with the APIs GameFeed and GameIDFeed that caused them to fail on some archived games.
– Fixed a bug that caused there to be too many teams when copying a team tournament game’s settings.
– Fixed a bug that caused players who had left the seasonal ladder to not be ranked. All players with 5 completed games should get a rank.
– The ladder pages for seasonal ladders now indicate if a player has left the seasonal ladder.
– Fixed a bug on the map designer that caused green lines that wrap around the map to appear incorrectly on very large maps.
– Fixed a bug that caused Azerbaijan’s thumbnails to not appear.

If you’re a WarLight member and want to help test the WarLight app for Android, please fill out this form. EDIT: Link taken down. Thanks to everyone who signed up!

The goal of this preview is to test the WarLight app for Android on a variety of devices to help iron out any bugs. I can’t guarantee it will work on your device, however I will do my best to make it work on as many as possible. All devices running Android 2.1 or higher are eligible.

Keep in mind that the app can’t quite do everything that the Flash version can yet, as this is just a preview and not the finished app. However, it does enough to play your multi-player games — all settings, cards, and maps are supported.

WarLight has come a long way in 2011.

I’m amazed when I think back to what WarLight was like a year ago. The site was still in beta, and none of the ladders existed. You couldn’t save your own templates, so creating games required that you manually enter every setting every time. No auto-boot existed, so tournaments would frequently get stalled whenever one game would get abandoned.

The list of features added in 2011 goes on and on. Custom scenarios, the dashboard, the statistics panel, open tournaments, the wiki, new graphics, vacations, map categories, ability to save single-player games, the stand-alone client, and music. Wow!

WarLight has five times as many active players now as it did when 2011 started. Although WarLight has been up since 2008, 2011 hosted more than four times as many WarLight games as all the other years combined!

Mobile Update

Although I’m proud of the above list of features, those were all actually secondary goals. In fact, I spent more than half of my time in 2011 working on iPhone and Android versions of WarLight. All of the features listed above were actually completed in periods where I took breaks from working on the mobile client.

I’m committed to making WarLight a cross-platform game. WarLight is a perfect game for mobile devices due to its asynchronous nature. Unlike other multi-player games where you have to be online at the same time as your opponents, WarLight allows you to take your phone out of your pocket whenever you have a free moment, enter your orders, and put it right back.

A prototype of WarLight for the iPhone already exists, but unfortunately due to Apple’s restrictions I can’t release it until it’s ready for the app store. It may be some time until it’s polished enough for the app store, but there should be room for a few lucky testers once it gets further along. Opportunities for testers will be announced on the blog.

Over the last month I’ve been working on getting Android version ready for a preview release. Android is great in that Google allows people to install apps off the web, so WarLight will be able to release previews. Stay tuned to the blog for news on a preview of the Android client, coming soon!

Looking Forward

2011 was a great year for WarLight, but it’s definitely not the end. This was the first complete year that I worked on WarLight full-time, and I have no intentions of stopping or moving on to a new game. I still view WarLight as a very young game. I want WarLight to be the best play-by-email game in existence and to be playable on as many platforms as possible.

I’m constantly amazed that, even after living and breathing WarLight for almost four years now, I’m still not tired of the game! It’s rare for a game to stay fun for its developers after so long.

I expect 2012 to be an even bigger year for WarLight. So thanks for playing, and have a happy new year!

There are two ways to buy lifetime WarLight memberships for someone else. You can either directly upgrade their WarLight account to a member, or you can purchase a code that is redeemable for a free membership.

Either way, start by visiting the purchase page.

To directly upgrade someone else’s account, just select “Purchase as a gift for an existing WarLight player” and select their name from the drop-down.

To purchase a code, select the third option. WarLight will ask you for an e-mail address to send the code to. You can either send the code directly to the recipient, or if you want to wait and give it to them later, you can enter your own e-mail address to receive the code yourself. This is useful if you want to print it out, wrap it up and present it as a physical gift.

I’m pleased to announce the first season of the new Seasonal Ladder! (see the previous blog post if you missed the announcement.)

This season will begin on December 9th and run for 60 days, ending on February 7th. If you’re a member planning on joining, it’s a good idea to join it right now to ensure you’ll be in the ladder when it starts. You can join it right now via this link.

Seasons are named using roman numerals, so this season is officially titled Season I. In February we’ll start Season II, then Season III, etc.

For Season I, we’ll use the settings defined by this template. This template is based off of the Strategic 1v1 template, with the following modifications:

• Light Fog instead of Normal Fog
• In-distribution neutrals are 0 instead of 4
• Cyclic move order instead of random move order

The in-distribution neutrals controls how many neutral armies start on each territory that neither player picked. This is usually 4, which makes it more expensive to take bonuses that you didn’t start in. By changing it to 0, it means that bonuses you didn’t start in will be almost as easy to take as ones you did, which makes expansion far easier. Attacking a 0 with even just one army is a 100% success rate, so they can also provide opportunities for easy cards.

The change to Light Fog means that players can see who controls every territory on the map, while still only being able to see army counts for adjacent territories. This change means counter-picks are less effective, as you can always tell if your opponent is on the other side of that neutral.

As an added benefit of using Light Fog, this also allows you to watch other player’s in-progress games. You can’t see army numbers, but at least you can get an idea of who might be winning. There may be times where it’s fun to check up on your biggest opponent’s progress.

I’m interested in hearing your ideas for settings for future seasons! Please post them to the ladder forum.

On Sunday, November 27th at 1am PDT (8am GMT), WarLight will be upgraded to 1.09.0. While the upgrade is taking place, the website will be down for a short time. If all goes well, the downtime should last for less than 15 minutes.

This blog post contains a summary of what’s changing.

Seasonal Ladder

As announced in the previous blog post, WarLight is getting a new ladder! Once it is ready to join, another blog post will kick off the first season.

Ticking Clock

In real-time games, the clock now makes a ticking sound when it’s under 30 seconds. This helps players who play with sounds enabled tell when they’re getting close to being booted.

Forum Search

The forum now has a rudimentary search feature, which makes it easier to find forum posts. All forum pages will have a search box on the top.

The search is powered by PostgreSQL full-text search functionality. It’s not incredibly powerful, but it should be good enough for the forums.

Graph Improvements

The graphs section under the statistics window is getting some improvements. Previously, you could graph “armies received per turn,” which showed the player’s income for each turn as the game progressed. This graph is inconsistent when it came to cards, as some cards would be reflected in the totals (such as sanction cards) and other cards were not (such as reinforcement cards).

This graph metric is being split into two separate graphs: Base armies received each turn, and armies actually deployed each turn.

Base armies received each turn is the same to the old graph, except that cards are no longer counted in the total. This means it reflects the number of armies that the player would have been getting if cards did not exist.

The new graph, armies actually deployed each turn, shows the number of armies that the player added to the map every turn. Therefore, this takes into account all cards, such as sanctions and reinforcements. What makes this graph extra useful is that it works while fog games are still in progress. It will simply show how many armies that you saw that player deploy for each turn.

This may not match their total income while fog games are in progress, as they could have deployed armies elsewhere on the map that you could not see. However, this makes it easier to see how many armies you’ve seen your opponent deploy without having to navigate through history turn-by-turn and adding up all of the deployment orders you saw.

Map Design API

Map designers who are also developers can now write programs to enter details about their map, which can be easier in some cases than using WarLight’s built-in map designer. This can be used to enter territory names, connections, center points, bonuses, and distribution modes. See Map Details API on the wiki for the details.

2v2 ladder change

As previously announced, the initial armies that each player starts with in the Strategic 2v2 template is being changed from 5 to 4.

Misc Changes

– The automatic refresh now refreshes more often when you’re actively chatting in a game, which makes real-time conversations easier.
– Added a button in the map designer that shows URL you can use to share your map with other players.
– Fixed a bug with the map designer that caused uploading a SVG that had problems to create an empty map that had to be deleted.
– Fixed a caching bug that caused map thumbnails to be very slow at updating when a map was changed.
– Fixed a bug that caused the Favorite Games screen to not show archived games.
– Fixed a bug that was causing total times played with another player to show lower numbers than normal on your invite list.
– Fixed a bug that caused a boot notification that appears in the orders list to come up a turn late when players are set to turn into AIs when booted.
– Forum threads that do not get posted to for more than 6 months are now automatically deleted. Some special threads are immune from deletion, such as The Impaller vs The World ones.
– Improved the analyze window in cases where the offensive kill rate is set to very low percentages. It’s still wrong in some cases, but they’ll be far more rare.

I’m pleased to announce that WarLight is getting a new ladder! The new ladder, called the Seasonal Ladder, works a bit differently than the existing 1v1 and 2v2 ladders. While the current ladders are never-ending grinds for the top spot, the seasonal ladder hosts 60-day seasons, where each season will use different game settings. This will give us an opportunity to explore WarLight’s great wealth of maps and customization options on a global scale.

Each season is ranked independently of each other. At the end of the season, the rankings are fixed and will be preserved for all time, and will appear on winning player’s profiles.

Since they’re ranked independently, it’s easy to sit out a season if you don’t like that season’s settings or just need a break. One could view the seasonal ladder like a sprint, whereas the 1v1 and 2v2 ladders are more like marathons.

Games

Each player that plays in a season will get 15 games*, and will never play the same opponent more than once in a season. Having all players have the same number of games adds even more fairness to the final rankings that the existing ladders don’t enjoy.

On the first day of the season, all players get 4 games. Every 4 days after that, one more game is added until all players have 15. If a player joins the season late or leaves it early, they are not guaranteed to get 15 games. However, the ladder will try to catch them up to the rest of the crowd, and in most cases will be able to.

Rankings

The rankings are determined using the same ELO scale that the existing ladders use, with one small modification. Players who play fewer than 15 games (due to leaving the ladder early or joining late) get a penalty of 40 rating points per game. It’s best to join the season before it starts and stay in it for the whole 60 days to ensure you do not receive a penalty. The penalty exists to ensure players can’t game the system by intentionally joining the season late and riding to a high-rank by getting a few lucky games.

Force-finish

In order to ensure a winner can be declared and the rankings can be finalized, all games in a season must be finished by the ending date, which is exactly 60 days after it began. If a game isn’t done when the season ends, it will be immediately ended by WarLight. The winner will be determined by adding up how many armies each player controls on the map, then adding in each player’s income times two.

All players are expected to give every effort to finish their games before the end of the season. Players who intentionally drag a game out to a force-finish will bring great shame to their families for three generations. (okay, not really.)

Settings

The settings for the first season have already been determined and will be announced in a future blog post (coming very soon). I’m very interested in everyone’s opinions for maps/settings for future seasons! Please submit your ideas to the ladder forum.

Initially the seasonal ladder will only support games with two humans (AIs are possible, though I can’t think of a scenario where it makes sense to use them.) In a future release, I plan to upgrade the ladder to support more than two players per game, which will allow for FFA seasons and random-team seasons.

The first season will start in early December. Like the other ladders, only WarLight members may join. You will be able to join the ladder once the next release is live (v1.09), which should hopefully be live within a week or so.

* Some players may get 16 games, since there are cases where it’s not mathematically possible to give everyone exactly 15 without duplicates. Getting 16 is neither an advantage or disadvantage.