Well, i think the reason everything seems worse is quite obvious.. the connection issues. It's as simple as: there are connection issues > games is not fun > am not motivated to play that much (or at all) > incapable of finding games (at least high rank games).
There are a bunch of complaints regarding this change or that change (which do have an impact), but i still firmly believe that the main issue is that i can't just start a game and know it will be a good game (connection wise).
This post? Fantastic. Clearly addresses each of our concerns, points out problems our solution has, and describes where our communication has failed.
The situation is: mod team comes out with a (ridiculous) change. Now WE have to take the time to formulaten an article on why this is bad. You are saying it is not acceptable to just write "bad change, reverse". You want an entire article with pro, cons, examples and whatever.
How about YOU (mod team) post a 'proposal' and not a change that might be reversed if enough people complain (obviously this is not appicable to every change, but it clearly is here).
I don't even know how to say how ridiculous it is that a rule is getting an insanly strict update (not sure how to formulate that), and you expect people to go "Yeah ok, it helps moderation".
Maybe a bit of an exaggeration but this is what it feels like to me.
As far as i understand this mod is completely graphic and no balance change? Can this be flagged as ranked? As dumb as it sounds, i have no interest in playing it if its unranked, as also most people wont join
This is a pretty bad idea. Recall is the option for the team to vote if they want to continue the game. By disabling this, you are "forcing" play a game they might not want to continue.
Otherwise players will just randomly quit and that is even more frustrating / confusing for the team. In most of my games if I vote to recall, and my team votes no, i continue to play (even in a brutally crushed position) because apparently my team sees a way to win. If this feature didn't exist I would just leave.
Maybe some players don't "fully understand the impact of their choice" but they will do so after the first (or maybe only at the 2nd) recall. If they don't.. well, we can't change game mechanics because people are incapable of learning.
This change is actually insane. Aswell as the reasoning behind the decisions. Imagine creating rules based on the size of the community. Say faf suddenly grows by 100k people. Are we now changing rules because of that?
The real question is "who asked" (as in who asked to check / control usernames). I do not mean this as a joke. Up to now literally no moderator cared until there was a report. So it literally did not matter unless someone is annoyed about you and wanted to pay you back. Now I'm supposed to stick to username from myself and i better not rename to somebody else (even by accident)!
You (moderation team) are now saying EVERY player must know the other players. There can be no confusion on usernames. Do I even have to talk more about this?
The example with the confusion regarding screenshots also has little relevance in my opinion. Surely chat logs must be saved somewhere, so reports should only be possible with a timestamp. Just like when reporting something ingame.
Also, when is the discord username purge coming?
Apparently there is a guy on FAF since 2013 or something called Nugget, so i guess i'm not allowed to have my username anymore - gg (also getting ready to report anyone with Nugget in their name).
@jip said in Discussing the "rename rule":
@ftxcommando said in Discussing the "rename rule":
Does it contribute to a healthy environment to ban people that are having fun having impersonating names and not being toxic within the rules? Because currently like 10-15% of the active 1800+ players have taken each other’s names and are impersonating each other. Do we stop that?
Do you need to impersonate others to have fun?
What kind of question is that. Of course you can have fun without. Doens't change the fact that you can also have fun with the name changes.
It's like asking if you need to have ingame chat to have fun.
So, I want to reply to a few of these points that particularly stand out for me
@jip said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:
Top-rated scene problems
Meanwhile, here at FAForever one can decide to not play the game for months (or effectively years) and still manage to come up on top in tournaments. How's that even possible?
And this is where the controversial part starts
.
In my humble opinion the gameplay experience that we created in FAForever has two fundamental problems:
- (1) There has been no fundamental shifts in how the game plays and/or is perceived the past decade.
- (2) The current meta is extremely volatile.
The problem with (1) is that once you learn and understand the trick that works then you can keep applying that trick. You discovered it, you use it and you win. It's as simple as that - there's no more challenge and you stop playing.
A lot of games that still receive updates they are often so large that suddenly certain tactics no longer work. As a few examples:
And the reason this is important is simple: each time such a big shift happens it levels the playing field. Through novelty you allow players to discover new tactics and new approaches to the game. And by doing so existing high rated players may actually find a fun and interesting challenge against players that they would previously utterly dominate. Every game that is still maintained does it. It keeps the game fresh and allows you to find new challenges. It's just good practice. And we're not doing it.
Other than Ashes of Singularity and Warcraft 3 (because i don't know much about them balance or change wise) these examples are beyond bad.
It's not like the game suddenly decided "ok, lets change balance". It is the fact that new content releases and thus the balance has to change accordingly. The area-command for example is not new content. It is a fundamental change to core mechanics, which is (kind of) considered for no reason (coming to that further down).
Then the problem with (2) is reclaim rate.
- A tech 1 engineer reclaiming wrecks produces as much as roughly 12 tech 1 mass extractors (!)
- A tech 1 engineer reclaiming props produces as much as roughly 25 tech 1 mass extractors (!!)
- A tech 1 engineer reclaiming tree groups produces as much as roughly 2.5 tech 1 power generators or half a hydrocarbon (fine to me)
It's absolutely volatile, and it completely removes various aspects of the game. The idea of 'fighting over a reclaim field' effectively does not exist.
Let's take several small patches of reclaim fields of about 300 to 400 mass each. This is not unusual, especially with the rocks that are worth 38 mass. If you manage to defend your engineer and snipe the engineer of your opponent then within mere seconds you suddenly have 25 additional tech 1 mass extractors (!) over your opponent.
Well first of all, you don't "fight" over 300 to 400 mass. That is way too little to even consider "fighting" over it.
If your opponent snipes your engi, and he gets the mass, he also invested more to do this. Also, he doesn't get "25 addition mex", he gets the mass, for which he also needs the energy for. Yes, you probably just didn't formulate that correctly, but it's still a bit ridiculous comparing the 2 things like that.
And when you take an engagement you better not take a bad engagement too close to an enemy engineer that manages to survive. If the engineer is nearby the fight then within seconds it can start reclaiming and your opponent suddenly has 12 additional tech 1 mass extractors (!) over you.
I'm sorry but i just have to be sarcastic about this. You better watch out where you fight! Otherwise the enemy will "abuse" micro in a micro heavy beginning of a game!! And what's more; the opponent gets rewarded for better micro?! Ridiculous!
Compare that to the rest of the game, take this distance:
It takes roughly 55 seconds for Mantis (one of the fastest of tech 1 units) to cover this distance (right to left). If this is your response to try to contest a reclaim field (of any type, but specifically natural prop-based reclaim fields) then by the time you arrive the patch of reclaim is long gone. It's not even worth trying.
Ok? And the enemy spawns in the reclaim field? He has to walk there aswell. Even if you sent an early raid that didn't work out, it feels like it's more of the players fault that he doesn't have a follow up?
This feature is so volatile on its own that the moment you understand this and what reclaiming means that you will instantly win all of your games until you get to the point where you play against players that also understand this. After all, a single engineer that is able to reclaim roughly continuously can support between 4 to 12 tech 1 land factories depending on what you are reclaiming and what the factories are building.
There has been a lot of recent discussions about area commands, both public and in the private balance team channels. And personally I think it's been a long wish of more casual players, as an example:1 2. The reason is simple: area commands make the game more approachable. It becomes easier to convey your intentions. You feel less 'blocked' by the UI.
Meanwhile, any casual player that I show the feature to is exciting about it
Well, it is a given that a casual player is "excited" about it. If somebody shows me a new mechanic for Stellaris or whatever, I would be excited aswell, because I am a casual player and not invested enough to care.
But as somebody said in some other thread; "balance should be focused around high rated play / games". Maybe not always true, but I feel like this is true for balance and change-wise.
Medium recap
And last I think a lot of the problems that are perceived right now on the top-rated scene are self-inflicted. If the game remains the same you'll remain at the top. And no other player with a reasonable budget of time (and there are enough of those - look at the other 17k unique players playing 400.000 lobbies each month) can ever match your play time and experience with the current meta. They'll always look bad. You'll always look good. If you're also against change, then enjoy being there alone when life moves on, players move on, but nobody can manage to catch up to your understanding of the current meta.
As you mentioned earlier; there is some sort of "trick" and you figured the current meta out. That is just completly wrong. I myself slowly grinded my way up to 1600 by just playing the game. At that point I started to watch streams are notice the descision making of high ranked players; and because of that I started to actually think about my descisions and analyze what I am doing - and then I was 2k.
So what I am saying is there is no trick, but just look at your own plays / mistakes and think about what to do better. Has nothing to do with the meta or it's understanding directly.
There appeared to be some masturbating sounds from one of your co-casters during the seton's game. Although Seton's is a very sexy map, my suggestion is to not masturbate during stream
So is this tourney one where 2 insanely strong setons team register and the rest are side characters? Isnt captain pick kind of good for this kind of tourney?
What is so difficult
By the fact that you actually think they are trolling makes me feel like you are completly out of touch of any multiplayer community. I will admit that forum names should probably be split from faf-names. But that is only because the forum does not have the feature to look into past names like in the client.
@nuggets said in Username rules updates:
As gieb mentioned in his post, might aswell remove rename altogether (i don't even have to talk about how ridiculous that is).
Given that it breaks soft links on the forums it's not that ridiculous.
It is insane to even think about removing the rename feature because there is a bug / something unexpected happening because of that in the forum.
And I may agree on something with @ThomasHiatt ; since when is renaming such a vital feature of the FAForever experience that the first comment (with 14 up votes, what (!)) in this topic states that it helps the author decide whether the author wants to stay or leave? I thought we were here to see robots fight and talk about how to improve the Fatboy.
Yes it's completly insane to think that by removing fun features people are less inclined to stay.
I'm going to casually ignore @FtXCommando as you take things to some extreme again and I have no interest diving into that.
I do not believe FTX comment was that extreme. I do believe that you do not get our perspective.
@TheWreck
just posting this here, what I said on discord.
I think talking about some kind of immunitie is completly ridiculous. MAYBE some kind of small exceptions or the like, but even that i kind of dislike (even if i were the one to have this). You are asking to have faith in moderation, but also have moderation be unequal to players. I strongly believe this is not the correct way.
The word or intent "selfish" in regards to moderation is kinda true in lots of situations, but a bit too strong of a word, i think.
Other than that I agree that there is a lack of trush in moderation. The main issue is that it is impossible (at least it feels that way to me) to refute any kind of change. I hate to bring it up, but the rename "shenanigan" is the perfect example of community feedback vs moderation stance. What results in that, is that people can't be bothered to formulate a complete and extensive feedback, as it seemingly does nothing. Thankfully FTX and Boom are still "resilient enough" to try to talk some sense into moderation.
All in all, i agree that what must be done is a reverse of quite a few descisions and discuss future actions and moderation rather than the rules.
@nuggets said in Firey Explosions mod FAF:
As far as i understand this mod is completely graphic and no balance change? Can this be flagged as ranked? As dumb as it sounds, i have no interest in playing it if its unranked, as also most people wont join
@IndexLibrorum do your thing!!
Yeah so apparently the bug was fixed that not-built scructures disappear when you die and your base gets transfered (as in your teammate will get your 90% t3 pgen for example). Great! But now we have EVERY structure which is currently in an upgrade get "kind of" duplicated.
So say for example a t2 mex is being upgraded to t3 and is at 50%. Your teammate will get the non-upgrading t2 mex AND a 50% not built t3 mex in the same spot. And then if you ground assist with engies, they will finish building (yes, building, not upgrading) the t3 mex and you have a t2 and t3 in the same spot. You can then also upgrade the t2 and you have 2 t3 mex there.
This is the case with all upgrading structures (shields, factories, mex, radar and whatever else i forgot)
I must say i hate the "description" of the factions. I get that you wanted to be kinda funny there but imagine reading that as a new player. Sounds like some sort of meme game
sign me up if i don't become a team captain, i do not like the rules at all.
@exselsior said in Full share duplicates upgrading structures:
@nuggets wait does that mean you can do the same thing again when you upgrade the t2 Mex by giving it while it’s upgrading to get a third Mex on the same spot and so on?
It doesn't work by giving it. But if the next player upgrades the mex and it auto-transfers because of full share, yes.
Yesterday my RAM got ddosed because of relay
Hi Fearghal, can you change mine and Deli's signups? We'd like to sign up as a team
