My 3 Years of Competitive Wargroove Esports
About a month ago I decided I would be walking away from being involved with the competitive community for Wargroove. There were a number of factors for this, such as wanting to move on to new projects and a lack of time to work on various Wargroove-related projects. The main one though was that I just wasn’t enjoying the game as much anymore though. After talking it through with the Groove of War staff, I stepped away from involvement in running events for the community.
So why write this article? Well, I’d actually started work on this about 5 months ago, with an almost complete draft of the original work completed around the time I had stopped being involved with running events. It seemed a waste to leave so much work just sitting there unfinished, so I decided to rework the whole thing to be my own personal perspective on the 3 years I spent running Wargroove events.
Early Wargroove
Getting into Wargroove came at a weird time for me. I had just walked away from my work at Esports Scotland after finding out that my father had been diagnosed with a serious medical condition. I figured I could pursue my dream of getting into game development and thought Wargroove’s campaign editor would be a good place to flesh out the story of the game I wanted to make.
I had long wanted to get away from the stress of running events and the news of my father, a man who had spent decades teaching computer science, essentially reaching a point in his life where new pursuits were going to be extremely limited made me come to terms with just how much time I had to reach my goals in life. Having spent about 5 years running esports events before picking up Wargroove, I wanted to seriously push toward game development.
As you can probably tell from the title of this article though, that didn’t end up happening. But that isn’t to say that’s a bad thing. At this point in time, I have far more direction and motivation in life than I did when I walked away from my work at Esports Scotland all those years ago.
I started as most people did with Wargroove. As an old fan of Advance Wars, I had followed development loosely during the years of trailers and developer blogs. When the game was released, I played through the campaign, did some puzzles, and decided to stream myself playing online multiplayer.
Groove of War 2
It was around the time of Groove of War 2 that I discovered the competitive community. Fearing that I was still some scrub at the game compared to all these people with “AWBW” in their names, I opted to sit out of the event and continue having fun on quickplay.
The early Wargroove meta was still messy at this point. Tenri and Nuru dominated, with a few other commanders such as Caesar and Valder close in power. The map design at this point could best be described as rough, with maybe 1 good map in a pool of 6. The unit meta was almost entirely spears and expensive units you would buy alongside constantly producing spears.
The event was also plagued with unfortunate timing. The servers for the game were having constant issues, often resulting in the matches ending with the game client freezing. This all happened while ChuckleFish was on a company trip to GDC 2019, with no staff at the office to fix the servers. There were some stories about staff trying to fix the issues from hotel rooms late at night, but it wouldn’t be until after the Groove of War 2 finals that this would be the case.
I followed the event where I could and when the time came for the finals to take place, I put my name forward as a candidate to stream it. With some help on commentary from Groove of War 1 champion Ash, we had a successful finals broadcast. For what was my first real experience doing commentary, I enjoyed it enough to want to keep doing it.
The finals themselves were pretty interesting too. Zeronix set up an interesting trap on Matex in game 1, showing the power of Valder in the early game and balloon surrounds in the late game. During game 2, Zeronix managed to pull off a maneuver that would break Matex’s defensive trebuchet position. For the entirety of Wargroove’s existence, trebuchets have long been considered a problem unit that causes balance problems. But during game 2, Zeronix made it work and took the tournament win.
The New Groove of War Team
Forming The New Team
After Groove of War 2, a few major things took place in the community. The founder of Groove of War xSkitz stepped back from running events before later stepping away from Wargroove entirely. GavinXI would proceed to stop streaming Wargroove after being one of the main streamers for the game, with other notable streamers also moving away from the game.
Despite what could be considered a good final, the second Groove of War event suffered from some of the issues the first event did. Overpowered commanders dominated the meta, the unit balance had some major issues and mapmakers were still figuring out how to make good maps. By modern map-making standards, only Hinterland Hijinks comes close to being considered not broken.
With the tournament organizers, streamers, players, and some mapmakers stepping away, things were looking quiet. During a conversation on the Groove of War discord, someone asked about future events and community member Coylise offered to throw their own tournament. I jumped in along with Fadedsun to help out and then quickly the small event discord grew.
Within a short space of time, this initially small event would become Groove of War 3 and the organizer discord would form the new Groove of War staff. After some small background work was done, Groove of War 3 was well into the planning phase.
Groove of War 3
Groove of War 3 was an ambitious step forward from its predecessors. The previous map committee had been replaced by a smaller team of mapmakers with Xmo5 making the final call on the map pool. Staple maps like “Life in 19x19” and Merchant Mountain were made, both maps which still hold up to this day (albeit with some updates).
Other changes would be made to the event as well. The format was changed from regional swiss brackets to regional double elimination brackets. Each round would feature a different map to be played on with admins setting up lobbies in advance to later be recorded. From this point forwards, almost every Groove of War match has been recorded and is available for public viewing.
Double elimination is a lengthy format, so rounds were every 3 days for over a month. It was a pretty brutal timeline to play over and there were a number of occasions where games didn’t finish on time. We also allowed a mixture of live games and asynchronous play to encourage more signups. This also caused problems when people hit each other that were heavily against playing one format or the other.
This all came to a head during the top 8 when two players were struggling to schedule a match on time. I was away at a funeral during this, so was only catching the cliff notes during the ordeal. Unfortunately, it got ugly and one of the people involved left the community as a result (with the other also leaving over a similar set of circumstances during a later event).
The event also saw us trying to enforce 5-minute turn timers where possible. With a lack of in-game timers for online custom lobbies, this had to be done using phone timers or similar means. While we couldn’t handle this as admins all the time, it did work for the most part in keeping the paces of matches going.
Streamed games would see admins keeping time for players too, something that would result in a disqualification loss during a set that Chucklefish had on a TV in the office.
This was a fairly pivotal moment that would highlight the need for in-game timers and would be brought up during a future discussion between the community and Chucklefish. But I digress, there is more Groove of War 3 to talk about before we get to that.
Despite all the issues, Groove of War 3 was a significant step forwards in event quality. The maps were better, the games were exciting, the storylines were developing and to this day, we still refer back to things that took place during Groove of War 3.
Some of the notable results that came out of the event were things like shoe placing third after losing in the first round of the tournament. This would be shoe’s first time placing in a Groove of War top 8. Zeronix dropped out of the event early on, leaving a clearer path for RedJams to go through to the top 8 and take the tournament win.
This was also the first event that had a significant amount of prizes. The top 3 would earn prizes for the event as well as additional prizes for play of the tournament, the community’s player of the tournament, and a random prize winner. Chucklefish employee Shu had expressed interest in supporting the events side of the game, offering us prize support and a bridge between the event staff with Chucklefish. The prizes added a significant reason for people to get involved beyond just trying to win and the relationship with Chucklefish would only grow over time.
Test Your Mettle
With Groove of War 3 now over, Chucklefish had started to talk about the possibility of future Wargroove content. The staff was fairly burnt out after a long event and with a potential game update around the corner, we were in no hurry to run headlong into another large event.
Groove of War 3 highlighted the need for in-game timers and for us to provide something more laid back as a way for people to get games without the same level of dedication. We also needed an effective way to test maps before they made it into events.
Enter Test Your Mettle, an event based on fighting game community “Ranbats” with some changes to adapt it for Wargroove. Roughly once a month a list of maps could be played, each with its own round-robin event. Groups would be made up of similarly skilled players to create a pseudo ladder people could climb up from month to month.
The event would prove successful, being a place people could test their skills without the pressure of taking part in a tournament. Many maps that have featured in competitive play and even been included in the base game started out in a TYM event. Test Your Mettle continues to run today, albeit in a more laid-back fashion.
Double Trouble
A New Update On The Horizon
During the autumn of 2019, it was revealed that a major update to the game would be released in the future. The update would include a new campaign, new units, new commanders and a rebalance to many of the units in the game.
A lot of balance discussions would take place during this period of time, as many in the community had grown tired of the spear and trebuchet heavy meta. Chucklefish’s founder and Tiy would post upcoming balance changes, taking feedback from the community.
Some of these changes were more obvious. Spears would cost more to build and dogs would cost less. Balloon transports lost the ability to carry many types of units, now being limited to only what a wagon could carry. Trebuchet saw a small increase in cost. Some balance changes removed a lot of annoying situations where units would have a “coin flip” on whether they would win certain fights.
There was a mixture of other changes that took place too, which ended up being confusing to people at the time. Merfolk had a cost increase alongside a damage nerf. While several good commander balance changes went through, Ryota ended up completely over-tuned. The meme “Buff Ryota” was born alongside some pretty great fanart.
Commanders saw a flat damage buff against swords and spears, increasing their power significantly. With the new ability to 1-shot swords on plains tiles, commanders would be able to build groove at a significantly faster rate than before. Damage-based grooves would also become stronger as a result of the base damage going up, which propelled Koji and Ragna up in strength as well.
There was one thing that got heated though. Throughout all the balance patch discussions, the random damage variance on units was a particular point of conflict between the developers and the community.
RNG
One mechanic that is pretty integral to the game and especially for competitive play is RNG on damage dealt. The exact mechanics of how this works is too complicated for me to explain (wiki page here), but the basic idea is every attack has a chance to do between 5 more or less damage. This variable is only reduced by units being damaged.
RNG is probably the single most divisive element of Wargroove and even 3 years can result in heated debates between community members. With the possibility of a big update coming to shake things up, many in the community asked for something to be done with RNG. The biggest request was some kind of toggle to disable it completely.
Looking back, the discussion behind this at the time was pretty toxic. A bunch of people in the community wanted something that Chucklefish felt went against the spirit of the game. Ultimately it just led to a lot of bickering over the subject resulting in the topic not really going anywhere. RNG still gets brought up from time to time and there are numerous mods that change how it functions (or just removes it entirely).
New Maps and A Chance To Revive Quickplay
One of the more positive things that happened during all this was Chucklefish reaching out to us to add community maps to the base game. This process was fairly complex as it required a number of legal hoops to jump through. All the maps went through the team at Chucklefish to make sure the decorations and naming would fit with the game.
We also had to make sure all our maps were of our own creation. One map based on an Advance Wars by Web map by another creator ended up being rejected due to the original map maker being inactive.
These maps would be used with the game’s arcade and online quick play modes, a much-needed update to the closest thing we had to a ranked matchmaking ladder at the time. During a conversation with Chucklefish, they asked us what maps from the game at that point should stay in the quickplay pool, to which we responded “none”.
Chucklefish was great throughout this whole process and even put us in the game’s credits. Most of the maps didn’t hold up over time and some didn’t hold up past the first couple of weeks, but it was an amazing experience to work on a project like this.
Timers
While Double Trouble slowly approached release, Tiy was spending some evenings hanging out in the Wargroove discord’s voice chat. Sometimes streaming a random game, other times just talking to various community members. One evening, Red Halo and I were hanging out on voice with Tiy, talking about the upcoming update.
One thing that had become painfully obvious after Groove of War 3 was that the game really needed timers in online PvP matches. Tiy noted that the best way to implement them would result in a significant upkeep cost increase for the multiplayer servers.
After some discussion, a possible way to implement timers with a low financial impact was proposed and Tiy took it to the team at Chucklefish to see if they could add it in time. With under 2 weeks left before needing to submit the build for cert, a simple version of timers was added to online multiplayer. If this hadn’t happened, it’s very likely competitive Wargroove wouldn’t have lasted past year 2.
Notable Exploit Fixes
Something that might not be widely known to even veterans in the community is a number of exploits were discovered in the lead up to Double Trouble releasing.
The first of these was discovered by accident during a tournament series where a player was lagging during their matches. The lag caused a weird error where a player was able to perform more than 1 action per turn with their commander. After some internal testing among the Groove of War staff, it was discovered that this was able to be reproduced on purpose with some rather hilarious results.
The other exploit was that players could mod the game to display random damage results ahead of combat, giving players using the mod a pretty huge advantage. Thankfully both of these exploits were reported to Chucklefish and fixed in the Double Trouble update.
Year 2
Double Trouble Releases
Double Trouble launched to a fairly positive reception. The new co-op campaign was hailed by many in the community as a large step up from the main story. Thieves added an interesting dynamic that neither Wargroove nor Advance Wars had seen before. The new commanders initially caused people to worry a lot but were overall well received.
Things were good at first, but some bumps in the road presented themselves rather quickly. Some commanders were completely overpowered from the beginning, such as Ryota who was effectively given infinite damage scaling on his groove. The improvements to quickplay fell short soon after with a lack of commander bans and maps with balance problems. The 2.0 unit meta proved far less defensive than the spear-laden days of the first year of Wargroove. What’s more, it was made apparent that any kind of update to the quickplay system would involve going through console certification all over again.
The competitive community quickly moved back to discord for finding games and the benefit of the new quickplay was mostly having some more competitive maps in the base game.
Something else that became apparent was that while the in-game timers were a huge step up from having no online timers, neither turn-based timers nor a chess clock style format was ideal for the game. Fixed turn timers were both too long for the early game and too short for later game situations with a lot of moving pieces. It was also possible for a game to run long without a fixed endpoint in terms of time taken, so scheduling was a large issue. Chess timers resulted in time-out victories and people turtling while taking quick turns to achieve victory, or just matches having interesting reset points where the time runs out as it’s getting interesting.
In the end, the community pushed for chess timers to make the schedule manageable, but even 2 years later we still see some incredible games come to a poor ending due to a lack of time.
Since timers relied upon players being in-game, many people who ran public lobbies without timers would run into issues with people just stopping playing. This is also a problem 2 years later and we’re only just looking into a discord “reminder” bot to help with this.
The Launch Show Matches
One of the highlights from the launch though was the launch show match series we ran on the 15th of February 2020. Featuring some of the best players in the Wargroove competitive community as well as some high-profile people outside the community.
The show match stream was one of the highlights of competitive Wargroove. The games were entertaining, with some fun fights between commanders that have long since been banned. It also marked one of the peaks of Wargroove in terms of Twitch viewership, hitting 67 concurrent viewers on the main Twitch stream and 40 on the secondary stream.
The biggest thing the show matches were able to show though, was that Double Trouble could deliver entertaining games of Wargroove at various levels of play.
Groove of War 4
On the 8th of March 2020, Groove of War 4 was announced. This would see a return to the original Swiss Open Bracket format of the first 2 Groove of War events followed by a single-elimination knockout. The tournament would also see players competing at a set time each week, with a qualifying Swiss bracket for 4 timezones.
With the help of guest streamers such as Ragnarokette, Feardragon64, and Bazikyoh all the tournament regions were covered during Swiss. It was nice to work with more content creators to cover an event, with Groove of War 3 (as well as later Groove of Wars) being mostly a solo project with guest commentary.
While writing this article, I took the time to look back through the videos from the event. So many names that would become mainstays in the community entered Groove of War 4 as their first event, with names like SneakyDragon, Saykoya, and AlsameSuzaku (now just known as Alsame) taking part.
The event ran much more smoothly than the previous Groove of War events and I have a longer article that goes more into the details here. Overall it was a fun event though and a huge step forward in running Wargroove tournaments. Many of the problems earlier events faced had been improved upon and the issues with the event all seemed possible to iterate on.
As far as results, this would be shoe’s first tournament win, taking it 2-1 over MasterOfMath in the finals. The finals were the highest viewership on a single tournament stream in the history of Wargroove. Veteran community member Killsauce would also take third place over the newcomer TFJ in the bronze place match. It was a good final, although it did highlight issues with running a 30-minute timer.
Thankfully, we got a 45-minute timer option in the patch around the end of the tournament, which was used in the other events of 2020.
On a fun extra note, Groove of War 4 featured an art contest that was won by Emo Tarquin. A particularly fun lethal by Fadedsun was captured in the following comic made by Emo T.
Dogball & Ryota Chess
Before the modding scene kicked into gear, the custom map scene has started to show some real creativity around early Double Trouble. A couple of maps, in particular, saw a lot of attention for a brief period of time in the early days of Double Trouble.
The first of these was Dogball, a map by Munrock that tried to emulate the gameplay of Blood Bowl from the Warhammer universe. For a couple of months, the community was having a blast with a couple of different versions of the map. It even featured in Test Your Mettle as an event. Dogball was truly the talk of the town for the first few months of Double Trouble.
Dogball would also be featured in two separate community maps spotlights and even on Chucklefish’s official Twitch channel. The prevalence of the map waned rather quickly though. After a few months most had turned back to the standard game mode or other custom maps. Dogball will always carry a special place in the hearts of those who were around during that time though. Maybe one day we will see a Dogball 2.
Speaking of other custom maps, one which spawned a few versions of itself over the years was Ryota Chess. As Ryota had quickly been banned from competitive play, Ryota expert Alsame took it upon themselves to make a map exclusively for playing Ryota.
The basic concept is this. Both players are given a Ryota who has a fully charged groove every turn from the beginning of the game and stays at 1% health during the entire game. The terrain is laid out in such a way that both players have options to move around without dying to the opponent’s groove.
Ryota Chess has seen a few versions over the years, with different takes on map layout and Ryota’s health. It isn’t unusual to see people playing it to this day and it ranks as one of the ways to have a shorter Wargroove session.
Patch 2.1.1
On the 11th of May 2020, a new patch was released for Wargroove featuring a rebalanced Nuru, a newly improved fog of war, and more timer options.
Nuru went from Fast charge to Medium charge, which by itself put them into a better place balance-wise. For competitive play though, this coincided with a decision to remove Trebuchets from all competitive maps resulting in a much more heavily nerfed Nuru. Nuru went from an auto-banned commander to a niche pick almost instantly.
The timer changes were a nice quality of life addition to the game. With 45 and 90-minute chess timers becoming available. 30 minutes of chess time was determined to be too short for serious competitive play, so 45 minutes was adopted immediately after Groove of War 4 ended.
Fog of war saw some great adjustments, resulting in a fairly healthy game mode to play with others casually. Fog of war started holding its own category in Test Your Mettle events each event, with a small group of dedicated fans of the game mode. The largest-ever Test Your Mettle event was the first event to feature Fog of War, so there was definitely interest in the mode from a lot of people after the update.
Sadly it never went beyond that as the number of ways to cheat was too common, including methods that weren’t detectable in a way that could really be enforced.
Modding and Project Groove
With the release of Double Trouble came official support for game mods. Before this point, it had all been modding the game client itself which allowed for a mixture of exploits but also some cool additions like skins for units.
Official modding support for Wargroove wasn’t as massively popular as something like Rivals of Aether’s workshop, but there have been a few notable mods over the years. Simple ones like no-RNG and small edits to fog of war were seen early on for example.
There were also some early bigger rebalance mods that popped up over time. One of these was by the community member Berk which featured new units. The other was a mod that would later become known as “Project Groove”.
Originally started as a way to rebalance some of the more obvious problems with Double Trouble’s game balance, it quickly turned into a more experimental mod with the secondary purpose of trying out different ideas for potential future entries in the Wargroove series.
Project Groove continues to be worked on, with the latest version released in early 2022. This is alongside other mods that have been released since then, such as the “Darkest Hour” mod by Robotos.
PlayStation 4 Release
Something that had been missing from the release of Double Trouble was the PlayStation 4 receiving the same update as the rest of us. There had been this weird split between the small minority of PlayStation users who lacked crossplay and the rest of the Wargroove community. This was felt especially hard during Groove of War 4 when an entrant had lost access to their PC due to covid restrictions and was only able to play the game on their PS4.
That would all change though when midway through 2020 Double Trouble would finally release on the PS4. This would finally bring crossplay between all the platforms, allowing PlayStation users to take part in events with the rest of the community.
To celebrate this, Groove of War 1 & 2 streamer GavinXI would throw a series of show matches for the game and I had been invited to take part.
Stronghold Series was a lot of fun, as was getting to play against Sedgehun. It’s funny to think that I played Ryota in this when he was completely overpowered, but I won like $15 from this so them’s the breaks.
Groove of Nations
If anyone is familiar with the StarCraft event “Nation Wars”, we decided to create our own event heavily inspired by it. Nations (or groups of nations) would build teams to play in a larger scale team event. After a round-robin between the teams, the top 2 teams would play a rematch to determine the overall winners of the event.
Using a format similar to StarCraft Brood War’s Proleague, teams would have to use 4 players from their roster in a series of 1v1s each round, followed by a 2v2. This format encourages teams to help each other improve and form their own communities. Team France saw their players improve drastically in a short span of time due to this.
I took a leave of absence from Groove of War staff during the running of the first Groove of Nations, so I’ll let the staff who were involved talk about this further.
Groove of War 5
7 months after the release of Double Trouble and a whole bunch of events, the time came for the second Groove of War since the release of Double Trouble.
Groove of War 5 was another huge leap forward for the event. Thanks to the support of StarCraft 2 commentator Ravi “feardragon” Pareek, Groove of War 5 would have a guaranteed $1000 in prize money. Before this, we had to rely on prize donations from various members of staff and the community. This funding meant we could focus purely on the running of the event and gave players something more tangible to duke it out for. This wasn’t just a one-time thing either as feardragon has continued to provide $1000 per Groove of War event.
Groove of War 5 also saw some classic maps debut into the tournament scene. Maps like Open Season, Dendritic, and Headland to Deadland would be used for multiple events throughout 2020–2022. Even the maps that wouldn’t be used again led to some incredible tournament moments, like Sneaky Dragon vs Pedient on Safe Haven.
There were some issues though. The map Canal Street had to be pulled in the middle of the event due to an all-in strategy that couldn’t be defended. The map had been made by someone who wasn’t active in the community anymore, so with no choice to make edits, we continued the event with 5 maps.
The event kept going under a similar ruleset to Groove of War 4. Timers were increased to 45 minutes from 30. Swiss rounds used best of 2 instead of best of 1. Bans were mostly the same, but with Nuru allowed and trebuchets were gone completely. Players had more freedom to schedule matches throughout each week, with only a set time to finish their games rather than a set time to start them. An additional tiebreaker bracket was added to allow 5–8th to compete amongst themselves rather than having a 4-way tie for 5th.
New memes were born from the event as well, such as people with the letter S at the start of their name truly being the elite of the community.
Top 8 saw some legendary sets as well. SneakyDragon coming close to defeating shoe in the semi-finals. Alsame taking a game off Spacefront with a clutch Elodie lethal. The Mercival mirror matchup between Saykoya and Alsame. There are probably more games I’m missing, but there were so many great moments.
The real highlight of the event was the finals though. After Groove of War 4, it was decided that Groove of War 5 would try having a best of 5 finals. The end result was an epic multi-day series that ran all the way to game 5.
No finals since this have been so close or so long. With Zeronix missing out on Groove of War 4, this was the first time they had faced each other, both players aiming for their second Groove of War championship win. In the end, shoe would take game 5 and continue his dominant streak through the Double Trouble era of the game.
Year 3
The Big Discord Merge
Towards the end of 2020, Chucklefish community manager Pilgrim approached the Groove of War team with an offer to combine the competitive community discord with the main one. I’ll let Pilgrim talk a bit about the reasoning behind this.
“I joined Chucklefish in August 2018 to help with community management. At this point in Chucklefish’s history, Wargroove had been out for just shy of a year and was on track to release a super secret DLC ‘Double Trouble’, which was currently in beta testing with an equally super secret group of trusted gamer pals who had a vested interest in making Wargroove the best game it could be. I recall feeling extremely fortunate at the time, because not only was this beta group exceptionally lovely and receptive to the ideas coming from the studio, but the community itself were equally as passionate and supportive.
Having Groove of War admin folded into the beta process for Double Trouble was immensely helpful in creating more interesting gameplay for those looking for a competitive experience. Our relationship actually blossomed in the difficult moments where they would have to give critical feedback about the game we were making. Having this level of trust and understanding was the predominant reason behind wanting to invite Groove of War to join forces.
Since then we’ve seen the community flourish — not only do we have admins who are in timezones outside of our own local time, we also have a wealth of experience in the space to guide both new and old players alike. It made natural sense to extend our working relationship to more than just the occasional tweet and virtual high five.”
The Groove of War staff was fairly burnt out on the community management aspect of events and the premise of working more closely with Chucklefish seemed like a huge win-win situation.
On the second of January 2021, the announcement was made that the Groove of War discord would be locked and 4 weeks later the server saw all channels locked, with the server kept up for historic purposes.
Second Anniversary Celebration
Much like the launch of Double Trouble, we decided to have another round of show matches to celebrate. Working with Chucklefish and other members of the community, a full day of Wargroove celebrations was planned.
Chucklefish kicked things off with an art stream by the talented t3nshi. They took art prompts from chat for commander designs, which was both hilarious and impressive.
Next was SneakyDragon with a free-for-all stream. With a group of community members all having fun while Sneaky talked with Chucklefish developers on voice chat.
Zeronix followed up after this with some Ryota chess against Saykoya. I’m not sure if the footage of this survived, but it was a fun hour on stream showing one of the many great custom maps Wargroove has seen over the years.
After Zeronix the stream was passed back to Chucklefish who had some fun with another custom map “Ragna Roulette.” They played this for a couple of hours, then followed it with a nice Q&A segment, talking about the making of Wargroove.
The main event of the evening however was the show matches. Starting with a 2v2 between team Shue (shoe and Shu) and Pilsaikgrimoya (Pilgrim and Saykoya). There had long been jokes in the community about people getting the pair of shoes mixed up, so it was fun to see that play out with them teaming up together.
Other show matches included a Project Groove show match between Emo Tarquin and Saykoya. This version showed off a heavily changed Dark Mercia taking on a slightly buffed version of regular Mercia. Along with some other mechanics such as a mana system for magic units and a few other balance changes at the time.
The final showing of the day was a few games between the earlier mentioned Ragnarokette and the StarCraft 2 personality Neuro. This was a bit of a for-fun-only kind of deal as Neuro went into it with no preparation. That said, everyone involved was having fun with it and we got some more eyes on the game.
Overall the second anniversary went super well. We had a ton of fun with it across all the different streams and events throughout the day. The entire thing lasted something like 12 hours. That wasn’t all though, there was one last surprise to round out the day.
Discord Ladder
With the new discord came the opportunity to push forward new technology. Throughout much of Wargroove’s history, attempts at third-party ladders had been tried without much success. The latest one had been built by CMAvelis around this time and was worked on by Fly Sniper to add more features.
So what changed? First of all, the ladder now had some stakes behind it. Every month prizes would be handed out to those actively participating in the ladder season, with rewards based on playing the 4 game minimum each month and the additional chance to win prizes based on the number of games won, even the average player had a reason to take part.
The bot also saw improvements in usability over time too. Originally all the bot would do was match players, but over time the bot would add features such as choosing maps for players, choosing player positions, elo ranking, and handling commander bans.
2021 also saw regular season changes throughout the year. Every 3 months the ranked pool would update the maps being played alongside a soft ranking reset. This would also mark the beginning of using ranked to feed into Groove of War events. Speaking of…
Groove of War 6
Groove of War 6 was a pretty huge undertaking and consisted of 2 major events. The first was a large-scale regional Swiss qualifier that worked the same as GoW 5. This would last just under 2 months, taking place between February and April.
This would also mark the last time we ran an open Swiss bracket as part of the event. For the strengths of having an open event where anyone can play through the open bracket, Swiss has too many issues to justify being used in a longer event and only really works in a 1–2 day setting where players are essentially forced to play through the entire event. Dropouts were common, players struggled to schedule matches, and admins needed to be on-call for something like 7 weeks straight.
Wargroove’s competitive player base had been shrinking as well, so the reality was that it was more about finding 16 solid players that would play through the main event rather than appealing to a wide audience to take part in lengthy open qualifiers. Still, the Swiss qualifiers ended and we saw 8 players join the 4 invited players from Groove of War 5’s top 4.
After the Swiss portion of the bracket, a new way to qualify was available for the final 4 players. The highest-rated players from the ladder system were invited to duke it out in a last-chance qualifier. This new system proved to be incredibly simple and time-efficient compared to the longer Swiss qualifiers, while also offering people the chance to play as many games as they want with real stakes behind them.
The main event worked out well too. Running what could best be described as “limited double-elimination”. Unlike standard double-elimination, the lower bracket would stop just before the top 4, with only those who made it through without dropping a game able to take home the trophy.
Despite dropping the system in favour of pure double-elimination in the future, it did what it was intended to do. Players in the lower bracket had prize money and invites to Groove of War 7 to fight for. The event was also kept to a more reasonable length due to missing 3 rounds of the standard double-elimination bracket, something that was especially important after almost 2 months of qualifiers.
The map pool also saw something notable as well, with Groove of War 6 featuring 3 updated versions of older maps. Typically the map pool would be completely fresh with every Groove of War, but after community feedback, the demand for some maps to simply be updated rather than starting from scratch proved popular.
As for the results, Groove of War 6 saw some early upsets in the bracket. Australian player Searingblight started the event with a 2–1 before taking out CleanerCode in a lethal focused clash of styles.
The big upset would take place next round, however, with searingblight taking down Zeronix with another 2–1 result. After a close-fought second place in Groove of War 5, Zeronix was considered one of the favourites to stop shoe’s win streak. It was not to be though and Zeronix would make the run through the lower bracket to place 5th after defeating ttam.
Meanwhile, searingblight continued to face off against their remaining winner’s bracket opponents, taking down SneakyDragon 2–0 to face shoe in the finals.
For shoe though, Groove of War 6 was a fairly short affair. With 1 player dropping out before the event started, he had a short path to the finals. After taking out Stargen 2–0, he went up against Saykoya in one of the most unfortunate sets in the tournament. There was a close 1–1 tie, but an early misclick on game 3 would put Saykoya massively behind.
Searingblight put up a decent fight against shoe in the finals, but his lethal style was no match for shoe’s overall solid gameplay. For the third event in a row, shoe would walk away as the champion and cement almost 2 years of being undefeated in tournament play.
The battles over the top 6 had some notable results too. SneakyDragon would take it 2–0 over Saykoya, with both players placing the highest they had ever been. A similar story would be true of ttam taking 6th place as well. It was also his best-ever result and ended with him taking a game off Zeronix.
Looking back at Groove of War 6, I think the best thing to say is that below the surface of shoe being a dominant force in the scene, the event showed there were still people working hard to improve and potentially take out shoe in the future. It was also the beginning of the shift away from open tournaments to a smaller scene of dedicated competitors.
The top 8 from Groove of War 6 would auto-qualify into Groove of War 7 and the scene would shift towards ladder qualifiers for the remaining slots.
Groove of Nations 2021
I was around for GoN 2021, so I can actually talk about it this time around. At some point, the staff realised that the event calendar for the year could only handle 2 main events per year and some other events to fill between them. After the success of Groove of Nations 2020, we decided to run it again in the late summer of 2021.
GoN 2021 didn’t see much in the way of structured change to the event. Teams of at least 4 players would group up based on countries, continents, or groups of the two working together.
These teams would compete in 4 separate 1v1 matches followed by a 2v2 “decider match.” Due to the round-robin nature of the event, all 5 matches would be played out with results anywhere between 5–0 and 3–2. The maps for each round were set ahead of time as well, giving players time to prepare ahead for each round.
Overall the event was fun and brought forward the community aspect of running events again. Hearing about teams working together to prepare specific strategies felt good, as well as seeing underdog competitors in the community getting their chance in the spotlight. GoN is also the only event that features 2v2, so it was fun seeing people try out the game in a mode that is often never seen.
The competition was close too, with the round-robin nearly ending in a 3-way tie. Thankfully 1 match had been declared a draw, leading to PUCK (Poland, United Kingdom, Canada) facing off against Team France for a rematch in the finals.
Despite team PUCK being victorious during the group stages, France proved too strong in the rematch and took the finals 3–1.
Better Replays
Outside of events, 2021 saw one of the best additions to the game from community member gp27. With some hard work modding the game client combined with a lot of skilled web development work, the replay website “wgroove.tk” was made.
Offering a far more in-depth replay experience to the base game, this website offered players access to something closer to websites like lichess. Every detail of a game could be paused, rewound, and skipped forward. The website also displayed useful charts showing off stats from the game, a tool that would later be incorporated into streams.
Map testing became significantly easier with this tool as replays could be easily looked through by map makers. Players could analyze their matches in a level of detail they simply didn’t have access to before. Even things like making lethal puzzle campaigns based on tournament games became easier, with puzzle creators able to find exact details on every tournament game going forward.
The only downside is the web-based replay lacks the polish of the in-game visual and audio experience. It did give an idea of what a replay system in Wargroove could be like though and the existing benefits are massive. We can only hope that such a system gets implemented into any future update to the Wargroove series.
Groove of War 7
Groove of War 7 was probably the first time I ever felt like we truly ran a great event. I should probably give a rundown on what made it better before I start gushing about it though.
First of all, there was no large-scale open qualifier. In the place of 2+ month-long Swiss events, we were running it with 8-auto qualified spots and 8 people qualifying through ladder. While this wasn’t perfect and the ratio was since changed to 4:12 invites-to-qualified, it spread out the event workload to be managed in a more healthy way. It also meant that once a certain threshold was met, players could engage with the qualification method as much or as little as they wanted.
With the more limited qualifier length, the format could also be extended to a full double-elimination bracket. This would allow for people to get a real second chance at making it deep into the event and in the case of Groove of War 7, would be significant for those entering this particular event.
The event did have a few rough spots though. The map pool contained 4 maps that the team felt confident about and there was a scramble to pick the remaining 2 out of the possible entries. One of those 2 maps ended up having a serious issue that didn’t get revealed until later into the tournament, so the map pool was effectively 5 maps with players having 1 ban.
Sadly we didn’t have time to release a trailer for Groove of War 7 either. One was made by Saykoya, but by the time we had time to record it, the tournament was well underway. For the sake of this article though, I went back to record and upload it.
Before we talk results though, one last thing to mention is everything up until the grand finals were broadcast from replays too. This method made running the event even smoother as players only had to schedule around each other.
Anyway, let’s talk about results because Groove of War had some juicy ones. Right out of the gate, shoe would drop a game to justyoureventualruler in round 1 before losing 0–2 to Sedgehun. After 2 years of constant tournament wins, shoe would finally lose a set.
It didn’t end there though as on the other side of the winner’s bracket, SneakyDragon would lose against tournament newcomer DestroyerOfDoom. This sequence of events would result in SneakyDragon vs shoe facing each other in the lower bracket’s second round.
There is some extra context to the result of this set too. SneakDragon had felt for a while that they needed to prove themselves worthy of being regarded as a big threat in the community and after placing in the top 4 two events running, this victory over shoe cemented that.
I won’t recap the whole bracket, but the other big story from the event was the lower bracket run by tournament newcomer Mαstro. They had been around in the community for a while, but this was their first time in a major tournament. After losing in the first round against Zeronix, they would go on an absolute tear through many of the strongest members of the community.
After 7 weeks of back-to-back sets, they returned to the finals to face off against Zeronix in a best of 5. Unlike the rest of the event, these games were broadcasted live across 2 days.
Both players felt confident in their ability to out-Vesper their opponent, but after 3 games, Zeronix would walk away with his second championship. Despite the 3–0 finals result, the quality of the games was good and I would suggest taking the time to watch the finals. The era of shoe dominating the scene had come to an end and it really felt like multiple people had a shot at taking it.
Overall though, it was a great event and really set the tone for how the future Groove of Wars would run. It may have taken 7 major events and 3 years, but future Groove of War events will likely stick to this template in the future with changes where needed.
Year 4 and Onwards
Refining the Ladder System
Since the bot is staff member Fly Sniper’s realm, I asked if he could write some thoughts about changes to the ladder system coming this year.
The Wargroove ladder has undergone many changes since its’ first release. Feedback from multiple users about its’ design has influenced how it all works. The system was originally designed to aid newcomers in playing ranked. Over time, we have seen far fewer newcomers so a change is required.
Furthermore, the current discord bot is actually two programs. One is written in javascript and the other is written in rust. This is a bit too complicated of a solution since only one program is required to do the job. Some applications use more than one program, but the ladder system isn’t big enough to warrant this.
Thus a new solution is required to help onboard new programmers and implement the calculation changes. The new bot will be in Python, be open source, and include new math for the MMR. The new MMR calculations will be closer to standard elo, where a higher-rated opponent earns less from defeating a lower-rated opponent and a lower-rated opponent earns more from defeating a higher-rated opponent. However, players within certain MMR ranges will earn more or fewer points for each victory.
The new system will include extra configurations like game limit, decay, and multiple queues. Currently, work on this new system has been progressing very slowly. Several features such as seasons, and maps still need to be implemented. Overall this new system should be more useful and elegant to set up.
Just to add to this, we also took the opportunity at the start of 2022 to change how commander bans functioned and used the ladder to test this out ahead of events. Instead of giving 2 blind bans to each player that apply to both players, the system was changed to 3 blind bans that only apply to your opponent. This would result in far fewer mirror matchups, with players being more willing to ban commanders they thought were powerful rather than trusting they would win in the mirror.
Lastly, the new bot would include plans to support asynchronous play between players. The bot tracking turn times between both sides to allow for more serious games without the requirement of players setting aside 2 consecutive hours to play.
Introducing…Take Your Turn 2022!
Something people might not know about me is long before I had even heard of Wargroove, I spent years running fighting game events. This included working as staff for the fighting game major Hypespotting for 3 years. I have since moved on from fighting games, but I look back at those events with multiple games coming together under one roof and wonder “could this be done elsewhere”. With that in mind, a personal goal of mine over the past couple of years has been to take that idea of communities coming together to build an event for strategy games.
Strategy games are definitely separate too. With the exception of a brief period where StarCraft 2 and Warcraft 3 were part of the same pro-circuit, there hasn’t been much in the way of crossover events. I guess Blizzcon could be added to that as well, but that was still a single company supporting only their games.
There are probably a variety of reasons why this could be though. Fighting games required in-person competition due to a lack of high-quality online options and games would work together to afford bigger venue spaces. The equipment and space requirements for PC games are much higher compared to consoles as well, adding a significant cost difference. Strategy games also take longer, making it harder to schedule multiple games into a single day.
This brings us to Take Your Turn, a multi-game strategy event trying to push the idea of taking a fighting game major and applying it to strategy games. We had a 3-month gap in the event schedule due to wanting to move the main Groove of War events around to avoid exam season. Since it was the first one of these events, the games list was kept small and with the delayed release of Advance Wars Reboot Camp would be kept to 3 games.
Take Your Turn 2022 would feature Wargroove, Chess, and Go. The Wargroove community was asked ahead of time which games they wanted to see, with these 3 taking the top places alongside Advance Wars. Each game would feature a $50 prize for 1st, as well as a bonus of $50 for the player who had the best overall results across all games.
For a pilot event, TYT 2022 definitely hit a lot of bumps along the road. An extension of round length along with the Swiss format caused large amounts of burnout alongside people just forgetting about the event. This led to results getting messy which caused more people having to go through from each swiss bracket into the top cuts for each game.
The person who we had originally spoken to about covering the chess side of the event had to drop out last minute as well for personal reasons. I won’t lie that there was quite a bit of stress in trying to figure out a good alternative to this stream and in the end chess didn’t get covered.
To make matters worse, the hectic schedule of needing people to play multiple finals brackets caused further extensions. What was initially meant to take 1–2 weeks for the finals ended up going into the area of 6–8 weeks instead. The event did come to a close though and champions were crowned.
Groove of War 1 champion Ash would return to win the Chess event. They had long been known as a strong chess player, so it wasn’t too surprising to see them take the crown here.
Staff member Fadedsun would pick up the win in Go. Given that he was the one in the community who had pushed for Go to be included in the event, it also wasn’t surprising to see him take the win.
Wargroove however saw some interesting results in the form of a newcomer entering the scene for the first time. A player by the name of Go7 showed up to try their hand at not only competing in a tournament for the game, but trying out multiplayer for the first time too.
Things started off strange at first with Go7 winning their first games against veteran player Luis07. Wargroove can be a volatile game though and Go7 is one of the best Advance Wars players. Next up they face Zeronix which went more as expected with Zero taking the clean 2–0. That said there was something really unique about the way Go7 approached the game, with a focus on strategies and usage of units that were similar to their Advance Wars counterparts which made for interesting games.
After a few more rounds of Swiss, along with the increase in the size of the top cut bracket Go7 would make it through to the top 8 bracket to face Saykoya in the first round. They would manage to take the set over Saykoya 2–1, followed by a 2–0 in the semi-finals to make it to the finals for a rematch against Zeronix.
I won’t spoil the result here since the finals are a pretty quick watch, but it was really interesting to see a complete newcomer to Wargroove manage to make it to the finals while taking down veterans of the community.
Looking Into Wargroove’s Future
With Take Your Turn behind us, the future is looking pretty good for Wargroove. A rough event schedule is planned out until the end of 2023, the ladder system is seeing improvements, and there are even plans to run things for Advance Wars should it meet the needed requirements to be featured in events.
Then there are the mentions of MoreGroove. Something that was teased by Chucklefish all the way back at the start of 2021 and has been mentioned a few times since then. While there has been no confirmation as to what MoreGroove is exactly, it is unlikely Chucklefish would mention something multiple times without there being a project of some kind behind it.
We will have to wait and see though. For now, however, there is still plenty to be done. When I started writing this recap of Wargroove history, it dawned on me just how much groundwork hadn’t been for the scene. Since the start of the year, the YouTube channel has been tidied up, the community section of the wiki has started being built, and staff is making sure that whatever is being run will integrate into any kind of update to Wargroove.
The Groove of War staff has also been picking up where I left off with event work. Groove of War 8 should be starting later this summer, with qualifiers taking place right now.
Looking Into My Own Future
Now that TYT 2022 is over and the Groove of War team has taken over on the events front for Wargroove, there is a lot of freedom to work on new things. The main project over the next 18 months will be making TYT 2023 into something much bigger, a true celebration of strategy games coming together.
While I do that, I started a series of tournaments called “The Strongest Cup” which aims to run events for various communities. These serve as a means of learning how to run events for various strategy games, building relationships with communities, and finding out information about what kind of scenes there are for these games.
With that information in hand, I can go into TYT with all the tools I need to run a really great event for the communities involved.
