Players are not interested in competitive?

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C4nt3r
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Players are not interested in competitive?

Post by C4nt3r »

I know this game has a strong PvE/Single Player component, but has a big playerbase too and a lot of multiplayer games are played every day as you can see in replays website.

On the other side, checking competive lasser website game history and ladder itself, I see the competive side of the game low compared to this numbers.

Just curious. Players are not interested in competitive gaming?
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BTIsaac
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Re: Players are not interested in competitive?

Post by BTIsaac »

I'm know I'm not
Misanthrope
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Re: Players are not interested in competitive?

Post by Misanthrope »

C4nt3r wrote: September 6th, 2019, 9:53 am Players are not interested in competitive gaming?
There are a bunch of problems.

First of all - there are low numbers of mplayers overall nowadays.

Second thing is - there are very low numbers of players who can play competitive.
It's taking about a few years (according to my personal experience), to become more or less good mplayer.
Tad_Carlucci
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Re: Players are not interested in competitive?

Post by Tad_Carlucci »

I got so soured on multi-player in other game that I've pretty much avoided it everywhere for the past ten or fifteen years. That's why I like games like Wesnoth and Freeciv. I can play at my own pace and don't have to deal with any other players.
I forked real life and now I'm getting merge conflicts.
Byron
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Re: Players are not interested in competitive?

Post by Byron »

I agree. I don't like playing people. The greatest thing about the emergence of PC's was I could play games without playing people.
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Krogen
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Re: Players are not interested in competitive?

Post by Krogen »

In my opinion, if you put real effort in it, you can become at the very least quite decent after a few months.
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shevegen
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Re: Players are not interested in competitive?

Post by shevegen »

> Players are not interested in competitive gaming?

For me, I am a bit too old to play games competitively. I am more of a child of the 1990s era, "oldschool" games. I sort
of lost interest when games became clones after clones after clones of 3D engines... I still follow game-related news here
and there but I have no real interest in getting into games too much again.

The last game I played a lot was wacraft 3. I still like it but I stopped playing it in 2009 already. Not that I was
seriously playing it "competitively" but ... quite intensely.

These days I simply lack the time. Too many other priorities. I still play games now and then but mostly I have
a limited amount of time that I can invest into games - and no way to really extend that. So I honestly could
not play competitively, most definitely not for a longer while either.

I have become more of a casual player and for casual players, games that don't take too overly long are better.

I understand that this may be different for other players.
DwarvenWarrior
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Re: Players are not interested in competitive?

Post by DwarvenWarrior »

if there is ladder for isar it would be best.

otherwise no one will be interested. (projecting my own beliefs here)
l1onsun
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Re: Players are not interested in competitive?

Post by l1onsun »

I'm new in this game and i'm interested in playing ladder, but didn't play it yet. I read the FAQ on wesnoth.gamingladder.info and found it very confused to start playing ladder. I think it is main problem why ladder so unpopular (Games last 7 days: 0).

I am now playing unranked games and having fun. I'm even very surprised that opponents are found so quickly (no more than 5 mins usually). There are only two problems: 1) opponents are very different in skill and 2) i dont see my skill progress as a rating number :)

So i think if there was build in matchmaking in the game (something like "find match" buttom) competitive would find some popularity.
And i don't think a player has to be skilled to enjoy competitive. Especially if there was matchmaking that tries to find u your skill level opponent.

[sorry: bad english]
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Iris
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Re: Players are not interested in competitive?

Post by Iris »

I've been giving this issue some thought as of late, actually.

The primary problem I see with implementing competitive into the game is the same as always: the potential for cheating to manipulate stats and make matchmaking unfair. Currently the game isn't designed in a way that could prevent you from cheating by doing things such as peeking under FoW. I'm also really unsure as to where we are with regards to the server's gamestate tracking and whether it's possible to alter it in unexpected ways without triggering the debug mode alert by using a modded client, for example (modded as in source code modifications, not WML/Lua mods). The server certainly has no way to know whether you are playing vanilla Wesnoth or your own custom versions with modifications that haven't been sanctioned by the dev team. It's also historically designed to trust the legitimacy of whatever commands the clients send to it as it doesn't run its own version of the game logic.

The secondary issue is that neither the game nor the community are prepared to deal with everything that comes with ranked competitive. We have a pretty small mod team and very poor tools on both the client side (the clunky /report command and our overall reliance on CLIs to work around our inflexible UI toolkit) and the server side. There's little coordination with regards to how incidents are handled and the majority of them go unreported and moderators aren't everywhere at once to notice them if nobody reports them.
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UnwiseOwl
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Re: Players are not interested in competitive?

Post by UnwiseOwl »

I suspect that if we had rankings integrated into the game that people would be more likely to use play multiplayer games, and also that if there was significant use then a developer would be more likely to take a look at developing anti-cheat methods to make that system robust, but that without the first step it never seems worth making the second.
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C4nt3r
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Re: Players are not interested in competitive?

Post by C4nt3r »

AFAIK one of the problems of multiplayer is the length of the matches. I don't have 1-2 hours to play just a match
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Hejnewar
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Re: Players are not interested in competitive?

Post by Hejnewar »

Iris wrote: February 26th, 2020, 7:53 pm The secondary issue is that neither the game nor the community are prepared to deal with everything that comes with ranked competitive. We have a pretty small mod team and very poor tools on both the client side (the clunky /report command and our overall reliance on CLIs to work around our inflexible UI toolkit) and the server side. There's little coordination with regards to how incidents are handled and the majority of them go unreported and moderators aren't everywhere at once to notice them if nobody reports them.
I'm not 100% sure what competitive system you have in mind but if there was just button that created game in lobby instead of putting you in queque then people just wouldn't play with cheaters, both sides know with who they play and they can choose if they want to play with person who created / joined. With queque things for sure are much more complicated.
C4nt3r wrote: February 26th, 2020, 9:14 pm AFAIK one of the problems of multiplayer is the length of the matches. I don't have 1-2 hours to play just a match
Play with timer. This is all there is to it. Believe me 6p game with timer can be much faster than 1v1 without it. With timer people tend to pay more attention and dont afk randomly (if they do they lose, their fault). Suddenly length of game is shortened to 30-45 minutes.
C4nt3r
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Re: Players are not interested in competitive?

Post by C4nt3r »

Uhm....and 1v1 with timer? how much? Didn't tried multiplayer BTW
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Iris
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Re: Players are not interested in competitive?

Post by Iris »

Hejnewar wrote: February 26th, 2020, 9:33 pm I'm not 100% sure what competitive system you have in mind but if there was just button that created game in lobby instead of putting you in queque then people just wouldn't play with cheaters, both sides know with who they play and they can choose if they want to play with person who created / joined. With queque things for sure are much more complicated.
In that case the unofficial ladder is just as good a solution as anything else. Only people "in the know" get to play ranked.
Author of the unofficial UtBS sequels Invasion from the Unknown and After the Storm.
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