@Firv, with other late-game upgrades, you get maybe a few minutes of value before the armies become too big to face, whereas billy you can potentially keep using to good effect almost indefinitely right now, sitting cozy under shields behind percy walls, lobbing rockets across the map. The risk hardly increases as the game progresses, like it does for other com upgrades, since there's not much incentive to get anywhere close to threats in order to use it. In addition, because armies tend to get bigger and less wieldy, the care you have to put into your aim actually goes down as time goes on. Plus, you can pair it with t3 which is a defensive upgrade. The change I suggested wouldn't mean you absolutely must bring the com into knife distance either.

Also, it doesn't impact tele billy at all, because in that scenario you're shooting at helpless and static targets. If you're hunting armies, teleporting is actually worse than airlifting because you can't adjust your destination as the move orders shift around plus your fire rate is shit.

My biggest complaint about the billy is it's insane range. It is too safe compared to other end-game upgrades, and less fun than it could be as a consequence. I propose making the projectile around 20% slower, thus a bit less useful against armies unless the player takes on a bit of risk by closing in. I wish effective use of it encouraged transport play more.

The counters to it should remain unit spread or mixing build power into the army rather than mobile shields in my opinion, because they require more attention.

I regularly used google translate in this way before the copy functionality was removed because it was way, way more convenient than using my phone to clumsily film the screen. The camera loses focus, the translated words jump and glitch constantly, the translation quality is low, it's super janky. Unfortunately that is now the only option, but it was always like this for lobby chats so eh.

Interesting, I didn't know all this about how the probabilities work. So if I understand this right, by ticking the "use custom style" checkbox, I've also switched from hand-tuned to flat probabilities that each generator option gets picked when set to random? In that case what I said earlier about default behavior is not true, as my assumptions were incorrect, and it seems this problem is already addressed for casual hosts.

I like the switch to separate generators and away from sliders in general. I always felt like the impact of the sliders was very unpredictable before, whereas now the overall shapes of the map are more controllable.

That being said, the default, minimal fiddle, all random behavior does tent to make boulderified maps way more often now, and more often than the UI would suggest, which is worse.

I don't know specifically if the prop generator now gets picked completely randomly if set to random, with the reclaim slider later acting as a parameter to the one that got picked, or if the slider affects the probability distribution function over generators, but maybe the latter is worth considering. Although I'm not familiar enough with the other prop generators and if they can easily fit into such a scheme, it seems to me the most intuitive behavior should be for this specific one to only start showing up if the reclaim slider is set quite high.

If such a fix is not quite quick enough, another very interesting suggestion by @snoog was to make the drop-down menus of the map generator multi-select. This would allow users to opt out of specific prop generators or biomes while still enjoying most of the diversity on menu. It's a (hopefully) small change to the UI that improves things a lot for the users since most people have negative preferences - they don't want a specific biome for instance, they just want to avoid the white one.

@ftxcommando said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

Nothing here was something I said.

This you?

Matchmaker from the beginning was a completely collaborative process on how to make things function fairly but also fun. For example, if we wanted to be totally tryhard, we would have no party system. I had people complain to me about that idea during the planning stages.

@ftxcommando I apologize for implying you were an endless-essay pretend-pro busy-body. That was very Passive Aggressive of me.

@thewheeler said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:

We would rather have the top 0,1% surgeon to operate on our heart than an average surgeon.
We would rather have the top 0,1% pilot fly our plane than an average one.
We would rather have the top 0,1% designer make our new phone than an average one.
We would rather have the top 0,1% coder write our apps than an average one.

Sure, I don't mind if the balance team is comprised mostly of top players. That can't be their only qualification, though, right? At the very least, they should be able to communicate without provoking undue friction with their peers, and work together with other teams, and not be afk for years.

Since there are not thousands of potential coders available to faf, we can't pick. We have a few, and they picked us.

Whereas players potentially balancing the game? There are quite a lot of players. How about top 10% skill wise (they could still consult with champions whenever they needed to), but they are the best at working with these devs without causing them to burn out - that includes explaining what proposals are unfeasible efficiently and gracefully, after making an honest attempt at making them feasible.

Given the circumstances - the extreme disparity in the scarcity of potential candidates for the two roles, that would be my preference.

@jip It's fine, I rattled his cage, I'm no better. What's actually funny is I was asking @FtXCommando how exactly a thousand new pros might improve his or my faf experience more than the features I like and he hits me with "we could have been real tryhards and prevented you from playing TMM alongside your friends, but relented". Insert tyrant extolling his benevolence to his subjects meme.

My dude, you're not even an actual pro, you're a 1900. "We"? Pffff

No wonder the lobby server dev quit after TMM was up and running. Imagine working to help players more conveniently find games and having to deal with some endless-essay pretend-pro busy-body actively trying to sabotage your main goal, because, you see, the trueskill data (a mere means to an end) would otherwise be a bit noisier than it already is. Then, to top it off, they go and take partial credit for the work, calling themselves Collaborator, since starting, then losing futile arguments about dumb shit technically counts as labor, right? Also, they get indignant should their effort not be valued over yours, the actual dev.

Regardless other contributions I have you to thak for, this one's not helping change my mind about whose activity benefits me more. The boastful claim this was actually within your power and we were spared such an outcome only by your willingness to compromise would be worrying if I actually took it seriously. I'd I'd rather hope someone reasonable will always be here, willing and able to step in whenever your lot fails to be brought to your senses, which is why I'm speaking up before you drive them away.

@ftxcommando I made no grand claims regarding my contributions, nor do I feel entitled to have a say in how this or that change is implemented.

I'd rather stay and offer reassurance that things are not as gloomy as the OP and complainers makes it sound.

If you did write code for faf, I guess you're a dev and what I said applies to you as well: just do your thing and ignore the haters. If instead you mean writing forum guidelines you then ignore, well, anybody can do that. Just because it happened to be you doesn't mean it couldn't have got done without you.

@thewheelienoob by reordering the reclaim commands such that the engineer has to travel some amount between them, as when it does so it gets closer than it strictly needs to be, thus wasting time. The width of the reclaim strip can be widened as well to achieve this. By making sure it stops to pick up every little speck of dust if need be. Some combination of those factors.

@thewheelienoob I already told you: as worse as other options are, to shut people up about it.

@exselsior at that point why oppose it? if it made someone happy and nobody unhappy? Why refuse to try it? Why quit the game over it? It makes no sense except as a power play.

Matchmaker from the beginning was a completely collaborative process on how to make things function fairly but also fun. For example, if we wanted to be totally tryhard, we would have no party system. I had people complain to me about that idea during the planning stages. Most people understood that it was a tradeoff worth having, though.

Oh how merciful of you to relent and grant us this basic feature that every game has of playing with your friends. Truly we are blessed for such a collaboration. Did you write any code or no? "if we wanted we could have made it utter shit" I guess that's your way of saying you listen to feedback ?

So if it were somehow a bit worse than manual reclaim the same way factory reclaim, attack move and patrol technically are, this whole argument would stop? Why not do that?

@exselsior I can't square what you're saying here "most of the proposed changes don't affect mid/low players" with what I thought the criticism for auto-reclaim was in the first place, that it would level the playing field between low and high tier players. Those can't both be true at the same time, can they? Maybe you don't agree with the latter, or it makes a disproportionate difference only past 1800 or what? I haven't kept up with this particular conversation, honestly.

@archsimkat a bit of charm can go a long way, potentially making up for a less extreme drive to victory. Besides, nobody likes whiners. If we really cared about these top players drawing in the noobs, we'd all be doing more to censor their public tantrums even as we pandered to their whims in private.

@Tagada I really appreciate the attempt at making auto reclaim work. I'm in no position to judge if these changes break the game or not, but I think the idea behind it is entirely fitting with the original vision behind the game, and if there's a way to also make it good balance-wise, I'm happy someone is trying to find it. Thank you for putting in the effort to give it a chance.

Even independently of auto-reclaim, I'm excited to try this change out, as I think it might shake things up a bit in an interesting way. How and when to fight for big reclaim clumps has always felt like one of the most important aspects of the game, in all it's stages, and I'm very curious to see what impact slower reclaim has.

@ftxcommando, thanks for eloquently expressing what input high rated players had to those features I mentioned. They're definitely the more fruitful collaborations. Please note, though, their help was not essential in the sense that if it hadn't been them, some other players rated 200 lower would have provided much the same support. And I think Sheikah was equally sensitive to what average players thought.

Not so much the case for the devs and mappers who actually made things happen. I've seen the code for the mapmaker, that thing alone took hundreds of man-hours of work to build, and had one of the devs decided it wasn't worth the hassle, it would probably have been years before someone else attempted it. Contrast that effort with a bunch of dudes just sharing their thoughts, and you can't really blame me for valuing this less than doing the actual thing, can you?

That's without even mentioning all the other moaners that aren't even good at the game. For some reason, nobody took issue as I suggested they should be ignored as well past a certain point, because it's only the higher rated players that should get a say in what the devs don't do, right?

@ftxcommando sure. As long as agreement about what "bad" means is reached without driving people away, should be a good strategy. Failing that, I'd rather let the devs have first say, trusting they'll come around once the evidence is in either way and revert bad changes.

Getting back to the thread topic, things do not suck, in my opinion. The fact that the title assumes they do makes me worried BlackYps might be bending the ear a bit too much towards the moaners. I urge him to start ignoring them if it ever becomes too much to bear, instead of stopping his contributions, if that thought ever crosses his mind.