I find the attitude of moral superiority some people have on FAF is pretty toxic in itself. There is no objectively right or wrong way to communicate and act. FtX and Biass seem to get more done than most people, so maybe their way of acting is actually superior. Playing god and saying these people's way of acting is wrong because you said so seems worse to me than the people who act "toxic" sometimes.

As far as player retention goes you seem to ignore that FAF player retention numbers are good compared to other games. Every game will lose most of its new players, that isn't a good excuse to not try and find new players. What percentage of player retention do you aim to achieve before beginning external promotions? Assuming people mainly leave due to toxicity also seems like a big leap. You made a thread on the forums, which only active community members read, and a few of them said they would have quit due to toxicity. They didn't quit due to toxicity though, because they are still here and participating in the community. Seems like survivor bias to me.

The game is kinda uninteresting since 99% of the time you just follow the same linear path through 3 the tech levels. Maybe you decide if you want to get T2 air or T2 land first on some maps. You decide which tech levels you are going to be aggressive vs defensive on, and if neither player messes up too bad you go to the next one. The balance seems to be flattening the power curve so that every faction competes pretty evenly on every tech level, land units get more normalized (blazes and obsidians have been buffed, rhinos buffed, pillars nerfed, selen was made into a lab, aurora made more tank like, jesters useless, zthuee nerfed), strengths are nerfed and weaknesses buffed. It makes the game more "balanced", but also more boring. It is especially boring when there's over a year from one patch to the next. The changes brought with patches are almost never things that you change your gameplay around, the patches are instead designed to make your existing gameplay "more balanced."

At the time many of these changes seemed good, and I was in favor of many of them, but I'd rather go back to having steeper power curves and each faction having some unique overpowered stuff, even if it's sometimes frustrating it's also more fun. Could also just be that I played the game too much and look too favorably at the past. I never have to be feel fear of xerxes amassing a hidden jester snipe, and I never get to feel the risk and adrenaline rush of using a pre-OC nerf ACU to take out a dozen percies on the frontlines, or the power of your first Harb coming out prior to the T3 nerfs.

The linearity of the game is pretty much baked into the design, so is not really a balance issue, but since SACUs are not really viable at the moment they are free to be radically changed in ways that could make the game less linear. Everything I have seen regarding SACU changes indicates they will be placed linearly between T3 and T4 though.

I don't know if it's a good idea, but engineers could get a 'hunker' ability so that they could survive a single bomb or last a little longer against a lab. That way if they are being defended they will likely survive, but if undefended they will still die. Removes the RNG of dodging while still requiring attention and defending, without modifying bombers or labs.

The competitive scene seems pretty dead judging by the lack of interest in the Summer Invitational. I think they should have just gone ahead with whatever players wanted to play though rather than gatekeeping them just because some old AFK pros didn't want to show up to crush them. If you prevent the up and comers from playing they'll never be able to replenish the ones who left.

Your idea is far worse than I could have ever imagined. I commend you for your creativity.

The unit cap in ladder games should be increased. On maps like Seton's Clutch the mexes and storages alone take up 1/4 of the 1000 unit cap. Most of the time the 'Unit Cap Reached' window does not even pop-up and it takes some time to realize that none of your factories are producing anything because you are at the unit cap. In team games the unit cap can go much higher, and you also get your dead teammates unit cap added on when they die.

I like mapgen and hardffa a lot in ladder. I have more fun on even the worst mapgen maps than I do on most of the authored maps in the pool.

Allowing people to choose their opponents in a ranked matchmaker doesn't really sound that great to me. Invites all kinds of rating manipulation, ghosting, and other degenerate behaviors.

I've never really seen it as a FAF-specific problem. It is just another aspect of the very aggressive, divided, tribal culture that is accelerated and encouraged by the internet and social media. Similar to how at this point, Star Wars "fans" are people who go on the internet to create and watch videos hating on the latest Star Wars content that comes out and the people who make it.

Everyone wants to feel like they are smart and better than other people, and it is quick and easy to get that feeling by talking shit about what other people are doing. Joining a tribe that says how stupid and/or malicious others are and implying that they could do it better. Nothing is perfect, so people can always find flaws to point out to justify their toxic behavior. I think many people, particularly the type who spend a lot of time online, don't have very enjoyable or meaningful lives and that makes them more likely to engage in online bullying and tribalism.

I have been quite guilty of this behavior on FAF. I admit that I am an arrogant asshole and probably caused some harm to FAF by being mean to people. I do often feel bad after I write mean posts on the forums, which is why I pretty much checked out of the community entirely and tried to focus on my own projects.

The following paragraphs are intended to be some armchair psychological evaluation of myself and why I do not respect FAF and am mean on the forums. I do not claim this logic is objectively true in any way, or that it necessarily applies to any of the other people who write mean stuff on the forums. Being mean on the forum is less than useless and makes my life, and others' lives, objectively worse.

I have never had a very healthy relationship with FAF. It was just an addiction and coping mechanism for my own miserable and pointless existence. Even when I played every day for years, I never had much respect for the project, and still don't. It's just a video game that offers little more than a way to burn time. On top of that, nobody here even created the game. I never really cared, and still don't care, if FAF dies.

A big difference between FAF and the other games mentioned in the thread is that those games were actually made by the people who are changing them. It is their creation and they have the right to do whatever they want with it. There is reason to believe that the changes they make will be good because they come from the same people who made the game you chose to play in the first place. On FAF every change comes from some random amateur who appointed themselves the authority to change whatever they want without earning the right to do so. So I think it is reasonable for FAF changes to be met with more contention than normal games.

In response to criticism, these people will usually point out how they are unpaid volunteers keeping the game alive so we can all play it. It comes across as an attempt to gain some moral superiority as if perpetuating some useless videogame someone else made two decades ago is some kind of charitable cause that benefits humanity. Just because I waste my time playing this game, rather than some other game, doesn't mean I owe you anything. When making a contribution, you take on the responsibility for whatever happens as a result of that contribution. It doesn't matter if you were paid for it or not. This attempt to gain superiority and avoid responsibility only encourages further hostilities. I think it would be better to either say nothing or admit some responsibility which would then generate sympathy and make further aggression more difficult.

These points are even more true for moderators since they don't even have to have some coding skills or anything to contribute. They just get power handed down to them from the beginning of time that grants them the right to judge players and make up random new rules. I haven't personally had many conflicts with moderators though.

I can't comment on anything that's happened in the last two years since I haven't been participating in the community. I left as a result of my self-induced suffering, not because of any FAF issues or changes that were made.

I have noticed that there are almost zero casts of 1v1 games on YouTube anymore, outside of major tournaments, which are also quite rare now. It seemed to me that the focus of the community shifted away from 1v1 once mapgen and TMM became things. I also disagree with the ever-increasing shift for 1v1 games to be played on larger and more complicated maps. These factors mean I will never return to FAF since I play almost exclusively high-rated 1v1 games. Though my return is unlikely regardless. So those of you who dislike my toxicity can celebrate, and the few people who keep trying to get me to play 1v1 can be sad.

The way it should be

1. Implement Galactic War, or Galactic War Lite (basically ladder league but for tallying faction wins in ladder and TMM).
2. Let players join a faction each season, give them a chatroom and tag showing their faction, like clans currently have. People in this chatroom can be grouped by rating or labeled as trainers.
3. Players are incentivized to train members of their faction in order to win the war, and players are incentivized to improve in order to win the war.

Each faction would essentially be a big clan that persists for a season and has a built-in incentive for community building and player improvement.

As a former competitive FAF player I preferred less complex maps because you can more easily manage everything that is going on and focus on a smaller number of more impactful decisions. Complex maps are a scramble to get all the mexes, reclaim, drop expansions, eco/upgrade quickly and perpetually, and then manage lots of things simultaneously as efficient as you can for an extended period of time until someone messes up. There is definitely strategy there, but for me it feels diluted because the speed, endurance, and multitasking overwhelms whatever thoughtful decision making and creativity I might have been able to perform in a simpler setting. Given the focus on large numbers and scales in the games engine and marketing I am most likely just asking for the wrong style of gameplay.

I do not think the size of a map is the most important factor in how a map plays. There are frantic 5x5 maps where you have tons of reclaim/mexes and rush to build as much as fast as possible, and there are 20x20 maps with more manageable and slower gameplay. It seems silly that both ladder and tournaments categorize maps by their size rather than how they actually play. 5x5 maps do provide certain gameplay styles that other sizes of maps cannot, such as base trades and weird close quarters low eco standoff type games. These unique styles are the reason why I think it is important to keep some certain 5x5 maps in ladder and tournaments. I have always been unhappy that less 5x5 maps get included in ladder and tournaments. Even when they are included they are just reluctantly thrown in based on their size rather than to get the unique gameplay they offer.

If the point of 1v1 ladder is to test players skills and rank them accordingly, then player preferences are not relevant to the composition of the map pool. It's about competition, not maximizing player count. The pool should consist of maps that test the skills FAF has deemed competitively important. All of these skills should be tested to roughly the same degree in each pool so that rating, and the experience in general, is consistent. If players do not enjoy what FAF has deemed competitively important then FAF can change what it focuses on, or players can stop playing competitive modes.

The problems are that there is effectively nobody deciding what skills are important for competitive FAF. There is just some list of maps that, on average, people agree are not trash. Maps are categorized primarily by their size, rather than the skills they test. Tournaments are all hosted by whoever feels like it and they just make up the map pool on the spot with no official rules or guidelines. There is no game designer with any control over what competitive FAF is supposed to be.

It seems that since GPG stopped being in charge there has been less focus on 5x5 maps in competitive FAF as time goes on. Competitive FAF even includes maps with modded behavior like crazyrush (mex duplication) and loki (scripted reclaim values). People seem to have concluded that maps with crazyrush levels of deviation from the norm should not be included in matchmaking anymore, but they somehow justify including them in official tournaments anyway.

Some team, or individual, should decide what skills competitive FAF wants to be about. Categorize the maps based on the degree to which they test each skill. Official tournament and ladder map pools should then be constructed to test each of these skills to a consistent degree in each pool.

Alternatively, if the point of 1v1 ladder is to maximize the number of players, and the average level of fun had by those player, then everything above should be disregarded and maps should be determined by polls and forum arguments.

It's like the single most important feature to keeping ladder alive (especially at higher ratings), but nobody cares. Been asking for it to come back for years.

Already argued about it in many threads and FAF doods want it to stay the way it is.

OMG DOOD!! How did we not notice that seraphim is LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE until just now?!? I just lost a game as SERAPHIM because my opponent made a GUNCOM and did a T2 LAND PUSH!! It was TOTALLY UNSTOPPABLE because the GAME IS BROKEN!!! I can even construct an UNLIMITED NUMBER of scenarios IN MY MIND and ON PAPER which PROVE IT.

(also it is just a fact that it takes more than one energy storage to kill and obsidian or ilshavoh with overcharge. Stop trying to argue against objective facts or you will be banned!)

If anyone is out of touch with the community it is all the people arguing here. This is just a video game, and nobody needs to represent anyone. Normal people just play the game because they want to, and do not want to be involved in all of this stupid drama. Stagnation is actually the goal of FAF. The point is to keep this 14 year old game around so people can keep playing it like they always have.

Then you can do some sick bomber trickshots by bouncing them off the map border and make youtube montages.

Yeah, I was also writing a post about how units are balanced relative to each other and not mexes. And how the value of eco structures is totally different on every map because they have different amounts of mexes and reclaim. There is no intricate balance there. It is just random numbers. The same as the 81% reclaim value that nobody seemed opposed to modifying.

They don't like it because they are grumpy and think it looks bad.

The default icons are all small, unbold, and do not make use of color. The icon mod inverts this so that all icons are large, bold, and multicolored. Both extremes are ineffective for actually providing you with information.

Ideally, icons would be sized/bolded according to their tech level, and only important things would make use of multiple colors. This is why I just made my own icons where T2 units are 1 pixel larger than T1 and T3 units are bolder than T2, then it is simple to tell them apart in mixed armies while still remaining uncluttered. All the structures remain default except the ones that are important to notice.

Removing factory attack move would greatly increase toxicity because hundreds of existing players would get very mad about it and complain about it.