The Cold Death of the competitive scene

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.

I have been around a long time, and from what I've seen over the years is that the flow of players coming into the game has declined since 2017 according to the numbers that Croat had posted when releasing statistics.
But if you compare 2012-2015 to 2018-2021 you will see that the amount of duels and clan wars being played is almost the same. The only time atwar really hit its peak was 2016-2017. So realistically it may feel as though games are not being played, but if you compare numbers they are almost equal.

I get that the repetitive game modes may feel boring after playing them 3000+ times like myself but people do it more as a fun past time rather than real competitive gaming like League of Legends or Overwatch. If you really want to make a small change you will make your own clan, and recruit new players and raise them to become better. If everyone did this we would have a boom in activity. Although no one really is willing to put in the time and effort. But people have gotten older, lives have gotten in the way, everyone has school and jobs and families now so everyone that used to play is gone because they've moved on. There's still a pretty active player base. It's just not from high ranks anymore.

No one is going to play for 3 years to get all needed upgrades to play a competitive game or going to pay for a general. Ofc it would die someday

No one care.

The map diversity itself is not a problem. All the competetive games have the same/similiar competetive settings that are played repeatedly. Trying to diverse it into more maps will even decrease the number of cw's, I am sure, because clans would start avoiding cw's even more, due to top players on maps/settings elitism.
What you said about numbers in 2016 is true. 2015 and 2016 were the peak of AtWar activity, generally speaking ( the graph does not really show that, but let's all remember that it was transition to html5 era, and server connection was always problematic, that is partly the reason the playercount decreased a lot after 2016)

As you can see, the biggest fresh players surge happened in 2014 (excluding covid surge), some of these new players trained for that year, playing few cws now and then (including me, Croat, Mecoy, tengri, and the majority of the current active competetive scene) and cw'ed actively in 2015 and 2016.

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Someone would say that the problem in competetive scene is the lack of fresh players, but that is not actually true. No one, absolutely no one, except Paradox, even cares to train the new generation of players. You all "raised standards"to rank 6 for players to join your clan "because if you make it to rank 6 you might stick with the game. No point in recruiting rank 2's that will leave in a week.". And still, everyone forgot how the old generation of players started cw'ing at small ranks. (I myself had my first cw at rank 3, and it ranked me up to rank 4)
You must understand the mentality of players that find this game enjoyable. The tutorial does not show them how to be good, how to adopt to the game settings and the map that they play in. The players that find this game enjoyable enough and reach rank 6 (which requieres a lot of played games for a newbie) will find world 50k, ancient or some scenario more enjoyable than CW most of the time. If you really want to find interested players and train them for competetive, recruit them without rank limits.

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Back to reality, the real reason of rank restrictions that most of the clans have is because this competetive scene does not care to train someone, share their knowledge, expansions, experience. They'd rather duel all day when they don't have cw.
The competetive scene became selfish. To remind you all, 2014 and 2015 was the era of training clans:
JNA (clear ex-Yu training clan until start of winter 2015, when we gave it all to try to win a season. Finished the 2nd, as a clan that played with fresh players that started 2014, trained together)
Winterfell training clan
Illyria's training clan
Shadow Aces's training clan
Sun's training clan
And a lot more, I am way too bored to find the rest.

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Players were not so selfish back then, they wanted to teach players to play and win.
Do you know how many official training clans are there now? One:
Paradox Youth
And players do not will to risk some elo and let the new players learn from real experience. It is boring to train until rank9-10 and until clan leaders decide that the new player "is ready to play". I've never see someone train competetive and never play cw (or rarely cw), that is impossible.

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Stop being selfish. Risk some elo, let new players play a cw or two aswell, it won't kill you.

I'm very good at competitive, but I don't like it. I play this game similar to clash of clans. I don't war much, I mostly just collect resources and try to make my base look swag. And when I'm not swagging out my base, I usually troll clans (I used to troll global chat until they removed it). A lot of people are like me. They accumulate SP (power) and vanity. Then with this power, they're able to wield it over others and constantly beat their friends.

I did that to my friends once but they don't play anymore. I actually hated this game at first and couldn't understand the basics at all (I was 15 when I joined). And you wonder what the average age for this game is? Like 15, right? So if I can't understand it at that age, then why the hell would you expect new players to stay? The only reason why I stayed was because it was the game my friends were playing for a few months. If not for them, I wouldn't even attempt to understand the complexities of this game, it is ridiculously hard to anyone who just wants an easy game to click through. Very difficult and I don't think you understand that because you're living in your own bubble. This is a fundamentally difficult game to pickup and until that introductory phase changes... nothing changes.

I remember I literally had no idea how to select a country. It kicked me out of the game like 3 times because I literally had NO Idea how to select a country. I don't watch the tutorial (nobody watches the damn tutorial). There needs to be provisions for the 99% of people who don't watch the damn tutorial. I didn't have time for that, I just wanted to get into a game.

Dave and other teams helping him have a plan. Maybe an argument should be set out to get more help for Dave, such as recruiting on and off site, fundraising money and in general volunteering. When you say 2016 was a peak year for AW, it was because it had a lot of help to upkeep the game. Where is that help now? Don't tell me we have too many staff. Maybe mods, MAYBE.. but that depends on the help they are doing. What we need is the volunteer work on Supporters who deal with exactly what you're complaining about, except negativity and the whole clan thing.

If you want answers start asking and complaining about the right things and actually take time to look into things (not that you didn't).. a lot of the time, especially this it has already been talked about. Thousands of times with hundreds of answers.

When I was head of the supporters I included everyone in our meetings. We should have an answer for anything you ask and I know we do. Just ask the right questions. Not a general complaint.


Thanks

Back then people were made different. Noone carried for shield everyone was original they helped because they wanted to. Staff imo plays biggest role. If you compare the staff then and staff now it's just a disgrace. AtWar is an old game thats not eye atracting and can be considered slow. We need new people to be able to compete since day 1 and not to wait to go rank 10 and have general to stand a chance, but that would require new appealing features for the premium so people would still buy it. Many factors changed, most got worse. Imo the only thing that went better is the owner. Now we have an owner who is involved with AtWar and brings slowly some changes something that back then was non existent. But the time has passed we need radical reforms to not only survive but finnally turn to that i have always dreamed and think you too. An AtWar with 2000 users online at any point of day. Is it hard? Yes, but not imposible.

We need Asian players.

1. Semi-active guy(s) who had only 5-6 cws during prevouis season, who decided to act 'retired' ones, but had alts on a daily basis and actually were around more or less whole the time, shouldn't be talking about activity in competitive scene. At least I wouldn't give myself such credits. Also, I was calling you to come with me and help me with clan + activating scene, you denied and decided to stay in shadow. You are one indirectly one of reasons our scene has less activity. Being around, not deciding to come in for whichever reason... Nothing personal, you know how I like you, I told you the same and I would like you (and similar guys) don't exclude yourself if you're around. I would really like to see you playing

2. Standard sentry moaners on this game, who are nowhere, who play nothing, but are active and are the loudest ones about everything. They have solution to all problems. Only God sent them to atWar. They know how to lead game, how to moderate, how to support, how to advertise, how to raise activity, how to bring millions to game, how to do literally everything. But they are still being nowhere, they are playing no games at all, being zero productive and useful. If only they decided to bring themselves at least a bit into games, it would be 500% more useful than everything they said around together.

3. Mixing your private issues and principles into team games. For example, with all hats down to him from private and player side, I think that Jugers's idea of not playing anyone he had certain indvidiual problems is literally killing it directly. He doesn't want to CW with idk 2 members of my clan, two members of other clan, three members of third clan, four memebers of 4th clan. He just wants to play against certain chosen people who never did anything bad to him...
This is not a self-service shop, just transferr your possible issues with someone from chats into battlefield, 2 flies with 1 blow. Would be excellent.

4. Too early dodge. I understand last couple of days or a week should be more wise if you are sitting on certain good spot. But 1 month earlier is too much. Not reffering this now to Noobs, they got what they deserved last season indepdently of my moan, but in general. People enjoy watching them being in top 3 on leaderboard, decide to avoid CWs and play only with the most strong players tooooo much before the season end. It's not that we have 300 clans competing, so that could be affordable. Try being understandable to other clans, compete and let the better win at the end.

5. GIVE THOSE LOWRANKS AND MIDRANKS! Not many of those that are willing to expand and bring low/middle ranks in. Everyone would like to have top 3-4-5 players and that's it. If every active clan recruited 3-4 low or midranks (or made their youth), we would have like 20 new guys on the scene. They could compete within themselves. I think this could be major problem. I remember when I started cwing around 2015., there were bunch of guys from rank 5-rank 9 into every single clan, we competed against each other and also, we watched big fishes from our clans competing as well. It's close to double CWs, just with introducing lower or middle ranks to cw scene and training them. It doesn't take as much time as people think. I started with my youth, I will see if anyone will be fair enough and start doing same for the better of the scene.

6. Scenario community and clans could do much more CWs, but they're not organised as competitive scene, so I cannot pressure anyone to do something I would like to be done. But no one can pressure me to start playing scenarios and vice-versa.

7. Overspam of cws in beggining which results in boiling after 1-2 months.

8. Real life - sometimes it just catches more guys at same time. Nothing can be done about it besides hoping that it will connect again.

Skrivet av JUGERS2, 01.03.2021 at 19:23

Back then people were made different. Noone carried for shield everyone was original they helped because they wanted to. Staff imo plays biggest role. If you compare the staff then and staff now it's just a disgrace.

Dude, I think you totally failed topic
So, competitive scene has some activity issues because of staff? Excellent logic.
Also, you just indirectly put myself (and other good pals) under the word 'disgrace' because of your private problems with certain staff member(s),

Staff brought you some encouragment majority seeked for, we will see how it's gonna work. Now you have pretty much to fight for, so let's just be together and transferr ourselves from this boring forum into cws


ALL: BRING RANDOM LOWRANKS AND MIDRANKS IN

There's need of more clans like Paradox Youth, U.N.S Courageous who open the doors of Coalition races to players who have potential. That potential goes to waste most of the time, a not-bad but with potential rank 7-9 player will always become moldy in a clan that plays cws only with their r12s because they never let him play!

I suggest If you, reader, are one of those wasted talents, either create your own clan for people like you or join clans like the ones I told above.

Skrivet av Tribune Aquila, 01.03.2021 at 18:42

I'm very good at competitive

Oki doki.

Skrivet av Xenomega, 01.03.2021 at 15:21

If i am not wrong, Gardevoir had an idea of making 'map generator', so clans can enter the qeue and wait for map to load (any map), so they just pick countries and start. Map moderators can enter certain amount of maps in the generator, the one that are playable, and that's it.

I think you understand my point, its similar to many multiplayer competitive games: team with fixed number of players qeueing for a battle while the game itself choose a map (1/20) and they just play 15min-1h until they kill enemy team or cap objective. Most people can play this all day(me included); because they love the game, and maps change every battle. But most people wont play the same map for years(me included).

I just copied and pasted this from njab as a copy pasta joke..... don't take it serious guys

Skrivet av PleaseMe, 01.03.2021 at 15:51

But if you compare 2012-2015 to 2018-2021 you will see that the amount of duels and clan wars being played is almost the same. The only time atwar really hit its peak

Thank you Escanor

Skrivet av Xenomega, 01.03.2021 at 15:21

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.

Hi Njab

Skrivet av Xenomega, 02.03.2021 at 10:32

I just copied and pasted this from njab as a copy pasta joke..... don't take it serious guys

Stfu retarded kid

Skrivet av Xenomega, 02.03.2021 at 10:34

Skrivet av PleaseMe, 01.03.2021 at 15:51

But if you compare 2012-2015 to 2018-2021 you will see that the amount of duels and clan wars being played is almost the same. The only time atwar really hit its peak

Thank you Escanor

Np

What kind of fucking circle jerk is this?

One clan that has been remade for the 500th time, moaning around like it owns the competitive scene saying they are the only real true clan with a training clan blabla, pointing fingers at the others when all of the players in that clan been clanhopping left and right... (being a direct part of the whole problem).

Even if Xeno trolled and copy pasted this from Njab, this is now true more than ever (besides that 10k EU+ is overplayed, EU+ is been played for almost 10 years and still going strong..). I mean c'mon, those graphics are just numbers, it doesn't show the 60 people sitting AFK in game lobby. It just shows that AW has x amount of players and therefore AW is very active! Woohoo!

Just look at the competitive scene for instance. Barely any activity, most of the players complain that nobody wants to CW. You see ppl call CW the whole freaking day, but maybe 2 or 3 get played in total? Very active!!

First step to getting more people to play "competitive" is be more welcoming and nice to newer players, play fair and help others without being a dick. The scene may grow a bit more if everyone does those few simple things. Just one example; if you are playing a 3v3 with a newer lad you've never seen before and he does a bad expansion or messes up then do your best not to just insult him and instead let him know how he could have done better.

Skrivet av Augustus Caesar, 03.03.2021 at 16:44

First step to getting more people to play "competitive" is be more welcoming and nice to newer players, play fair and help others without being a dick. The scene may grow a bit more if everyone does those few simple things. Just one example; if you are playing a 3v3 with a newer lad you've never seen before and he does a bad expansion or messes up then do your best not to just insult him and instead let him know how he could have done better.

facts dont care about your feelings

Skrivet av Augustus Caesar, 03.03.2021 at 16:44

First step to getting more people to play "competitive" is be more welcoming and nice to newer players, play fair and help others without being a dick. The scene may grow a bit more if everyone does those few simple things. Just one example; if you are playing a 3v3 with a newer lad you've never seen before and he does a bad expansion or messes up then do your best not to just insult him and instead let him know how he could have done better.

stop trying to instill basic moral human conduct in us. We are apes. And ape do what ape do.

I wish they could implement a new map every year which would be played by everyone to CW and Duel,, i think that would put everyone at a fair point where all need to learn new metas and not just repeat the same moves or picks that u have for years like in the current one xD.

Skrivet av sirivann, 04.03.2021 at 16:11

I wish they could implement a new map every year which would be played by everyone to CW and Duel,, i think that would put everyone at a fair point where all need to learn new metas and not just repeat the same moves or picks that u have for years like in the current one xD.

People like to play where they've practiced and dont like to lose. Illyria challenged everyone everywhere on every map during its peak including the scen clans and nobody was interested.

There's no point pretending new maps could be the solution. This is not a new idea, it's an old 1 that has existed since 2012. The decay of activity has affected every area of atwar as the competitive scene weakens and the scenario players struggle to fill their games. A collaborative effort between the 2 to generate activity might work, but i dont see that as likely.

Atwar is in for a rude awakening once this covid fiasco begins to die down and our lives go back to normal.

Hate to break it to you but the competitive community is not the end-all be-all of what drives atWar. It's just one area.

We have a big casual community which gets no credit or attention because, for the most part, they just come and play their games and don't complain a whole lot. (As a casual player myself, I've gotten to know a few of the "regulars" in the community who never, ever, post on the forums, and yet they remain active...) Then we have the scenario and RP communities, which I don't know too much about, but I think the same applies to them. Of all the different areas, its the competitive community that we hear the most about, but there is a lot to atWar beyond that.

Now, I do my best to keep all the different communities happy... just because I prefer one style of play personally doesn't mean I don't still care about what others want. That said, I find this idea that a slowdown in CWs somehow spells doom for atWar to be totally silly.

Some fun facts:

In 2020, there were 542,686 games played.
Of those, 21,531 were duels. (4%)
Only 2,498 were CWs. (<1%)

Compared with:
181,455 quick games on custom maps (33%)
73,990 quick games on custom scenarios (14%)
33,482 casual games (6%)

As of today, there are 719,213 registered users on atWar.
Of those, only 9,651 are members of any clan.
In other words, 99% of atWar players do not even belong to any clan.

Now you might point out, rightfully so, that a lot of those registered users are inactives. That's true. So let's just look at the users that were active in the last 30 days:
11,103 active users in the last 30 days.
Of those, only 1,453 were members of any clan.
So about 87% of our active users still do not belong to any clan.

Does competitive play drive activity? Yes. I'm not dismissing that. Is it the *primary* driver of activity? No, I don't think so. It's just one small piece of the puzzle.

As for coronavirus-related gains... the traffic spikes are long since over. We had the big spike last March/April, and a small spike last November/December. We picked up a lot of new users during those, especially Italian and French users, but other countries too. A small but significant share of those are here to stay... probably none of them have filtered into the competitive community yet, but they remain active in regular quick and casual games. Peoples lives are already returning to normal.

There is no "rude awakening" on the horizon.... atWar's numbers were already improving before the pandemic.... we got a boost for a time and that's already over with.... and our numbers will continue improving after the pandemic. But you gotta realize when I say "numbers" I'm talking about the entire picture, not just one particular area.

Bottom line, I think you guys should relax. atWar will continue on just fine no matter what. If you're worried about a decline in the competitive community, then do something about it... but I really don't think competitive will ever truly "die". We need to look at the bigger picture as well.

Nice stats, but out of that 719,213 only 50 players are on everyday (virgin fucks) also the ones not in clans are mainly alt accounts or dead accounts last seen in 2013. The competitive scene died when aw died so in 2016

Dave said everything, subject closed ^^

Let us think about not sleeping anymore, about ways to keep as many new players as possible, while keeping the old ones.

After launching a Championship Tournament for Casual players, then a tournament for middle rank players in Casual. Which always take place and where everything is going well.
I am currently working on a tournament, for a few days, for competitive players, I hope that its players will be present the day of its release.

I also have other tournaments, whose creation I have finalized, which will see the light of day in the coming months.

Yes I don't sleep anymore ^^

Dave just destroyed competitive ego with facts and logic

Skrivet av Dave, 05.03.2021 at 01:45

Some fun facts:

Nice post.

But also strong competitive scene = strong game. Or it should be like that, because players have reason to fight for something and improve. So cws should be top end product of this game.

For this game of course every type of player should be important, also its good to have more different kinds of them. Sp hunters, casual/relaxed players, scenario, new and rest...

More is better in this case.