Casual games are here!

Hi everybody! One of the most requested features on Dominating 12 have been "pointless" or "practice" games. I'm glad to announce that we're actually supporting these now! Normal games as you're used to are now called [b][fa]trophy[/fa] ranked[/b] games. You can now also choose [b][fa]handshake-o[/fa] casual[/b] games as an option on the game creation page. So, what should you know about casual games before you jump in? [list] [li]Casual games don't reward any rating or battle tokens when you finish the game.[/li] [li]Casual games still contribute to your daily game limit if you are a free player.[/li] [li]Casual games don't contribute to the minimum number of games needed to be eligible for the Dominating 12 list. You can't retain your rank by just playing casual games![/li] [/list] We hope that casual games are a great way for people to play game modes they're normally wouldn't, or help newer players get better by mentoring them directly in a game. You can now do this without the risk of losing a lot of points. That said, ranked games are still the default, and will be the only way to improve your rating and make it onto that Dominating 12 list. In the future, we may explore using the casual game mode to add more advanced game settings that aren't necessarily balanced. So, what are you waiting for, head over to the game lobbies and start creating some games!

Thank you Cireon :thumbs:

woo hoo, nice work cireon

That's awesome! Great work Cireon!

Great stuff Cireon <3 ======= "A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." - Thomas Mann - Rockbert - Michael Scott

Loving this! Great job! With apologies though, as I do believe the 20 tokens should still be awarded, as running out of tokens is one reason people leave the site. Logically it’s best if newbies don’t use up their game limits only on 2 p games, then need 120 tokens for the next game, as that path uses up tokens fast, (2 player gaming). I vote to encourage the building of new people’s collection of tokens, in whatever way that can be found. Personally I will try to remember to give away tokens to new people in Casual multiplayer games. Ps. Calling them “casual” was a terrific choice! I applaud this effort with glee and admiration.

Well done, very creative

[quote=Axobongo]With apologies though, as I do believe the 20 tokens should still be awarded, as running out of tokens is one reason people leave the site. Logically it’s best if newbies don’t use up their game limits only on 2 p games, then need 120 tokens for the next game, as that path uses up tokens fast, (2 player gaming). I vote to encourage the building of new people’s collection of tokens, in whatever way that can be found.[/quote] As much as I appreciate your argument, the choice to not reward battle tokens for casual game was on purpose. We may review it in the future, but for the time being we're sticking with it. We want to avoid "Casual" from becoming people's go-to game mode. In the end, there is an underlying competitive system on this website, so people should be playing ranked games the majority of the time. The tokens rewarded from finishing games aren't so big of a deal that they completely punish people who play a casual game every now and then (after all, the tokens from games can sustainably reward a player just [i]one[/i] extra live game per day, it's not actually that many in the larger picture), but in the long term should still push people towards the ranked games by default. Using battle tokens to play games above your limit was never meant to be the main way people play. It's really an extra we put in so that if players get invited by their friends or for a game they really really want to join, they can go above that limit by spending some tokens. If players use up all their tokens immediately by going over the limit every day, that's their choice, and not something we as a site should really optimise for in my opinion. If this token issue turns out to be a major problem, we can review it. Whether or not the limits are a problem for this site is a completely separate discussion unrelated to casual games.

This is also a benefit if, in the event of a stalemate (which sometimes happens in fixed or cap games), the survivors can play a re-match (with increasing setting) in order to determine a winner, winner of one takes both. But with this new feature, it adds no further risk to the survivors. I agree though that it should still award tokens, as it still counts towards ones total game count.