Raffle in the public chat

The Raffle is an event in the Global Chat, where chatters can win coins and powers or artifacts. Sometimes a raffle will only be coins. A new Raffle will start at a random moment between 10 minutes and 2 hours after the previous one ended.

Joining a Raffle

When the Raffle happens, the RaffleBot announced in chat:

(number) coin and a raffle starting! Say !raffle in the next 60 seconds to enter the raffle. (you must have chatted in the last hour)

If a player successfully joins a raffle by sending "!raffle" while the Raffle is active, the bot will reply in one of two ways:

• @(PlayerName): OK, you're in the raffle! Winner will be announced in (remaining seconds)
• @(PlayerName): You cannot enter since you did not chat in the last hour

At the end of the 60 seconds, a random winner will be chosen from the players that joined the Raffle, and a winner will be announced:

RAFFLE OVER: Congratulations to (PlayerName) for winning (Reward) ! Stay tuned for the next raffle!

Variations on Raffle

The term "Raffle" is only used 95% of the time, the other options are "Waffle" (4%) and "Wafaffle" (1%). This is reflected in both the start and end message of the Raffle.

The end of the announcement message is also varying. There is a roughly 2% chance for a Raffle to end with "You are all ruthless!" instead of "Stay tuned for the next raffle/waffle/wafaffle!".

If no player successfully joined the Raffle, it displays "RAFFLE OVER: Nobody entered the raffle! These coins will be added to the next one. Be ready for it!".

Warzone Facts

The end of the Raffle is followed by a random Warzone fact, containing the following facts:

1. For its first year, this game was invite-only.
2. Fizzer quit his job in 2010 to work on this game full time, and has been full-time on it since then. He hopes to continue working on this game for the rest of his life.
3. In addition to a global rating, Quickmatch has ratings in many different categories, such as for each template, real-time versus multi-day, 1v1s vs ffas, and more
4. The Feature Request Forum is the best place to request changes to the game. It was introduced in 2024 to replace the UserVoice forum.
5. The boot timer was added about four months into the game's life. Before that, a single player abandoning a game would cause it to get stuck.
6. Warzone uses PostgreSQL as its primary database software. It also uses MongoDB and Sqlite for some things.
7. Warzone uses a product called MaxMind to determine player's country flag on their profile, based on the IP they play from.
8. Warzone version numbers look like vA.BB.C.D, where A only changes in major overhauls, BB is a normal feature release, C is a bugfix or smaller update, and D is optionally used for hotfixes/patches. It's currently {version number}
9. Warzone uses websockets so that your device can instantly be notified when a game advances.
10. Warzone uses UTC time internally. If your timezone changes for things like Daylight Savings Time, then the clan wars timeslots will change by an hour for you.
11. Warzone relies on volunteer moderators to investigate reports of rule-breaking filed by the community. Every report will be looked into.
12. Sanction cards can be configured by game creators to be negative, and then will actually increase your income instead of reducing it.
13. The first game ever played was a test game in 2008 between Fizzer and his friend Anthony, who was letting Fizzer use his server to host the game for free at the time.
14. The first WarLight Android/iPhone apps were developed on the platform MonoTouch/MonoDroid, and were eventually released in 2013.
15. The website changed from http to https in 2014, to keep things more secure.
16. In 2024, a whole new map rendering engine, BabylonJS, was added to the website that allows 3d maps.
17. This game didn't show any ads for the first 5 years of its existence.
18. Multi-attack was one of the very first features added to the game, even before fog or cards.
19. The original WarLight Android/iPhone apps were re-written from scratch for the Warzone launch in 2017.
20. This game was multi-player only at first. Single-player wasn't added until over a year later in 2009, which only had 5 levels at first.
21. Warzone has music in the mobile app, but it's off by default based on the results of A/B testing that found players had a slight preference for silence over music.
22. On April 1st 2015, there was an April Fools prank that caused ghost messages to appear in chat of multi-player games.
23. Warzone Idle was launched in 2020
24. WarLight was ported from Silverlight to Flash in 2010.
25. Warzone has 2840 public maps, nearly all of which are made by the community.
26. Game IDs started at 1,000,000 and counted up. However, this isn't a reliable way if counting the number of games played, since IDs can sometimes be skipped.
27. Warzone has extensive automated tests that get run before every update. They take several hours and Fizzer usually runs them overnight.
28. The raffles are not, in fact, rigged.
29. The global chat room was added in January of 2019. Raffles were added 8 days later.
30. Before the Feature Request Forum, there was the UserVoice forum (launched in 2010). UserVoice was originally free but then started asking tens of thousands of dollars to continue using it, so Fizzer wrote his own.
31. The game was ported from Flash to Unity in 2017.
32. Fizzer first streamed on Twitch in 2015
33. Fizzer created this game in his spare time while working at Microsoft in 2008.
34. In 2017, Quickmatch was introduced and it quickly surprassed all other game totals combined.
35. The sound that plays when you pick a territory is a microwave door closing.
36. Quickmatch ratings give an activity bonus when below 500. This means that ratings below 500 tend to correlate with how active the player is, but ratings above 500 correlate to the player's skill.
37. When the 1v1 ladder was new, it was dominated by a player named The Impaller. There was a special game called "The Impaller vs the world" where he played against the entire community, and he won.
38. Quickmatch tries to match players of similar skill levels. To accomplish this, it generates a Match Rating for each player, which is 90% of their rating for that template plus 10% of their global rating.
39. When multi-attack was first introduced, it also allowed multi-transfers which meant armies could move an infinite number of times in a turn. This was after when players started entering thousands of delay moves to try and out-delay each other.
40. Created by Fizzer in 2008 using the technology Silverlight.
41. In 2010, auto games were introduced as a way to ensure the Open Games page was never empty, since at the time most open games were filling so fast that it was hard to find one.
42. Warzone is primarilly written in the C# programming language. It also uses Haxe, Sql, Scala, Lua, Python, Javascript, Java, C++, Objective-C, and Swift.
43. The forum was added in 2009, and all forum posts are still available to read.
44. In 2017, mods were introduced, which are ways to customize the game further beyond what is normally allowed.
45. When the 1v1 ladder was new, it was dominated by a player named The Impaller. There was a special game called "The Impaller vs the world" where he played against the entire community, and the community won.
46. The full history of nearly every multi-player game ever played is stored in Warzone's databases (>30 million)
47. Warzone is the sequel to WarLight
48. The game has been hosted on many different server providers over the years: Rackspace, AWS, Linode, Google App Engine, and bare hardware. Fizzer can switch providers without any downtime at all.
49. Real-time games were introduced in December of 2010. Before that, all games were multi-day.
50. I have {number of facts} Warzone facts that I can print out. Each raffle, I pick a random one, and I've been doing that since May of 2025.
51. Warzone has been team-building exercises at some companies.
52. Activision sued Warzone in 2021
53. Auto-boot was controversial when it was first introduced. Before that, some players thought of the boot time as more of a suggestion and would get angry when someone actually booted another player.
54. Warzone has been used in classrooms. Teachers in some schools have used it to teach geography and strategic thinking in an educational setting.