Have to agree with the most common argument here - military rank is not common knowledge at all. Not even for the populace of the countries that use them.
At best, you can argue people kinda understand the concept of captain (someone who has a larger number of men under his arm), admiral (controls big naval army) and general (controls big land army). And that's also mostly skewed from popular media (because that's how most get their knowledge).

So yeah, neither common (in its naming scheme), nor common knowledge.

The "material" badges are common place in a lot of games to represent competitive rank. I'm sure 95% of the children populace would sooner understand if you told them you were "diamond" rank rather than "corporal" or whatever.

Also, as already mentioned, there's not only 3 tiers (bronze, silver, gold) to the FAF's ranking system, there's 6 (bronze, silver, gold, diamond, master, grandmaster).

Most games have ties to the Elo system, which, although not used by FAF, is the most prominent and actually well known system to rank competitive mastery. And it has its roots in chess, from which the "master" and "grandmaster" titles are derived from.

@ftxcommando I forgot to add, which is quite important: that is a valid reason. But, at least the Draw mechanic should have a timeout so it's unrated for a sufficiently short games.

@pviddy That's because of the most recent client update that now doesn't show rating changes in matchmaker games at all. The change still happens, you just don't get informed on it

Ok, that's a good reason. But couldn't a system that punishes such behavior be put in place? Like keep track for each player what maps they get and if they DC. If someone DCs >10 times from a particular map (and always on that map), but almost never from others, the likelihood of that not being on purpose is really low. Increase the "10" number to reduce chances of false positives.

Or, could there be a detection system that sees who DCed, that person gets penalized, and the rest of the players don't. I understand it would be hard to pull maybe in 1v1 if a player comes up with some kind of DoS attack on the opponent, but in 2v2, 3v3 and 4v4... idk, 60 seconds feels like a safe bet game-wise (as in nothing really major can happen in the first 60 seconds).

Edit:
Like, I'm thinking how other games get around this issue. I'd assume a time-penalty system would work as well, but I feel such a system would probably punish willing players that just had an unlucky DC too much.

@blackyps I see. That's dumb. It should at least consider game length, and anything say sub N minutes should be unrated, where N is number of players / team (so 1 min for 1v1), regardless of how the game came to an end (recall, draw, or people simply leaving). Or you can say N/2 minutes.

Unless it's some kind of a system limit, which I highly doubt, I'd really like to hear a good reason why a game that lasted 30 seconds should be considered for rating (again, you pretty much have time to build a single factory and nothing else). Even more so for team games where maps tend to be larger.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but any game sub 5 minutes is unrated. This should be the case for draws as well!

To make it extra clear, the game in question was ended after 34 seconds because of a DC, and it was done with a Draw call. In no situation ever in any respectable system should this result in rating change.

@morgul44 You need to enable it in options: Options > Gameplay > Control groups > Add to factory control group: On

Hmmm, in that case, worth a watch (by someone, not me, I'm off to bed, gl with that one).

Kinda lazy to watch the replay, but are you using any mods? I noticed this behavior in games that have ACU's walking speed increased.

@blackyps You can have an ex member retire from contributing, but still keep playing the game tho.

But yeah, there is a ambiguity to my idea, which wasn't helped by Rowey unretiring himself a month or 2 after "retiring". We should define it better, for sure. Maybe the definition could be "avatar is granted to previous FAF Team leads", or in addition, have a "time" variable also required, say "for at least 1 (or more) years".

I don't dislike the idea of "some other way" either.

My view (omg a personal experience!) on avatars had always been that they are a type of 'badge of honor' rewarded to the few for exceptional success (note this can be interpreted in many ways).

Thus, the idea of "personal avatars" doesn't really sit well with me. I wouldn't, however, be against a 'Profile image' idea.
So you could have a profile image you can upload and have visible when someone opens your profile sheet in the client, and it would function like any other profile picture in any service ever. Ofc, this would require client and backend work, which we obviously are lacking people for as it already is, so I'd sooner place it on the back burner of "things we'd like to have but aren't high priority".

That being said, I'd still keep avatars as a way of marking those with special contributions and achievements. And not as a way of personalizing one's profile on an "everyone" basis.

@deribus
Not sure how important it is in particular RN, but I'd list "Veteran FAFer" under "Contributor" - it's original purpose was to honor direct FAF contributors (members of any team) that stopped participating in FAF (the project, not game) in their further life pursuits.

This is kinda like the smallest window size, so that's what you get sometimes, maybe minimum size could be defined somewhere so this doesn't happen any more @Sheikah

@sheikah Would not that mean they should only be permitted to assign avatars specific to the tournament - doesn't make sense their 'pallet' is all the avatars ever.
@NOC not trying to fry you here, just asking. ^^

Whatever the case, I don't mind working on special avatars for these odd cases, but they will for sure not be personal - they'd have to be based on the actual tournament avatars imo, or as I proposed earlier, we can make an avatar for everyone who ends up in this situation.

I understand the appeal of the idea, but it's a bad take.
You can't really prevent the abuse of people just exiting the game at a correct timing, and thus 'gating out' in the middle of an army thus not exploding their units.

Just to give legitimacy to Sladow's claim, I am indeed not satisfied with how that particular avatar, which is the FAF Veteran avatar, was handled.

When creating it, I envisioned it to be given out to direct contributors to the FAF project, who are ready to pass on their duties and "retire". My trigger was Rowey, yes, but just like anyone else, it wasn't a personal avatar for him - but for any members who contributed to the community directly (and yes, Rowey turned out to be a special case, given he returned back to 'active duty'). I wouldn't really mind if it were given out to the active 'monsters' that keep this amazing project going (Jip, Brutus, Sheikah, BlackYps, Balthazar - only to name a few), but I think the team avatars are much more appropriate for that (and they were quite some work as well). The avatar was not meant for members that play a lot, or participated in many tournaments (a.k.a. 'regular' members, despite how active they may be).

As with all my work, I give all the use rights to FAF, and as such I probably don't have a direct say what a particular avatar will be used for, but I do feel like this is in poor taste.

That being said, I'm not here to admonish people and turn this into a witch hunt, so I propose we do come up with a fitting avatar that can be cool in it's own way, that could be used as a reward for those who either refuse monetary rewards, or are unable to collect their rewards for any reason. We could even make two, one for each of those situations. I hope that with that, we can keep the "FAF Veteran" avatar assigned to appropriate people (and this would entail taking it away from those that aren't), but also make sure everyone feels good. With that, I hope I soon get a request over at the discord #promo-projects for this exact cause.

Just lock this thread, so no one can steal it *smirk*

By ctrl-king both of the factories, duh!

Jokes aside, I'm assuming he 'cancels the command' (ctrl+RMB or whatever it is, it's in my muscle memory).

Y'all necromancers.