@ThomasHiatt You have not apologized. You can consider yourself reported.
I'm quoting two instances of you stating that the community should regularly participate in discussions and play FAFDevelop before taking a negative stance towards the changes.
Taken out of context, allow me to add the missing details.
For those unaware, the quotes originate from here:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/5786/factory-models
The bottom line is that there are community members that feel they were uninformed about a change. To some degree the changes were in the news and promoted by Gyle. We did not mention recreating the factories at that point because it was unclear that it would be required to do so. I won't repeat myself further, you can find all about it here:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/5786/factory-models/9
The discussion continued, again people stating that they feel uninformed. People suggested all sorts of channels for this. I'm fairly certain none would work in such a degree that it would solve this communication problem. And I know this because there already is a place where you can see exactly what we're doing: FAF Develop! And if you're not interested in that, then there's this channel:
https://github.com/FAForever/fa/commits/deploy/fafdevelop
A few posts down the line we get to the content that you quoted from. It lacks the arguments to backup the quote, you can read the full post here:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/5786/factory-models/27
Which then brings us back to the bottom line: there are community members that feel uninformed. I point them to a few sources to be remain informed with the latest changes while also helping us out with confirming the changes. Whether they do that is up to them. But if people want to remain informed, regardless of whether I write a post on the forums, promote it in the news, promote it via casters, spam Aeolus or whatever - then you can.
I don't see what is bad about my response. People want to be informed. And they can be if they choose to be.
As I have stated, the use of "We" was an attempt to defend the "A lot of people" and "Some people" you mentioned in the initial quotes I responded to. I have clarified above that there is, in fact, a large, silent, majority of the playerbase that did not ask for PBR or factory changes, but received them anyway. I did not intend to convey that these people felt you had abused your privilege, regarding factory changes or otherwise, merely that this silent majority did not ask for changes, does not participate in discussions and feedback, yet will come out to complain when the changes are deployed to FAF.
Taken out of context, allow me to add the missing details.
For those unaware, the quote originates from here, at the bottom of the post:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/5786/factory-models/39
Neither you nor me can talk as if they represent the silent majority of the player base. Anyone is always free to complain. I'd rather if they'd provide us with constructive feedback though, that way we can make progress.
The quote was referring to your constant usage of 'we', as if there is some group of people behind what you write. As if you represent people. You are, just like I am, just talking for ourselves. Stating anything different is just plain wrong.
This paragraph is me attempting to clarify what I meant, as I have just done for a second time in this post. I claim that 99.9% of the community is content with the game and do not follow what goes into FAFDevelop to give feedback. The only time I use "We" in this thread is to say "We're just here to have fun playing a video game", which I believe does accurately represent the goals of the majority. People seem to be taking the 99.9% statistic out of context as me saying 99.9% of people disapprove of the changes, but I did not say that. I said 99.9% of people are content with playing the game and not following along with FAFDevelop. Once again talking about the silent majority. The 99.9% number was, of course, made up on the spot, but it is quite accurate.
I feel like I've already addressed this. You can be informed if you want to be. If you don't feel like being informed then that is fine too. And when you complain about being uninformed then I'll happily tell you how you can always remain informed. Which is what I did.
Here is another player echoing my sentiment that most players have no interest in testing these things. They also echo my sentiment that you have the power to upset thousands of players and were notelected by those players. They also echo my sentiment of displeasure with your "having a moan about nobody giving you direct feedback", which is why I wrote my initial post explaining that you should not expect direct feedback.
Specifically:
having a moan about nobody giving you direct feedback
What moan 🙂 ?
We're always looking for feedback. I'm sure you and I can both appreciate that. It is how we find bugs that we missed during development. It is how we can poll the community on what they think. We put a lot of effort into reaching out and as you state yourself usually only a small group of people show up .
This chart shows that my assumption for the FAF playerbase is accurate. There are about 20,000 active users on FAF.
There were 75.000 unique players playing at least one game, regardless of their type, in the year 2022. I'm very aware of the size of the audience playing this game.
You continue on with statistics in how little of the community we tend to interact with on a monthly basis. And you're correct. That is because everyone is free to participate in that as they see fit. Some people do, a lot of people do not. Which is fine - I'm sure you agree with that - half your post is about how strange it would be if we'd expect them to participate in more discussions.
To have a representative sample of a community this large we'd need about 360 people to give their thoughts. You can learn all about that here:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/sample-size-calculator/
We work with the people that do respond with constructive feedback. We work with what we have. That is how life works 🙂
We can start with the changes to the GC.
Finally - you know that this was the only bit that I was interested in when I told you to back up your claim on abusing my privilege. You also didn't bother asking what really happened. I'll give it to you regardless.
This entire thing got kicked off by @Deribus , interestingly enough.
It started with this question on July the 5th in the balance team channel:
Something wreck-related I noticed recently: units killed by GC claws don't leave wrecks
After which there was some discussion in the balance team channel about whether they should or should not leave wrecks. They wouldn't mind if it did.
That created this change:
July 5th:
https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/4020
Which brought us to this:
July 11th:
https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/4040
I told the balance team in the balance team channel that the colossus is an absolute beast with properly functioning tractor claws using the existing blueprint configuration. They thought it was a good change regardless. To quote:
As long as it makes it more consistent its better
The pull request was merged because more than half the balance team has no development setup. The only way to test it for them was to merge it so that they can play test it on FAF Develop. Archsimkat did and concluded it was way stronger.
On July the 17th the balance team mentioned they were going to look at it. Nothing happened at that point.
The balance team had a meeting where they showed the intention to release a balance patch soon after the development patch.
On August the 20th I made it weaker, because it was still too strong:
https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/4155
And that is the state we released with, knowing the intentions of a soon-to-follow-up balance patch that would fix all the other issues. That patch still didn't happen for the colossus, but as you state - we have a separate team for that 🙂 .
The remainder of your post is about UI features being enabled by default. I'm sure that you and I can both agree that we want to give new players the best possible experience out of the box. That is why some are enabled by default. We tweak with these settings as we receive feedback from the community on what they do and do not like. There's even a post on it:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/3248/default-game-options
Not all of that is implemented yet, but as we are refactoring the options menu we take more and more of it into account.
And I'd like to finalize by responding to this:
Improvements to graphics, performance, or UI are not going to increase my level of immersion, its at 100% already. Games with horrible graphics are just as immersive as games with good graphics. Performance could actually have an impact on immersion, but 99% of 1v1 to 4v4 games I play never get slowed down, so performance is not at all an issue for me. It kinda feels like a joke to improve the performance of the game after so many years and hardware getting so much faster.
There are more communities surrounding Forged Alliance. One is LOUD, which took the same trajectory we did but then six years earlier. Another is the Chinese alternative, which is not far from the Steam version in terms of changes. With thanks @Edtjuh we can get a glimpse of what that looks like. You can see the full video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ7LyhdJKXw
I'd like to focus on these snippets:
https://youtu.be/UQ7LyhdJKXw?t=1411
https://youtu.be/UQ7LyhdJKXw?t=1527
Do immerse yourself in every single stutter you see there. Do not mistake them with the video buffering - that only happens a few times as Edtjug is scrolling through the recording. Then compare that when Edtjuh plays FAF using the same hardware:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi9qEdOH16M&t=1090s
And you can experience this yourself too. Start the Steam version of the game and do the following:
FPS performance issue: Select 400 ASF while their range rings render, zoom in
Sim performance issue: Have 400 ASF fight 400 other ASFs
Sim performance issue: Have 100 hives build something, this consumes about 25% of the total sim budget in the base game
...
There are many more, I encourage you to read the changelogs of the past two years. Search for the 'performance' header using your browsers search function. You can find all of them here:
https://github.com/FAForever/fa/blob/deploy/fafdevelop/changelog.md
There's also a lot of miss information surrounding the reclaim labels. We didn't integrate a few mods because we thought that was a great idea. We improved the performance of the reclaim labels because on a decent, modern computer rendering those labels previously could drop your fps to below 30 in the average late-game situation.
Any change we made to improve this would've broken all mods, regardless of the change. So we took a few that we thought were most useful for the average player and integrated those accordingly.
