Hello dear FAF player,

today i want to ask two questions:

Question 1:
Do you want to see FAF putting work into making FAF awesome for the average casual RTS player?

According to the video "The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This Is Why." (highly recommended), around 77-80% (!!!) of Starcraft players are "casual" players (players that only played the campaign and never touched multiplayer). Starcraft is one of the most competitive RTS out there, so we might assume that the ratio is even more imbalanced for Supcom FA.

So my personal answer is YES!

More people means more ideas and creativity, more work put into FAF, more fun, more donations, more everything! And some of those casuals will naturally become salty, competitive tryhards by the nature of this community, providing more spice to the flow!

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Question 2:
If yes, how could that be done?

Well, to know that, we have to forget ourselves and put ourselves into the shoes of a casual player. Luckily i am somewhat casual. You want proof? I only play bot matches in Dota 2 and I tried playing that game with a controller. I still like to play the FAF campaign from time to time even though it is way too easy for me at 1100 global rating. Hopefully that qualifies me as casual enough!

However, if you are even more casual than me, i want to hear your opinion!

Now lets talk about what causal players want. The key difference is quite easy to understand:

Casual players do not want to compete, casual players want to progress!

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Chapter 1: Difficulty
The idea of creating an auto-balanced queue for casual players, where players win/loose 50% of the time thanks to Trueskill like in TMM would be stupid. Why?

Because casual players to not really want to be challenged by a competitve opponent. Casual players want to instead have a fun and satisfying gaming experience, which for them means having a feeling of PROGRESS, and while this can include personally improving at the game, it does not need to.

However, how easy exactly should it be? And the answer is different for every player. Some players can stand loosing against opponents more often than others. This is why in gaming there is the very popular concept of "game difficulty". Difficulty allows players to decide what the "skill gap" between them and their AI opponent should be.

This skill gap preference is different for every casual player! There are games that do not have difficulty settings, which are usually explicitely marketed at "hardcore" players like Dark Souls. However even Dark Souls has built in "difficulty" by allowing players to farm stats and play in Coop. I know it because it had to farm against the O&S boss, because I would have been too bad to beat it otherwise.

(difficulties in AoE2 DE)

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Chapter 2: Progression

So our casual player selects a difficulty, the game should not stay that difficult the entire time. There should be a diffiulty progression that the player can keep up with. This is straighforward to handcraft in a RTS campaign, but how does difficulty work in RTS skirmish matches against AI?

Well, the progression in a skirmish against AI is to select a harder difficulty at some point. Lets say i played against Dota 2 bots at mid difficulty, at some point i might feel like im skilled enough to turn it up a notch and try playing against hard difficulty. The turning of that nob, if i win, is what is satisfying as a casual! This is why RPGs with auto-scaling difficulty are hated by quite a bunch of players, but thats a different story.

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Chaper 3: FAF custom games vs. AI

Now that we know that the casual player desires to set the difficulty in a vs-AI game, why is this a problem in FAF? Don't we already have Sorian with various difficulty levels and a bunch of alternative AIs?

Well, the problem is that selecting a difficulty in FAF sucks. In fact, it is hardly possible for a casual player:

• The actual new good AIs are hidden in the mod vault and lengthy forums post, where a certified casul does not ever dare to look
• There is no readily accessible information about how good any of the AIs really are
• Even the AI authors do not always know how good their AI is
• AI performance changes as balance patches and AI patches hit, causing the performance of AIs to swing
• Some AIs are somewhat broken on some maps, the whole AI marker situation is a thing that casual players should not have to deal with - if possible, it should "just work".
• There seem to be no balanced steps in difficulty. How much better is Sorian Adapter compared to AI Easy? The casual player has no good way to find out if he should try Adaptive after Easy or if there is something in between
• The AI developers themselves have no incentive to create modifications of their AI for different skill brackets (nerfing the AI to create an easier AI variant, adding a cheating variant, finetuning the cheat multipliers etc.)

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Creating a consistent concept of difficulty for FAF AIs

As a solution to these problems i propose the creation of "AI skill brackets". These are rating brackets that AIs are sorted into and that effectively define what "hard AI" etc. means on FAF. The numbers here can of course be changed, but something like this might work:

How AIs in each bracket should perform expressed in global rating:

• under 200: Very Easy
• 200-400: Easy
• 400-600: Normal
• 600-800: Hard
• over 800: Very Hard

This would allow us to simplify AI selection a lot. A casual user can just select one of these brackets and automatically get an AI implementation that plays acoording to that skill bracket. If AIs get better, they might change their bracket, allowing casuals to have consistent difficulty without thinking about how AI authors change their AIs.

If the casual user wants more control, they should still be able to select a specific AI in a specific bracket. If he doesn't, then just select a good default or a random AI from that bracket.

It should be noted that if an AI is exploitable with a very specific hard to find exploit, this should not be factored into the skill level of the AI. We can assume that a casual player never finds those exploits, or that they can quickly be fixed if found. The goal here is not to give an exact represenation of AI skill, but a consistent system that is usefull to the casual player who doesn't play very often.

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The hard part

All of this until this point is just mostly client/lobby implementation work, nothing that i think would be too hard. Were it gets hard, is this:

How do we know which AI belongs to which skill level? How do we measure the skill of AIs? There already are multiple ideas, as expressed in the "AI in matchmaker queues". And there are other ideas like regular AI tournaments that could be used to manually asses AIs capabiliy. However first i want to know:

Should this be the next big project for FAF? Making playing against AIs easy, consistent, and a generrally pleasurable experience? Do you think creating well-defined skill brackets for AIs is a good idea? I think this would substantially improve FAF, but that is just my casual opinion.

@Jip

The FAF community has always been conservative regarding changes that touch gameplay in any form. And parts of the community have always been rude, ignorant or lacking empathy with other people's opinions when discussing anything.

The "Grubby attitude" will never be the majority here. And FAF will never have a balance team that has enough authority and consensus-making ability to push through meta-changes in quick succession.

If think there is no choice than to accept this as fact. It might change in the future, but i doubt any single person can really impact this, and i also don't think it is necessary to be happy as a contributor / developer.

If a FAF contributor wants to make changes to FAF gameplay (even if they have a perfect technical solution), what they DO NOT necessarily have is community consensus.

Pushing things through without "enough" consensus is the path to burnout and unhappiness. If a contributor wants to keep having fun doing things around FAF, this is the one thing that they should not do. The technical solution that the contributor has built here does not really matter, other than that it works! It is the consensus that matters and the consensus alone that has the power to bring that change into standard gameplay in a way that everybody is happy with.

And here is in my opinion the common pitfall for contributors:
Contributors burn out trying to create consensus for their proposed change.

The reason for that is that trying to create consensus in a short amount of time is often practically impossible. No amount of playtesting, putting things into news, letting Gyle talk about them or making a forum posts will be able to convert a change from "controversial" to "generally looked forward to".

In my opinion, the only way to really do things happily is to do them primarily for yourself. Make a gameplay change that YOU want to play and play it together with people that also like it.

And i believe that good changes will eventually mature into having consensus to be put into the game (might take years but still). However, let other people argue for that. The contributor's job should then be to market whatever they made, so that other people can find it, but thats pretty much it.

This is for example how map generator got into ladder without a lot of problems. It took a lot of time, and in the eyes of many that is a good thing.

If a contributor absolutely wants to (and is motivated by) bringing changes to FAF quickly and in short succession, they must indeed only make absolutely uncontroversial changes (like the performance improvements).

Given the stupid amount of energy and words wasted by all kinds of people in the PC election thread, i wanted to present a different idea out there. This not just about PC. It could probably replace several councillor positions, maybe even the entire Council of Setons.

The goal of the system is mostly:

• Transparency about who does what in FAF.

Ill call it the "Badge System" or maybe "Roles system" because i have no better word.

• A person can hold more than one badge
• Each badge is linked to exactly ONE kind of responsibility
• We hopefully only ever discuss exactly one badge at a time, if there is an election. No more "discuss these 30 responsibilities that councillor position XYZ comes with" for fucks sake.
• There is a "Main" Badge for every responsibility that only one person can hold, and that person hands out sub-badges of the same type (but not "Main") to anybody they want. Only Main badge is voted onto a person by election.

Example:

• "Main Tournament director" can hand out and remove "tournament director" badges to anybody.
• "Main TMM director" can hand out "TMM director" badges to anybody
• and so on...

Pros:

• Non-insiders can finally see who the fuck is actually doing what.
• We see more people with badges which makes it look like its easier to participate in FAF. right now "PC councillor" is a scary word.
• FTX can still do everything because he can hold literally every "Main" badge in the world.
• The conversion from the old system to the new one doesnt require any kind of power being handed over so we could get it done without too much drama.
• Maybe we can convert the other councillor positions as well because i see no reason to have a mix of old and new system.
• Badge holders can give their badge to somebody else (maybe a bad idea?).

Negs:

• The forum needs to be able to display all badges a person holds.
• We need to implement a system that tracks who has what badge i guess? Otherwise there will be chaos.
• Handing over badges needs to be done though the mentioned system (like a tab in the client)
• We still need to decide which badges are voted/eleted, so i expect that would be a shitshow of a discussion. But for now we could just make all PC related badges votable and assign them to the winner of the PC election.

Its basically Discord roles on steroids but for FAF.

Opinions?

Edit:
There might the some badges for which sub-badges dont make sense, so maybe restrict those.

People always tend to prefer things they know, when they have a choice. This is why the mapgen can do what handmade maps cannot.

If a person goes into the map vault, they see a bunch of maps they have never seen alongside ones that they already now, and their brain is automatically going to dismiss the maps they dont't know because anything thats new is frightening on a primitive human level.

The mapgen solves this problem by frontloading that choice:

• Do you want to play an unknown map or not?

And then forcing you to stay with that choice by preventing your brain from categorizing it as just another map and therefore reverting your decision to try something new. So the way in which the mapgen creates an advantage is not necessarily by just creating unknown maps, but psychologycally.

Of course the mapgen should eventually still reach higher level of quality. But its important to realize how important the UI is here.

Lets assume that there is a way for the client to automatically select a handmade map that

• Follows some easy to use filters (size, amount of water, etc.) similar to map generator
• Guarantuess to select a map that is generally not very actively played by the community and of certain minimum quality
• Introduces some sort of UI-barrier to backpedalling from the decision to play something new

Then maybe handmade maps could in some way fullfill the same function that the mapgen does. However, we dont have that kind of UI for handmade maps, and as long as it is that way, people will resort to the mapgen to play unknown maps instead of simply selecting a not much played handmade map.

The mapgen also crates some sort of unspoken contract: The map is guarantueed to be new to everybody (in reality thats not true because you can regenerate a seed, but this is still the expectation that people have). This is of course very hard to replicate with handmade maps.

PS:
Could participants in this thread please stop assuming that everybody else argues in bad faith or against their interests? Turning this thread into a mapgen vs handmade war will not create many usefull insights on this topic. Too late probably.

Who event wants 3, god forbid 4 blues? Why?

Does choosing the bright but saturated red color make you a connoisseur of the exquisite art of expressing yourself by choosing the color that represents your inner spirit animal or what? Does sending your professional 4th shade of green into the enemies slightly desaturated (but not quite brown) orange base make you a collaborative map-painter, such that your are creating an interactive piece of modern art by mixing units such that the resulting composition makes you think deeply about the world of shapes and abstractions? Does anybody suffer torment from the idea of having to paint themselves and their units with the brush of a color that has been excluded from the cool color space club that is currently en-vogue in the most accomplished circles of the Illuminati?

Colors are in this game to easily distinguish and call players out. And as long as the available colors do no induce eye cancer, that is what they should be selected for.

I think that there are technical, social as well as UI/UX aspects to this problem that go way beyond just "what moderation would like to have".

1. Technical

As @BlackYps said, when names are referenced in a tool in any way, the ID for that name should be lookup up and used internally as soon as possible (so if there is a UI form with a name input in the client, the client should resolve the ID right after the user inputs it).

2. Social (recognition)

Members of a social community (which FAF is) want to be able to recognize other members (even after coming back after leaving the community for some months). This is really a basic social need in any community for mainly two reasons:

2.1. Social self-policing

Every well-working social community has some form of fluid social contract between each other. Moderators/bans can and should never police all behaviour that is taking place inside a community.
Instead, the community itself enforces certain standards of behaviour. This happens automatically and is important. It is a major part of the "culture" of any community, and it requires people to be able to remember social misbehaviour of its members, which requires recognizing other player on FAF.

2.2 Social hierarchy

In every community, there is some sort of social hierarchy. In FAF there are two major hierarchies, skill and contribution. Generally, community members want to be able to respect other people inside this hierarchy. This is how legends are born inside a community and also requires recognizing other players.

For example, if a random player joins my 1200 rated games and absolutely destroys me, i will probably not react positively (i got smurfed?!). However if that random player is instead Blackheart, my reaction will be totally different because a legend player just joined my game.

3. Social (self-expression)

However, it is also true that self-expression is a good thing! Popular communities often provide a whole range of customization to how you appear to other people (not just name but usually also additional bits and pieces). Im not going to go into detail here because plenty of people have expressed how important this is to them.

4. UI/UX

The goal should then be to make both possible through UI/UX. And it is important to realize that a player ID is not sufficient to address the recognizability problem. Humans are not good at memorizing a random number per player.

One solution was already mentioned: Fixed player handle and changable player name. In addition

• the player handle must be shown in conjunction to the player name
• OR it must be trivially easy to look up the player handle for a given playername (for example by showing the handle when hovering with the mouse over a player name)

Another solution is to move the self-expression from the name to some other self-editable part of self-presentation (many games have "titles" or "status text" that is shown under the names of players).

Stop claiming that "icon confusion" was intended by the devs.

• You have no idea if that is true.
• The whole point of the stratetgic icons was that it was supposed to allow players to play at the strategic level instead of zooming in. So the icon confusion actually goes against stated goals of this game's design.

@javi said in Introducing Mapgen Week on Ladder:

(thanks Neroxis)

don't forget Sheikah who has improved it a tremenduous amount for more than a year now : )

+1 like to mapgen week.

Here is another approach to solving this problem used for example by Star Citizen:

Red: Character/User name (can be changed)
Green: Player Handle (cannot be changed, chosen during account creation, not related to login credentials)

I pretty much agree with you @Jip, ive just mostly given up arguing for this kind of attitude, because it seems to indeed be pointless on FAF. But i will add some points now in a harsher tone than previously because you are right and you deserve the support, and it fits in.

Oh boy here we come.

The primary interest of the average high level player is to protect their skill-investement against any real or perceived threat.

Grubby on the other hand is a pro player (that is an entirly different player category). He earns money by keeping up with changes, which is pretty much the opposite attitude to the majortiy of top rated players on FAF.

Blackheart and most other top FAF players are not pro players. In fact there have never been any respectable number of "pro players" in FAF. A pro player gets payed to keep up with changes to the game and to re-invest time to re-learn every change that happens.

If you do not have the mental energy for that, or your ego is not able to survive temprary drops in rating (which can of course even happen entirely without balance changes when new metas are discovered), you won't stay at the top for long anyway, in a real e-sport at least. Real e-sport players require (and some receive) high mental and physical well-being (psychologists etc.).

For an example of extreme changes look at Dota and the insane changes in the last year or two (complete character base stat mechanic changes, complete map changes, insane hero skill changes). Didn't hurt their competitive scene like at all.

Blackheart is probably a good example of the quintessentiel non-pro player, and his balance mod is probably on of the most conservative (conservative here meaning "if we just turn back time enough everything will be awesome") mod in the FAF vault. Or maybe its more nostalgia than conservatism, or maybe both, not sure. From a pro-player perspective (which i do not share), this would probably be seen as mostly a self-serving "i want to stay in my comfort zone" attitude.

On the other hand this is mostly just human nature. The average human is not mentally healthy enough to be a pro player.

What is also seemingly human nature sadly is the accompanying tone. And yes it seems that often the better the player in question is, the more "deranged" their elitism gets. Like imagine thinking that only >2300 rating players (probably the top 0.1%) should be allowed to propose game design changes. Like literally no game in the world is being desgined or balanced by the 0.1% top players of that game because that is a deranged idea.

The problem is also not just about games. The "status quo bias" exists, which is normal human bias against any changes.

Whenever any big software anywhere on the world changes almost anything, like it might be the position of a single button, people flip the fuck out. They create discussions so unrespectful and unconstructive that you would think somebody was murdered.

This is sadly, what anybody that actually is trying to improve anything is constantly fighting against, and it is of course tiring. Take a rest @Jip if you need it.

I can only say that i would (and have) stopped engaging entirely with people that I know are not interested in actually at least sometimes changing their own opinion or at the very least trying out changes before complaining about them. I consistently just ignore their posts in this forum, and i have no advice other than that strategy.

Such people just suck your energy it into a black hole. @zhanghm18 banning that behaviour is imo both pointless and ethically questionable, poeple have enough ways to suck up your energy that does not require bannable offenses anyway.

So for anybody that does not want to constantly fight resistance, the "do things for yourself" is in some ways "giving up", but in other ways it might just be the wiser thing to do in terms of personal happiness.

Last but not least, let me say that this video "Dear Developers, Stop Listening to Pros" is not a good video. It does not seem to produce any actual argument as to WHY this should be the correct thing to do for devs. Which is sad because its not that hard to formulate actual potential reasons/arguments (like preservation of skill investment).

Massive mushrooms (tree-sized) are a classic of "alien world" design.
And anything that makes water look better (might require shader changes rather than props though). Underwater cliffs/riffs/plants.

The game simulation is updated (recalculated) every 100ms (at speed 0). One such update is called a "tick". Only when a new tick is calculated can inputs be applied to the simulation. This means input is delayed by 5 ticks (500ms / 100ms). So the tick in which the input was made (and sent to others) is different from the tick in which it is applied to the game.

The F11 windows mostly tells you for how many past ticks a player's input has not arrived yet at YOUR computer. For example if you see that "player 2" is behind by 3 updates/ticks/packets that means that you havent yet received the input that you will need from that player 2 ticks in the future. When a player is behind 5/6 ticks, your game simulation stops, because you need his input (which he should have made and sent 5/6 ticks ago) RIGHT NOW.

The F11 window shows you only the connection between you and other players, not between two other players. (every player is connected to every other player), so everybody sees something different in the F11 window.

So when you see that one player is 6 ticks behind in sending you their input and game has stopped, but every other player is 1-2 ticks behind, that means:

• Maybe that players internet has a temporary problem (might reconnect though)
• Maybe that players computer/game has crashed so he not longer sends his input
• Maybe only the connection between you and that player has a problem (his connection to other players could still be fine, this is why its useful to ask others in chat if they see the same player being behind)

Sometimes a player is not constantly behind 6 ticks but is oscillating between about 4 and 6 ticks, resulting in a stuttering game, that means:

• Maybe ping spikes above 500ms regularly
• Maybe that players computer is so slow that the game cannot slow itself down enough to account for bad performance.
• Maybe that players computer has performance spikes (thermal throttling) that confuse the game enough to make it not slow down how it should

If one player is constantly sending his input but at a slower rate than other players, the game slows down (time between ticks is increased) until that player can keep up. Thats why game speed for everyone is determined by the slowest players computer (because the game simulation must be kept in sync on every players computer).

Edit:
Keep in mind i don't know if the input delays is fixed to 500ms or to 5 ticks. If it is defined in ticks, that means it would change when you change game speed. Not sure. If it is defined in ms that means that the amount of ticks that somebody can be behind without causing the game to stutter/stop can vary based on game speed.

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As FTx said, desyncs are a different problem.

Ok now i want to look at the far future.
Arguably there is still a lot of time until map generator maps reach a level of quality where somebody like FTX will replace 100% of the 1v1 queue with random maps. But still.

Lets make some likely assuptions:

• The quality of the map generator maps will improve, to a point where most people (except handmade map makers) will not notice the difference in asthetic quality.
• More and more people will like the notion of a guarantuee that makes BO-whoring impossible, and we make it so this is actually enforcable (we mark mapgen maps that where created from known seeds vs newly generated as such). What doesnt matter is if BO-whoring is actually a problem, what matters is if people perceive it as a problem and want that guarantuee in ladder.

If we make these assumptions, it should be quite easy to see, that after a long period of transition, the endgame is AOE2, in other words, the death of handmade maps in competitive play. You might disagree with those assumptions, but please think about wether you actually disagree with them OR if you just dont want to follow through to the conclusion, maybe because this conclusion is subjectively horrifying.

Now, in that scenario, a lot of people will just not care and go with it, some people will be sad, and handmade maps will fight a war for dominance, that they will slowly and agonizinly loose as more and more players desire the things that mapgen can provide. This thread is a good indicator for how that will look like imo.

Now, there is another hidden asumption here:

• Handmade maps mostly stay as they are know

But we could change this if we want. We already have adaptive maps. What if handmade maps could provide the same guarantuess that generated maps could in terms of BO-whoring?

• Predefined mex groups that sometimes appear and sometimes not.
• Mexes that slightly move position
• Several possible positions for hydros to appear, sometimes they dont appear at all.
• Same for big wrecks

Im not saying we need to do this. But if the first too assumptions hold, i think that handmade maps need to evolve in the long term. And i think they can, and anyway discussing how that would look like would be much more productive than descussing how far along the trajectory mapgen maps are right now.

In in additon to that, we can think about maybe a better way to present handmade maps or allow players to select them, but that is mo harder to achieve.

I think that the most engaging way (not the most efficient in terms of time spent) to learn stuff as a very new player is by "tutorial campaign". Unlike the vanilla campaign (which really doesnt teach much, it just restricts units/buildings) it would be much more focused and showcase specific mechanics, encounters with specifically restricted toolkit.

• Start with the player only controlling the com and having to escape from an invasion, pretty much a on rails mission, teach about ACU health, survivability and overcharge specifically.
• Teach player how to evade an incoming air snipe, let them run to allied mobile AA safety (teach about T2 gunships vs com health vs AA relationships), dont let them control units yet.
• At some point force the players to have certain upgrades and teach the difference between a no-upgrade sera com and a double nano double gun monster for example.
• Have a situation where player is required to collect X reclaim in Y amount of time so that they can overflow enough mass to let allied AI finish a needed experimental, otherwise player looses. Reward is of course cool experimental saving the day in the nick of time.
• Put the player in a sitation where he can clearly see how having radar affects effective shooting range.
• Have a situation where a player needs to surround kill an enemy com with a fixed number of T1 spam that he cannot increase and one where he has to fend of T1 with com (the beginning of prothyon is quite nice in this regard, but i don't like the second half)
• Have situations where the player needs to counter higher tech units with cheese / lower tech units, and the other way around where they micro a small number of higher tech units against lower tech ones.
• Basically make it fun and interesting first (good story is important for that) but weave in lots of situations that all teach one specific thing.

Some things cannot be thought well like that, for example general tradeoff between eco / tech / bp / units and general game progression, but make sure that the player is aware of the entire toolbox that the game gives them. Its much less frustrating to get beaten in PVP if you at least have some idea about all the tools.

Problem with this is that of course if big balance changes happen, that might cause certain situations to play out differently than planned. The idea itself is not new, i think several people have mentioned the small starcraft missions that you play with fixed units, but those seemed a bit boring because its just the same thing over and over with different units (and im not suggesting to always put the player in fixed unit situations, that is too repetitive).

At the end of the day, if learning is not enjoyable, not many people are gonna try to get gud. When you first joined FAF, your goal was probably not to dominate ladder rating. The competitive aspects comes after you have seen the potential of all the tools that the game provides. The game must prove that its going to be worth the time spent to improve.

@FtXCommando

I said nothing about who should be Player Councillour in my post. you are creating a horror-scenario out of it. The most important point seems to not have come through:

• With the split, the primary purpose of the Player Councillor is not to ACT or DECIDE, but to LISTEN, COMMUNICATE and basically have good social skills. Most general conflicts are caused by misunderstandings. The player councillor would recognize this and therefore be able to facilitate constructive discussions and if necessary de-escalation.

You are the kind of guy that NEEDS to be judgemental to do your job. Because if you don't judge, you cannot act. The player councillor could look at FAF from a completely different viewpoint andi think that could be very valuable.

As it stands, we don't need to do this exact split, but we need SOME split. The current amount of responsibilities that are piled on this position is absolutly ridicoulous. The list of stuff you do is laughably out of any reasonable bounds. We are talking about work that is supposed to be done by volunteers in their free time here. This is not a critique of you, its a critique of the position, you are doing a great job DESPITE the job description.

@Mach
Nobody thinks timed expansions is a bad thing.

What is bad, is that the players don't know that FAF changed the most-used strategy of noobs for how to beat any missions. We can do a better job of telling players about it. See below.

@speed2

I asked GPT and maybe the code she returned matches the requirement

Narrator: It didn't.

Mavor most iconic unit confirmed.

This guy still has not understood what it means to not have the source code. I doubt he has ever written code in a compiled programming language ever.

@Spy_Emanciator
Im sorry to say that there is probably no random hero dev hiding in the woods that is just waiting to be encouraged by your non-sensical expectations and will spring into action once you say "its so easy" 100 times in a row.

@ThomasHiatt said in Legacy client not working:

• Java client has cost FAF a very large amount of developer time for an inferior and unneeded product. Dev power is supposedly scarce around here and this is an egregious waste. The python client could have simply been refactored and improved. Even after several years of work the Java client is not really any better.

"Inferior": subjective
"unneeded": no
"not really any better" : repeating urself
"could have simply been refactored": so simple that nobody showed up for like 2 years after repeated calls for more python devs in the forums;

If was repeated about a 100 times already, but the python client was so abandoned that it actively blocked improvements to the entire rest of the FAF infrustructure.

Your nice idea about making websites today for vault tabs is only easily possible today because the Java API exists, which was basically blocked from being improved upon by the python client.

Java client reduced backend maintenance cost (which is more important than all of the points in your list), made map gen improvements easier or even happen at all, makes TMM UI happen and will probably in the future wipe your ass for you while you sit on the toilet complaining about it without noticing.