Some quality forum drama here for a change.

For a bit of context I’m someone who has never changed their name. I’m also someone who thought things like the barcode names were annoying. Additionally, I do think it’s a bit of extra work to figure out who’s who when there are renames, especially since I don’t play much these days. It’s a bit confusing whenever I show up for a day or two or whatever.

BUT. This rule change is not the answer. Even if I thought the barcode names for example were annoying I don’t see why that should be banned behavior. Let people have their fun even if my grumpy ass doesn’t like it at the time. It sounds like we’re trying to solve a technical deficiency (not having a backend static UUID) by implementing rule changes that are unpopular for the people it actually impacts.

I’d guess most people don’t rename, or at least rename very often. Those people also aren’t going to be the people on the forums advocating in favor of this change, because they don’t care. If people want to have fun and rename who cares? I’ve seen hardly any convincing arguments against it, sans things that are technical problems that should be solved technically and not by limiting freedom to the subset of people using the feature, especially when that subset involves very active community members.

Having a static backend UUID that’s the true reference + being able to report in Aeolus by right clicking their name in chat solve the majority of the problems here. I’m sure the former is a huge amount of work and will probably not happen, but it’s still a better idea than essentially removing name changes.

Seems like it slows down high level play and does little to nothing for lower rated play. I think this is similar to what Paradox is saying, but imo area reclaim solves a problem that doesn't necessarily exist. What I mean by that is no low rated player is losing games because they didn't click enough rocks. There are a million other mistakes they're making that are far more important than clicking rocks. The difference between attack move and manually clicking rocks is meaningless until maybe 1600+ and that's being very generous, realistically it's a higher rating than that.

Even watching the replay was kind of sad, felt so much slower than normal ditch progress which sucks because that's fun to both watch and play.

Yes, it makes it less volatile early game and makes losing engineers less punishing, but I feel that that's the only real benefit and even then it's only a benefit at high level play.

I vote we fix by deleting it from the game

@morax said in "What will you do if you lose the election" and 5 Questions for FTX:

5. Have you ever donated your own money to a FAF event? Why or why not?

No comment on the rest but why do we care if a college student is donating money to FAF? Hell why would we care if anyone, college student or not, is donating money to FAF when they clearly put time into it? For all we know he’s broke as hell, and if you know he’s not it’s still kind of a strange question if he’s putting a lot of time in anyway imo.

I think both sides of the bo argument are missing a crucial point for lower level players: Cognitive load.

If you're a 1k ladder player who has played some random map 100 times up vs another ladder player who's also 1k but hasn't played as much ladder and has never played that map before, who do you think is a bit more likely to win that?

The dude who has played it 100 times probably doesn't have a BO, at least not one past the first couple factories, and even if he does it's not going to be that refined (again, 1k rating). But, here is where he has advantages:

1. Takes zero thought for him to know where to send acu.
2. Knows how powerful air is on the map, if transports make sense, best expansions to go for, etc
3. Has a better rough idea of how much power to make and how many factories the mass can support
4. Knows what the passable terrain is without looking
5. In general doesn't have to spend time looking at the map, reclaim, etc
6. And probably a lot of other small things I'm too lazy to come up with now.

All of these things matter far less the higher you go because better players figure that stuff out faster and more accurately.

tl;dr: imo it's not bo, it's general map familiarity. I think experienced players are underestimating how much that matters at lower levels.

Edit: I mean obviously people responding like Thomas and Grimplex don't need BOs for maps, any shit they come up with on the fly is going to be better than what any 1200 is going to come up with after playing a map dozens of times. FAF at the 1800+ level is not the same game as FAF for the rest of people.

I don’t have much stake in the game when it comes to server updates during FAF peak hours since I’m rarely able to play during peak hours as it is, but I’d rather the people like you who are volunteering their time to keep this ship afloat be able to do what they need to do when it’s more convenient for them if possible. It’s not like you’re paid for this, and personally I’d rather you guys not feel burned out by feeling forced to give up personal time just for FAF’s convenience.

Appreciate the work and the update on what happened here!

Almost never able to get a game and when I do the odds are too high that it’s a 5x5 map or 10x10 that plays like a 5x5.

Need mapgen ladder week more often.

Story time! And yes, I do tie this back to the thread.

To the surprise of no one, I'm a huge nerd and also the kind of nerd who has been into building computers since I was a kid. Around the lovely age of 13 I built my first rig that was capable of playing games, but to back up a little, my family wasn't well off. I knew I wanted to do this for a long time, so for almost 2 years leading up to that I did whatever odd jobs I could do as a kid to save money. Mowing lawns, dog sitting, whatever, until I could afford the parts myself. My dad then took me to GameStop, and the first thing I saw was the Forged Alliance gold pack that had very recently come out. It had a giant robot on the cover and was a strategy game. Sounded perfect. It was the only game I could afford, and the only game I played for a while on PC. This was late 2007.

I have quite literally been playing FA for longer than some people here have been alive.

I'm not the only person here who has played this game a long, long time. Of course people like me are somewhat resistant to change. Change needs to be damn well justified, because I love the game exactly how it is, perceived warts and all. Some things are no brainers. Performance updates have been amazing, they have no downsides and really do help keep the game alive. Seriously, thank you @jip for all the work there. Overall balance changes have been solid, the balance we have now might just be the best balance the game has ever had.

Other things like advanced target priorities, spread move, spread build, etc are great additions because they do nothing but add to the base game in a positive way. They add strategic depth, which is perfect for a game like FAF.

I'm not going into more depth here since this has been covered to death, but area reclaim doesn't add to strategic depth, it takes away. It makes all forms of reclaim other than factory attack move redundant and pointless most of the time. Good players no longer have to think "hey is it worth spending my apm on manual reclaim right now or is attack move good enough". With area reclaim, the answer is almost always area reclaim or factory attack move. It also does nothing for lower rated players, because for them the answer to that question already virtually always is it's not worth it and they should attack move.

Much like the rename debacle, I do not think communication here has been well handled. On both sides. Valid criticisms of area reclaim have gone essentially ignored.

All that said, out of the things I mentioned in my original post area reclaim was at the bottom of what I cared about. If anything the associated nerf to rock reclaim speed is worse than area reclaim in my mind, but I could be wrong there as I have so far done little more than watch the replay from Tagada. I have, at least, done that though.

Back to my first paragraph. I want FAF to stay successful. I also want FA Forever to embody the Forever part. This means changes that actually impact how the game is played need to clear a very high bar before they're implement. In some cases that bar is trivial to clear. In other cases not so much.

The idea that people should move on from FAF because it's a 20 year old dead game and there's no merit there is a depressing clown take that spits in the face of tons of great open source projects, not just FAF. Even if I don't agree with everything devs/mods/whoever does, I'm glad they try to help the game and put their free time in. Call me naive or whatever the hell you want, but I do think most here have the best intentions for the game regardless of if I agree with their vision.

Communication is hard, and I think we've had some of the worst communication breakdowns I've seen in the past few months on FAF. Hopefully I've added a bit of explanation for the views of people who might be more conservative with applying changes.

Oh, one last thing. Exactly zero people who are current high level players will have any issues still being top players unless the entire game is fundamentally reworked, and even then many of them would become top players quickly if they put the time in. Top players aren't top players due to some magic tricks or meta abuse, they're top players because they have great fundamentals. The idea that top players are against this because they'd have to relearn something and might lose their rating is comically wrong and misplaced.

I have never once had an issue with ping due to where someone lived, only due to them having a bad connection. It's honestly good there are no flags right now so there's less discrimination based on supposed latency issues due to location which more or less isn't actually a thing since anything less than 500ms is fine. The exceptions should be person by person, not country by country.

It got to the point where FAF was barely playable for me due to the DDoS attacks. I was getting busier with life and had less time and energy for games, and then the occasions I had time for FAF I'd try and fail to have a game that would last longer than a few minutes. It got to the point where I just wouldn't bother and I'd play some other game if I had time to play anything. I knew that I would come back when I had more free time and connections were more stable. From what I could tell devs were actively working on fixes, so I was mostly waiting for those fixes + life to calm down.

Fast forward to now, and both of those things seem to have happened; I can now play full games without issue and I have a bit more free time. It does feel like there are just fewer higher rated games though. A few times I've been on recently where this time last year there might be at least one or two higher rated games going, whether it be setons, mapgen, or likely both, but there was just nothing.

Nuggets is right, the connection issues were a huge problem. I don't think the recent things that have come up would be quite as big of a deal if it weren't for the piece of shit who was (is?) DDoSing FAF. Or, perhaps they would be, but we wouldn't get people quitting over them. I think the rename rule changes would piss some people off regardless of how happy they were with FAF previously, but it wouldn't on its own push people to the verge of quitting.

More thoughts on recent changes/proposed changes.

Rename changes

If the mods just came out and said, "hey no impersonating people, we can't have a bunch of high rated players be TheWheelieNoob for reasons x, y, and z" then while people would be unhappy and I'm not sure I'd agree, it wouldn't be as bad. However, they didn't. They both said no similar names and made a significant change to renaming in general where you can only rename once a year. Furthermore, the first post was pretty light on the details to justify the change, and they then took entirely too long to start addressing the real feedback they were getting. Sure, lots of people were just being angry without posting anything of substance but there were good counter points that the mod team should have been prepared to address. They then, in my mind, proceeded to use arguments mostly against impersonating people as justifications for changing renames from one month to one year.

This change doesn't even impact me and I still don't like how it's being handled, so it's far worse for the people it actually impacts.

League System

I don't think anyone has a problem with the league system. I legitimately like it. I think most people either like it or are indifferent. Where the issue comes in is having the league system replace the trueskill rating rather than living along side the existing rating system. I think it brings a lot of potential value that's harder to do without it, such as seasonal rewards, potentially nicer leaderboards, and another avenue of progression. All of which are accomplished without hiding trueskill and trueskill rating changes.

I find the arguments for hiding mmr and mmr changes to be weaker than what you lose by hiding them, especially for higher rated players, but I am also getting tired and have other things to cover. If you'd like I'll elaborate there later.

The one other thing I'll say here is that I also see this as a move towards getting rid of global rating. I know, I know, that's a slippery slope fallacy, but basically all of the arguments for hiding rating are using global games as the example and not ladder games so I'm not sure I'm being unreasonable with that concern. I feel very, very strongly about not getting rid of global rating and I could see that actually killing FAF.

Reclaim changes/area reclaim

I thought people had been against this for years, and for good reasons. Why is this suddenly a thing that might actually go into FAF?? The scarier thing is that people are now seemingly so jaded that there's barely any actual discussion there. I said this on that thread, but it was legitimately sad watching The Ditch replay that was given as an example for the corresponding reclaim nerf. We are seemingly going from reclaim being so fast that the best can't use it entirely (overflow from Setons mid years ago as the example), to now which is a nice balance where skilled players actually can manage reclaim, to this where you're stalling with 3 or 4 reclaiming engineers minute 3 on the ditch. That's a joke, and not a funny one.

Small recap

The theme with all of these changes is they disproportionately impact higher rated and more active members at a time when said higher rated and more active members are already becoming less active and less engaged largely due to the connection issues.

I've never understood this push to hide the current rating system.

League system is going to be identically inaccurate compared to the current rating system, except now it's even more vague and just hides things that I think a lot of the community finds interesting. We are, generally speaking, nerds who like numbers and details, hence we're here playing a 17 year old RTS.

Hi yeah it’s fucking stupid to hide global rating. I’ve stayed mostly quiet on this thread because it’s pure idiotic cancer, but if Mizer is here calling out bullshit I guess I will too. Getting rid of global rating is completely and utterly asinine, full stop. I don’t know what breed of ignorant elitism leads to people thinking it’s a good idea, but for the sake of FAF I’d like none of that in our community leadership.

What do you even think getting rid of that will accomplish? Congratulations you made any sort of manual balance in global games impossible unless you know every single player in the lobby! Wow! Amazing! Congrats, you took away a nice psychological trick to get people to play more games because seeing rating go up is fun. That’ll really help player retention! I’m sorry that you’re compensating for the fact some (in your mind) gaptard is higher rated than you globally, cry me a river.

Okay thanks I’ll get off my soapbox now. Have a nice day.

Firstly, there was a disappointing lack of math in this. I think that's because what math there might be here doesn't support your premise.

Secondly, have you tried... not killing the lowest rated enemy ACU and instead go kill eco or something actually useful to kill? Or maybe tried pressuring the apm of the person who gets the base because managing two bases well is hard? You know, the strategy part of the strategy game?

Been there tried that. And tried it with people who had money and the will to throw it at the problem. Let’s not turn FAF into a subscription model, thanks.

Hot take: Not only should well-known members not receive extra immunity, but they should arguably be held to higher standards. Their toxicity has a greater impact than that of a random player with a low rating. Known players might receive more leniency in appeals since everyone has bad days and they’re known quantities, that's not the same as immunity.

That said, I agree that recent changes are contributing to the disinterest among higher rated players on FAF. The removal of rating changes + the hiding of TrueSkill, and the changes to the renaming rules were factors in Sladow and Terrari leaving. However, as Nuggets said, these issues were just the final straw; it could have been anything that led to them quitting.

I tried to contribute to the rename thread as someone unaffected by the change, since most people not affected won't care either way. I dislike how communication around that change has been handled. I was, imo, reasonable in it but mods also completely ignored. Only a dev responded to anything I said with a clarification on the technical side. Which is good, but otherwise mods just let that thread go wild without responding, then when responding ignored everything repeatedly.

Anyway, don't want to drag that thread in here more than it already is. Maybe I'll have more to say later but mostly wanted to comment on immunity + frustration from higher rated players on recent changes.

@thewheelie said in Novax needs to be nerfed, here's why.:

@exselsior said in Novax needs to be nerfed, here's why.:

It’s even worse than what @CorvathraNoob said because a single sat breaks t2 shields covering mexes.

No it doesnt. And even if it does it will be so time inefficient its not worth doing it at all

Just for fun I quickly tested this to make sure, it takes ~5 firing cycles and a little over a min of game time for a sat to break a uef t2 shield and kill a t3 mex. Now, the thing here is that the only maps where sats are cancer are high eco maps with spread out mexes. Meaning often the mexes will be surrounded by mass fabs. Killing the mass fab rings kills the t3 mex even faster if I am not mistaken, was too short on time to thoroughly test that part though.

Is this time inefficient? Probably. I can test this later but I'd bet on the novax killing distant mexes faster than a t3 arty would though, assuming mexes are spread out.

@arma473 said in Novax needs to be nerfed, here's why.:

I can think back to a match where I made something like 6 novax and they wouldn't break the enemy's shields. They made a significant number of shields but they spent a lot less on the shields than I spent on the novaxes.

You're doing it wrong. You don't build 6 sats unless you're doing that purely for laughs. You build one or two and then a Mavor. Good luck defending vs a mavor and 2 sats without having a ton of hives + sera t3 shields. And at that point unless you have a para all you can do with your eco is assist shields.

Edit: Also you should have synchronized the sats firing if you had that many. It would take a very large amount of assistance to defend against 6 sats on the exact same firing cycle.

@rezy-noob said in Novax needs to be nerfed, here's why.:

so far,i haven't seen a single game where novax spam beats arty grid spam and the single usage of a novax efficiently can probably be the t2 mex hunt if they are split across the map,aka setons but that's it?
i was also thinking about killing t1 assist,but making novax in order to do that isn't the best idea

Same thing I said to Arma, if you're just spamming sats with no arty then you're not using them effectively imo. It's sats + arty, not just spam sats. That combo brings down shields better than just sats do, and then the sats kill the shield generators the instant they go down to arty. Just arty and there's a decent chance it misses or lands after other shields come back up. With a well managed sat if there's any blip in the shields you start picking off shield gens.

That being said, on smaller and more compact maps sats make less sense than purely spamming arty, unless you don't have Aeon on your team then they're very nice for vision and situationally worth it.

Honestly the only situations where sats are arguably op are almost exclusively high eco 20x20 team games with spread out mexes, but they are obnoxious as hell when they are useful in a way that nukes, bombers, and arty aren't. Their perfect intel + perfect accuracy with decent damage is a pretty strong combo. That's just my opinion though.

I've played SupCom on and off since its release back in 2007. A big appeal for me is that it has had something for a wide variety a play styles or level of investment. What I mean by this is that back in the GPGNet days I was playing some other games more competitively with some friends and didn't really take this game that seriously, I just liked having massive survival battles or going through the campaign with different and usually troll strategies or self imposed limits like air only or defensive structures only. On the opposite side of that, much more recently I've been on a kick to start getting better at this game instead of playing chill games with zero effort or improvement and it's amazing the amount of depth there is. There's something for every level or type of player in this game.

Some more specific stuff:

• The scale
• Strategic zoom. This is one of the biggest reasons I never got into Starcraft despite giving it a few tries. Feels so limiting to not be able to zoom all the way out.
• The amount of outplay and comeback potential in the game at all stages
• Huge skill cap - even the best players have room for improvement
• The community - for keeping the game alive and all the new content that is added to it
• The community - for the nice good players willing to help not as good people get better
• Still plenty of new strategies or builds to try if you're feeling creative

@zbc Nuggets is tying to help spread your mod. If it’s ranked a lot more people will get to use it. That’s up to faf mods/admins from the sounds of it. Mod looks good!

I'm for adding it for a a few reasons. Obviously people here know my bias towards it, but here's why:

• It's a good and dynamic map that has at least a bit of everything. Very few maps have everything in the way that Seton's does imo.

• More navy maps in pool is nice

• It's a very high skill cap map - I don't really like the Setoner's have BOs argument. My reasoning for that is similar to what FTX said in the thread Cheese linked: You can go with aggressive non-meta play and absolutely trash most Setoners under 1800. There aren't a lot of traditional Setons only players that wouldn't work pretty consistently against. You can just go first bomber from any slot and crush your opp if they mostly just play setons and you have at least some level of competency in eco scaling in general. Should we remove EOTS (I think that's the right map I'm thinking of...) from ladder pool because it's free win if you know the meta of winning through air dominance and you opp doesn't? Should we remove Seraphim glaciers because having optimal transport timing making use of the spread out reclaim at start optimally can easily win the game for you? What about The Ditch and other maps where if you have a basic BO it gives massive advantage over someone who doesn't? I don't really hear much about those outside of lower ranked people complaining about people having BOs for ladder maps. This sounds the same.

• At least with Seton's even if people have sweaty BOs the meta is obvious what you do in general, the whole supposedly not knowing the meta on that map makes no sense. Sure I'm biased, but the meta on setons is more obvious than most other maps in tmm pool imo. Clear cut air and navy slots, clear mid mass that should be obvious to walk your com to pretty quickly, etc. It's not like other maps where no one knows they should be t3 air or whatever.

• The toxicity argument sounds like complete bs as Spikey pointed out, outside of my next point.

• People who ctrl k are being dicks and that's a them problem. Maybe they should actually be getting warnings from mods when ctrl k'ing in tmm matches and wasting people's time. I don't ctrl k on shitty 4v4 10x10 guncom rush maps even though I hate that shit, it's boring, and has a super low skill cap.

• Some have complained about the lag in late game seton's, a couple things there: Jip's wonderful work has largely made that a thing of the past outside of people playing on potatoes and there are other 20x20 maps with high mex and reclaim counts in the pool as well and no one is arguing those should also go away.

Edit, one more point: I think I saw somewhere where someone said a setoner could beat someone 300 rating higher by virtue of knowing the map. I really don't think most 1500 rated setoners are beating a (solid) 1800 rated tmm player unless the 1800 is beach and that's mostly fine anyway. Only exception might be on air, and definitely if you get a certain 1500 who is way stronger on air than other slots. Can count on one hand the number of people who fall into that category though and none of them play tmm afaik

@monstratus said in Why would you have left FAF?:

I think the problem with the rating system is not that there will be a lot of snipes (I just assumed that). The problem is that even those players who died receive ratings, even if the team won, so there is a strong imbalance. If we made it so that only the survivors would receive ratings, it would be much better...

There are lots of games that I hard carry but die in a desperate snipe attempt from the enemy team. Why shouldn't I get points if I crush their team but then die due to the last guy going suicidal tele or something stupid? Frankly, I've seen the rating system be pretty solid if you exercise some common sense around it. Meaning if some dude is a 1600 gapper, I generally would trust him to be 1600 on gap but then on Seton's or map gen he'll be a 1200. Same deal if you stick a 1600 setoner on gap.

The issue that comes up is if someone is an 1800 air player but 1k everything else and is rated 1300 or w/e. He'll play like a 1k in most slots but then crush air, never being his actual rating. There are no rating systems that can account for that in a game like FAF though, it's quite impossible.

There are exceptions where people get troll ratings, but those are just that, exceptions, and all rating systems have them.