Cold death of the competitive scene
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Update: after several discussions with several prominent scenario and custom map players, I've came up with some palpable demands. Since some people constantly say they don't get the point of this post, let me state it clearly for them. More points will be added in the future.
Without those, CW scene will still be practically and technically locked on EU+ 10k as it is right now.
The extra point of the post is for competitive community to stop being self-centered. I've presented my insight on why the community is dying and offered several options to prevent the cold death. It's the competitive community's choice whether they ignore it, or face the issue instead. Seeing the responses and upvotes to this post, I see many familiar faces from the competitive scene supporting it. For the rest of the community I have a clear message, to stop being delusional.
I am still wondering how much time it has to take to make people realize some apparent things.
First of all, the number of competitive players is constantly shrinking. Since almost all currently active ones registered before 2016 and you can see more and more players going inactive every day, the trend is obvious. Currently active coalitions have at most 100 competitive players, for which I doubt more than half are active. Back in 2016 in the peak period of overall activity, Epic Clan had almost 60 members itself, out of which almost all played CW. Let's not even mention other coalitions like ENIGMA, SM and Mystics all had 20-30 players each. MK and several other smaller coalitions had up to 20 aswell. Unlike in this moment, at that time 90% of the mentioned players were active. The bar to join is very high aswell. All the skills of new players are overshadowed by experience of the old players who are playing the same map for years and years.
Second, the most basic competitive setting, EU+ 10k, has been played out. Since the vast majority of games are played with 6 picks and each team can pick one of the two picks in three parts of the map, there are 8 combinations total to play. Even with a few extra combinations, there is not much change. Adding that the most games are decided in first 8 turns, you can conclude the initial picks as well as the initial picks are the deciding factor in the victory. Now tell me what is the last time you've seen something new happening in CW? All moves have already been seen, they all have been played out. There have been at least 6000 CWs so far (90% of them on EU+) and at least 10 times that many duels on EU+.
The solution to that is obvious, and it's that the competitive scene stops being elitist, exclusive and egocentric. Playing diverse maps, even the other parts of world map, as well as scenarios, would increase the number of people participating in CWs 10 times. There are far more scenario, RP and world map players than competitive players, as it could be seen from several polls conducted in past. The exclusion of them from one of the most interesting features this game offers has to stop, or the game will ultimately suffer. Choose wisely.
Below is the competitive scene, colorized
- Make scenario CWs work. Currently, it's technically impossible to play such game.
- Have a scenario / custom map mod. Currently, there are zero custom map mods, let alone scenario mods.
- Stop mods from disallowing ghosting in scenarios. So far there have been numerous warnings regarding this, I'm not sure have there been more severe actions. Forcing the ghosting rule in scenarios would severely hurt the game.
- Make a functioning map editor. Already discussed in other threads. I've been told it's very bugged and needs a lot more work.
Without those, CW scene will still be practically and technically locked on EU+ 10k as it is right now.
The extra point of the post is for competitive community to stop being self-centered. I've presented my insight on why the community is dying and offered several options to prevent the cold death. It's the competitive community's choice whether they ignore it, or face the issue instead. Seeing the responses and upvotes to this post, I see many familiar faces from the competitive scene supporting it. For the rest of the community I have a clear message, to stop being delusional.
I am still wondering how much time it has to take to make people realize some apparent things.
First of all, the number of competitive players is constantly shrinking. Since almost all currently active ones registered before 2016 and you can see more and more players going inactive every day, the trend is obvious. Currently active coalitions have at most 100 competitive players, for which I doubt more than half are active. Back in 2016 in the peak period of overall activity, Epic Clan had almost 60 members itself, out of which almost all played CW. Let's not even mention other coalitions like ENIGMA, SM and Mystics all had 20-30 players each. MK and several other smaller coalitions had up to 20 aswell. Unlike in this moment, at that time 90% of the mentioned players were active. The bar to join is very high aswell. All the skills of new players are overshadowed by experience of the old players who are playing the same map for years and years.
Second, the most basic competitive setting, EU+ 10k, has been played out. Since the vast majority of games are played with 6 picks and each team can pick one of the two picks in three parts of the map, there are 8 combinations total to play. Even with a few extra combinations, there is not much change. Adding that the most games are decided in first 8 turns, you can conclude the initial picks as well as the initial picks are the deciding factor in the victory. Now tell me what is the last time you've seen something new happening in CW? All moves have already been seen, they all have been played out. There have been at least 6000 CWs so far (90% of them on EU+) and at least 10 times that many duels on EU+.
The solution to that is obvious, and it's that the competitive scene stops being elitist, exclusive and egocentric. Playing diverse maps, even the other parts of world map, as well as scenarios, would increase the number of people participating in CWs 10 times. There are far more scenario, RP and world map players than competitive players, as it could be seen from several polls conducted in past. The exclusion of them from one of the most interesting features this game offers has to stop, or the game will ultimately suffer. Choose wisely.
Below is the competitive scene, colorized
His pont stands croat, there could be a hundred cws a day but it's not the amount of cws, its who's playing them and its the same couple dudes over and over again, and if they quite it seriously would be dead. Competitive needs more players, and more variety, and less toxic assholes with superiority complexes.
----  We are not the same- I am a Martian.
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bro look how many clans are competing ...15 clans of course if 15 clans quit comp would die
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I speculate it has to do with a new admin. Two months ago this game was on its death bed. It's a valid point, people leave comp faster than they join. It just so happens Dave rekindled many old players will to play, but that could fizzle out very quickly
---- We are not the same- I am a Martian.
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excuse me.. we medaled when we actually tried for one season tyvm  Also, I think your right in that the competitive world is elitist, I couldn't agree more. However, I think the heart of the matter is that it takes (relatively) so long to get to that certain skill level that by the time you get there, you feel you deserve to be cocky or deserve to be considered important because you put all that time in. How many times do you see high ranks lose their nice attitudes of their lower ranked former selves. I don't need to name any names, we all know who those people are around here. I've been saying for some time now we should incentivize those mid ranks (5-8) to stay around by adding in more ranks (making current system go up to maybe 50). That way your ranking up faster, and feel better about yourself. Yea I'm going for placebo effect here, but numerous other games who are successful have wider rank ledgers, and I think its quite apparent that our small rank ledger just doesnt work. Many rank 5s get scared off by main room, and leave. I mean.. I was one of those myself, and I've met many others who are like this. Lets empower the noobs to want to stick around and get better, give them a hit of self-confidence 
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No, it doesn't. I reffered to that in the bigger reply.
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You did not disprove the fact that we lose competative players faster than we gain them. You justified that with activity and I countered by saying you can't rely on the same players forever. They eventually will not come back one by one. As it stands all my friends already left, leaving a husk of what comp used to be for me. Where I get consistantly attacked by a small minority for having a different opinion. The arguement that everything is fine, nothing needs to be fixed may work for the current competative group for now but one day people will scratch there heads and ask where things went wrong. We can fix this issue now. We just need to work together rather than argue.
---- We are not the same- I am a Martian.
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Who said we are losing competitive players faster than we gain them? you and njab? I told you that competitive scene never had more than 80 daily active people on cw scene. We had certain seasons (especially from 9th-12th month) which is generally the most inactive season every year since now. Same was in 2018. I bet that current cw scene is averagely the same as before by an amount of new players coming on scene and old players who gone inactive. We are holding that number between 90-150 players since ever. Never less and never more. Players like grom, 4nic, froyer, tengri, dominoz, lelouch, bugs, kaixo, apocalypse, josipjefaca and tens of others replaced zone, opi, ghost, bossko, ferlucci, etc..... You may feel that loss is bigger if you see well known name going inactive, but remember how many new guys are currently controlling the cw scene. Many of them you didn't even hear for, but they are daily coming online and willing to cw anytime. Trust me, no one is going to scratch his head asking where things went wrong, because things won't go wrong. Competitive scene will never stop existing, but will remain as fluid as every year since aw was made. We are talking here now like we have only 20 competitive players and things have to change drastically. No, we have between 60 and 70 daily active competitive players and in total about 120 competitive players in competing coalitions. Which is nothing but pure average like in prevouis years. Even more than average if we zoom into certain seasons of 2017. and before. Nothing to fix with competitive scene imo. It's just a fallacy if you ask me.
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Sorry I forget my place, arguing with slavs is like yelling at a brick wall to melt. Please continue to jeopardize what could potentially be the main component to saving this game, so you and your elitist friends can pat each other on the back at the end of seasons. I'll just stick to map making and scenarios, until i get to tell you I told you so.
---- We are not the same- I am a Martian.
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Even, I was not arguing with you (but normally trying to dispute your wrong quotes how we lose much more competitive players than we gain); this stereotype and prejudice based on someone's roots/race/whatever is the dumbest thing you could post at this moment and at any moment. It is being even more dumb if we consider that you absolutely agree with 1 slav and disagree with another slav about same theme and still you're able to write your sentence from above. Does that auto-explain you someone's roots/race have nothing with certain theme opinion on virtual game? It's individual opinion. You think competitive scene is falling, I think it's not. We will see soon who was right 
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I think you took that part to harshly or race baiting, I simply ment you are strong willed and stubborn.
---- We are not the same- I am a Martian.
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a r9 has all good upgrade when u are r9 upgrades mean nothing anymore and some players did it lulu bugs josip and I did it its more than possible when u are r9 u should win agaisnt decent/good comp players or u are a normal r9 why would u try to be a competitive players if u cant win an old players zz ofc u wont beat nic wd lao or some other very good players but with more experience u will win (I started to duel nic when I was r7 and won him only r9) . And for the clan who cant win season they will say we play for fun not like u but better clan play for fun too ofc they want to win season , im not telling they should stop cuz more cw more fun and they will get experience join a good clan or stay and 1 day they will be on the top 3. Ec could be on the top 3 of the season but u think quantity is quality but u proved its false by losing all bugs and I elo won yes we kicked some nubs but we won more elo than 10 of ur active players will.
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Hey guys this debate doesn't matter it doesn't matter whether we had 80 players at any point in our history whether we did or we didn't, surely we can aim to have more than 80 now? Instead of arguing about if the community is dead or not, can't we just try to increase the population either way?
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Rn I don't have time to read all the replies, but this is my point of view that I expressed today before I saw the post when a member of our clan asked our opinion about inviting a middle rank to our clan who wants to improve: Almost the entire development of a competitive player comes almost ONLY from his will. If u don't have the will to go the extra mile and also play the game seldomly, u will never become at least low tier competitive. Also, almost all of us don't have much time to share for training. But we can train a bit an already raw diamand who went already 'the extra mile'. If an unknown players don't wanna improve and first of all HELP HIMSELF, he can't be helped by others, let's face it. I even invited some promising middle ranks to our clans, some don't want to join, or want to stay in clans with low cw-power. I even tried to mentor a few newcomers through the Mentorship program, where are they? They all went inactive or stopped asking me questions. So it's not all about competitive clans and established players, it's also about the wrong attitude of the newcomers!
---- For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 
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Just wanna make a few points based on what I've read: 1. to anyone dissing waffel: his opinion is as valuable, if not more valuable, than yours. He's played the game long enough and he's seen it throughout its entire history since 2013. so I'm pretty sure he's able to make a judgement based on first hand experience (unlike many players here). as a general rule, please, instead of attacking the person, attack the argument. that way we might actually reach a productive conclusion  2. we have this discussion every year, but for good reason. we should all be reminded that we're the same player base, and both the scenario community and competitive community should try to diversify internally (new/diff maps, obv is hard with the state of the map maker but im speaking in general) and externally (try going to the other side). obviously, we can't force anyone to do anything, but for those who willingly wanna try something different, be a little headstrong. you're gonna get called a noob, deal with it. I'm pretty sure I will when I decide to play a scenario, and I'll even say I'm a scenario noob so people don't have high expectations. Nothing to be ashamed of. 3. however to deny there is a problem would also be wrong. the competitive scene needs to invest more in training low ranks like it used to. that's what gets people to stick around, the sense of community. I wouldn't have came back if it wasn't for my friends here, some of which like Sultan and Enigma, I helped recruit and train in SM (and now they're higher rank rip) 4. croat makes some very good points on activity. no, the competitive scene isn't dying. no, atwar isn't dying. this stuff is always said but in reality the numbers only go down ever so slightly, and I'm pretty sure they're going up right now and will continue to do so with dave. 5. it wouldnt hurt to play different settings every now and then. i always try to play maps like destoria, dreamworld, or different settings like 5k 2 initial or just regular 5k - and of course, king of the hill  some of these games are much funner than your standard eu+ games. that being said though, the common ground we have in eu+ allows us to take the game to higher levels through playing with new scenarios on an old terrain - sort of like chess. 6. the point has been made before in this same discussion years ago that competitive players have more transferable skills than the average player
---- We are not the same - I am a Martian. We are not the same - I am a... divided constellation? 
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The thing that gets me the most is, that you guys say competitive players haven't tried enough or aren't willingly to expand their ''field''. I mean over the years, the competitive community had plenty of scenario/map-based tournaments, enough clanwars, enough duels, take ancient as perfect example. Last summer almost every player from competitive (even myself included) was thrilled to play ww2, it was the first time in years, that I played a game that had a potential to last more than 30+ turns. Most of the times I don't care about games with turns like that, but ww2 was different, because it was enjoyable and somehow gave you the boost to play, because it wasn't just all stacking and spamming, it contained alot of aspects that were close to the competitive scene and thats what made the game going for me. Ofcourse I am talking about the games filled with the experienced and skilled players, because in the beginning when it was usualy filled with the casual scenario players, the scenario was pretty much stale imo, only the main important countries fighting the battle, and the weaker ones doing almost nothing. All of this changed when the (not to sound arrogant) 'competitive players' showed what harm those 'useless' countries could do and imo brought the map to a newer level, skill/potential-wise. Take sf for example, he showed the potential canada had to mean something in the fight between uk/usa/canada vs eu (germany). Alot of other players showed the huge impact of china southeast (yellow one, idk the name) to the fight between japan and china. I mean, it didn't take long before Unleashed had to change a few key components of his map, because the competitive players showed that it was unbalanced or balanced, when played propperly. This thread (guess the other threads were deleted by unleashed, which contained most of it, competitive and scenario players both discussing and fixing maps together, talking about nerfs/boosts etc) kinda shows what happened last summer, (note: the other threads, which had a better reflection, are unfortunately deleted) https://atwar-game.com/forum/topic.php?topic_id=38196. In my opinion last summer was kind of the perfect example of how the two communities could come together. I remember during that time when the ww2 games were so popular, people we're trying to make the games fail and remade over again, because of the popularity (among competitive) it had. So you have to understand how ironic it is that its those people who trolled and failed those games, are the ones complaining about the competitive vs scenario problem. Unfortunately everyone is aware of what happened to Unleashed's maps, and I think most importantly the way it happened caused a big cleavage between the two communities, who were finaly getting along. I guess the reason some maps tend to attract the players from the competitive scene, is because they, like explained, contain alot, or even some, aspects from the competitive scene and isn't just all about stacking and spamming. Perhaps if there were more maps like these to offer, im pretty sure more competitive players would play more scenarios, and perhaps the scenario players would be interested in playing competitive, after playing with the players from that scene. So, if you are a scenario player/map maker, why don't you just ask a competitive player what it is that attracts him to some sort of gameplay, and ask what it would take for your maps/games to attract competitive players (like I explained above, what attracted me to ww2 games). In my opinion this is a much better solution than the subjective solutions made by Njab, which mostly just contain the personality traits of a person.
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njab Cont șters |
njab Cont șters
To reply to the most of criticism of the post (e.g. by Croat, Waffel, 4nic) I have to say you are arguing about something I'm not. You're also ignoring the problem and disallowing the game to grow. The most of the guys Croat mentioned have been here for years and have also been playing competitive. All the "come back from inactive" players he mentioned have already been included in the numbers I counted. Funnily, all of them played in the peak period I mentioned, when Epic Clan had 60 players. It's pointless to argue about the number of people Epic Clan had with people like 4nic who were R7 and not in the clan back then. Stop fooling yourself with apparent newcomers to the competitive scene. 95% of people have already been here for years, and the problem will only grow. Up to 2016 and maybe even 2017 there have been newcomers. Now they're almost nonexistent and again, you are not allowing them to join the scene. Another thing to add is that by the number of players, the true competitives definitely aren't even 25% of the total player base. They're just the most active on the forums. 25% trying to control 100% is the textbook definition of elitism. Stop it before it's too late. This post isn't suggesting to stop playing EU+, but to start playing other maps aswell.
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Croat and waffel explained it perfectly. Anyway the competitive scene could be either better or could be worse w/e. doesent change the fact that its the lifeblood of atwar in game, duels, pro- ness, and forum spamming. And about branching out in cw duels outside of Europe, clovis your clanmate was competitive on south america and you were competitive on greater middle east, did you not get people to join your duels back then and have fun? pointless topic lock pls
---- ''Everywhere where i am absent, they commit nothing but follies'' ~Napoleon 
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Ive started this game in 2016, and in my opinion the game needs to be attractive in order to attract new players and keep current players. To do that u need fresh changes. Changes that will make players who previously abandoned/ thought it wasnt worth it, play the game. When i first played this game back in 2016 compared to now, for me personally it hasnt changed, and i can understand why people would leave if the game doesnt give u something new. Everyone has its favorite maps, and all these maps are played by the same kind of people hence they like that map, thats why they play it. The variety of new, well made, good maps keep the current player base intact.
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It seems like scenario players are playing this cuzz of maps. Competitive are playing cuzz of people.. To beat someone over and over again and make him your slave or to get raped and seek for revenge. Even tho i agree that we should try other maps for completely different reasons, eu+ gives you equal balanced/unbalanced starts and both your opponent and you most likely have the same knowledge of the map. So you start on equal terms, in a way. And its not fully a monotone map which is the biggest advantage of all. I have like 10 expansions for turkey. Its all about reading opponent. You have options.. Also you cant just assume that all players leave just because they get bored. Thru these years most of the people i met here are between 15y old and 25y old. For anyone over 20 you can probably figure out couple of reasons why you cant play anything anymore, college and just teenage life for example. Ffs i stopped playing this for like half a year because of weed...
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Nice topic. According to me, NJab is right. new development should come I've been playing for 4 years and everything is the same m starting to get bored
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At one time we mitigated this by matching ranks. This was an agreement between two clans to allow there lower ranked players participate for experience. This is how Stalins Martians Operated and why we had so many successful players.
---- We are not the same- I am a Martian.
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At least 20% of my games are also scenarios, doesent make me a scenario player though, bad logic. Anyway hes right about effort of competitive play and effort into scenarios. Whats harder, 50 turns of camping with WG in ww1, or dueling as turkey or ukraine for 5-20ish turns where every move you do can determines the win or loss? Moreover, when a competitive player plays a scenario he is upto par or even better then the scenario players who played the map forever. While i havent seen a scenario player transition well into dueling (he gets raped by everyone )And about the thread in a whole, youre dramatically purporting the size of scenario comunity compared to competitive. Let me remind you back when we all played unleasheds ww2, at least 70% of the players were competitive the rest were scenarists. And with each game we tried to balance it untill it became the probably one of the most competitive and balanced scenarios made, all thanks to the evil no good competitives..  we literally balanced it over 30 times lmao, never seen scenarists try to balance the other scenarios to attract more players tho.
---- ''Everywhere where i am absent, they commit nothing but follies'' ~Napoleon
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I hate the typical stereotype about a rubbish WW2 map. People act like players such as unleashed are even proper scenario players and use examples like WG in ww1 to post how much unskill there is. Scenarios are not WW1 and WW2 omg get your head around it.
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I've took 10 minutes to calculate all the played cws. On the shown summary, I've added 40 cws which were played by my ex coalition Paradox which is not shown cuz 0 memebers. I don't know how many other unshown coalitions which played at least 1 cw are there, but till we find out, here is the number of played cws: 21170 Just wanted to prove again and again that njab's numbering is being so subjective that it's making everything irrelevant.
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- fail part - 4nic is right tho, the threads where we daily discussed a way how to balance the ww2 map to its ultimate form are unfortunately deleted/locked/moved (idk), but they did exist, and they did work. Ww2 became a great scenario and was played multiple times a day, and each one of those succeed. Isn't that what you guys want all along? A good, playable, balanced, map/scenario that both sides of the communities were able to play on? Then why are you guys debating on things like ''you aren't a competitive/scenario player because ..% of your games are ..% of your total games'', because how is any of this relevant to this whole discussion? This isn't about terms or definitions like ''scenario player'' or ''competitive player'', because like it or not, both communities aren't really that different at all (besides the skill-gaps/gameplay/roleplays/etc). Both communities have toxic people, both communities have egocentric people, both communities have trolls and people who ruin games, both communities have newcomers, both communities love to play this game, both communities use the same (kinda) units and the same strategies, both communities have clans... (you get the point). So instead of massively upvoting a thread (which is ironic, since you guys complained a while ago about not using forums and therefore not being included when strategies were discussed, yet here you are) that brings no solution to the table, other than just blaming the subjective characteristics, which both communities have, and speculating, come with actual solutions, because I think I just mentioned a few key solutions in my previous posts, and even did in this one, yet all of you are blinded by the rivalry between the two sides. 
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Well i think the thread is being upvoted so much because Njab makes his point well heard. When strategies were being discusses i never once had any clue were to check, but with this topic i have a clue because Njab is promoting it
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njab Cont șters |
