The Supcom/FAF reddits

I wanted to raise this point for a number of reasons, but keep in mind that i'm not really a reddit user and thus am not completely aware of the functionality.

We have two subreddits, the /FAF one and also the /supremecommander subreddit. Both are completely underdeveloped, and moderated with a detached skeleton crew of staff including Gorton, who vanished from the community a number of months ago.

We have a bit of a issue here. The issue is that permabanned users from FAF can easily walk into the subreddit, and damage the influx of new users from that platform. Case in point is mirddes, who is actively causing major disruption by slanding the SC:TA project, and arguing about supposed "authoritarian practices" on the supremecommander subreddit.

Techincally, we're in charge of these places. I feel that besides the obvious moderation issues we're having, we're losing a major source of new users and retention of those by letting a community discussion panel stay in this state. There is still a sizable level of traffic on the subreddits, and for a lot of new users who might not know about the forums and the discord, reddit is such a popular place that people will likely head there for tech support and general discussion.

I want to suggest the following, and am happy to help work on these too:

  • Close the /FAF subreddit.
    • Communities like DOOM manage content over mutiple games by using tags/flairs to indicate what they're for. We can allow having FAF content, vanilla content, AND Supcom 2 AND loud content in the same space. This would allow communities to interchange ideas and help users who came from those games to be shown FAF content naturally.
    • https://www.reddit.com/r/supremecommander/comments/i2rrnp/meta_the_last_post_on_rfaf_was_8_days_ago_i_think/
      People have talked about doing this already, including the one active moderator of the supremecommander reddit. The idea probably fell on deaf ears because the other two mods are inactive.
  • Close the moderation loophole.
    • Giving the relevant councilors/users proper powers and titles on the subreddit will drive up the engagement on their promotion. I'm talking linking casts, news posts, etc. Anihilnine posting news looks strange if he is just a random user linking posts. Anihilnine properly presented as the community manager for promotion looks far superior.
    • Stop people damaging the user pipeline if they're banned from FAF, or other relevant community spaces. (I'm assuming supcom 2 has a discord, or something.)
  • Make the place look better, its ugly.
    • Reddit has a banner location that is empty, as well as some various iconography spaces that is missing content.

I don't think people will have issue with FAF taking hold of the reddit and enforcing proper rules there. As long as we are fair and open towards other supreme commander communities, and communicate the expectations properly.

I'm happy to open the dialog with the current reddit admin if people are busy. I don't want to see "my" contributors be slandared and lose motivation because of FAF's apathy.
Tell me your thoughts. I know a couple of users from FAF frequent the place such as Tatsu so their input is important for this project.

I’ll die before becoming a redditor but if other people want to post their stuff there feel free. I would say @nine2 could see if we have someone in the community willing to actively moderate the reddit or not and then approach the current people moderating it about these ideas. I’m a forum and discord goblin so don’t ask me.

I am agreed with second option. You noted Mirddes assault on the integrity of SC:TA project, and its thankfully not caused any issues beside taking time out of my day, Biass day and others to respond and refute baseless accusatiosn.

It also damages ANZ Reputation by falsely claiming bull. For some brief history put this into context why this matters. Mirddes as most know is permanently banned from FAF for a variety of reasons. The cause or reasoning of his banning from FAF, has also caused his banning from other games in Chris Taylor’s Family of Games Community Areas (Total Annihilation Discords and from what my contacts at TAU have informed me Planetary Annihilation discords too). Mirddes also had back in early August-June had promoted SC:TA Project and represented himself as a leading “member” of the Project itself.

Having gone to LOUD, TAU and otherwise presenting himself as co-developer or otherwise. I personally took time to go to adminstrator of each of those respective discords and do essentially damage control. Ultimately I banned him SC:TA discord and removed him from the project, when he insisted or tried to claim it wasn’t my project but the “communities” as such I had to accept what he wanted as features for SCTA mod (notably Adjaceny and Shields).

However he also sprouted falsehoods and claims about SCTA, such as claiming I would never be adding TMD when even I had banned him, I actually had a TMD in place as a stand in until Hedgehog and Scarab were ported later in July.

And in terms of advertisement and promotions, I’ve put in extensive effort with folks here at FAF, communicating with Nine, who has provided regular advertisements on FAF news, talking and working with individuals at TAU whom have provided support for SC:TA project both in giving permission to use various TA Balance Mods unique “Models” to replace ones of OTA, folks interested in having TA factions in Supreme Commander directing them my way. As well talking with folks at other TA related discords, such as Balanced Annihilation, asking for there help and opanion. All while I do research to create/understand what is seen as the “True” OTA experience and making sure the balancing, and bugfixing SCTA doesn’t confuse a bug for a feature.

And a post that Mirddes made on reddit not just slanders SCTA but for new users or folks whom might have looked up “Total Annihilation in Supreme Commander” or someone looking up SCTA. Might now see this reddit thread first instead of my forum posts, the news post on TAU, or on FAF. Furthermore it brings up a discussion I generally been trying to avoid publicly about SCTA project direction. Both to not burn a bridge with a very prominent and avoid a specific converstation about direction/people see as True TA.

Escalation the most popular TA Mod/Game Style on GameRanger, which is what introduces things like Shielding. Took a very different direction from OTA compared to Mayham, or even Balanced Annihilation. To the point after doing research, I am not going be looking at using mechanics or looking at Escalation for what is true “OTA” Experience. But didn’t want to discuss that publicly yet to not burn a bridge with Wotan. As even if I don’t intend to use Escalation for research for my curating/balancing/etc of SCTA he still has extensive knowledge and be an invalulable resource to ask questions about TA. So yes, all this potential damage done to SCTA Project because of Mirddes finding this loophole.

My 0.2 cents

I’m a shitty 1k Global. Any balance or gameplay suggestions should be understood or taken as such.

Project Head and current Owner/Manager of SCTA Project

Not an active reddit user myself, but I agree with the points brought up in the first post. Sounds good to me if biass wants to initiate a discussion about these with the current reddit administrators. Moderation team will co-operate when/if necessary.

Fully support every idea brought up by biass. I've been on the subreddit every now and then, and there seems to be quite a bit of misinformation and confusion regarding faf.

One more suggestion: I've also seen a lot of gaming subreddits clip highlights from streams or cool moments from games. Those posts tend to get a lot of engagement because it's both easy to consume and entertaining, especially on mobile (which I think is how the majority of people on reddit consumes content). I have a clip in mind from the recent faflive stream I'd like to clip and post to the subreddit, and hopefully there can be a consistent stream of content to highlight on the subreddit in the future.

Decent idea, faf reddit should be moderated according to faf moderation team policies.

With r/supremecommander its a bit murkier as we are only part of the supcom community (supcom2, vanilla, loud, steam, xbox, etc). Perhaps being banned from FAF shouldnt get you banned from supcom reddit. That one we could just moderated for swearing toxicity etc.

I wouldn't mind if FAF reddit got closed. I only post in r/supremecommander anyway. I would assume that that everyone in faf is also in supcom.

@archsimkat your clip sounds nice, i'd recommend just putting it up and counting how many views you get. After we can put it on newshub and see how that changes things. Measuring is good because you can see if effort is worth it.

I see quite a lot of new people who are interested in playing some Supcom, but are frequently given misinformation on r/supremecommander (e.g., false dichotomies like LOUD is better for playing coop and FAF is better for playing other players, or Supcom 2 is just Supcom 1 with better graphics and pathing). While faf is obviously just one part of the Supcom community, if the faf community is more active on the subreddit in general, we could likely get quite a few new players to join.

I've created a post with the clip here: https://www.reddit.com/r/supremecommander/comments/jixcq0/chicken_incoming_what_do_basetrade_of_course/

I couldn't make a Twitch clip because the clip is too long, and I chose not to upload the clip directly and use the reddit video player (because the reddit video player is dogshit). I uploaded it to my YouTube channel for now, but it might make more sense for the clip to exist on the faf channel or a new faflive video channel. Also. let me know when you guys make the flairs for the subreddit and I'll flair the post accordingly.

I sent a message to the moderators over there earlier today. Hopefully they get back to us quickly.

I'm against yet another official communication channel. We have IRC, this forum, the official discord (+ lots of side Discords).
Where should people ask their questions? Who is monitoring all these channels to try to answer there? This is especially an issue with technical issues. If it's an official channel, people expect to get an answer in a short period of time. We can't keep up with this expectation already today, adding more channels won't make it better.

In theory I'd be for closing them, but that's not how the world works. People would just recreate it. Also we can't leave it unmoderated because of all the trolls, we see everyday. So my proposal would be: Moderate it with least effort possible and somehow flag it as unofficial.

"Nerds have a really complicated relationship with change: Change is awesome when WE'RE the ones doing it. As soon as change is coming from outside of us it becomes untrustworthy and it threatens what we think of is the familiar."
– Benno Rice

@Brutus5000 said in The Supcom/FAF reddits:

I'm against yet another official communication channel. We have IRC, this forum, the official discord (+ lots of side Discords).

Not every place needs to be for trying to talk to the FAF developers. This place should be one more for community to community discussion. It is a sense of community that retains users, even if they're banned or otherwise unable to be on FAF directly.

@Brutus5000 said in The Supcom/FAF reddits:

Where should people ask their questions? Who is monitoring all these channels to try to answer there? This is especially an issue with technical issues.

It's very easy to route users to a central, relevant place for help with a bit of basic UX. I don't expect every location to talk about supcom be a place for spoonfeeding tech support questions. And if users ignore the UX mapping and choose to blindly make posts on reddit asking for help; frankly, our limited tech support users shouldn't bother helping them.


The moderator of /supremecommander has expressed his interest in keeping the location "neutral" of sorts. While this does impact our goal of stopping this strange moderation loophole, we are still on track to improving the area and it's influx of users into FAF/etc.

IMO faf subreddit is unneeded and should be merged with the supcom one. Even more as we can already see questions being pointlessly split between those 2. And flairs alone would get rid of all the problems that merging might introduce.

Not to say splitting the community into smaller parts also seems counterproductive, especially as our main ways of contact are already forum and discord when it comes to faf players. And well, FAF reddit is kind of dead anyway?

It's been a month, Where is this at? we all agreed to close the FAF subreddit and unify the moderators. no-one's saying we need to provide FAF support on reddit, for example I'm continuously encouraging redditors to use this forum instead. we can put it down in the subreddit's rules that support is not due on that subreddit (In fact it's not even due here either)

So I really don't see any problem with going through with this.

@tatsu said in The Supcom/FAF reddits:

we all agreed to close the FAF subreddit

The problem with this is that upon closing, people can just "open a new one" without much effort. we decided keeping it "in our hands" yet unused or with crossposting is far more safe than closing it.

@tatsu said in The Supcom/FAF reddits:

unify the moderators.

The owner of the supcom reddit is very much interested in keeping the space neutral, and is not going to just let us make it an extension of FAF. We orginally discussed the moderation issue because of in particular mirddes, who I know has now made it personal with you too, so I understand your desire for haste. But the head mod has again stood firm with not cross-banning people who are banned on FAF.

There is not much we can do if we're not that role.

@tatsu said in The Supcom/FAF reddits:

we can put it down in the subreddit's rules that support is not due on that subreddit

See https://www.reddit.com/r/supremecommander/comments/js5gak/welcome_links_and_information/

..that I updated some time ago.

Note: FAF users who do tech support do not check the reddit to answer calls for assistance. Please use the forum or Discord link above if you have problems related to FAF. Don't ask here or in r/FAF

The best things we can do right now is:

Make the place appear better, which I have planned to do when i'm able,
Post more often about random things,
And tastefully plug our links, without making 500 word long shilling posts that garner negative reputations and don't earn us any traffic. Please stop that.

@biass said in The Supcom/FAF reddits:

And tastefully plug our links, without making 500 word long shilling posts that garner negative reputations and don't earn us any traffic. Please stop that.

you can't help but be a dick.

the post you're referring to is the living definition of dredging up the past.

which makes bringing it up an uter disregard for how things have evolved from there.

I haven't posted since then apart for a sales post which did garner positive traffic.

a lot of new players from the realtimestrategy subreddit who were convinced into buying it and who I saw subsequently post on the faf forum.

so slapping me on the wrist, what does that accomplish?

anyways it's pointless to explain this to you.

@tatsu said in The Supcom/FAF reddits:

the post you're referring to

is the "sales post" and not the post you are thinking of.

All i'm saying is to be tasteful, selective and factual. I don't want to see people coming into FAF with false expectations because you made a list 200 lines longer than it needed to be. Especially when it comes to work in progress, user created content.

While i'm here: if anyone wants to crack a shot at making a reddit banner or icon, feel free to do so. Expect me to vet your submissions though.