Moving Forward here at Global Warfighter League, the direction will continue to evolve. Our evolution here is largely based on community involvement and input. This means we take input from the community seriously and it plays a large part in the direction of Global Warfighter League.
GWL Website Content
In the past, website content was based on the games that were supported at our league. The gaming news content came through game admins that represented their individual communities. This will certainly be the case moving forward. However, absent this individual specific content, “Gaming News” in general will be posted .
As indicated in the last Blog Post, content for the website has taken the form of gaming news from previous games supported here at Global Warfighter League. You’ll likely see other games mixed in the news feed, but generally the gaming news we initially loaded the website with are the current iterations of past games we’ve supported here.
We’ll be posting Gaming News in the form of new game releases but not necessarily updates to these new games unless there is a major update. As an example, GWL has never supported “League of Legends”, but someone did bring it up in an email. GWL has never supported Helldivers, PUBG, or Star Wars Squadrons, yet we heard from players of all these games. We welcome their input for the direction of the league.
Global Warfighter League was primarily based on First Person Shooter (FPS) games previously. While COD and Battlefield games dominated at first, it was the SWBF2 Classic community that kept the site going for so long. The point is, we did evolve into a collection of communities that spanned a few genres. Increasingly, that’s not the whole online competition arena any longer. Increasingly RPG’s and MMO’s can be competitive as well. The news feed content here will likely include all genre of games and not just FPS games.
Archived Leaderboards
Overwhelmingly, the responses we received from our post here and on Steam, were encouraging but in order to continue with new leaderboards for new games, we should restore the old leaderboards for the past games we’ve supported. It’s something we’d like to see, and by the input we received, something our community wants as well.
Before Global Warfighter league went inactive for public online competition, there was an initial problem with transferring the database from the old server for a new migration. In tandem with this database growing older and more obsolete, there were several versions of PHP and its extensions on the server that required our own custom code to be updated as well. Updating the website and the database became increasingly difficult and time consuming. More on this in our History post.
We still have these databases. We still have all the tables and records for the ladders, tournaments, and seasonal leagues to include players and teams, along with partnered sites for exclusive competitive leaderboards within their own gaming community (private leaderboards). We are now better equipped to convert the databases and we’ll be restoring all these leaderboards while Global Warfighter League continues to grow.
Gaming Today
Online gaming today is different than gaming as it started out years ago. Years ago is when GWL had it’s start and at that time game developers didn’t have leaderboards for their games. They didn’t have online accounts for players to log into. There were usually mods for competition and it was the gaming communities that developed them once mod tools were released for the game by the developers.
Games depended on and maybe sometimes partnered with third party sites to supply leaderboards and competition within their genre or specific game. Global Warfighter League filled this gap for a number of gaming communities and players. These players, teams and gaming groups used the tools here at GWL to navigate their competitive engagement with our own online league’s leaderboards.
At the time, much of this was based on the honor system within the specific gaming communities here (aside from any anti-cheat that recommended for the game like PunkBuster). Today if developers are going to offer multiplayer, they get involved with their online community directly within the game itself. Leaderboards are actually in the game (Diablo 4 comes to mind) or leaderboards are linked within the game to their online site.
Global Warfighter League will be hard pressed to fulfill the role it used to in today’s gaming environment. We’re simply not needed i the same way.
GWL Goals Moving Forward
We are not without goals here and our path remains the same. The things that set Global Warfighter League apart from other gaming leagues, when we started was the organization of a player’s online gaming world as he or she wanted it. If a player wanted to form a team for a ladder or a tournament, they could do that here. They could schedule matches with other teams and the communications were logged in matchoms, here at GWL.
Stats for Win/Loss were calculated and leaderboards were created for bragging rights for a a player or team. They could create guides within our wiki and if competition required it, they could upload mods and files to enable and empower competition. The community at large had a forum to congregate while teams had their own forum where they could organize.
Teams and groups could set ranks within their clan (Leader, Co-Leader, Captain, Member, etc.) and admins within these games were allowed to create ladders and seasonal leagues using the GWL tools for their respective community.
Taking everything into consideration here, the tools GWL provided in the past allowed gamers to be gamers. We provided bragging rights to players and groups through leaderboards while providing the tools to organize and be competitive online. We’d like to continue that spirit but in a new format and a more hybrid approach within a few platforms.
More to come.
Thank you for your interest and patronage,
