2020 M&M Election

I like your vision, but you never really explained what the FAF author vaults are and how they should work.
I think one of the most important issues at the moment is how we can showcase and reward high quality map and mod work while also having minimal effort with curating that list of contributions.
I guess these FAF author vaults are your tool for this? Can you explain what you have in mind with these?

@BlackYps There is some information on how that would work, end of point 3.

@biass said in 2020 M&M Election:

I mentioned the FAF author vaults would be discussed in this section and it’s because completing tasks like these could net you access to the FAF author vault as a reward. Other rewards for completing this could be avatars, forum decorations if they’re added to the new forum, and other forms of compensation as well. This gives you actual reasons to make maps/mods/other content and to make it of an acceptable standard. We can’t possibly expect you to work for nothing here, and while other councilors might protest that “noone is motivated to do anything,” it is this councilors job to motivate you. I personally don’t believe that your creative contributions to this client should be left out in the cold and have advocated for this stance across multiple other councilor cycles. Maybe it’s time you actually got compensated for the work you put in?

Finally, I want to extend these suggestions to grunt work.
Grunt work can be defined as for example: testing new FAF systems, maps, new mod content, doing janitorial roles like being a vault moderator, etc. No matter how many times we advertise in chat, no one appears to help because they don’t benefit. When we gave users even a small avatar incentive to help test ICE in one instance, participation spiked. I want to continue this trend by including them in this system.

@biass said in 2020 M&M Election:

Personally I think it’s time that FAF got someone to give their contributors the actual project management they need to really drive the project forward, and I think that the “Maps and Mods Councilor” was a role far too limited in scope.
Perhaps as the close of my proposal here, rename this role to the “Creative Councilor” instead?

I really agree with that last part. Thank you for this post and best of luck.

@Stealth9 said in 2020 M&M Election:

@BlackYps There is some information on how that would work, end of point 3.

@biass said in 2020 M&M Election:

I mentioned the FAF author vaults would be discussed in this section and it’s because completing tasks like these could net you access to the FAF author vault as a reward. Other rewards...

Maybe I am blind or too stupid, but this only mentions them and then goes on to other rewards. That's why I asked for an explanation on what the FAF author vaults actually are/do.

@BlackYps said in 2020 M&M Election:

That's why I asked for an explanation on what the FAF author vaults actually are/do.

Yes, the FAF author vaults are a concept that is made by Morax. He explains that here.
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/3/m-m-map-vault-plans-for-fall-2020-and-on
I don't have any special additions to what is a simple system. Especially because that relies on the implementation, and the availability of FAF's development resources.

Just to re-iterate, Morax wants to add this curated vault and then remove the basic vault. I don't want to remove the basic vault.

@BlackYps said in 2020 M&M Election:

Can you explain what you have in mind with these?

Getting acknowledged as - and staying part of - an "exclusive group" is an incentive. You have a reason to make a good map/mod if you get something out of doing so.

I was told this would be a proposal, gentleman post, but instead all you did was claim I'm lazy and discuss my ideas being bad.

You could have been truthful to that and just propose your ideas, but instead you chose the "explain why morax is bad path."

Alright then, time to rewrite my post and show why you are full of it.

@Morax said in 2020 M&M Election:

I was told this would be a proposal, gentleman post, but instead all you did was claim I'm lazy and discuss my ideas being bad.

You could have been truthful to that and just propose your ideas, but instead you chose the "explain why morax is bad path."

Didn't really feel that way to me when I read his post. So not really sure where this is coming from.

Also I hope this won't become a shitshow of personal attacks, that last sentence doesn't bode well...

I would support biass' position here. Its not a perfect solution to the problems but its better than hiding all the maps. It is kinda hands off but whether thats a good thing awaits to be seen.

70% of maps are awful and should be purged,dunno why people keep defending them

queuing with a newbie to show him the beauty of tmm and meeting tagada be like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLcRpdZ0Xb0&ab_channel=Tomoko

@Vinyl117 said in 2020 M&M Election:

I would support biass' position here. Its not a perfect solution to the problems but its better than hiding all the maps. It is kinda hands off but whether thats a good thing awaits to be seen.

The issue with being hands on with constantly hiding vault content is that it's incredibly draining and time consuming, requires thankless gruntwork, and then doesnt provide any value because the maps just appear again. It's been a couple of councilor cycles already where it's just acted as a janitorial role until they eventually burned out of motivation. The community doesnt gain anything from the role if that happens, because being sick of hiding maps all day impacts your desire to work on other projects.

I want to spend the time working on solutions to the underlying problems rather than continuing to fight a battle that cannot be won.

Of course, not everything i've thought about ended up in the proposal. That's why I suggested that people spam me with questions. Thank you to the people who have done so already; I'm currently unwell and have plenty of time to allocate to answering them.

@Resistance Well Yes and No, First off you start purging maps you get a riot. Riots ain't helpful for anybody and not to mention the amount of effort it takes to clean the entire what? 10 Years of Maps on the vault, like that's insane. I support biass because biass will actually do the work and isn't going to bang his head on the wall as he said. He'll come up with good ideas to deal with these existing problems. The last Few M&M Councilors have been banging their heads for a long time so seeing something new is really what we need. I don't think we should have a full-on election because people don't really know what they are voting for, because nobody likes to read the forums or anything.

I know people like to rage and rant about Dual Gap and Astro Crater and I have my times where I do it too but on a serious note, its really not helpful and everyone how does it is literally just banging their head on this 20m thick wall of brick. This community has a massive majority who plays Dual Gap and Astro Crater. What are we going to? Remove 30% of the player base, because we personally don't like a certain map. We should leave our opinions out of this and look straight forward to improving the mapping ability, and etc. We let our opinions get the best of us when we should look at this not from our own perspective but from the perspective of "How we can improve FAF overall?" Removing Maps, Creating Riots, and Hating on a certain group of players who play these maps will not improve FAF, stop saying that it just doesn't. I do believe that listening to the community is a good thing but also a bad thing. There's a whole lot of bad ideas and some good ideas. I believe that Biass will at least ATTEMPT to listen to us even if we have horrific ideas at least he'll listen. I won't ask for anything else.

Developer for LOUD Project | https://discord.gg/DfWXMg9
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Community Manager for FAF
Member of the FAF Association
FAF Developer

Morax said in 2020 M&M Election:

rewrite my post

Doing this is cheating.

@Resistance said in 2020 M&M Election:

70% of maps are awful and should be purged

In my opinion:

If you're talking about maps that are broken or have some other issues like bad versioning, they'll still be removed because they're still breaking the rules that remain in the system.

If you're talking about maps that are "bad" because of their low quality;

You want users to make "better content" which mostly entails devoting more and more hours into contributing to a client they may or may not be invested in. Doing so is ultimately thankless at this stage and they don't benefit from putting in those hours.

With that in mind, is it really such a mystery why people don't try and make their maps good? It's like when you used to ask devs to program new features for the client and they asked for money or made jokes about wanting a full time salary.

As I stated, It's up to the councilor role to motivate people into making better content. That's what I plan to do with it.

Are we still waiting for Moraxs' response/post??

Thanks

Yeah, it's pretty ResidentSleeper

nine2 said in 2020 M&M Election:

Morax is this your application?

That post is not the application.

Let me be very clear here.

We both have platforms written in advance to post here.
FtX was already given both of those to read over and approve.
FtX had approved both of the documents before making the thread.
These are the terms that we had both agreed upon.

If Morax has:

  • Waited for me to post first,
  • And then rewrote his platform in an attempt to hardcounter mine.

Then he has cheated on this election process.

I don't care about needing to back up the statements i've made. I'm confident that I can do that.

I only care about a fair election process. This method of counterplay is inherently cheating the system and doesn't count as fair process.

Deal is off the table with the pre written proposals.

You screwed up and you know it. Blocking me on discord to disallow resolving matters privately proved to me you're not really willing to work things out.

I was never told you were going to post up, and ftx screwed up by not taking our proposals and sharing.

Just to keep honest, I wrote this up, so you will see something similar when I can actually finish it off:

Morax’s Maps & Modifications Councilor Application for 2020

FAF Community,

If you have not heard, it was requested that the vote for M&M councilor take place now. I have been the M&M councilor for the past years and for those who have not been here since the start, and are looking for some background, here is my original application back in late April / early May of 2019: https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17394&hilit=morax+councilor&start=50

The only reason I can think of why the election did not take place at the annual mark is due to the pandemic disrupting schedule, my lease ended and bought a home (was busy moving), and maybe because of a lack of interest in others having the vote? Regardless, it is taking place now.

For the most part, I am unchanged in most of my views, except in that I believe one major issue is at hand: the management of the vault showrooms. This includes both the mapping and modification ones, so pay attention to what I would like to do going forward:

Vault Management for Maps

Facts ( numbers are from Downlord Client as of 09/01/2020 😞

There are 248 pages of maps in the vault at the moment of writing
This amounts to approximately 20 (number of maps shown on each page) by 98 pages for a total of 4,900+ uploads.
The first map uploads were not possible until 2.5 years into the existence of FAF (typical “Soon [™]” slow development capability!)

Part of the responsibility of the FAF map and mod council is to decide how the community sees and has access to contributions from map and modification authors, and it is hardly ever a fun process: there are plenty of people that have no regard for others, they take others’ work without permission (call it their own), and in general a lot of quite unfinished work goes in.

Let us start by taking a look at the latter vault page:

https://i.imgur.com/fGwpUGD.png

Now let us look at the listings on what is currently page 1 in the client:

https://i.imgur.com/nNkweWj.png
In my observation, the average quality has not really improved by much, and therefore that is a problem. Per many requests, authors that spend a greater deal of time making something more interesting see their content “buried” by new uploads, and spare their creation ending up in the ladder pool, or advertised by the promotions council, they average # plays is abysmal: a low 10 or less. That is, not really, helping anyone get their work out to the community.

To help demo maps that really show off what the game can do, we created the “M&M Top Picks” showroom that permanently keeps content created by authors who pour their heart into creations:

https://i.imgur.com/u89yg4Z.png

You can read about why it was made here to better understand its history: https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17820

Still, this did not really do much, and a lot of the community has still voiced - in my research - disdain for the level of content one finds in the vault. I don’t have good data here on this as it never was something I did, so your vote for myself or whomever runs against me will have to be based on whether you agree with me or not.

Long story short, I gave up on managing the vault recently after others did as well. With so little people managing FAF, it became apparent it is not the best focus; yet, we still do want to try and boost the quality of the additions. There are good maps and mods in the vaults, but one has to sift through pages upon pages to really find anything.

That is why, I would like to present the following idea to FAF:

First, see my original post here - https://forum.faforever.com/topic/3/m-m-map-vault-plans-for-fall-2020-and-on

Whitelist Vault System 2020 (and on) for Forged Alliance Forever:

The main showroom, what is known as “Most Recent” will become a whitelist showroomwhere authors are given permission, and unlimited access will be given.

CARE must be taken to keep to the vault rules and regulations as a author can be removed for multiple violations

One can become a whitelist author by applying for it, and show a few maps, with demos, to the M&M team to show they can at least grasp the basic rules.

Authors who ARE NOT on the whitelist STILL can upload to the vault!
A person who hosts their uploaded map can expect players that join to be able to see information and download the map
There is no blocking of content: anything will be allowed, regardless of whether it follows the rules (maybe spare egregiously broken ones, hacked)

M&M team can work on other valuable pieces of content like tutorials, video reviews, learning new things themselves, and best of all: be a lot less stressed by people.

Will the author permission system be as strict as the M&M top picks list? Not even close… I simply want to dodge having entirely low-effort maps go into the vault and have to spend so much time chasing people around.

For reference (and this is not complete), here is a running list of authors I believe should be a part of the whitelist vault without question, starting Day 1:

Farmsletje
Mozart
biass
FTXCommando
Petric
svenni_badbwoi
Robustness
lilsidlil
Size
borgcubejanitor
MadMax
Jip
speed2
Exotic_Retard
keyser
Chosen
Saske_Kaske
Mikkz
This_Guy
CurrySmuggler
Box-
Lionhardt
Blodir
Tokyto_
Blue_Owl
CookieNoob
Krapougnak
Molotov
Marlo
lextoc
DesertWolf216
Raymorend
F-Odin
Sandokan
SoviertPride
Arhurt
MichaelRosen
Plasma_Wolf
Gingerbreadman
AchievedCheetah8
barmaleushko
StrangePotion
seero
Winged_Mind
Ajack
DeathWolf99
deGRONDDateNoob
MadCat
iBeaver
TheBestUsername
Hell
eptaceps
Snoop
Kiliax
Hellgich
Freedom
BRNKOINSANITY
Picco
silly_noob
Degulum
TheBlackWolf
EvanGalea
SiwaonaDaphnewen
Pl4t_
GrunttiNoob
seraw
Chipi
H-Master
Capricious
Wifi_
Montana
Warner-Valholl
Evildrew
Nequilich
Hawkei
ika_m
Bodabubdub
Aware

It is my hope that, if you take a look at the maps created by those people above, you will see it is not overly strict, nor condemning.

Other Thoughts:

It really blew my mind away how much time was spent being a “vault policeman” over other things as the FAF M&M councilor. I do realize, as I am getting more and more busy with work, that is more difficult to produce content and run the council. But I will remind people that, as a FAF council member, you only need to commit to a minimum time a week, which is believe it or not, 2 hours.

My goal with this proposal and application, is to get some headway on the project, and begin working on more advanced content assistance. The community does not have a lot of modifications nor authors, so that needs attention next. We work at the availability of software development time, so things are planned and often not executed for months, maybe a year or more.

If anyone has any questions about other matters not discussed here, or in my original application, feel free to inquire and I will respond in this post.

Morax

That isn't really my "official" reply to biass since he decided to basically take my idea and one up it... This is a complete mess since no one said "okay go post" and you put me on the clock when I'm not really available to finalize my post.

That's a real fair election in that no one said when we would do what.

I find it absurd to be reading "Morax is delaying" when both of you messed up:

Yup... https://imgur.com/gallery/dEeko3u

I'm not trying to start a war and cast stones at biass, but I'm also not going to let him ridicule my ideas and then get hasty with me. I took a long time to write my first m&m application for 2019 to now, and it made for a much clearer, and more in depth review of want I want to say.

@Morax said in 2020 M&M Election:

Deal is off the table with the pre written proposals.

You do not decide how this election works. You cannot change the plan at random to suit your needs and expect to get away with it.

@Morax said in 2020 M&M Election:

Blocking me on discord to disallow resolving matters privately proved to me you're not really willing to work things out.

You've spent the past couple of weeks, since the start of this scenario, flooding my private messages with abuse and vitriol. There is no attempts to resolve matters. You've been attempting to make it seem like I didn't have a chance, and trying to scare me away by threating to "expose" my "bs." This is not acceptable for a councilor or even for an adult. As I said to you when I finally - after weeks of getting pm'd with unsavory comments almost every single day - I don't have to deal with your abuse.

@Morax said in 2020 M&M Election:

I was never told you were going to post up, and ftx screwed up by not taking our proposals and sharing.

FtX messed up by not taking the finished proposals that you already sent to him, and agreed that it was finished by sending it to him and saying it was and posting them both at the same time.

I don't care if you post your thing and then reply to mine (as you post your proposal while I write this) but don't cheat.

You broke the boundary as shown in the chat I had with him, so good luck saying it's "cheating."