Hello, i'm not sure if i'm supposed to be here but I was just looking for my old map thread and noticed I wasn't banned.
If anyone cares, I left FAF around 2021/2022 roughly. That wasn't "I left but I still posted on discord" or whatever - but I forgot about FAF entirely and moved on with my life.
I wouldn't say that the game itself had any impact in leaving but it became too much of a chore to play if i wanted to take it anything other then playing Gorki or some other insane thing with a close few friends. The 1v1 ladder took hours for an Australian to find a game and honestly, the mapgen didn't help with anything either. It was more about the "work" I did, which was mostly mapping and then administration for mapping later on.
I am/was a creative person and so contributing here felt like doing "work", or a job that I wanted to do even. I think that is why I managed to become so invested in the status of this community and the "work" I put into it. I still put the same level of passion into my actual work, and it fustrates me to a similar level, though i'm not going to make a forum essay about why I can't hit tolerances on a lathe any time soon.
This is also what I think when I see people here fight endlessly about contributions that align with that they do in real life - you need to seperate what you do here from the work that actually progresses your career. And if you're going to put anything here into your resume (hello jip) you need to not spend your life here getting into heated circular arguements that cannot bring forth a positive compromise.
One day, I describe it as a "cable" in my mind snapping. My attachment to FAF if you will just left after years of arguing strongly about anything I deemed relevant here. I actually left design as a career entirely here and moved into engineering. I can now proudly say that I am "Craftsman" biass of the Australian Defence Force, and spend my time creating shit out of metal instead of making maps.
If i had any advice for you all now, and I do:
You need to limit your attachement to the "work" you do here. You are not posting 5000 word essays about how you're going to rope over people not liking the work that actually earns you income and I don't really see a reason why you (or past me..) should be doing it here, for free.
If you want people to take your balance issues or etc seriously, show that you are serious by making it into a mod that you can show off. It's really easy to do. It's interesting to see the same people arguing on the same problem for YEARS on end because they're basically asking someone else to put in the "hard" yards. Stat changes can be as simple as some copy pasting and changing a value, so just make it and test your own ideas.
And ultimately, you need to remember that you are here because you want to play a fun video game. IF you want to "work", you should go and work at your actual job. Users in the LOUD project are NOT having the same problem this community has, because they're a group of people who just want to sit down and play a silly game about blowing up robots, not fighting for the sake of their white collar careers every single day on a half functioning forum that hasn't been visually upgraded since it was implemented. When was the last time you sat down and just played survival with your mates? Sent all 4 ACU's at one guy who doesn't speak your language, and were laughing about the 20 global elo you got for your trouble? if you're on the forums and you post here every day, this stuff might not be the core of why you show up anymore but, it needs to be - because it's why you came here in the first place.
Anyway, just my two cents.
I poked my head in earlier because I saw my old friends here talking about FAF drama on discord. It upsets me to see the same people trying to fight for their lives over the same topics with no real chance for anything changing. A battle that lasts until the other guy quits isn't healthly, and even if i agree with what I said years ago, i can't imagine why I would write so much on a video game forum about it. FtXCommando needs to hit the gym and not the keyboard buttons 4head
Also, if you're reading this and you have the required admin permissions, you may unhide, and enable ranked games on all of the maps under my account. All i ask is that if i search for them, is that I see people having fun playing them. Oh, and credit any edits.
Good luck, and don't actively make the place I spent my time as a young adult any worse that I once thought it was, cheers!
