My opinion and solution to "Cold death of the competitive scene"

This is my personal opinion and does not represent anybody. I may have missed some things from the original thread, I do apologize.

While I have been eating popcorn and watching the entertainment that is the "Cold death of the competitive scene" thread, I've also formed some opinions/solutions I think we can work towards to increasing the amount of competitive players or just the amount of players in general. Furthermore, I'm posting this in a new thread because I think that the previous thread has become a place where flaming piles of shitposts fly around.

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A look at both sides

• njab's opinion is that the competitive scene is declining. While I don't particularly understand how his third and fourth points will directly increase the amount of competitive players, his solutions are:
  
  (1) Incorporate scenario into comp, for example fixing scenario cws
  (2) Expanding the normally and most played comp map of eu+ into other places in the rest of the world map or even other maps.
  (3) Allowing map mods (Not quite sure on how this will directly affect the number of competitive players either, but it does relate to my solution)
  
  
• On the other hand, players like Croat have come up with statistics that support the competitive scene actually increasing in number, in particular the number of cws played. Others (or was it Croat again) have mentioned that it is purely the seasonal nature of the game and old players often go inactive but come back. More others have mentioned that the difficulty involved in playing other maps outside eu+ is that there currently aren't any map that are as balanced.
  

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My opinion

(I'm basing my opinion off Gigi, who quotes Dave that the amount of yearly players has gone down and is at an all-time-low) It is my opinion, and only my personal one, that competitive isn't as widespread as it once was. That being said, I don't feel confident saying that incorporating scenario will greatly impact the amount of competitive players. Obviously, having scenario cws would allow scenario clans to compete for elo; but isn't it at the same time just calling a group of players by another name? What used to be scenario players are now "competitive" scenario players.
I'm also not against playing competitive on maps outside of eu+, but I also think for the atWar competitive culture, eu+ is the most conventional map. I don't think a lot of people would be against others playing for elo in maps outside of eu, but people want to play what they have the most experience in and are best at. For most competitive players, that map is eu.

So what is the root of the problem? First of all, in regards to what njab posted, I agree that the entry bar to competitive is high - ie, high ranked competitive. I think we can all agree that to shine in competitive you need quite a lot of experience. But I think this is also the inherent nature of competitive and being a competitive player - which here I define as someone who plays a relatively high amount of duels. Every player has the ability to compete for elo, but obviously not everyone can be the best. Thus, most are simply content playing a couple duels here and there. I think that if we were to "increase the amount of competitive players", we couldn't call most of them "competitive" players according to my definition. But isn't this an aspect of every "competitive" game? We can't all be Global Elites here.

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My solution and afterthoughts

My second point in regards to the root of the problem ties to my solution so I'm explaining it here. atWar isn't a big game, it never has been. Back in 2012, when we were all kids and probably didn't have access to money, playing an online browser strategy game was appealing. It's now been 7 years, and many have grown, gone to school, graduated from school, begun their own families ,etc. Quite obviously, many have responsibilities that require them to move on from the game, or they've simply grown less fond of the game after 7 years. With that said, it should be clear why there may be more older competitive players becoming inactive than those becoming active again. Furthermore, there are so many free games nowadays that are so much more popular and appealing; browser games just aren't as popular anymore. As a result, the amount of newer players just isn't as high as it used to be. (According to Gigi quoting Dave).

So what can we do?

I've thought about it for a while and come up with a couple steps I believe can lead us in the right direction. They're not as concrete as I'd like them to be but I've yet to come up with better ones.

• I agree with njab in regards to scenario cws/duels. I don't think this will bring any negative impact at all, and instead can give scenario players a chance to compete for elo and rankings as the best scenario players.
  
• Introduce new players to the elo system and competitive scene early, for example through the tutorial. Perhaps there are those that want to rise to the top but don't even know about it?
  
• But instead of focusing on small little changes and bandages, perhaps it's time we focus on the bigger picture? Since browser games just aren't as popular anymore, maybe the solution would be to follow the many topics in the suggestion thread asking for a Steam port or at least something that people can discover on a popular game platform? I do understand that this "solution" is a high risk one financially and would require a massive amount of time investment. (I'm a programmer myself so I know). That being said, I personally think that this is the direction the game should move in. Having the game not simply be browser based and on Steam, for example, can not only attract more players as a downloadable online game, but also resolve njab's idea of mods. For the first time, we could make mods for atWar!
  

In any case, I would like to thank you for reading this far if you did. There's always going to be a special place in my heart for atWar. I'm sure we all want atWar to succeed, so please stop turning threads like these into flamewars. While there is truth in everything, I cannot comprehend how talking about someone's political views, or who got banned even related to the thread. Furthermore, they are not constructive but obstructive. We all want atWar to grow right? Then be nice and be constructive.